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Coming up, I'm going to go through the indictment of President Trump, the logic of it, or the illogic of it, I should say.
I'm also going to show how Hillary and Obama violated campaign finance laws in a truly serious way.
I'm going to argue it's now the turn of Republican district attorneys to indict some prominent Democrats.
And Jeremy Tate, a champion of classical education, joins me.
We're going to talk about Aristotle and the politics of moderation.
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And what a fateful day it was.
Maybe no handcuffs, maybe no mugshot, but just the fact that the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, walking into a courtroom, being processed, being fingerprinted, and being arraigned, this is a This is a very serious matter indeed, with sweeping consequences.
Debbie and I last night watched Trump's speech, and I noticed my mood as the day was going on was shifting.
Initially, I just felt just sad, not just for Trump, but for the country, a little disgusted, outraged.
And then as the day went on, I found myself becoming amused and even exhilarated As I began to see that the 34 felonies are not really 34 felonies.
In fact, they're not felonies, I don't think at all, as I'll explain.
But they're 34 business entries.
And the business entries are so routine as to be almost comical.
Apparently, these are communications and payments from Michael Cohen, not from Trump, but Michael Cohen, to Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels.
And this is literally the kind of stuff you have.
Counts 1 through 4, February 14, 2017.
Counts 5 through 7, March 17, 2017.
Count 8, April 13 to June 19, 2017.
Apparently, Michael Cohen was making these payments...
One by one, a month here, a month there, with a couple of months in between.
And each of these is now elevated to a felony count.
It's the same thing over and over, the same payment.
It's almost like if Michael Cohen had written one check, $130,000, there'd be only one count in the felony.
Now, when I say that this is an event with broad implications, here's a hint of what I mean.
Here is the president of El Salvador, and he's speaking for a lot of people around the world.
In fact, I've seen Indian leaders make similar comments.
This is El Salvador President Bukele.
Think what you want about former President Trump and the reasons he's being indicted, but just imagine if this happened in any other country where a government arrested the main opposition candidate.
The United States' ability to use democracy as foreign policy is gone.
So these people around the world are saying, you're supposed to be a champion of democracy.
You're locking up or you're trying to lock up for years.
Not only the guy who was formerly in the White House, but the leading candidate of the opposition party.
So don't come talking to us about what we can and cannot do.
We're going to pay no attention to you from now on.
So look at the way in which...
The left, and I don't think they really even care much about this, is they're eroding U.S. credibility dramatically and rapidly around the world.
In fact, our so-called soft power, the power to persuade, the idea that we stand for decency, we might fall short, but those are our ideals.
And the world is going, no, those really, if they are your ideals, they're your ideals to which you pay a sort of perfunctory lip service.
And that's pretty much it.
So the first point I want to make is the copy and paste nature of the indictment.
I've had a chance to go through the indictment, and I'm going to go through this whole case in some detail.
But one of the remarkable things, here's a tweet from Viva Frey.
What is the underlying crime to which the indictment makes repeated references?
Turns out the indictment keeps talking about the fact that there's an underlying crime, but it never says what that crime is.
And so there's a kind of garbled quality to all this.
People are saying, well, you keep copying and pasting the same thing over and over.
Every business transaction is treated as a sort of separate felony.
But a felony, what is the nature of the felony?
Is it that Trump had an illegal liaison with Stormy Daniels?
Is that the crime? Seemingly not.
Is it the fact that Trump did a hush money payoff?
That's not even the crime alleged in the indictment.
So if it's not illegal to have done this, if it's not illegal to have done the payoff, is it alleged that Trump took campaign finance money and used it to pay Stormy Daniels when that was not allowed under campaign finance law?
That's not in the indictment either.
So it's none of the above.
So what really is the violation?
Well... Let's go through this to see what...
And I'm going to be sort of sympathetic to Alvin Bragg in a weird way because I want to lay out what is his theory of the case.
What is he trying to say?
So basically what he's trying to say is that Trump violated something called New York's false records law.
So what's the false records law?
It's a law that basically says that if you're operating a business...
You can't keep false records.
You can't keep false books.
