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April 26, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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RUNNING ON EMPTY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep566
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Coming up, Biden's running again and he says he wants to finish the job.
My question is, does he want to finish the United States?
I'll celebrate the collapse of BuzzFeed, noting it couldn't have happened to a worse group of people.
Economist Peter St.
On joins me. We're going to talk about the fate of the dollar as a global reserve currency.
And I'll explain how Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox might actually be a good thing for him.
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The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Joe Biden is running for re-election.
Wow. First of all, I can't say I saw this coming when Biden first took office in January of 2021.
It looked to me like this guy was very much of a transitional figure, very much of a puppet.
And I'm not saying he isn't.
I think he still is.
But it looks like he wants to continue to be that, whatever he is, for another four years.
And this means that we're going to have a leader, if Biden makes it, in his 80s.
Now, Trump isn't exactly young either, so you're actually dealing with the possibility of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024, and you have both guys who are really up there.
While Trump appears to be physically fit, energetic, there's absolutely no signs of cognitive decline.
You may think Trump is out of control, but Trump is being Trump.
Biden, on the other hand, is a kind of feeble shadow of the old Biden.
He appears physically impaired.
He appears cognitively impaired.
He says things that make absolutely no sense.
And I'm talking about just grammatically.
I'm not even talking about the fact that I don't agree or there's no factual basis.
I'm talking about the simple ability to communicate in sort of a coherent way, which we would take for granted in the US president.
Even more scary, Biden says that he's running to, quote, finish the job.
This I say with a chuckle, but I'm a little bit of a nervous chuckle because what does he mean by finish the job?
Now, I saw a funny quip by a Republican congressman on social media this morning.
He goes, finish the job of giving the country to China.
Well, that's perhaps a little bit too sharp a way to put it.
But to finish the job of...
It seems collapsing the United States or at least collapsing the United States in terms of any of the things that make America exceptional, that make America particularly dynamic or innovative or create ladders of opportunity for people.
Now, Biden would, of course, deny this.
He would point to, look, unemployment is very low.
The economy has come back.
Well, the economy has come back after a self-imposed shutdown.
It's kind of like putting a noose around your own neck and then loosening it a little bit, which would obviously bound to happen.
Then you go, oh, I can breathe.
This is amazing. No, this is something that you did to yourself.
Look at what's happening all around the country.
We've got crime rates that have reached almost 1970s-type levels in major cities.
You've got economic hardship, a middle class that has been hollowed out.
Of course, manufacturing that has been wiped out, whole towns and communities decimated.
We've now got inflation, which was at, what, 1.5% when Biden came in, now at 6.5%.
It was as high as 8%, 8.5%.
We've got a porous, if not an open border, people pouring into the country, not just from Mexico, Central and South America, India, Venezuela, China, with consequences, I would have to say, unknown.
How many of these people are drug dealers, criminals, terrorists?
There doesn't appear to be any effective vetting going on.
In fact, it almost is as Biden invited them.
They say Biden invited us.
That's why we're here. Look at the way we've emboldened other countries around the world, certainly Iran, certainly China.
There's a big mess going on in Ukraine.
We've been able to sort of hold off Putin, but that's only by deploying at enormous cost.
The resources of America and of NATO. And it's still not clear that we're going to be able to win this war and repel the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
So we've seen domestically surveillance.
We've seen censorship, targeting of political opponents, attacks on free speech, religious freedom.
So all of this, this is the America we live in now.
And leaving aside the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the attack on Trump, ordinary citizens who are certainly Republican on the right side of the aisle have got to be really watchful to make sure that we're not gratuitously, and I emphasize the word gratuitously,
Investigated by the IRS, investigated or raided by the FBI. We've become targets of the Department of Homeland Security, which, by the way, many people don't know, is actually 10, 20 times bigger than the FBI. It's a giant compared to the FBI. So this is what Biden wants to keep going on.
Let's be sure that more Biden means we're going to see an acceleration of the things that have been happening in America over the past three years now.
