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April 18, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MAN OF CONVICTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep560
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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.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, a very interesting interview.
I'll have Mark Houck.
Remember, he was the pro-life activist who was raided by the FBI and unjustly prosecuted.
I'll also show why Putin's new formula for a multipolar order is a thinly veiled justification for tyranny.
I'll answer the question of why the left hates El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, so much, and Pascal's wager and the case for a rational belief in God.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please hit the subscribe button.
night. Appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
In recent episodes, you've heard me talk about a multipolar world order that is emerging.
A world order in which the United States is no longer the single dominant power.
It's no longer a unipolar world.
But rather, you've got multiple loci or locuses of power.
And in some senses, you're seeing two blocs emerge.
I don't know if it's quite right to call it the Western and the Eastern Bloc.
That's the old terminology of the Cold War.
But it kind of is, because think about it.
The Western Bloc would be the United States and largely Europe.
And the Eastern Bloc would be China and Russia, both of which are Eastern.
China is most certainly Eastern.
Russia straddles the East and the West.
But it's a little bit of a mixed-up picture.
Brazil appears to be inclining right now toward the Eastern Bloc, even though it isn't the Western Bloc.
There are obviously leftist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, and they obviously are not on the American side.
Now, what would this multipolar order look like?
It turns out that the Chinese and Putin are both coming up with a sort of a recipe.
And the recipe is deeply misleading for a reason that I want to outline here today.
So the recipe that is outlined, and Putin recently gave a speech, and he said it very clearly.
He goes, this is the principle, the guiding principle of the new multipolar order, quote,"...the possibility for any nation, any society, any civilization to choose their own way, their own sociopolitical system." Now, this is the principle of non-intervention.
It's a principle that is based upon, you could say, self-determination, because it tells countries, look, it's not Russia's job or China's job to tell you to be This kind of society or that kind of society to have a capitalist economy or a socialist economy to legalize gay marriage or not legalize it.
That's not our business.
That's your business.
You handle it.
And our job is to respect your sovereignty and to deal with you on the basis that the existing form of government that you have exists.
So, right there, in that second part of what I said, lies, I would argue, the problem.
Now, you can see what Putin and China are doing.
They're trying to contrast With the, I would argue, clumsy leftist brutishness of the Biden regime, which is to go to countries and try to strong arm them and bully them into adopting Western systems and adopting Western leftist cultural mores.
So not adopting traditional America or the traditional American culture or American values, which by the way are congruent with many of the values of people around the world, but rather to adopt trans propaganda, LGBTQ orthodoxy, liberalize their abortion laws.
All of this stuff is being, I think, recklessly pushed by the Biden regime for ideological reasons and other countries are balking and the Chinese and Russians are saying, we won't do that.
And you can see why that's appealing to many countries in Asia and Africa and South America, countries like India, which would normally be more inclined toward America and are still wavering in terms of their commitment to the sort of Chinese-Russian alliance, but are tempted to it for this reason.
We won't interfere in your internal affairs.
The reason this seems compelling is that it seems the most fundamental right of any group of people, any society, is to shape its own destiny.
So what Xi and what Putin are saying makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.
But here's the problem.
The problem is that no society has unanimity on its own future direction.
In every society, and look at our own society as a classic example, obviously if we had our way, the policies that drive America both internally and in foreign policy would be completely different than the policies that the Biden people are pushing.
So even in America, if someone were to say, well, we are going to respect American sovereignty, uh, And therefore, we're not going to interfere in anything that America decides.
Biden could become a tyrant.
Biden could, I mean, Biden is already moving in that direction, but he could suspend our civil liberties.
He could declare martial law, and he could claim to speak for all Americans, which he wouldn't.
But nevertheless, the Putin Xi principle is, well, that's okay.
That's because you're the president of the country.
You get to decide what the whole country is and what its direction is.
So that's the problem, is it defers the definition of where a country wants to go to the ruling regime.
So think about the practical impact of that.
If you live in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi royals become the automatic, unquestioned spokesman, if you will, spokespeople for the country.
If you live in Iran, even though we know there's a lot of dissent in Iran, there's a lot of people, that's why they don't have fair elections.
