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April 21, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:55
THE WRONG HOUSE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep563
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Coming up, I'll review the case of the IRS whistleblower who says the Biden regime is hiding the crimes and corruption of the big guy.
Debbie joins me for our Friday roundup.
We're going to discuss the tragic shootings of a bunch of people, not just one, who accidentally show up at the wrong house or even turn in the wrong driveway.
We'll also discuss Elon Musk's latest comments in the Tucker Carlson interview.
By the way, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, or watching on Rumble, please remember to hit the subscribe button.
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A prominent whistleblower has expressed his willingness to come forward before Congress.
...for the investigative committees of the federal government and testify that a cover-up has been underway for the Biden family and specifically for Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden has been facing criminal charges for evading taxes.
Now, this is not a direct hit on the crimes of Biden, which is getting payoffs that are then shared by the Biden family in exchange for access to Biden as vice president.
But this is that the Bidens have collected all this money.
Well, the money is income.
So regardless of how you got the money, you have to pay taxes on it.
And Hunter Biden did not pay the taxes, even though he acknowledges getting the money.
And we know this in part because Hunter Biden, once he knew this criminal investigation is underway, paid overdue tax bills totaling $2 million.
So he knew he had been withholding the taxes and now basically to cover himself, he's paying the taxes.
But there are criminal laws that are being violated here, tax laws, intentional evasion of taxes.
Now, a special counsel has been appointed to look into this.
Merrick Garland went before the Congress and swore under oath that there was no obstruction whatsoever for this special counsel. The special counsel, who happens by the way to be a Trump appointee, has complete sway. He can bring indictments. He can pursue the case in whatever jurisdictions the evidence leads. It doesn't even have to be in Delaware.
If Hunter Biden was living elsewhere at the time, the money came into a different area. He can work with those jurisdictions to bring charges.
And as it turns out, at least according to this whistleblower, none of this is really true.
The fact of the matter is the federal government at the highest level has been blocking the Hunter Biden investigation, has not been giving permission to the special counsel to go outside of Delaware where he needs to go to follow the trail of evidence as well as potentially to bring charges.
and that Merrick Garland has been lying when he has been saying to the Congress that there is no obstruction here.
This guy has a free hand.
Now, who is this He's an IRS agent.
He's evidently an IRS supervisor.
He's high up in the IRS. He's very credible.
In fact, he has won a number of awards for distinguished service.
But we don't know this person's name.
Why? Because an attorney has come forward, an attorney named Mark Little, by the way, also a very prominent attorney, somebody who has...
Dealt with a number of high-profile cases.
This is a guy who's a former federal prosecutor.
In fact, he represented Twitter head of trust and safety, Joel Roth, in the recent congressional testimony that I talked about.
He's also defending an FBI supervisor who's been accused of pro-Biden political bias.
So this is a guy who comes up actually through the Democratic fold.
He's a Democratic lawyer, but he's representing this IRS guy.
And the IRS guy is very clear.
He's like, I'm not trying to make any partisan points here.
I'm not trying to go in with the Republicans so that they can have hearings on this.
I want to talk to Republicans and Democrats.
I want to talk to people in the Congress and in the administration.
I want to show that there is a legitimate investigation that career people in the government have pursued and they are being blocked from pursuing it further.
So this is actually... I mean, we all kind of intuitively knew that the Biden regime will do its best to cover for the big guy.
He's, after all, their boss.
He's the head of the Biden mafia, if you will.
And it's ultimately, as I've said repeatedly on the podcast, not even about Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden is the front man.
He's the bag man. But there are like, and Representative Comer has talked about this, as they look at bank records, more and more members of the Biden family get implicated.
So it's a large La Familia Biden, and apparently something like 11 Bidens are already involved.
So we're talking here not just about the sons, in other words, James Biden and Frank Biden, not just about the next generation Hunter Biden, but the in-laws are involved, the wives of the in-laws are involved.
So this is a Biden family racket, right?
And it is proven to be unbelievably lucrative.