Now, obviously, by and large, the law is aimed at discouraging people from keeping wrong books because you don't want to hide because of the tax implications.
So you might think that Trump here is accused of not paying his taxes or accused of cooking the books for tax purposes.
In fact, the indictment goes that Trump overpaid his taxes.
He He paid more than he should have, but he kept false records supposedly to hide this hush money payout.
And the problem for Bragg on that theory is that even if this is true, even if Trump kept false records, and you'd have to prove that he intentionally did that, he's the one who directed it even though he was president at the time.
So as president, these are payments, by the way, that go back to 2017.
It's as if Trump is keeping the books of his own company.
No, he had delegated the running of his company to others.
And even if he kept false records, keeping false records according to New York law, look it up, is a misdemeanor.
It's not a felony. So in the next segment, we're going to talk about how Alvin Bragg tries to take misdemeanors, or 34 misdemeanors, and somehow conjure them into 34 felonies.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the Alvin Bragg indictment.
And as I mentioned in the last segment, even under New York's false records law, if you were to keep false books or have false transactions on the books, that would be a misdemeanor, not a felony.
So where do you get the felony? The felony is you have to attach this violation to another law, That Trump supposedly violated that's a felony.
And here Bragg is taking refuge in Trump supposedly violating a federal crime, which is federal campaign finance laws.
Now, that is not specifically said in the indictment.
In fact, Bragg says, I don't have to mention what the federal crime is.
I'm not required to do that.
And yet, how do you get from a misdemeanor to a felony unless you've alleged a felony crime?
Well, it would be a felony crime to violate the campaign finance laws, but Trump is not accused of that.
He certainly hasn't been convicted of that.
People who looked into it at the federal level decided this is not something that's even worth going after.
And so here you begin to see the problems that are faced by Bragg.
Bragg has got to convince New York courts.
To let the prosecution go forward.
The New York courts, and again, I'm not saying I know the outcome at the local level.
You could have an extremely left-wing judge, an extremely left-wing jury, but Trump is certainly going to appeal.
He's going to appeal to a higher court.
And one question that I was asked yesterday...
As I was talking about this in my locals' Q&A was, does Trump have a chance to go to the U.S. Supreme Court or is he stuck in the New York courts?
Because the New York Supreme Court presumably is Democratic-leaning, leans to the left.
If that's all that Trump could appeal to, then he might be stuck.
But that is not all that Trump can appeal to.
He could very well get a reversal in the New York courts themselves.
But even if he doesn't get a reversal in the New York courts, because the way to get to a felony is to allege a federal crime, Trump can go to the Supreme Court and say that this is a federal matter.
It certainly affects a man, Trump, who is running for federal office, which is to say, president of the United States.
And there is a rule in Supreme Court jurisprudence It's called the rule of lenity.
And here's what it really means.
It means that if you have a law, and in this case we're talking about a New York state law, that doesn't make it really clear that if you do this, you're committing a felony, Then the law is meaningless and can't be enforced as a felony because no person who read the law would know that we're talking about a felony.
So, since the New York law talks about the...
False records as being a misdemeanor and nowhere suggests that you're facing felony charges because of it.
This creative legal theory of taking these misdemeanors and kind of, you can say, hitching them or bootstrapping them onto a federal law and claiming that to be taken together, these misdemeanors have now been elevated into felonies.
No one reading it, no common person reading this would get that out of the law.
It doesn't even say that.
And so the Supreme Court could on that basis alone say, listen, this is nonsense.
And the Supreme Court has already proclaimed that the rule of Lenny is a valid law.
And the only question is, would the court A, take the case and B, apply the law in this way?
I think if you're talking about Trump being disqualified somehow from running for the presidency or Trump being incarcerated, the Supreme Court would have to Take it up.
There's no way the Supreme Court could let it be and say, oh, we're just going to pass on this one.
The implications are too severe.
So it's really interesting here that you've had.
I mean, let's back up for a second.
You know, you've had and I guess I'll take this up.
In more detail later.
But you've had massive campaign finance violations by Hillary.
She used campaign finance money to pay for the Steele dossier.