If the mullahs actually were immensely popular, They could run free elections and win every time.
They wouldn't need to pre-select their candidates.
The reason they do those things is because they know that there is a powerful well of discontent, difficult to measure because you can't get accurate polls, and they don't really have elections.
And then come to the CCP. In China, they're presumed to be the legitimate spokesman for the people of China.
Well, have the people of China said that?
Have they decided that? Have they voted that?
No. So basically what I'm saying is that That Putin's formula and Xi's formula is a justification for tyranny.
It allows all the tyrants of the world to sit tight.
Not only that, it goes even further than that because it allows the tyrants of the world to treat anybody who is an internal dissident.
Russia itself is a classic example of this as being a pawn of the enemy, as being a pawn of the West.
Hey, I, Putin, am speaking for Russia.
And so Russian dissidents are somehow in concert with the West.
They are enemies of the state.
So what I'm getting at is the multipolar order would be more defensible if it were articulated in different terms.
But the way that Putin and Xi are pushing it It's not an order that we can look forward to.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome a new guest to the podcast.
This is actually someone I have talked about, but we haven't heard from.
His name is Mark Hauck.
He's the founder of a group called The King's Men.
He's a pro-life author, lecturer, radio host, activist.
Now, this is the Mark Hauck who was accused of violating the so-called FACE Act, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrance Act.
We're going to talk about his raid by the FBI. We're going to talk about his subsequent acquittal by a jury.
It's a great story and an inspiring one.
Mark, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
You know, let's start by just talking about you and the King's men.
You are someone, you've got five, what, six kids?
You are a family man.
You're a working guy.
And yet you devote time to this cause that you founded, the King's Men.
Talk about why you do it and what is the King's Men.
Sure, thanks, Dinesh. Yeah, seven children now, and we founded The King's Men about 20 years ago.
It's a men's ministry, and it really was an outgrowth of seeing a lack of male leadership in the pro-life movement.
And speaking out on life and love, chastity, things that I was doing at that time, there was a real lack of that leadership.
So we launched a ministry called The King's Men to really address that crisis in masculinity.
Alright, now let's talk about what the Kingsman does because the incident that we're about to talk about involved you going to a Planned Parenthood to an abortion clinic where abortions are done and there was some sort of an altercation or some sort of an incident with one of the guys who was supposedly claimed to be an escort for the clinic.
Now, is that what the Kingsman does?
Is it you sort of go on site and you distribute material?
You try to talk women out of having abortions?
Talk a little bit about what you were doing when you went there.
Sure. So the Kingsmen is mostly just a men's faith formation group, and essentially we have those around the country.
And an outgrowth of that is taking our faith to action.
So when we go to Planned Parenthood or any facility like that around the country, it's really our work kind of coming to fulfillment, working with men on a weekly basis.
So I go every week and have been for 20 years down to Center City, Philadelphia, where I live, And I'll be there for a full day and really just attempt to help and intervene in women and men in crisis.
And it's really, again, just that outgrowth of growing in virtue in our weekly men's formation groups.
Okay. Let's talk about what happened on this fateful day.
You go to the clinic and what happened then?
Sure. So that was October 13th, the day the Sun danced, 2021.
I was there with my 12-year-old son at the time, and he's been coming down with me to the mill many times throughout the previous two years.
And on this day, a volunteer escort for Planned Parenthood, who I've known for years, who's known to be very aggressive, Started to get very aggressive with my son.
And it was mostly in his distance from my son and then badgering my son, talking to him, harassing him, not ceasing, which he normally would do.
He would stop when I would ask him.
But on this day, on October 13th, he wouldn't stop, and I told him he needed to stop.
Eventually, after about three requests, I had to intervene physically, and I did push the man away from my son.
He did fall to the ground, and subsequently, there was a private criminal complaint in the state of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Court, which was dismissed on April of 2022.
Let's put that into a little more slow motion.
You're at the incident. First of all, it does seem odd for a, you know, you have a dad with a 12-year-old son, and if somebody wants to have an altercation or get into an argument, it would seem natural to get in the argument with you.
What made him feel like, why was he engaging your son at all?
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, again, we've encountered his name's Bruce.
We've encountered him many times and had dialogue with him.