And obviously, there's a large amount of taxes that's due on this money that has essentially gone into the Biden pockets.
But it turns out that Biden DOJ appointees in the U.S. Attorney's Office have blocked indictments against the Bidens, even though career investigators have been recommending those indictments.
So there are honest people in the federal government.
They're like, we want to pursue this.
We need an indictment. And then the Political appointees running the DOJ, people high up in the FBI, and of course Merrick Garland, who seems to be one of the liars in chief here.
All these people have been covering it up.
So it's going to be really interesting to see.
I don't think this is something that can be ignored.
Of course, the Republicans are going to be all over it.
Basically, the whistleblower is looking for what?
Whistleblower protections. He's basically saying, look, normally there's retaliation.
They're going to try to destroy me and destroy my family, destroy my life, destroy my career.
If I'm officially given whistleblower protections, which I think he will be given those protections, we're going to be hearing a lot more about this.
And I, for one, can't wait.
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Tavi and I are here for our Friday roundup.
And there's one topic that's been in the news a good bit of this week, but it's one I wanted to save for our discussion about it.
It's the Ralph Jarl case.
This is the kid, 16-year-old, Who goes to the wrong house.
He goes to the wrong door and apparently rings the doorbell.
There's some debate about how much he went into the house.
But there was apparently an incident with the guy who owns the house, an 84-year-old man named Andrew Lester, who ends up shooting the kid.
Not dead. The kid is injured.
And as it turns out, this kind of thing happens from time to time, but this case has gotten a lot of publicity.
Perhaps no surprise, Andrew Yarl is, I'm sorry, Ralph Yarl is black, and the shooter is an old white guy named Lester.
I want to talk more broadly about these sorts of cases, but what are your thoughts about this one?
I mean, it's obviously tragic.
It's very tragic because, you know, as we've found out, he's elderly.
And elderly people are murdered more often than young people, right?
Because they're weaker and more vulnerable.
And sometimes they're even a target.
You know, if someone knows that an elderly person lives in the house, you know what?
Easy prey. But, and in this case...
You know, it could just be that the kid was just at the, as we found out, wrong place at the wrong time.
This guy, Lester, did not know if this kid was going to come in and rob him or not.
You know, he had no idea.
Now, I have read reports of an ex-wife of Lester's, Andrew Lester's, that says that he was very hot-tempered.
And that she was always scared of him because he would just kind of go off on her.
So, you know, as we know, sometimes when people are that way, as they age, they get even worse.
Well, here's the thing.
I don't know. This is not a case where the kid looks like he was trying to rob the guy.
Nothing like that. He was supposed to pick up his siblings from a friend's house.
They gave him the address.
He went to the wrong address.
Now, the law, however, might be on Andrew Lester's side.
And I say this because a number of states have these so-called stand-your-ground statutes and also the so-called castle doctrine.
So the idea is that if you are in a place where you are entitled to be, and it doesn't even have to be your house, it could even be I'm entitled to be at work, I'm entitled to be at the mall.
You're at a place where you have a right to be and you're going about your business and And somebody threatens you and gives you a rational fear for your life.
The key is that you felt a legitimate and real fear for your safety and your life.
You're allowed to use deadly force.
By the way, this was evidently not the traditional doctrine on this topic.
It used to be in many states and for many, many decades that you only had a right to use force You had a duty to retreat.
If someone came up to you, you had to back off, try to do everything you can to avoid an escalation.
But these laws are not like that.
You don't have to back off.
You don't have to do anything like that.
You have a right to be there.
And this is, of course, doubly true if it's your own home.
So this guy has a right to say, somebody came into my house.
It's my castle. Exactly.
And as a gun owner, a legal gun owner...
I don't know that I wouldn't have done the same thing, you know, if somebody had come into the house.
You don't know who they are. Exactly.
I would have at least drawn my weapon and maybe warned them, but, you know, and I don't know if he did or didn't.
I don't know the facts.
Well, interestingly, the question is not so much whether he conducted a proper investigation to find out if the kid was trying to rob him.