And then her campaign tried to hide that fact by paying the money to a law firm and then listing it merely as legal expenses.
And she got a modest fine, $113,000, I believe.
End of the matter. Obama got huge donations from large donors and tried to hide them by camouflaging them as small donors.
He was hit with a campaign finance violation.
By the way, these are very serious violations.
They exceed my violation by a factor of $100,000 or $1,000 or $10,000.
And yet again, the Obama people settled this quietly with the fine.
End of the matter. So this is the point.
When the left goes and we hear Never Trumpers go, everyone is accountable under the law, you've got to explain why the law is being used in this discretionary, selective, and highly ideologically motivated way.
That's the heart of the matter.
That's what I was up against, and that's what Trump is up against now.
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I'm continuing my discussion of Alvin Bragg's indictment.
Now, as I mentioned, the heart of Bragg's case is to take the violation or the alleged violation of New York's False Records Act, which is in and of itself a misdemeanor.
And hitch it to a not mentioned federal felony violation, which is a violation of the campaign finance laws.
Now, let's look at the two parts of this for a second.
The first one, the false records part of it.
Turns out, if you read the False Records Act, It has a statute of limitations.
And the statute of limitations is very clear.
Five years. Now, let's do the math.
When was Trump's final payment to Cohen?
These are the payments to Cohen that are supposedly the reimbursement.
Now, Trump listed these payments as just, I'm paying legal fees to Cohen.
But Bragg says, no, no, no, these aren't really legal fees.
He didn't provide any services for these fees.
These were a reimbursement.
But the last payment was in December 2017.
And that is more than five years ago.
18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and here we are in 23.
So, right away, the...
The law, even if it was violated, and let's remember violated as a misdemeanor, the law is now inoperative.
The date has passed.
If you wanted to bring this case, you should have brought it and you could have brought it before, but you chose not to.
Too bad for you. So New York courts are themselves in an awkward position.
They would have to somehow contend that this five-year statute of limitations is somehow not operative.
Because Trump has, what, left the state, he's living in Washington, D.C., he's president at the time, he's doing other things, and somehow the law can still be applied.
So that's the first problem, and it's a pretty serious problem.
There's a second problem, and that is that Where is the campaign finance law violation in the first place?
In order to hitch your misdemeanors to a federal crime, well, you've got to have a federal crime.
And you have to have a crime that is at least, even if the crime wasn't prosecuted and wasn't convicted, you have to have committed it.
So the question is, where has Trump committed that crime?
If the payments were not a federal crime, then Trump can't be charged with a felony version of the New York law, and the case against him completely collapses.
In fact, it must be dismissed.
So this is a reckless act by a completely out of control, I would argue vicious, but also extremely dumb New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg.
Now, yesterday I saw a lot of comment to the effect that this is really puzzling.
Why would Bragg accede to something that's so foolish?
Isn't Bragg supposed to be a smart guy?
Didn't he go to Harvard? Didn't he go to Harvard Law?
Let me say it right away that...
Going to Harvard and Harvard Law, at least over the last 30 years, is basically meaningless.
If you are a person of color, and by the way, I don't mean a person of color like me.
I'm not talking about Asian Americans because Asian Americans have had to climb an even higher bar.
In an era of affirmative action, by and large, standards have been dramatically lowered.
I noticed when I was at Dartmouth, for example, we had guys who were in my class who essentially were operating at about the 9th or 10th grade high school level.
They were super dumb.
They could barely do the work.
They were mostly in remedial classes.
And a lot of times they took up activism as a way to camouflage their obvious academic inferiority and mediocrity.
And so a guy like Alvin Bragg could easily have been one of those guys, essentially a buffoon, who went through the process.
Now, let's say he's not.
In that case, I think Bragg would have somehow felt that he's making a move here to curry favor with the left.
Remember, a couple of his own prosecutors had resigned because he had looked at this case and said there's not a whole lot there.
So it could be that Bragg feared that he would face serious opposition from the left, maybe a challenge from the left at some point.
And so this is, in that sense, a purely political case.