So this, I think, is very disturbing.
It's hard for me to believe that the American people are watching this and going, we want more of the same.
In fact, every survey I've seen shows that the American people, even Democrats, don't want Biden to run again.
But maybe Biden figures out, I've got a foolproof way to get me across the finish line.
Remember 2020.
And if I can use the same or perhaps a similar formula, even the American people can't stop me.
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The left is celebrating the departure of Tucker Carlson.
I read an article in the New York Times this morning which was quoting all kinds of people in the Pentagon.
This is the Biden Department of Defense.
And they were like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
This guy was a prominent critic of the Ukraine war.
He was bad-mouthing the military.
And so we're just thrilled to see him gone.
Of course, these were all leaks.
These are Pentagon sources, unnamed.
But I think there's no question that this jubilation is accurate.
On social media, of course, you've got AOC.
You've got Chuck Schumer.
By the way, these are both people that called on Rupert Murdoch to get rid of Tucker.
And now they're like, yeah, look, it worked!
No, I don't think that that's the reason Rupert Murdoch or the Fox people did it.
But nevertheless, the left is in a good mood, even giddy, about the fact, no more Tucker.
And then I saw an article on The Hill also this morning to the effect that there are Republicans, and I'm assuming these are the Mitt Romney types, but nevertheless, there are a couple of Republicans now, again, unnamed.
They don't want to be named because they don't want to be criticized.
And they're like, well, you know, Tucker was really wrong on Ukraine.
So the focus is on Ukraine.
But I think their point is Tucker was off the reservation.
Tucker was not playing by the rules.
Tucker was raising topics that are considered taboo in which the Democratic establishment and the Republican establishment appear to be on similar terms or at least on the same ground.
So, the question is, is Tucker's departure from Fox really, for our side, a win or a loss?
Now, I don't want to be one of these people who go, Tucker's free.
Tucker can say whatever he wants.
It's a big win. There are people who are acting as if this is an unmitigated victory.
But no, I think it's quite obvious that Fox is an important cable channel.
It's certainly got ratings that far exceed CNN or MSNBC. Tucker was the most prominent cable host in the country.
And he was presenting ideas you couldn't get anywhere else.
And we don't have Fox as a forum to present those ideas anymore.
So that is a negative.
I don't see how you can see it any other way.
Debbie and I often talk about the fact that there are older guys who are not active on social media, who aren't following my podcast on Rumble.
They might be fans of mine, but by and large, their way of consuming news is leaving the Fox News channel on for much, if not all, of the day.
And these are the guys who get...
Or used to get, Tucker.
So now, are they going to pivot and look for One America News or Newsmax?
Are they going to start forging social media?
Perhaps, but perhaps not.
And so that's the downside.
Now, here is a potential upside.
And I get this actually from a Twitter chain from my friend Larry Alex Taunton, whom I've had on the podcast before.
And he goes, you know, Tucker under the Murdoch regime was a guy with a little bit of a chain around him.
Not that he had no latitude, but he had latitude to move within a certain confined space.
And Larry gives two examples.
He goes, number one, Tucker puts out a couple of clips from January 6th, and then zip, no more.
His other example, 2,000 mules.
He gave no coverage to 2,000 mules.
He goes, maybe he didn't want to, but Larry goes, nah, he probably did.
He probably would have. He knew that this was in the news.
It was something he should cover, but he got pressure from above.
And I can testify that that really was the problem with Fox.
Larry gives an interesting analogy.
He says in 1519, Martin Luther, who was at that point still within the orbit of the Catholic Church, was invited to debate a papal representative, a fellow named Johann Eck, who was a kind of a very tough rhetorician.
And Luther was a young academic.
He was an Augustinian monk.
And he thought, let me have a dialogue with this Eck guy.
But Eck's goal was to label Luther as a heretic.
And so in the debate, Eck basically asked Luther, what do you think of this guy John Huss, H-U-S, who was, by the way, burned at the stake as a heretic?