Apparently, no words were exchanged between the two.
At least that's what the reports are.
They didn't speak at all.
But the question is, did he have reasonable grounds to believe this is an intruder?
Yes, it is. This is a thief.
Why else would he be here?
Why else is a kid, a teenage kid whom I don't know and know nothing about in my house?
And did I have a real and genuine fear for my safety and my life?
Those are questions that we can't answer.
I think I assume they apparently have charged him with two felonies.
And he has made the statement that he was, quote, scared to death when this happened.
So that's going to be his defense.
I was scared to death, and I acted in defense of my life.
Now, what makes the whole thing really strange is that there have been some other incidents recently that are not identical, but somewhat similar.
Here's a case out of Texas.
Look at this. Two cheerleaders shot in a Texas supermarket parking lot.
After one opened the door to the wrong vehicle.
We've done that. I got in a car and realized it wasn't my car.
And in fact, my keys opened it.
It was bizarre. It was an exact same replica as my car.
I got in. I looked around and I was like, those aren't my sunglasses.
That's not. And then I'm like, oh no, I'm in the wrong car.
Goodness. I mean, I find this really hard to believe.
Look, listen to this. There are two teenage cheerleaders.
We're talking about two cheerleaders, and they get into the car.
There's this Hispanic guy, Pedro Teo Rodriguez, 25 years old.
I would say if you're a normal red-blooded male and two cheerleaders get in the car, your instinct is not like, whip out my gun and shoot.
But that's evidently what he did.
And do these cheerleaders look... I don't know.
It's not a matter. I mean, I just think it's strange that he felt threatened.
He's been taken into custody, by the way.
I think the reason we find these interesting is there's a racial element here because there have been other cases where there's been a wrongful, go to the wrong house, get shot, but the victim is white.
And in fact, there was a woman who was killed.
In this way, some years ago, she had a GoFundMe.
It raises like $80,000.
This kid already has like $2 million raised for him.
So the publicity goes when there's a racial dimension to it, when the media gets to play the race card on it.
And so we need to be aware of that aspect of it.
But the other aspect of it, I think, is the responsible use of guns.
Yeah, and that's a good one there because I don't know about this.
It's not clear in these cases.
Two cheerleader case. Or the other one.
Or the other one. I mean, it's tragic, really.
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Elon Musk had an interesting conversation with Tucker Carlson, and the topics covered Twitter, free speech, but they also covered artificial intelligence, so-called AI. And I wanted to discuss with Debbie a couple of the key things that Elon Musk said in that interview.
The first one is that The vulnerability of Twitter was more than we had suspected.
Not just the shadow banning and the banning, but apparently the officials at Twitter, not to mention the officials at all the Twitter censorship apparatus, also had access to people's messages, their DMs.
So evidently the DMs don't have any kind of separate encryption.
Yeah, they're not, yeah.
And what that means is that the surveillance is much more than you think.
You get on social media, you're like, okay, it's one thing to put something out on Twitter for the world to see.
It's a whole other thing to say, I've got a friend or I've got someone I follow on social media.
Let me send them a message and know that other people have the chance to look in on it.
So that's the first interesting thing that came.
The other one was Elon Musk talks about the fact that this AI business, which, by the way, shows an incredible promise, Artificial intelligence technology, both robotic technology, but also software technology, the ability to program computers to both physically do things and make things and build things.
I mean, we have now robots that can make a pie.
We just bought one that...
You just bought one from our house.
I bought two little rumors. I come home and I hear this vague...
Debbie is a... I call her the gadgeteer.
She loves gadgets.
And I hear this humming sound and I'm like, where's this sound coming from?
Debbie goes, meet our new friend.
Have you given him a name yet?
Roomba 1 and Roomba 2.
Okay. Well, apparently it's an automatic kind of vacuum that makes its way around your house on its own.
It navigates around things.
I had one a long time ago, but it would always bump into things and then kind of like get stuck.
And so it was ridiculous.