In other words, Bragg, from a legal point of view, goes, I kind of know.
There's not a whole lot of there there, but I'm going to push ahead with it anyway.
Why? Let's look at the timing of it.
This is something that Trump brought up, and I hadn't really thought about it until I heard it from Trump's mouth, speaking from Mar-a-Lago.
Debbie and I weren't at Mar-a-Lago.
Danielle was there with her husband, Brandon.
But Trump made the point, he goes, these guys want to stretch out this trial and have it when?
Very conveniently in January of 2024.
Aha! We're good to go.
At disqualifying Trump from the, even if Trump were to appeal and win, that itself would take time.
So you might have a guy, brag may go, I can get a New York conviction and that's all that matters.
It doesn't matter if I'm overturned on appeal because I might be able to get Trump out of the running.
So this is the kind, these are the kind of games that the left likes to play, the kind of evil and vicious games.
And in the next segment, I'm going to talk about things that we can do to fight back.
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It is time, it is beyond time for Republicans to start doing to Democrats what Democrats are quite obviously and brazenly doing to Republicans.
And what this means, I think, is that it is crucial now for DAs in Republican states to start indicting prominent leftists and prominent Democrats.
I say this without realizing that this is not always an easy thing to do.
It provokes resistance from leftists at the bar.
They try to go after you, disbar you, file complaints against you.
And they've been doing this against Trump lawyers, for example.
And harassing them, making their lives miserable.
And so there might be, Republicans tend to be a little bit scared and a little bit diffident, a little bit shy.
Or in the past, they've had the view that that's not our job, Dinesh.
You know, we don't really want to turn our office into a weapon of political prosecution.
Well, guess what? Alvin Bragg is doing that.
And what is the best way or the only way to deter the left from doing what it's doing?
Well, it is to show them a taste of their own treatment.
I'm applying here the bully principle.
The only way to stop a bully, a bully who enjoys beating up smaller kids, is for a bunch of the smaller kids to get together and go, you know what, let's ambush this guy in a dark alley.
We'll teach him a lesson and then the next time he's going to be more reluctant to bully us in the playground.
Now, where do we go with this?
How do we start? Who do we go after?
Well, the obvious candidates are, of course, Biden.
There's wide circles of corruption with Biden.
And all you have to do is link it to something that's happening in your state.
And there you go. You've got a case.
Bring an indictment.
Bring indictments against Mayorkas at the border.
There's no reason that the Texas Attorney General can't find a reason to indict Mayorkas.
Now again, this will run into legal obstacles.
It's going to be challenged.
It's going to be fought over.
But that's okay. The indictment still, it drags out.
This is what the left has taught us.
Drag it out. Make sure that the guy is brought in.
Make sure that he's arrested.
Make sure that he's fingerprinted.
Make sure that the cause of action is under state law.
Even if it's hitched to some kind of federal offense.
Bill and Hillary Clinton should both be indicted for their crimes under the Clinton Foundation.
Think of it, stealing money from Haiti, collecting money, and offering basically U.S. foreign policy in return.
There are all kinds of violations.
Again, you need to be a legal guy to be able to go through the stuff, go through the business records.
Normally, we don't even take the trouble to look.
It takes investigative reporters like Peter Schweitzer to put this stuff out.
Well, you know what?
They've done it. So now the DAs can take the lead, take the information available, and pursue it further, pursue discovery, get more information.
So go after Bill, go after Hillary, go after Joe Biden, go after members of the Biden family.
It's not limited to Joe.
This is a family-style mafia.
They split the proceeds, indict them all.
Indite them all. And don't stop there.
There's plenty more targets here.
And again, there's in fact a luxury of targets.
You're almost at a kind of legal shooting range.
You've got a lot of different options.
Rosie O'Donnell has violated the campaign finance law on at least five separate occasions.
I don't know if the statute of limitations has passed, but even if it has, you can find some reason to revive it.
Maybe Rosie moved to a different state.
Again, take a page out of the playbook of Alvin Bragg.
What about Soros?
Here's a guy who's a Nazi collaborator in his teen years.