And he knows that it's a no-no not to talk to my son because I don't want him to.
And he usually complies with that.
On this particular day, he seemed interested in getting me agitated.
He seemed interested in baiting me.
We had already had one prior encounter prior to this one that day where he intervened and really was aggressively preventing me from exercising my First Amendment rights of sidewalk counseling.
And so on a second occurrence where he knew that I was getting further agitated by him, he decided to intentionally Get right next to my son, really violate his personal space.
And he started talking to my son about me, which of course, that's a little disconcerting to a 12 year old boy.
And certainly it made my son kind of nervous and scared.
And so what you did, and you admit you did this, you just basically shoved him, you pushed him, and what he stumbled and fall back down.
I mean, this sounds like one of those things which, you know, happens in, you know, in schoolyards and bars, and there are altercations all over the country that happen a million times a day.
As you say, there was a complaint, but nothing came of it.
The whole thing seemed to have gone away.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I want to talk about how somehow, mysteriously, this incident, this, let's call it mini scuffle, was elevated to a federal case, literally, and you got an unwelcome visit from the FBI. We'll be right back.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with Mark Hauck.
He's the founder of The King's Men.
By the way, the website, thekings, no apostrophe, thekingsmen.org.
You can also follow them on Twitter, at thekingsmen.org.
And we're talking about this incident in Philadelphia.
Mark, you have this little, I would say, nothing burger of an altercation.
Was this FBI raid on you kind of out of the blue, an unexpected bolt?
Or was it something that you thought would happen?
So again, in April of 2022, the case was dismissed.
Again, the Philadelphia court, PA district attorney, Philadelphia district attorney, Philadelphia PD, they wanted to not press any charges.
They weren't interested. As you said, it was a nothing case.
It all gets dismissed.
Five days later, April 27th, I believe, I was served a target letter This is after the trial.
Everything was dismissed at the trial.
I was served a target letter by the Federal Bureau of Investigation Eastern District in the Philadelphia area.
Now, I was a target of a grand jury investigation with potential indictment against the FACE Act, freedom of access to clinic entrances. Now, that's what I found out. And my attorney at the time, Matt Heffron from the Thomas More Society, reached out to the assistant US attorney and said, you have no case. My client's innocent. There's case law in your own district, but should you want to indict my client, he's a peaceful man. We'll bring him in peacefully to you and you don't need to bring an agent out to his house. This was in April of 2022.
So with the raid to your question, it was totally out of the blue, something I was not expecting.
Describe the raid. Sure.
So about five months later, of course, Dobbs has happened at this point.
People are being arrested, Mar-a-Lago, all that stuff.
President Biden has declared that he's going to defend abortion rights.
I get a call in August of 2022 from my attorney and said, have you heard from the assistant U.S. attorney?
I said, no. He said, well, she won't return my phone calls.
I said, well, maybe there's just no case here.
So September 23rd, Friday morning at 6.30 in the morning, I was up early to prepare my home and my children for their co-op.
We're a homeschool family.
And that's where we leave the house that day, the homeschool, to go to be with other kids and have other classes.
Well, there was a heavy banging at the door at 6.45 in the morning.
And someone yelling outside, open up.
I thought there was some sort of problem outside.
Maybe someone got hit by a car.
I didn't know anything. Was not expecting what I found.
I went to the door and I said, well, who is it?
And they said, it's the FBI. Open up.
And they rang and banged the doorbell again, or banged on the door.
When I opened the door, Dinesh, there was 15 marked and unmarked units, PA state troopers and federal agents with long guns pointed at me, M16s, heavily armored vests, ballistic helmets, ballistic shields, and two battering rams.
And I said, what are you doing here?
And they said, well, you know why we're here.
And I said, no, I don't.
And now, describe the reaction.
I mean, your family was probably stunned by this and, I mean, traumatized by it, right?
Of course, they're the true victims.
So they were all asleep, right?
Cardinal Mueller said, you know, dictatorships are coming when they arrest fathers in the middle of the night and they wake up sleeping children.
And so my children were all asleep.
Now, of course, with the banging and the ringing of the doorbell, they all were alarmed.
Everybody was alarmed. And so I see all this and I say, what are you doing here?