They're much better now.
He kind of like backs up and was like, ooh, you know, like that's not a good place to go.
Backs up, does a little swirl.
I mean, I'm just like, honey, they need to make...
Robots that clean the bathroom and wash the dishes.
I can't wait. I think it's going in this direction, to be honest.
I mean, if you project out, this is kind of like with the early internet.
If you project it out, you could see the ways in which it's kind of taken over our lives and changed things dramatically.
And in many ways for the better.
I think we're going to see, we're moving toward a world in which a lot of tasks done by humans are going to be done by machines, by computers, and by AI. And overall, this is fantastic.
This is similar to getting people, you know, not to have to do backbreaking work on the farm or, you know, load things by having to carry hundreds of pounds on their back.
A machine does it.
It's better. In the short term, yeah, what's going to happen to jobs?
I get all that. Now Elon Musk's fear and concern was not that.
It's that at some point the machines, this is almost like the plot of the Terminator, the machines kind of can do it themselves and they can take over.
They can make decisions because they are able to use inputs coming from the internet into the machine and the machine then uses those to do this or to do that.
Or to lie. And to lie.
Yeah, that was a big one.
And I think what Musk is getting at, he's talking about building his own AI, his own answer to chat GPT. I think it's called Truth GPT. The idea being that the left is programming its machines, its AI, to promote woke propaganda.
Imagine that. Imagine that.
And in Elon Musk's view, they're telling you things that aren't even true, but they're presenting them as true.
And it's almost like you need to be ingenious and ask the AI questions that force it to fess up and give up on the lies, so to speak.
But Musk's point is, this is very dangerous because you could conceivably get artificial intelligence to write a legal paper and it cites all these cases and the cases don't exist.
They're fictional cases, fictional footnotes, reference to fictional historical events that are treated as real, reference to fictional people who are presented as real.
It's a little bit of a...
It's scary. And the other thing, too, and we're going to talk about teaching another segment, but the kids also cheat this way.
You know, they write papers using artificial intelligence.
And now, teachers can't detect that as well as...
In your day, you could easily...
In my day, yes.
Google Translate, yes.
And I was like, oh yeah, you have to know the context.
And obviously, the computer doesn't know the context.
So, but in this case, very scary.
Absolutely. I think Musk is right on that point.
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We have been treated recently to the fascinating spectacle where some prominent Democrats have been coming forward and demanding that Dianne Feinstein, who is 89 years old, evidently not in the best physical or mental shape, maybe she's the female answer to Fetterman, but In her case, it's just more the natural decline that comes with age.
They've been saying, hey, Feinstein, it's time to get out of here.
It's time to quit. It's time to have a replacement.
And it's time to let us move on.
And Dianne Feinstein says no.
Fighting every step of the way.
I mean, look, there are a lot of other old guys hanging in there.
So in that sense, it's not new in our politics.
But it has very interesting implications because evidently, she has agreed to step down from the Judiciary Committee, which is a very important committee.
This is the committee that confirms judges.
It's as a Supreme Court opening.
The Democrats want her to get off the Judiciary Committee at the least, but evidently the rules of the House are such that a single Republican senator on that committee can block it.
So, in other words, if you want to quit the Senate and get out, you can do that.
But this idea that you can decide on your own, I'm going to step down for the committee for someone else to take my place, that requires We're good to go.
I don't care that she's a woman, that she's a Democrat.
Listen, this doesn't matter to me.
If you're 89 years old and you're a Republican, you shouldn't be in Congress.
Period. End of story.
I think that this is the same reason that I didn't want my mother to drive when she was 80 years old.
You know, it's not being, you know...
What do you call it? Insensitive.
But what's the, you know, not sexist, but it's not ageist.
Is it ageist? Ageist. Yeah, it's not being ageist.
It's just being realistic that old people, elderly people, don't have the same reflex as they did when they were young.
So it's a dangerous thing. Your control is not as good on the steering wheel.
Your eyesight is not as good.
And making decisions on a national level when you're that old, also not a good idea.