He accompanied this guy who's confiscating Jewish art and Jewish money and Jewish furniture.
And he claims this was a formative influence.
And in a way, it kind of has been because this guy has been a worldwide menace ever since.
He's caused crime and mayhem, not just in the United States, but around the world.
There should be 40 different ways that this guy can be indicted.
Why hasn't somebody already indicted him?
And then, of course, there are the 51 intelligence officers who interfered in the 2020 election.
They all lied and said that they were convinced that this Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
What was this, if not election interference, trying to get Joe Biden across the finish line?
They probably knew, all of them, that this was real.
Their idea is, that's okay, we'll find out after the election, once Biden is already in there.
Let's keep the American people from knowing about this, and if they do know about it, we will be on hand to lie about it and convince them that it's something other than it is.
All these guys are crooks.
All these guys are really traitors.
All these guys need to be indicted.
And so my message to the GOP is, it's time to get up.
It's time to move into action.
It's time to indict.
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Again, that's Patriot Mobile, M-O-B-I-L-E, PatriotMobile.com slash Dinesh or call 878-PATRIOT. Guys, I'm happy to welcome to the podcast Jeremy Tate.
He's an advocate of classical education and classical learning.
In fact, he's the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test and also the host of the Anchored podcast.
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You can also follow him on Twitter, at JeremyTate41.com.
Jeremy, a real pleasure.
We've been communicating on social media.
I gave you an assignment, which is not an easy one, and that is I said, hey, let's have you on the podcast to talk a little bit about Aristotle.
Now, Aristotle is...
Acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential philosophers.
In fact, if you made a short list of two or three of the most influential philosophers, my list anyway, would have Plato, Aristotle, and Immanuel Kant on it.
Let's begin by talking about...
Who Aristotle was, where he lived and when.
And it seems like Aristotle was coming into a tradition that had already been established to a degree by Plato and was answering and responding to things that Plato had put forward.
Talk a little bit. If you were speaking to people who are really smart but didn't know anything about Aristotle and they go, tell me about Aristotle, what would you say?
Dinesh, thanks a ton for having me on the pod this morning.
We've been DMing on Twitter and I've been thinking, I first read Aristotle's Politics back in seminary about 15 years ago and dug in after we decided to do this.
And I want to make the argument to your audience this morning, which may sound wild, that America itself might not exist at all apart from Aristotle's Politics.
Now, that may sound crazy.
What does this philosopher in ancient Athens have to do with America being founded in the late 18th century?
But essentially, America's founders were doing the exact same thing that Aristotle introduced to the world.
In Aristotle's politics, he is analyzing the various types of government.
And looking into what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses of these various types to maximize human happiness, which is Jefferson, right?
Repeating that. And human flourishing, right?
This idea that he introduces that he calls eudaimonia, which is human flourishing or human happiness.
And the founders, all of America's founders, We're deeply read in the classical tradition.
Many of them were deeply read in Aristotle and his politics in particular.
And we see this in the way they set up.
I believe the most, and I'm sure your audience says, as you do as well, the most brilliant system of government ever created by man.
But it's because they were looking to Aristotle to think through where governments go wrong, where governments have their strengths.
So hugely influential.
There's no question about it. Let me restate what you said in the way that I understand it and you tell me if I'm getting it right.
What you're saying is that Aristotle identifies different forms of government.
He says there's democracy which is basically ruled by the demos or by the people.
There's aristocracy, which is the rule of virtue or the rule of the few.
And then there is monarchy, which is the rule of the one, the king, the monarch.
And Aristotle says that there are strengths and weaknesses to each of these types of approaches.
For example, it's kind of obvious that we think about a monarch has the advantage of being able to make an immediate decision.
Everybody follows it.
it and so you get speedy ability to respond to situations.
By contrast, if you ask the people to make a decision, they have to operate through elected representatives, it's complicated.
So what you're saying is that Aristotle, by looking at these different forms, said, can we get some elements out of here and some elements out of there and create what Aristotle called a mixed regime, a way of combining the best elements of different systems.
And you're saying the American founders did the same thing.
Can you explain further?
It's exactly right.