And they said, well, you know why we're here.
I said, I don't. And they said, well, you know, we're here to arrest you.
And they really didn't give me a warrant or anything.
My wife came down and said, do you have a warrant for his arrest?
He said, well, we're taking him with or without a warrant.
So you see the attitude with M16s pointed at me, pistols pointed at me, surrounding my house, SWAT team behind at the back of my house.
It's about 20 to 25 federal agents.
My family was in shock and in pure terror.
The kids are screaming, Dinesh.
At this point, my wife says, you can't do that.
That's kidnapping at gunpoint.
So I said, look, you know, I just went into protector mode.
I need to protect my children.
What do you need me to do?
I said, can I put some clothes on, like a sweatshirt?
It was cold. I only had a pair of shorts and a t-shirt on.
No, they wouldn't allow me to do that.
Within about 10 minutes, I was cuffed in the back of an SUV. Heading down to the federal building while my children are screaming.
And guns are now, they're downrange in my home.
So the guns are in the threshold of the home, pointing at my wife and the children as well.
I mean, Mark, what strikes me here is not only the fact that this is overkill, right?
I mean, an absolute insanity of deployment of force.
But number two, you had offered to come in.
So it looks to me either that they're trying to make a statement to the whole neighborhood that this guy's a really bad guy.
You know, you should look at him as if he's a member of ISIS or the mafia.
Or number two, the trauma is the objective.
They recognize that even if they don't have a case, they take it to court, it doesn't work.
Nevertheless, hey, you know what?
We basically put the fear of God into this guy and his family.
We terrorized him, and in that sense, that becomes its own punishment.
Can you think of any other rationale for why they had to do it this way?
Look, the amount of armory, Dinesh, that was at my house, I think they had a desire to shoot somebody that day.
I was considered a high-risk arrest.
There's more people that came to my home than SEAL Team 6 went after Osama Bin Laden.
So the armory was beyond what you could imagine.
I had to be a high-risk arrest.
I was a flight risk to them.
And I was a violent offender.
I've never committed a felony.
I've never committed a violent crime.
I'm not a flight risk.
I've lived in the area 48 years, and I was not a threat to the community.
So their goal was to humiliate, intimidate, and I believe, and law enforcement has backed this up, that they were hoping that I would come to the door with a gun in my hand so that they could shoot me dead that day.
That's what I believe. Mark, let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to talk about your trial and very happy acquittal.
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I'm back with Mark Houck, founder of The King's Men.
The website is thekingsmen.org or Twitter at The King's Men.
Mark, you talked about this harrowing raid by the FBI. You go to trial.
Now, as I understand it, the essential absurdity of the whole situation is that the FACE Act is about...
Protecting women who are accessing reproductive services.
But am I right that this guy was not at the time escorting anyone per se, so no reproductive services were being interfered with by you or your son?
Talk about how the trial went.
Just give us a summary and talk about what you felt as you were going through this and what the jury decided in the end.
Sure. So you're exactly right.
There was no women involved or men at the time of the altercation.
The motive was that the government was trying to prove was that, beyond a reasonable doubt, was that I was trying to stop this man from doing reproductive health care work.
Now, the FACE Act says that a volunteer escort, per Ted Kennedy, and when they instituted this bill, is that it does not apply to escorts and even people on the sidewalk.
It applies to people in the building.
So they had to prove in the court to the jury of my peers that this was what my intention was in pushing him, which was not, of course, because I was a father just protecting my son.
So I looked at the trial and advanced the trial as a journey of the Stations of the Cross.
And so when we got to the trial, we were at Station 10, and it was...
The strip Jesus is being stripped of his garments.
And so I experienced the passion of Jesus very quickly in about four days at the trial.
And it was very interesting jury selection.
Almost all the jury members were supportive of Planned Parenthood when we were doing our pre-screening of them.
They all seemed to support that.
So it didn't really seem to be reflective of my peer group.
But nonetheless, they were very objective and they were honest and they saw for what it was, that this was just a shove.
It happens every day pretty much on the street of Philadelphia.
And the trial was very interesting.
We saw that Planned Parenthood destroyed evidence.
We saw that the FBI's investigation was very tainted and skewed and really biased.