The other thing, and I don't know if this is even worth bringing up, it's a little out there, is the idea that, quite frankly, if you're 89 years old, do you really care if we get into World War III? If you're 89, you're like, wait a minute, I'm already at the end of the pass.
I'm going to be exiting the stage.
Yeah. But you know what? I don't know.
These people, and even Nancy Pelosi, who's like, oh no, it's because she's a woman.
It's because she's this.
It's because she's that. But to be honest, she should also resign.
Nancy. Well, and what about Biden?
I mean, I think that part of Biden's mean-spiritedness, his crotchetiness, his kind of who cares, it's the callousness that is, in fact, also a product of age.
Well, you can see it in Biden's case.
If you look at Biden when he was younger, he was different.
He wasn't like that. I'm not talking about ideology here.
I'm just talking about a personality trait when your bad qualities become kind of hardened or reified, and you become kind of a nastier version of your old self.
We should actually work really hard to make sure this doesn't happen to us.
Yeah, no, exactly. And to be honest, it really...
Even Mitch McConnell.
You know, so again, this is not ideological.
This is not, I don't like it because she's a Democrat or whatever.
I do think that at some point, these people should go and have fun with their grandchildren and Oh, great-grandchildren.
Or great, in this case, great-grandchildren.
And just live the rest of their golden years happy.
I mean, I'm not sure whether, do you think it is the power or do you think it is the status?
In other words, the power, I'm 89, but I want to get some things done.
Or could it just be, I like being a senator.
I like people opening the door when I step into a car.
I like the deference that people extend to me.
It's probably a combination of both.
It's probably a combination of both.
And quite frankly, it doesn't matter.
But there's also a fight going on with some of the Democrats.
Some of them are saying, you know, quit, go now, let's replace you.
Other people are saying, when women age or get sick, the men are quick to push them aside.
You know, they make it about sex or whatever.
Let's just say whenever Democrats are fighting with each other, it's a good thing.
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Debbie and I spotted an article and I realized that this is like right up Debbie's alley as a former teacher.
Teacher fired for refusing to comply with the school's no zero grading policy.
Let me just say that...
In India, where I grew up, there was no such thing as a no-zero grading policy.
Zeros were given frequently and were given for all kinds of reasons, including showing up late to take the test, being disrespectful to the teacher, cheating.
But then, just sheer stupidity.
Your performance is so bad, I have to give you a zero to show you that you essentially need to begin again, begin, you may say, with your ABCs of the subject.
Talk about this particular case, and I'd like you to, just as a teacher, reflect upon what this means about our schools.
So, Diana Tirado was a middle school teacher.
At a school called Westgate in Florida, actually.
Imagine that. And she was fired.
She started teaching there in 2018, social studies, and she had been a teacher for 17 years, so she was a seasoned teacher.
And basically, two months into her job, she was fired because she was giving students zeros for not turning in their homework.
But she was in violation of the school's no zero policy, which states that the lowest possible grade you can give is 50%.
Stop right there. Because right there, you begin to see that a policy like that is making a joke out of grades.
Because grades are proportional to your level of knowledge.
And there's a spectrum, right?
The reason we grade on a scale of 1 to 100, 100 is the best, 0 is the worst.
So in what universe can you say, let's begin with 50?
Let's begin with everybody at the average level.
Or everybody had some kind of preferred starting point.
This is nonsense.
I, too, went through this policy.
And I would give students zeros if, number one, they didn't turn in their homework.
Number two, they cheated.
There were a lot of students that cheated, and that's a fact.
Talk about the Indian kid you told me about.
Yeah. So, in one instance, I had a student who cheated and Smart kid.
A very smart kid, but apparently he was so wanting to have his GPA up there that he felt like he had to cheat in my class.
I taught Spanish, and this was in high school, and he was petrified when I gave him a zero because he was like, my parents are going to kill me.
First of all, Debbie is the master cheat detector.
Oh, yeah. Nobody could cheat in my class, trust me.