Actually, I want to ask you this question as well.
It seems to me that maybe the political right that conservatives even, that there's a bit of a suspicion about the use of philosophy.
And as you said, Aristotle, regarded by St.
Thomas Aquinas as just the philosopher, right?
Even out of the three you listed, maybe the preeminent one, arguably the most influential philosopher in the world— I'm wondering, is there any truth to that?
Is there a suspicion about the merit of setting philosophy on the political right, maybe even more so than the political left?
And if so, where does that come from?
Because essentially, the way I look at America, it is taking the very, very best of not just Enlightenment political philosophy, but doing the very best from the ancient world political philosophy, especially from Aristotle.
And putting that into a constitution.
So that would be a question I'd have for you.
Is there a suspicion about philosophy on the political right?
Is that fair?
Well, it's a very complex question because I would say that the only resistance to philosophy itself that I've encountered on the political right has by and large come from a certain species of Christianity that holds philosophy in suspicion.
The idea is that the philosophers are using reason alone and therefore there's a kind of, you could almost call it epistemological atheism, built into philosophy.
They're trying to travel on reason, whereas, wait a minute, don't we have the Bible?
Don't we have Revelation?
Don't we have God's Word?
So America's founded in the biblical tradition and any attempt to attach America to Aristotle is specious at best.
On the right, you have different schools of philosophy.
There are people who say America is an ancient project.
You have those who say America is a modern project.
Those who affiliate America with the ancients would by and large be willing to incorporate Aristotle, but those who say America's a product of the Enlightenment, a lot of libertarians think for example that it's Adam Smith and David Hume and John Locke.
So it's not that they don't want to admit philosophy, they just don't want to admit ancient philosophy and they don't want to admit Aristotle.
and they don't want to admire Aristotle.
Now, having said all that, I'm going to take a pause, and when we come back, have you respond.
Now having said all that, I'm going to take a pause and when we come back have you respond and I want to also pick up another important theme in Aristotle that I think could not be more relevant today.
And I want to also pick up another important theme in Aristotle that I think could not be more relevant today.
Sure.
Sure.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Jeremy Tate, advocate of classical education, founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test, the website cltexam.com.
Jeremy, we were talking about philosophy and the role of philosophy, and is there some skepticism on the right?
Have you encountered that kind of skepticism?
And if so, where does it come from?
I think so, and it may have been maybe Marco Rubio's response to maybe one of the Obama speeches, kind of, you know, we don't need more philosophy majors or that sort of thing.
But certainly, we're seeing a quick death, not just of the philosophy major, but of the history major as well.
And I have deep concerns, Dinesh, about this.
I mean, America, you think about the kind of education the first Congress had received.
You know, and at the time, of course, these are all men, but they were men...
We're deeply immersed in the classical tradition, deeply immersed in history, the lessons of history, and deeply immersed in philosophy.
And just by the number of people majoring in philosophy itself, but also the way that colleges have trashed, most of them at least, Hillsdale and many others are exceptions, but most have trashed any kind of a serious core curriculum that requires students to take philosophy.
So it's very likely that students now go from kindergarten all the way through college, maybe to a PhD.
They've never read Aristotle. They've never considered these questions. What is human happiness?
How do we live well in community together? What is the right kind of government?
You know, these you know, and you think about this quote from Adams, it kind of gives me the chills, right, that America is only intended for, you know, he says, a religious and educated electorate.
Well, for him, an educated electorate included philosophy, maybe philosophy at the very forefront there.
Well, I think the problem is not so much that the colleges don't offer these things, but they teach them in such a way that they are driving people away from them.
And I remember, for example, I had a fairly traditional- Yeah.
I mean, when I got to Dartmouth and I discovered the classical tradition, I found myself more and more deeply being drawn into it.
And it completely changed my orientation.
It changed my life's ambitions.
It had a transformative impact, but it was because I was studying with professors of Shakespeare who really loved Shakespeare, who really wanted to get at the multifaceted richness of the plays.
Sure. Not somebody who approached Shakespeare as, he's a bad guy, let's figure out the Eurocentrism of Shakespeare, let's expose him as a hidden apologist for colonialism.