And so there was a lot of discrimination against me to put me in this situation.
And I think the jury saw that for what it was.
My son testified and I testified.
And really the government had really no place to go with any of that.
In fact, most of their evidence that they put forward was very confusing to the jury and not corroborating with one another.
It was very conflicted.
And so I think the jury saw it and gave us a unanimous verdict.
I mean, this is really interesting, Mark, because as you know, with the January 6th juries in D.C., with some of the juries that we've seen in New York, Philadelphia, of course, is a democratic country.
It's not unanimously democratic, but it is democratic leaning.
And as you just said, the jurors were kind of sympathetic to the objectives of Planned Parenthood, and that's probably what the prosecution was counting on.
But it's heartening to know that they were willing to look at the facts And they were willing to say, you know what, even if we support what's going on in Planned Parenthood, this guy cannot reasonably be said to have intended to block that.
Does this in some ways at least give you some, I mean, not confidence in the government because of what they did to you, but confidence in the jury system?
It did. I mean, it was definitely a relief.
I thought for sure I was going to prison because the federal government has a 98% conviction rate, so they don't come after people that they're not equipped to convict.
Now, your people should know, your audience should know that they came in with a plea January 6th.
Of all dates. And, you know, the government never gives a plea.
They gave me no time, no fine, and no probation.
Basically a slap on the wrist.
They just wanted me to admit guilt to the second count that was on the charges, which was a simple assault charge.
And I said, well, I'm not doing that.
My wife said, you're not going to do that because you're innocent.
It's a cowardly deal. And she said, don't bother coming home if you take that deal.
So that was her desire to see that, but we also knew that it was important to risk this for the pro-life movement, for the good of the pro-life movement, because if I got a conviction, Dinesh, they were going to come after the next person on the sidewalk, and they were pretty much going to make it hard for any pro-lifers to do First Amendment sidewalk counseling, which is protected right.
So, you know, we were willing to risk that, and if it meant going to prison, then so be it.
Well, Mark, I got to pause for a moment and just commend your heroism here, because to be honest, you know, it's one thing if someone were to say to you, you're facing, you know, 30 days in jail, but we'll let you go if you sign right here.
You were facing how many years in prison if you were convicted on all charges?
11 years and $350,000 in fines.
Right. So we see here the logic of taking the plea.
They basically make it sound like what rational person would go to trial, even if there's a...
I mean, just do the math.
If there's a 10% risk of being convicted, right, on an 11 years where you have seven kids...
I mean, this is just downright atrocious.
And so they want to get a conviction by getting you to take the plea, but you refuse to take the plea and you went to trial and you beat them at their own game.
I mean, there's got to be a certain, not just political, but I would say moral and even spiritual satisfaction that you hung tough and that you pushed back on them.
Well, we felt all along that God had called us for such a time as this.
And we felt blessed that we were chosen to suffer in this way.
And it was a suffering. It was a trial.
But, you know, God was faithful and grace was sufficient.
And, you know, what man intended for evil, God intended for good.
So we just trusted that.
And I said to myself, even if I go to prison, it's still going to be for the best, right?
That God will find it a way to bring this to good.
And it would be for the good of my children and would be for the good of me and my family.
But you know what? He found it that it was not to be the case and that that was not his plan for us.
And now we're sharing the good news and it's very uplifting story and we're sharing it and look forward to sharing more.
Awesome stuff. Thank you very much, Mark.
I really appreciate having you on the podcast.
My pleasure. Thank you.
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The world is changing fast and we need to pay attention to things that we previously might not have paid a lot of attention to.
In this case, I want to focus on a A leader of a small country, El Salvador.
His name is Nayib Bukele.
And I want to focus on him because what he's doing is important in itself, but it is also important because it offers a roadmap or at least a suggestive guidepost for America's approach in dealing with, let's say, the Mexican cartels.
But let's start with this guy Bukele.
He's a young guy. If you look at videos or pictures of him, he looks like he's, I don't know if he is, but he looks like he's 38 or 42.
He's a young man with his hair tied back and a beard, a kind of very distinctive Latin American look.
And his party is an interesting party.
I don't know the name of it.
Debbie told me yesterday, but I've forgotten.