And Luther said, open-mindedly, well, I agree with some of the things he said.
And Eck basically said, well, Luther, if you agree with Huss, and Huss is a heretic who was burned at the stake, you're a heretic who, by implication, should be burned at the stake.
And this debate did not go well for Luther.
In fact, he was very shaken.
He was shocked and he did not think, he thought he was making an objection to indulgences, but suddenly he's facing the charge of being a heretic.
And so the idea is that Luther had a choice to make.
He had to either stay within the fold and be confined in the way, you can see the analogy here to Tucker.
Tucker is being held in by the papacy.
The papacy here, of course, is the Murdoch regime, the Murdoch family, and, or Luther had to say enough.
I'm out of here. I'm going to be my own man.
I'm going to have to build my own.
And of course, this was the movement we call the Protestant Church.
Calvinism and the other forms of Protestantism came out of that movement.
But I think what Larry's getting at is he's saying it was in some ways the liberation of Martin Luther.
And then using the new technology of printing, Luther was off and running, Bibles were being printed all over Germany, and you had a powerful Protestant movement.
And Larry's point regarding Tucker is that cable news is not the future.
Cable news is declining.
Even Fox on a good day has, what, three, four, at the most, five million listeners.
But then, says Larry, look at Joe Rogan.
What does he have? Ten million on his podcast daily?
Think of Rush Limbaugh, who had 15, 18, 19 million people.
And so Larry's point is that there is an opportunity here for Tucker to move into the new media, into the new space where he might find himself like Martin Luther, more free than ever.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is Peter St.
Ange, O-N-G-E. He's an economist at the Heritage Foundation, former MBA professor in Taiwan.
I actually encountered Peter with videos that he makes regularly about economics and freedom.
Peter, welcome to the podcast.
Wow, we're living in strange times.
It looks to me...
That there's a lot of economic chaos in the United States, perhaps America even losing its position economically in the world.
And yet, on the other hand, you have President Biden.
I'm running again because I've been doing an amazing job.
In fact, I need to finish the job that I started.
So I thought I'd begin by asking you to make sense of this kind of disconnect.
First of all, What is Biden referring to in terms of his economic accomplishments?
And then can you set that against the larger stage of what's happening in the country and more broadly?
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Dinesh.
And God help us all if Biden finishes the job, given what he's managed so far.
You know, his presidency so far has been largely paying back the activists who brought him to the dance.
So he's delivered a lot of, you know, crony handouts for green energy and things like this, sort of clickbait for the activists. And the rest of his alleged victories have been, you know, the economy sort of springing back from the insane lockdowns that had been imposed during COVID. And so, you know, when Biden goes on about the job growth or the income growth or the rest of the alleged accomplishments, these were all freebies that were just sitting there.
You know, policy had been sort of holding, crushing the economy down.
And of course, you know, when you let the people actually go work and open their business again, then lo and behold, jobs are created.
Now, added to that, of course, is that Biden has been pouring money out, you know, through government spending.
This is then enabled by the Federal Reserve.
This has driven, of course, the I think?
The Fed, of course, panicked, and rather than telling their masters and the federal government to control themselves and rein in spending, instead they hiked rates so high that it crushed the economy.
Again, literally the fastest rate hike since the 1970s, and at this point it's doing exactly what happened in the 70s.
It is crushing the economy.
Jobs are starting to turn.
incomes have been falling now for three years straight, you put that on top of the reckless foreign policy that Biden has been engaging in, and it's raising real doubts, not just about our economic future, but about the future of the US dollar.
When I was in college, Peter, I learned about something called the Phillips curve, which was an inverse relationship between inflation and interest rates.
And the basic idea, I guess, is that you can have one or the other, but not both.
Now, it is worth noting that under Trump we had low inflation and low interest rates.
Now we appear to have higher inflation, not as high as it was, but it's still high, and certainly high by the standards of the last couple of decades.