And they tried. All kinds of ways.
And some of them did, but they got caught. But anyway, so that was an incident in which I did give a student a zero.
But the 50% policy came in a little later.
And basically, I couldn't give kids anything under 50%, which really...
You know, took things, you know, to a whole new level because number one, as she states, what kind of message are we sending these people, these kids, who then grow up to be adults and can't cope with real world situations because in school they were given a pass.
I mean, let's just apply this logic to working at a company.
I don't do the job.
In fact, I mess it up.
The whole operation gets spoiled.
And they come, Dinesh, why do you do such a horrible job?
Hey, listen, I showed up, didn't I? I deserve to get a 50% allocation just because I turned up.
Doesn't matter how the quality of my work.
Well, no boss would go for that.
No company would go for that.
It makes absolutely no sense.
In fact, Firing somebody is kind of the equivalent of getting a zero.
You can argue that a zero is much more lenient because in a zero, you get to come back and try again.
You need to get other chances to improve your grades.
So a zero just means on that particular race, you get no score and you need to start again.
But even that's too much.
The schools are like, no, no, no.
It's going to harm the self-esteem of our students.
Yeah, well, it really doesn't harm that.
It does harm, however, the role of teachers in education because...
If you're told how to grade, it can impact the ability to teach effectively.
Because at that point, you're thinking, well, what's the point?
If I teach something and my student isn't learning, why am I going to give them a pass if they're not really learning the material?
What does that say about my teaching ability?
So I think that this is a really bad policy and they need to be given a zero.
When I think of my teachers, and not just in school, but in college, I mean, some were more lenient and some were more strict.
I would say the majority in school were strict.
In college, it was all over the gamut.
And there are advantages and disadvantages to being more or less strict.
Very interestingly, there's a Harvard professor I mentioned to you before, Harvey Mansfield.
And he would give his students two separate grades.
Yeah. Because he said there's great inflation at Harvard because Harvard kids want to get into law school.
And so the average grade is like an A minus.
He goes, but that's not the grade you really deserve.
He goes, I'll play along.
I'll give you your quote Harvard grade.
But right next to it, I'm going to write your real grade.
So you'll realize that even though you got an A minus, you really deserve a B minus for this paper.
Good for him. Guys, I want to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
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By the way, if you're an annual subscriber now, you already know this.
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I won't say a whole lot about it, but let's just say it illuminates in a fresh way all the stuff that has been going on in the country that's on all of our minds.
In some ways, I think it's going to be even bigger than 2000 Mules.
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Debbie and I came across a story about a Tennessee Air National Guardsman.
This is a guy named Josiah Ernesto Garcia.
Josiah. Josiah.
Was arrested last week after applying to be a hitman.
On a parody website.
I mean, I both felt, I had kind of a mix of emotions, including amusement when I heard that.
But there are very interesting issues that are brought up here about entrapment that I think we want to go into.
Talk a little bit about the facts of the case, and then we can kind of...
Yeah, so apparently this kid...
I mean, the website is called rentahitman.com.
That's the name of the website.
I'll tell you why they, in a minute, why they came up with that name.
Okay. Because that website, that's not what it is.
Right. You know, originally was not set up that way, right?
It became that, but it wasn't that originally.
But going back to Josiah, he's 21 years old.
Apparently, he's going to be a first-time father, and he needed some money.
So he found this website, he explored it, and he began searching online for mercenary jobs.
And according to the press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tennessee, he first made contact with the site in February when he filed an employment inquiry for indicating he was interested in obtaining employment as a hitman.
Hit me.
I mean stop right there.
I mean, it's... I think I'll be a hitman.
And evidently on his application, he even said he's a military guy and he really knows his way around a rifle.
He's a marksman, yeah. And in fact, he noted that his military experience and rifle expertise were going to be great assets for them.
Because it says that he was very good at shooting and killing the marked target.
He's a stupid kid.
And if you look at his picture, he obviously looks like him.
He's inexperienced and he's obviously...
I mean, this is really, really strange.