In any event, it's a centrist party.
It's neither right nor left.
It's got sort of elements of the right, which is to say it's a party that emphasizes nationalism.
It's a party that also is strongly committed to free speech.
So two critically important values Bukele embraces.
On the other hand, he believes in what he calls a social market, which is not socialism, but rather a kind of a regulated market.
And so he's striving for this kind of centrist as he sees its sensible middle ground.
It's called New Ideas.
It's a New Ideas party.
And it's a party that is transforming El Salvador and is proving to be appealing even to some people in America.
There's a woman I follow on social media and she made a video recently saying that She's moving to El Salvador.
And it kind of shocked me a little bit.
But she goes on to say, well, listen, you know, I've been told since I'm a kid, she's of Latin origin, but she goes, since I was a kid, I'm living in the freest country in the world, the most sovereign country in the world, the least corrupt country in the world.
And she goes, it's not really true.
She goes, today there are other places that you can live in the world where they'll leave you alone, they won't bother you, you can live your life, they've got decent tax rates, you have freedom of speech.
And so she's quite literally moving to El Salvador.
Or more precisely, she says, she's becoming a kind of global citizen with...
Some countries do allow you to have multiple passports.
So imagine if you have four or five passports.
You're not limited. You're not hemmed in.
And you just have stopped believing the old pablum that there's only one place to live.
It's the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Well, it would be if we were still the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Now, the reason that this naive Bukele guy is so controversial these days is he has launched an all-out governmental attack On the dangerous gangs that once dominated El Salvador.
There was almost no urban street that was safe.
These gang members paraded their gang numbers and their gang letters.
And this guy just declared war, not a war on drugs, a war on the gangs, and shut them down.
And in many cases, when the gang members offer fire and so on, they thought that they run the place.
They've just been shot and killed.
And in a kind of crowning blow, El Salvador has passed a law basically saying that when you are a gang member and you are killed, there can be no gang markings on your grave.
So it's sort of like rubbing it in.
Now, interestingly, these international human rights organizations are in uproar.
How can you do that?
And so on. You can't dictate to people what they say on their graves.
And this guy, Bukele, is like, yes, I can.
First of all, this is our country, not yours.
Second of all, we're not saying that gang members can't have graves.
We're saying that they can't decorate their graves with MS-13 or this street gang or that street gang.
He goes, I'm just not going to allow that.
You can't have gang names or gang signs.
We are going after the gangs.
And And so this so-called tombstone controversy is something that has been, the flames have been fanned on the international stage.
But in El Salvador, this Bukele guy is extremely popular.
New York Times runs an attack on him.
Basically goes, at a price, El Salvador stamps out its gangs.
Well, what's the price? The price is what?
Peace on the streets?
People can now go out at night and sit in a cafe?
Or here is Vox.
Meet the MAGA movement's new favorite autocrat.
Well, first of all, how is he an autocrat?
He was popularly elected.
He won a democratic election.
No one's claiming that that election was somehow fraudulent.
The American right is falling in love with El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele over his crime crackdown, but he's tearing down Salvadoran democracy.
How? How is he tearing down Salvadoran democracy?
First of all... Has he suspended free speech in El Salvador?
No. We have less free speech here than they do in El Salvador.
Is he preventing due process of law?
No. These gang members are going through criminal convictions.
They're going through, and, well, it's a political prosecution, Dinesh.
Oh, yeah, really? The left is lecturing us now on political prosecutions.
Yeah. All that nonsense doesn't work anymore.
It just doesn't. No one's paying any attention to it in the United States, let alone in places like El Salvador.
By the way, this is the same guy, Bukele, who said when Trump was arrested, he goes, listen, whatever you think about Trump, whatever you think about the case against Trump, if any other...
If any other leader around the world, such as me, were to arrest the leader of the opposition, there'd be worldwide screaming and the United States would be pompously lecturing me about, you can't do this, this is not acceptable.
Well, the United States has lost the credibility to do that anymore.
As I think about what this Bukele guy has accomplished, I think the ramifications go beyond El Salvador because it really shows a way, for example, to Andres Manuel Oprador in Mexico.
Hey, listen, you can use this recipe to go after the cartels.