We also have high interest rates and high inflation at the same time.
So does this mean that the Federal Reserve...
Is running out of tools in its toolbox because it looks like the way they try to squeeze inflation is move up interest rates.
But now we've seen that moving up those interest rates brings down Silicon Valley Bank.
Talk a little bit about this kind of hemming in of the Fed so that there's only so much they can do now.
Yeah, the Fed has an amazing tool sitting right in front of it, really a magic wand, and it's called Cut Federal Spending.
They, of course, do not want to do that, and so they are moving heaven and earth trying to find some other way.
And unfortunately, the only other tools that the Fed has is either print up a trillion dollars for Wall Street or...
Squeeze interest rates so high that you choke off credit, you crush businesses, jobs, families.
That is the only thing left.
And so they have the solution staring right in front of them.
You see commentators who say that they have sympathy for Jerome Powell.
You know, he's caught between a rock and a hard place.
That is BS. He is afraid to tell his masters to control themselves.
And instead, he kicks us, the people.
Now, let's talk about what he can do.
You want him to go to the Biden administration and go to Congress and say, basically, spending is out of control, that you guys are the drivers of high inflation.
You guys are the drivers of high interest rates.
And the way to bring this down is for you to start putting a bridle, a lock on the spending habit.
And you're saying he won't do that?
He won't do that.
And frankly, he can make it happen.
He alone can make it happen.
All he's got to do is give a speech where he says, we are buying no more treasuries.
And in fact, we're going to sell the treasuries we have.
We're going to sell them at the same speed we bought them, $1.25 per month, $125 billion a month, we're going to sell these.
What would immediately happen is that the treasury markets would go ballistic, the bond vigilantes would ride again, and the federal government would be obligated to quit with the deficits for fear of breaking the treasury markets.
The large banks, the large donors who hold treasuries would make them do it.
Jerome Powell has it in his power alone.
He and the Fed's board have it in their power to stop the deficits that are driving the inflation.
Do you think, Peter, that that's because of the fact that Powell is ideologically aligned with Biden and the left and therefore himself believes that this kind of profligate spending is okay?
Or do you think that he's a timid man who just doesn't, even though he has the power, is not willing to use it?
Yeah, I think it's the latter.
I think he just doesn't have the backbone for it.
As much as he praises Paul Volcker and the tough choices that Paul Volcker made, he can't do it.
Ideologically, I think he's fairly centrist for Washington.
He's just kind of an establishment from central casting.
Trump, of course, appointed him.
I mean, he was talked into it.
I don't think Powell was his first choice.
I think maybe Stephen Moore might have been.
But at any rate, here we are, and Jerome Powell will not stand up.
And, you know, this is, for 100 years now, the Fed has been unwilling to confront the federal government because whatever it says on paper, in reality, the Fed is the in-house money printer of the federal government, and they will not criticize their masters.
There have been recent press conferences where Jerome Powell has been point-blank asked by reporters, you know, does the federal government bear some responsibility for the inflation?
And boy, oh boy, you may as well have criticized his wife.
I mean, he gets real uptight.
He says, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not, no, I'm not gonna talk about that kind of thing.
So no, he knows who butters his bread and he's not gonna do anything that they don't want him to do.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with economist Peter St.
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By the way, you can follow him on Twitter, at Prof, B-R-O-F, St-S-T-O-N-G-E, at Prof Stonge, as Peter sometimes puts it.
Peter, let's talk a little bit about the dollar as a global reserve currency.
I mean, all of us in this country, we use dollars.
We have pretty much all our savings and wealth in dollars.
Should we be worried?
And what's happening to the dollar on the global market?
Yeah, the dollar... It was given this really dominant position over the entire world economy coming out of World War II. The rest of the world was completely obliterated.
The U.S. had, I think, a majority of world GDP at that point.
The U.S. basically was the world.
And ever since that moment, 1944, the U.S. has been losing, very gradually, but it's been losing share little by little.