If I had heard any of that, I would immediately have moved and become a math major, sort of the way I started and the way my parents wanted me to go.
So I think it's not so much that the education has failed, the education itself has the power to speak to young people, but the professors won't let it happen.
You know, Dinesh, I think you make such a great point.
I was on campus at a major elite university making a case for CLT adoption a couple months ago, and I was with a head of school who is an immigrant to the US, a Latino immigrant.
And we get in this conversation with a very progressive white female, and she wanted to tell him why the classics are racist.
And he's there saying, I'm a Latino immigrant.
I grew up in Honduras.
And this tradition changed my life.
Plato woke me up to the world, to reality.
And so I think you're right.
I mean, if they're taught as, you know, again, dead white guys that are bad, or maybe, you know, the reason things have gone wrong, who's going to major in history?
Who's going to major in philosophy? Yeah.
Well, one of the themes, I mean, as if to illustrate your point and circle back to Aristotle a little bit, one of the things Aristotle is known for is his ideas of moderation, the idea of the mean.
The mean is a kind of middle position between two excesses.
And so, for example, you can think of, I mean, we have all these proverbs, like the look before you leap, and But then we also have, he who hesitates is lost.
And I think that if you think of that, those two things, they seem to contradict each other.
One recommending caution, one recommending going for it.
I think what Aristotle is saying is that there are times when it is reckless to go for it, and there are other times when you can be too cautious.
So that Aristotle's doctrine of moderation is not some artificial middle position that you just find in the middle of things, but rather being able to know prudentially when to do the right thing.
And I say all this because it seems to me that we're a country really lacking in Aristotelian moderation right now.
Would you agree? Absolutely.
I mean, the focus on virtue and the loss of virtue from our national conversation, I mean, especially with Aristotle's focus on the mean, to apply this to something like alcohol, right?
One or two drinks, I would imagine, in Aristotle's world, is preferable.
Getting wasted and having sex?
Bad idea. You know, being the person who's not going to get near it may be a bad idea as well, right?
You apply this to something like courage, right?
You know, there's cowardice on one extreme.
There's recklessness on the other extreme.
You're right. For Aristotle, I mean, we're thinking about a pre-Christian understanding of virtue.
It is this median between these where you're exercising prudence in every different case to discover what that mean is exactly.
At one point, I believe, this is stuck in my memory, Aristotle is talking about anger.
And unlike the Stoics, Aristotle is not one of these guys who thinks our emotions should be bad, they should be suppressed, it's better for us to operate as if we didn't have any.
But Aristotle says something very telling.
He says,"...to be angry with the right man and right person at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reason, is not easy." In other words, anger itself has to be deployed, but it has to be deployed in conjunction with reason and with moderation.
And I think this gives us a hint of just how sort of supremely on target Aristotle is.
I mean, I'm contrasting with Plato, who's kind of a wild man and has all these fantastic ideas about forms existing in the Empyrean, and the best form of government is communism, and children should be taken away from their families, and Aristotle won't go near any of it.
And Aristotle is also, isn't he very empirical?
He looks around, he goes, let's see how they do it over there.
Let's see how they do it over here.
To me, Dinesh, this seems to be Aristotle's most salient trait, is he's a profound observer.
I'm a Chesterton junkie, and what I love the most about Chesterton is he is the profound observer of the world, and I think this is what Aristotle brought.
More than maybe anything else.
And maybe what we're lacking in the modern world, we're so busy, we're so distracted, we're so over-entertained that to contemplate, to observe, is something that we're really, really missing and something I think that we need to go back to.
Jeremy Tate, just a very short introduction to Aristotle, I must say, but a good one.
Hey, let's do it again. Let's do it again.
I look forward to it. Thanks for the invitation.
Thanks for taking an interest in what we're doing.
I appreciate it. We're good to go.
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If the universe is a closed system, if it operates according to fixed laws, so-called laws of nature, and if we can know those laws, then miracles which are a violation of the known laws of nature are impossible.
That is the proposition I'm examining and have been examining over the past several days.