It also tells the United States.
Now, the United States obviously has limits in what it can do.
Debbie thinks we should kind of like go after the cartels, and I think we should too, but there may be some limits of sovereignty.
What can we do on the Mexican side of the border?
Lindsey Graham and some others have proposed that we designate the Mexican cartels like ISIS. They become international terrorist organizations.
They certainly do operate in an international way.
They operate all over Latin and South America.
they have tentacles that reach as far as China.
So this is one approach.
This would get around the issue because if you're dealing with international terrorism, the United States does claim, I think legitimately, when the circumstances warrant, to be able to go and strike at a group like ISIS because they are transnational organizations that pose a danger to us here in the United States.
And they often plot their schemes over there, but the schemes are then carried out over here.
And who can deny that the cartels are also having a lot of their bad effects, not just outside, but also inside the United States.
So I guess what I'm saying is that Naive Bukele, although he runs a small country, El Salvador, is making his own country better and showing some important lessons to bigger countries like Mexico and the United States.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I don't know if you remember the name E. Jean Carroll.
This is the, well...
Fourth-rate novelist who claims that she was attacked and raped by Trump, not in a dark alley, but supposedly at some top-scale retail store.
I think it was Bergdorf Goodman.
Was it Bloomingdale's or Bergdorf's?
One of those, supposedly what Trump did was push her into a bathroom, like do his thing, assault her.
The whole thing is like insane.
It's preposterous. And if you've ever listened to E. Jean Carroll, she sounds unhinged.
I mean, she sounds borderline crazy, at least to me.
But she has been with Ahab-like determination pursuing this lawsuit against Trump and it's been dragged out and it's been thrown out and it's been brought back and now there's a New York judge allowing it to move forward.
One question you might be thinking about is, you've got an ordinary person like this, and okay, maybe they have some vendetta against Trump, or maybe they're trying to gain 15 minutes of fame, but who funds all this?
It's not cheap to pursue this lawsuit.
Litigation is expensive.
There's a lot of discovery.
Well, as it turns out, there is a huge left-wing Democratic donor named Reid Hoffman.
He is secretly bankrolling the E. Gene Carroll lawsuit.
Well, Kind of what you see here is the way in which people like E. Jean Carroll become pawns of these mega-rich donors.
They are the puppeteers.
She is the puppet.
He probably knows that there's little or no merit to it, but he has got this vendetta against Trump.
In fact, this is a guy who has also entertained the idea of supporting DeSantis, not because he likes DeSantis, not because he agrees with DeSantis, but only in order to undermine Trump in the Republican primary.
So... That should surely tell you something.
Now, E. Jean Carroll has been asked in the past, and asked in discovery, who's paying for your lawsuit?
That's a reasonable question whenever there's litigation.
How is this being funded?
And you can say, I'm paying for it myself, or there's some non-profit group, or I'm doing it on contingency.
And E. Jean Carroll has implied that no one has really been funding her lawsuit, but now it's emerged that that's not True, she is being funded.
And so the Trump people have gone to a judge and said, listen, we need to do a separate deposition with E. Jean Carroll to focus on her dishonesty, on her credibility, on why she implied that no one was funding this lawsuit and that she was somehow paying for it herself, when, as it turns out, behind her stands a vehemently anti-Trump political donor.
If the case ever goes to trial, isn't that relevant for a judge to know or a jury to know that this is a politically mobilized operation and she's simply the tip of the iceberg, if you will, or the front phalanx for this kind of giant LinkedIn mogul who is the real guy who's been putting the dollars behind this enterprise.
So I don't think this is actually going to go anywhere.
But it could also be that the left's goal here is just to tie up Trump, to waste his resources, to waste his time.
After all, the guy is trying to run for president.
And if he's having to fend off not just the New York case with Bragg, Not just a possible Georgia case with Fannie Willis, not just whatever Jack Smith, the special counsel, brings, but also this civil lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll.
That could tie Trump up in knots, and that may very well be the objective here.
I'm beginning my discussion of Pascal's famous wager.
And this is a proof, but it's not a proof that God exists.
It is a proof for why it is reasonable to believe in God.
Those are two slightly separate things.