And this is partly because other countries have grown, so Europe, Japan, places like Korea, China, of course.
And what's happened in the past couple of years is that that has really accelerated.
And what's driving it, particularly last year, was a bit shocking how quickly the U.S. started losing ground.
So there's an economist, former Morgan guy, Stephen Jen, and he did the math.
Once you control for the price of the dollar...
The dollar lost 8% of its share of global reserves, so that brings the dollar down to 47%.
8% in a year is shocking.
It's really a flight from the dollar.
And what's driving that, of course, we have the inflation.
And that makes people nervous about a dollar being a good store of their wealth.
But pretty much everybody else in the world also has inflation.
Even Japan ramped up inflation.
Europe, of course, most of the world ramped it up in order to buy these COVID lockdowns.
So that, we're merely one of the gang at that point.
What's really driven this wholesale flight from the dollar is the sanctions on Russia.
Now, setting aside the conflict itself, the problem here is that what Biden did was froze the sovereign dollars of the Russian Central Bank.
Okay, so that's about $300 billion.
Now, given the size of Russia's economy, that would be about $4 trillion in our terms.
In other words, really what they did was went in and seized, effectively, the entire basis of the Russian financial system.
What they were hoping to do is to spark bank runs and then perhaps civil unrest and maybe they were hoping for a Libya-style outcome where Gaddafi was knifed by a mob in the street.
Whatever their goals were, it backfired because what happened instead is that countries all over the world, even erstwhile allies like Saudi Arabia, Brazil, countries all over are now asking themselves, are we next?
In other words, if we offend the US in some way, if our environmental policy or our LGBTQ+, whatever it is this week, if any of those things offend the Biden administration, are they going to come in here, seize our sovereign dollars, collapse our economy and perhaps send us out to go play with the mob?
So instead, what a lot of these countries are doing is they are shifting to euro, yen, any other currency.
China, of course, smells an opportunity, so China's been encouraging them to move either into bilateral currency, in other words, Brazil and China would use each other's currencies to trade, or to try to push them into this notion that China has to create a separate so-called BRICS currency that would compete with the dollar.
Now we don't know what that's going to look like, but if they're smart, they'll put some gold backing on that thing and it would actually be a serious contender for the US dollar.
I mean, that's what I read was that the Chinese are at least promising that they would have a currency that would be backed, if not just by gold, then by some basket of commodities that would stand behind the currency.
The dollar doesn't have that kind of backing.
Am I correct? Right now, it's pretty much the pure faith in the US economy and the historical strength in the dollar.
Yeah, at this point, US dollars are just tokens.
They're like any other crypto tokens.
They print them up. If the price goes down too much, they don't print as much.
They are backed by absolutely nothing.
And the concern here is that if people all over the world stop using this unbacked, now risky dollar...
Then, you know, effectively, the U.S. has printed about three times more dollars than are actually needed by the U.S. economy.
Okay, the other two-thirds are soaked up by foreigners.
They're either using them for trade purposes or they're actually saving them, right?
Rich people in many countries.
In Mexico, if you're a millionaire, you're not saving in pesos.
That's too risky. You're saving in dollars, right?
So all of these dollars are sitting all over the world, happily soaked up.
If those start getting sold, they flood back into America.
Americans, of course, are the only people in the world who are actually obligated to use dollars.
It's this obscure Civil War era law that Lincoln put in that you have to use the dollar, you have no option.
Everybody else can get rid of it, you cannot.
So what that means is if those dollars come flooding back into the country, the inflation, the pressure on the banks would be like nothing we have seen.
Very scary stuff. Peter St.
Ansh, thank you very much for joining me.
I appreciate it. Thanks.
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We're clearly in an age of media shakeups, media transformation.
Of course, everyone's talking about Tucker and the future of Fox News.
We also have Don Lemon out now at CNN. And he's not the first one.
CNN has been pushing one by one.
Of course, Brian Stelter got the boot.