And I'm going to make the case that scientific laws are not verifiable and that there are no known laws of nature.
This seems like a staggering thing to say.
And I would concede that as a practical matter, we have laws that we live by and we operate by.
The question I'm raising is, can these be known with any kind of logical certainty?
And to this I answer a resounding no.
Now, Why are scientific laws unverifiable?
Strangely enough, the answer is in the work of David Hume himself.
David Hume pointed out 200 years ago, and listen carefully to this, that from no amount of empirical observations, however large, can we derive an unrestricted law or general conclusion that is true as a matter of logic.
So let me repeat that.
From no amount of finite observations, however big, however large, can we derive a law that is always and everywhere true, that is true as a matter of necessity or as a matter of logic.
Now, let's test this out by taking a famous example from Western philosophy itself.
If I were to say that all swans are white and say that's a scientific hypothesis, I'm not going to go out and test it.
I'm going to go see if that's true.
And how would I go about doing that?
I'd be checking out swans, I'd go to zoos, I'd go to natural environments, and I'd start counting the swans, a million swans, 10 million swans, and then I can say, well, based on this, I'm pretty sure, well, I guess I'm sure that all swans are white.
But Hume's point is, you don't really know this.
Just because you've seen one white swan after another after another, you're concluding that in the entire universe, all swans are white?
You have no possible way of making such a preposterous statement.
The best you can say is, as far as I know, or as far as I've seen, all swans are white.
By the way, and I think I've mentioned this on the podcast before, for thousands of years before Australia was discovered, the only swans that people in the West had seen were in fact white.
And so everyone took it for granted that, you know, swans are white.
For phrases like, white as a swan, you will find it in Western literature, you find it in Western poetry.
It's only when the white man first landed on the shores of Australia that he saw, whoa, a black swan.
So what was previously considered a kind of scientifically inviolable truth, every swan ever observed is white, that law basically collapses.
It had to be retired.
Now, at this point, you can expect the champions of science, and particularly the skeptical and atheist champions of science, to jump in and go, well, this is the wonderful thing about science.
We're always open to correction and revision.
We learn from our mistakes.
Here's Carl Sagan.
He's congratulating himself and other scientists for, quote, our tradition of mutually checking out each other's contentions.
Here's Daniel Dennett.
The methods of science aren't foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible.
There's a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are discovered.
So the idea here is that science doesn't necessarily reach an endpoint, but it makes kind of steady progress toward this kind of logical perfectibility.
Hume's point is that this is bunkum.
This is nonsense. Science is not justified in positing these rules in the first place.
You're not getting closer and closer to any truth.
In fact, you remain as distant from the logical truth as ever.
All scientific laws are empirically verifiable in exactly this way.
And you can take the laws that you consider to be the most obvious.
Let's look, for example, at...
The speed of light. Light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles a second.
There have been literally countless measurements that show light traveling at this speed.
It's the fundamental basis of Einstein's theory of relativity.
No matter when and where you travel, at what speed you travel, you're traveling alongside a light beam, the measurement of speed of light is the same, 186,000 miles a second.
But now I ask you this.
How do we know that this is true always and everywhere?
How do we know that in every distant spot in the universe, including spots that are outside our reach completely, that light over there travels at this speed?
How do we know that light has always traveled at this speed in the past?
Nobody had light sticks.
Nobody was traveling through the galaxies measuring the speed of light.
So the idea that light always and everywhere travels at this speed is not a conclusion.
It is not something that can be proved or verified.
It is, in fact, a sort of assumption.
It's kind of like we've seen this happen a bunch of times.
We kind of assume it's been happening all the time.
But that is a massive leap from it's happened every time I've measured it to it has happened and is happening always and everywhere.
And this is really what Hume is zooming in on.
He's zooming on the fact that it doesn't matter if you measure...
The speed of light a million times, a billion times.
It doesn't follow that light always and everywhere travels at a single speed.
We don't know this. We're just assuming it.
Tomorrow we might find a situation, maybe a unique situation, in which light travels at a different speed.
And then we will be reminded of, guess what, black swans.
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