The existence of God and then, is it reasonable to believe, even if you don't know for sure?
That's where Pascal is going.
And his argument, partly because he narrows the scope of it, becomes all the more powerful for that reason.
Now, Pascal begins with a simple postulate.
It's kind of a Kantian postulate.
Reason's final step, he writes, is to recognize that there are an infinite number of things Now, in a bunch of his writings, Pascal makes a related point.
He says, look, it's kind of fortunate for man that it's like that.
It's fortunate for man that the highest truths are accessible through faith rather than reason.
Now, why? Because faith is available to everyone.
Think of it. If the only way to find out about God was through, let's say, a sophisticated deployment of reason, if you needed Einsteinian or Newtonian mental capacity to figure it out, then smarter people would have the inside track, and less intelligent people would be shut out.
Pascal goes, that's not how God wants it.
Heaven shouldn't be like getting into Harvard.
So, God wants to have some people who are not PhDs in heaven.
He has made room for fishermen and other humble folks.
So think of it this way. Reason is aristocratic, but faith is democratic.
Now, why should, why is it reasonable to have faith in the presence of doubt?
This is the focus of Pascal's wager.
Now, Pascal didn't really invent the wager.
In fact, It's emerged in recent decades that the Waitro was actually offered in a different form, but nevertheless the same type of argument by a medieval Muslim theologian named Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali.
Al-Ghazali wrote a medieval work called The Alchemy of Happiness, and you find a kind of sketchy outline of this argument in there.
Now Pascal may or may not have got it from there, but he reformulates it.
And the wager is now associated, I think correctly, with Pascal.
He gave it its current classic expression.
And in doing so, he puts a kind of choice before all people who consider themselves agnostics or skeptics, even atheists.
So Pascal says that in certain things in life, we have to gamble.
In other words, we don't know the outcome for sure.
It's heads or tails, but we have to toss the coin.
We don't have a choice.
So let's take an example.
You're offered a new job, you're in an existing job, but you're not sure.
You kind of are offered a paycheck or maybe an offer of a bonus, but you don't have any way of knowing how that new job will turn out.
Will it be better than the old job?
You hope so, you think so, but you don't know so, and yet you have to make a decision.
Do you take the new job or do you stay with the old job?
Let's say you're in love with a woman.
You've been dating her for a while.
You think to yourself, what would life be like over the next 50 years with this woman?
Answer? I don't really know.
Who can really know?
It's not just whether or not you have chemistry.
It has to do. Someone could get cancer.
This could be... The future outcome of your life is uncertain.
And yet, you've got to make a decision.
You can't just say, well, you know, since I don't have all the data, Dinesh, I'm going to remain agnostic on the question.
I'm going to let it all play out.
Well, it's never going to play out.
You're never going to know for sure.
And if you wait too long, she's going to marry someone else or you will both be dead.
So the point being, in life, we have to...
We move forward, making choices whose outcome can only be known looking backward.
Afterward, you go, wow, I really made a good marriage.
Wow, that was the right movie to make.
That was the right job to take, and so on.
So Pascal goes, life is like that.
And so we have to make decisions even when you don't know everything in advance.
No amount of rational investigation, laboratory experiments can produce definitive answers.
Because what comes after death is unknown.
You will only know later.
So there is a fact of the matter, but we don't know the fact of the matter in advance.
So Pascal says we've got to examine our options, and we've got to wager.
And here's the key point. In wagering, we have to consider, with both choices, the risk of being wrong.
So this is kind of a cost-benefit analysis.
In terms of a job, sort of think of it this way.
If you take the new job, and let's say you just can't do it, you don't like it, you don't know how to figure it out, you're going to get fired, that's the downside.
The downside is that you could, in fact, end up with no job.
The job you're doing now, at least you know how to do, so you've got the security that you figured it out.
And so that's the downside of taking the new job.
On the other hand, if you stay in your old job, things could get ossified.
Maybe there'll be layoffs.
Maybe your company isn't doing all that well.
So there is a downside even in staying where you are.
And that's Pascal's point. When we look at God and the afterlife, we've always got to ask, what is the benefit that I stand to gain?
And also, what is the cost that I stand to lose if I make the wrong decision?
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