And a couple of other more minor hosts have also gotten pushed out.
And now the news site called BuzzFeed.
Now BuzzFeed was a huge sensation at one time.
They won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for some reporting in China.
And investors in BuzzFeed, these huge media giants, Comcast, NBCUniversal.
BuzzFeed, by the way, also owns the Huffington Post.
But BuzzFeed is shutting down.
And I gotta say, from the point of view, if you like truth, you like honest journalism, this is actually very good news.
BuzzFeed was in trouble.
Their stock value down more than 90%.
So essentially, their stock is trash.
And finally, the CEO decided, hey, I gotta get out of here.
And he sent out a notice to his staff.
Several of the top people have already left.
So the rats are kind of leaving the ship, and it's a good thing, too.
BuzzFeed represented the absolute worst of political propaganda.
The founder and CEO, this Jonah Peretti, absolute woke ideologue, at least to decide whether he is or not personally, he moved BuzzFeed in that direction.
And so evidently BuzzFeed is trying to keep the Huffington Post, which is by itself a mess.
And it was a small part of BuzzFeed.
Keep the Huffington Post going, HuffPost.
But the sort of the parent company is going bye-bye.
And let's remember that BuzzFeed was the conduit that was chosen by the Hillary Clinton campaign to push the discredited Russia hoax.
The Clinton campaign used BuzzFeed to get its message out, which basically means that Hillary and her goons could trust the BuzzFeed leftists to transmit the story and not reveal that the story was, in fact, a setup by the Hillary campaign itself.
Because think about it. If you put something out and you go, the Hillary campaign is saying this about the Trump campaign, people go, well, yeah.
Obviously, that's because they're the Hillary campaign.
They're doing whatever they can to discredit the Trump campaign.
But the Hillary team knew that we can rely, by the way, it wasn't just BuzzFeed.
We can rely on this reporter at the Washington Post and that reporter at the New York Times.
So the left is very good at using their media advantage.
They've got reporters at these outlets that They weren't really reporters at all.
They're happy to do the bidding.
And these are, by the way, the same guys who do the bidding of sources in the Biden DOJ, the same guys that the Pentagon is leaking to now about how happy they are about Tucker Carlson's departure.
BuzzFeed was part of this kind of the worst of the worst.
I mean, the media as a group is horrible, and BuzzFeed was particularly horrible.
And therefore, BuzzFeed's demise is particularly delightful.
And it's wonderful to see these journalists now having to put out resumes and to see BuzzFeed having gotten its due karma.
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The film is called Big George Foreman, the miraculous story of the once and future heavyweight champion of the world. It's based on the true story of one of the great comebacks of all time and the transformational power of second chances. Big George Foreman stars Chris Davis, an Academy Award winner, Forrest Whitaker. It's rated PG-13, maybe inappropriate for children under 13, only in theaters beginning April 28. So go ahead, mark your calendar for tickets and showtimes. Go
to biggeorgeforeman.movie. We here, we've all heard quite a bit about equity, about equalizing We've heard about critical race theory.
And one question to ask is, why are these people doing it?
What is driving them to make this kind of a insistence on artificially rigged outcomes?
Well, the answer can be found by looking at the performance of different ethnic groups on any measure of academic performance or economic success.
Let's just take a single example, the scholastic Now, the average score, I'm going to look for a moment at the math section of the SAT, of all test takers in the country is about 510 out of 800.
And this score remains fairly persistent over the years, 510 over 800.
The average score for Blacks?
428, almost 100 points lower.
Latinos, a little higher, 457.
The average for whites, 534.
For Asians, 598.
So the Asian score is almost 150 points higher than the black score.
And that is on a score of 600 or is it 800 these days?
Is the SAT 600 or 800?
Tubby's like, it's been a long time since I've taken the SAT. Well, it doesn't actually matter.
The ratios are obvious by themselves.
And these ratios are particularly startling at the tail ends of the bell curve.
So let me give you an example of this.