I mean, I'm a really good shot, but I don't...
You wouldn't apply to be a hitman or a hitwoman.
Yeah, I mean, I just wouldn't have said, you know, that he goes, what can I say?
I enjoy doing what I do.
So if I can find a job that's similar to that, like this one, put me in, coach.
Well, now this is the way that the plot thickens, because what happens is you think, okay, it's a parody website.
They're not actually looking for hitmen.
But it turns out that the feds, Pay attention to these kinds of websites and use them to perform, I'm just going to call it sting operations.
And by sting operations, what I mean is there's no hitman assignment.
There's no one really who's the target.
But what they do is they then start pretending to be someone who's looking to rub someone out.
And so it's like, okay, let's go back to this guy and say, listen, let's pursue the plot.
That's what happened here, right? Yeah, so the FBI issued an order to the website's owner, Bob Innes, saying that Josiah, a field coordinator, will be in touch with you in the near future.
You're going to receive a message when they're ready.
Timing is based on clients' needs.
So he was all excited about An undercover FBI agent was assigned to pose as an agent for the website and contacted Garcia for a phone interview, which led them to a meeting in person where he told him that he had accepted a job at Vanderbilt Medical.
But at that point, I think it was too late because...
But what happened is that what the FBI does is, and this is the ambiguous part of the whole thing.
In fact, we've seen this in the Whitmer kidnapping.
We've seen it with, we may well see, have seen it in January 6th, is that what the FBI is doing now is trying to show that this guy is serious about it, is willing to go through with it.
And so the FBI now provides all the enabling equipment.
So they come to him and they go, well, you're going to need a rifle and an AR. So do you have one?
No, No, I don't have one. He did have one.
Did he have one? No, I don't think he did.
No, he did. He did. They recovered an AR-styled rifle.
Of course he had one. He was even posing with one.
So they did discover the AR-style rifle and the same one that he allegedly would use during the contracted killing.
So apparently what happened is the FBI gave him a potential target, said they would pay him $5,000.
Apparently they said that there's a wife who wants to get rid of her abusive husband.
She'd pay him $5,000.
He agreed. He got the first half of the money.
So the reason all of that is important from the point of view of prosecution is they want to show that he didn't just, this wasn't just bluster or talk.
He was actually willing to go through it.
And the FBI went in his home, as they usually do, and discovered that AR-style rifle.
But this is what I wanted to say at the beginning, was that Rentahitman.com was actually created in 2005 by four friends that were attempting to create a cybersecurity company.
And so they called it Rent4, Rent as in hire us, Hit, as in network traffic, and men, because there were four of them.
So that was the original.
Well, this is called not knowing how to name your company, because quite honestly, anyone who says rent a hitman will get a whole different meaning out of it.
Apparently what they meant is, rent a cyber security company to get more hits on social media.
But that is not the obvious implication.
And then while the company was failing to get off the ground, it began receiving inquiries about Murder for Hire services, which led the owner to then turn it into a parody site, which included false testimonies from fictional customers, a service request form, and even a careers tab where people like Garcia can apply to be a hitman.
But that actually has gotten many people arrested through the years using that service.
I got to say that it makes me...
This kind of approach makes me a little uncomfortable in the same way that I'm a little uncomfortable in these entrapment schemes that people use.
Media companies do it all the time.
What they'll do is they'll have, you know, a 17-year...
You'll have an adult posing as a 17-year-old girl and sending messages, suggestive photos to someone, go, listen, you know, show up here.
I got some hot stuff to show you.
The guy shows up and it's like, you know, basically, you know, he's an adult pedophile because she's underage, but she's the one who's been sending him all these messages.
And so it's not...
This is not a case where you've got a pedophile going out and breaking the law, which is one thing.
What you have is someone who's enticed to do this.
And then, of course, there are cameras waiting, busted.
What are you going to say for yourself now?
Aren't you married?
If he's convicted, he faces 10 years in prison.
So I think, to be honest, they should have just shut down this thing in 2005.