Among top scorers—oh, actually, here we go.
It's 800. Top scorers are people who score between 750 and 800.
60% of those people are Asian.
33% are white.
5% are Latino.
2% are black. So if top schools were to admit on merit alone, that gives you an idea of what the distribution of the class would look like.
And at the bottom, it's the opposite, right?
If you're looking at bottom scores between 300 and 350, very low scores, 37% of those people are Latino, 35% are black, 21% are white.
Only 6% are Asian.
So, the point being, this is why there's so much attempts to hide this, to fix the outcome so that it doesn't...
By the way, this is the academic equivalent of what you see in the NBA, right?
Blacks who are about 10 or 12% of the population are, what, 60, 70, 80% of NBA players.
So, we see huge racial gaps there as well.
But... In the case of the NBA, nobody says, well, it's time to lower the net every time a white guy goes up to hit the basket.
But if you did CRT, if you did equity, if you apply the same logic to the NBA, that's what you'd have to do.
You'd have to ruin the game in order to produce diversity on the court.
And that's what we're doing. We're ruining our academic and even our corporate and economic institutions.
Why? In order to produce this forced equity that is by and large trying to pretend that people who are not doing very well need to be moved up so that they are given the same rewards as other people who are doing better.
But you might say, wait a minute, isn't it true, Dinesh, that there is really, these race gaps are due to historical discrimination?
That if you look at the distribution of income and wealth in the country, finally, aren't you going to see whites have the most?
Hispanics are in the middle, blacks are the bottom, and guess what?
Whites basically control the power structure.
Whites are the ones who impose slavery and segregation.
So the fact that they're on top is a reflection I want to show you why that is not true.
Here I have in front of me is a list of the ethnic distribution of the most successful groups in the United States.
And think of it this way.
If America was structured on white supremacy, you'd expect to see whites on top, leading in pretty much all measures of academic achievement and economic success.
And then you'd expect to see the other minority groups all bunched together, probably in fairly equal status down at the bottom.
In fact, The ethnic group with the highest income in the country, Indian Americans, with an average income of $100,500.
Next, Filipino Americans, next Taiwanese Americans, next Sri Lankan Americans, next Japanese Americans, then Malaysian Americans, then Chinese Americans, then Pakistani Americans.
That's the top six.
White Americans come in after that.
And then right after whites, Korean Americans, Indonesian Americans, and then Thai Americans and Bangladeshi Americans.
And then lower down, you find Nepali Americans, and then Hispanic-slash-Latino Americans, $43,000.
African Americans, $35,000.
So I ask you, does that look...
Normally, when you look at a distribution, you think the people at the top have been oppressing the people at the bottom.
Can we say reasonably that Indian Americans, Filipinos, Taiwanese, and Sri Lankans have been oppressing Hispanics and Blacks?
That's absurd. And so right there, in the very distribution of ethnic success, you see why the idea that differences of ethnic achievement can be blamed either on present or on past discrimination makes no sense.
I'm talking about the supposed crimes of religion and I'm going to be comparing them to the crimes of atheism.
In the back of my mind, I have sort of a body count and I'm adding it up.
So I talked about the Crusades, I've talked about the Inquisition.
But the Crusades were in the Middle East and in Europe.
The Inquisition, of course, was in Europe and most focused in Spain.
But now let's talk about the United States.
probably the most famous or infamous example of religiously motivated oppression or violence would be the Salem witch trials. I don't know if you've been to Salem, Massachusetts. Debbie and I actually went there to check out the witches and today they're doing pretty well. They've become like a tourist attraction. They've got all kinds of stores and they do their chants and rituals. In any event, the Salem witch trials, you know, I'd heard about them.
I had learned a little bit about them.
And if you had asked me before I began to look into it, how many people were killed in the Salem Witch Trials?
I would have said, I don't know, you know, thousands, certainly hundreds.
Well, here's the actual number.
Fewer than 25.
Fewer than 25.