Exactly. I've been focusing so far on Christian apologetics and the question of whether or not belief in God is rational.
And I now want to pivot to almost a new section of this course, of this discussion.
And that is the question of whether belief in God, belief in Christianity is good.
I say this because the chapter I'm going to be focusing on for the next few days is called Rethinking the Inquisition, the Exaggerated Crimes of Religion.
So in other words, we're dealing with the argument coming from the skeptics and the atheists that, well, leaving aside the question about whether it's true is Is it good or bad?
And of course the atheists go on to argue that Christianity and other religions, all of them, have had a really bad influence in the world.
Religion is, if not the source of all evil, certainly the source of many great evils.
Here is Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, in his book called Facing Up.
Good people will do good things.
And bad people will do bad things.
But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.
Now this is a quotation that when I first read it kind of startled me because in some ways, if true, it is quite damning.
It's damning because it's essentially saying that it takes a special kind of evil to corrupt a good person.
And to steer and inspire and provoke good people to engage in bad deeds, this is the peculiar record of religion.
This, again, if true, would be disconcerting to say the least.
So we're going to look at this in some detail.
It's the charge that Christianity is worse than irrational.
It's evil.
And we're now going to explore whether it is the fact that religion is the source of much, if not most, of the conflict and death in the world, and if the world would be better off if there were in it no religion, no God, no Christianity at all.
In some ways, we're exploring the theme that John Lennon touches upon in his song called Imagine, right?
Imagine there's no heaven.
And in that sense, Lenin was pointing to, I think in a quite conscious way, asking us to imagine secular utopia.
In his book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris calls belief in God and religion, quote, the most potent source of human conflict past and present.
Here's Steven Pinker. Religions have given us stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers, and abortion clinic gunmen.
He goes on to say, he's now talking about the Bible, that God has commanded humans to, quote, massacre the Midianites, stone the prostitutes, execute homosexuals, slay heretics and infidels, throw Protestants out of windows, withhold medicine from dying children, and crash airplanes into skyscrapers.
So there you have it. That's the critique.
That's what we're up against.
That's what we are going to address and to answer.
Now, even though this is a critique of religion in general, there's talk about fatwas, there's talk about flying planes into buildings, Christianity is usually the main focus of the atheist and the skeptical attack.
In his book called Why I Am Not a Christian, the philosopher Bertrand Russell says, The whole contention that Christianity has had in elevating moral influence can only be maintained by wholesale ignoring or falsification of the historical evidence.
And so here's what I'm going to argue in response to all this.
The problem with this critique, a critique of all religion but specifically of Christianity, is that it greatly and ridiculously exaggerates the crimes that have been committed by religious fanatics while neglecting or rationalizing the vastly greater crimes committed by secular and atheist fanatics.
So my view is there are fanatics on both sides.
There have been crimes committed on both sides, but the crimes of Christianity are minuscule.
I'm not saying lesser. I'm saying infinitesimal compared to the vastly greater crimes.
And again, this is not a matter of my impression or my feeling.
We're going to be doing some body counts in this chapter to validate the points I'm making.
The idea that religion is a primary source of the great killings and conflicts of history, this is wrong, this is nonsense, this is not borne out by the facts or by the data.
In fact, such a view can only be held by people who insist on ignoring or falsifying the evidence.
Now, when we pick this up next week, I'm going to get into the Crusades.
I was about to launch into it, but I realize I need to save it because I want to develop this idea.
I'm going to talk about the Crusades.
I'm going to talk about the Inquisition.
I'm going to talk about the Salem witch trials.
And then I'm going to, once we kind of tally up the crimes of religion, I'm going to show, let's look at the total.
And then let's now look at the crimes of atheism.
Not just crimes committed by atheists, by the way, but crimes committed invoking atheism in the name of atheism, using atheism as its justification.
And let's do a tally on that side.
Let's compare the two tallies, and then we'll be able to answer the question, is religion or is atheism responsible for the great crimes, massacres, and death counts of history?
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