So 19 were evidently sentenced to death.
A few others died in captivity.
And yet we've got a whole, you know, literature about the Salem witch trials.
There are books, there are movies, there are plays.
I don't know if you remember Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
Basically, Miller was using the Salem witch trials as a kind of precedent to illustrate the harms of McCarthyism in the 1950s.
But little did he realize that his example, he was like, McCarthyism is so bad, it's like the Salem witch trials!
But, of course, the point is the Salem witch trials were no big deal.
So, in a way, McCarthy was right.
McCarthyism, the so-called hunting down of communists and former communists, is comparable to the Salem witch trials in that neither of them was really that big of a deal.
I'm not saying the Salem witch trials were a good idea.
They were wrong, but they harmed a relatively small number of people.
So, few casualties and big brouhaha.
Now, let's look at the way in which atheists today, who have access to this literature, let's see how they treat the Salem witch trials.
Here's Carl Sagan. He goes, no one knows.
No, here he's talking about the witch trials in Europe.
I'm sorry. He goes, no one knows how many were killed altogether, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.
Well, there's a big difference between thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions.
And it turns out Sagan has no idea.
So he simply invokes millions, even though there's no data, there's nothing to support this at all.
He cites no sources, and we can just conclude that he knows nothing about the subject.
Now let's turn to Sam Harris, who's done some reading, and he knows that the historical estimates about these witch burnings and so on is exaggerated.
So he goes, yeah, he goes, contemporary historians put the number of witches burned, this is throughout Europe, at about 100,000.
Well, let's say that that's right.
That's a big number, but it's a lot less than Sagan's millions.
And it's about 20 times lower than previous estimates that were bandied about basically by skeptics and atheists for many, many decades.
And then Harris, Sam Harris writes this, he goes, such a revaluation of numbers does little to mitigate the horror and injustice of this period.
Well, why not?
I mean, if I told you that there was a famine and 100,000 people died and you're like, oh, that's terrible.
And I said, well, those estimates have been revised.
Actually, it's 5,000 people.
Would you say such a revaluation of numbers does little to mitigate the horror?
It does a lot to mitigate the horror.
In fact, it reduces the horror by a factor of 20.
So similarly here, if the estimates of the witch burnings were 20 times higher than they in fact are, that does a lot to mitigate the horror.
Take, just by way of example, the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they cost an estimate of about 100,000 civilian deaths.
Again, that's a big number, but let's say it was 20 times less, 5,000 deaths.
So then you go, wait, that was unfortunate, but again, 5,000 people can die in a single battle on a single battlefield, so it doesn't become the sort of world historical event that Hiroshima and Nagasaki rightly, Now, here is Carl Sagan again putting on his kind of philosophical hat and he's trying to ask why these witch burnings occurred.
And he says basically this, if we're absolutely sure that our beliefs are right and those of others are wrong, then the witch mania will recur in infinite variations.
In other words, he's saying this could happen here.
Whenever people are sure of something, it leads to witch burning.
And I ask you, is this really true?
I mean, aren't there things that you and I are sure of, that Carl Sagan is sure of?
I'm sure he's sure of the theory of Darwinian evolution.
Does that lead to witch burnings?
I'm sure he's sure of the fact that the universe is really old.
Does that lead him to go into witch burnings?
No. So, notice the deployment of selective rhetoric.
Apparently, when religious people are sure of something, it leads to witch burning.
But when secular people are sure of something, and we notice, for example, that secular surety, secular assurance can lead to intolerance.
Look at all the woke stuff in the universities.
It's a secular movement, but it's an attempt to impose ideas.
So look, Sagan hasn't burned anyone, and neither have you and neither have I. And so our records on witch burning are actually pretty good.
So in some, the witch burnings, both in Europe, the number is exaggerated.
In Salem, pretty minuscule, under 25.
And so again, all of this is tragic.
But again, when we add up the crimes of religion, the number turns out to be tiny compared to the crimes of atheism.
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