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April 27, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:25
SCORCHED EARTH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep567
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Coming up, Trump is going scorched earth on DeSantis, and I'll evaluate the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of that strategy.
I'll review the Disney lawsuit against DeSantis and argue this is a fight DeSantis should relish.
I'll reveal how Vivek Ramaswamy played a key role in getting Don Lemon sliced and diced at CNN. And I'll answer a simple question posed by a student to me at a recent talk.
What is conservatism?
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Trump is going scorched earth on DeSantis.
It seems like when I look at Trump's feed on Truth Social, every single day he's pummeling DeSantis.
And in fact, Debbie and I were watching Trump's most recent ad that he's put out, an ad that actually in some ways makes you laugh.
It makes you laugh because it's so Trumpian and it's so over the top.
And the basic theme of the ad is that Trump created DeSantis.
So DeSantis was this kind of absolute nobody.
Get the impression he was just some guy on the street who decided to sort of run for governor.
He had absolutely no chance in the Republican primary, let alone in the governor's race.
Then to the rescue rides in Trump.
basically anoints Desantis and then Desantis has a glowing future.
So Trump's point is that this guy who's claiming to be this kind of better alternative to me is none other than, you may say, my political offspring.
So, it's a condescending ad and a little demeaning, of course, to DeSantis, but it also makes you laugh because it's like, wait a minute, I mean, this may be true.
Trump is from a generation earlier than DeSantis, so no surprise, a lot of people have come up.
Think of it. A lot of people came up through Reagan.
Pretty much the entire generation of Republican leaders, from Newt Gingrich to Jack Kemp, so many others, came up through the Reagan revolution.
And so this is something actually Trump should be proud of, but not in the negative sense of bashing those people and saying, hey, guys, listen, you would have been nowhere because of me.
It would be more appropriate for Trump to say really the opposite.
I'm proud of DeSantis.
I'm actually glad that he's gone on to do a good job in Florida.
Now listen, Trump can make the case and should make the case that, look, I was cheated out of the 2020 election.
I did a really good job.
I've sort of earned the right to be reelected.
And Biden is absolutely horrible.
And I know how to fix the things.
I've actually learned some things while I was in the White House.
No one has that kind of experience.
I have a full understanding of how deep the so-called deep state goes.
I know how to root it out.
So I'm sort of paving the way for For the next generation of leaders to take over after my turn.
But this is not the case that Trump is actually making.
So for this reason, I think that this attack on DeSantis or this wave of attacks on DeSantis is not really working.
Now, there are Trumpsters and of course...
I had Caroline Levitt on the show.
She's representing the Trump back.
And she was like, hey, listen, it is working.
Trump is decisively leading DeSantis in the Republican fold.
And moreover, that lead has widened.
And while I agree that's true, I think that first of all, Trump would be leading DeSantis anyway.
And second of all, the lead has widened, I think in part, Because of the Trump arrest, because of the Trump indictment, people feel a sense of sympathy, a sense of outrage, and they feel like, well, okay, if you're going to do that, you're so obsessed with Trump, our support for Trump is going to be stronger than ever.
I see, for example, in a guy like Cernovich, a kind of hardening of his support.
And he was someone who was on the verge of defecting to DeSantis, but he has pivoted right back into the Trump column.
Well, I think one of the unfortunate effects of this kind of burning of DeSantis is DeSantis at some point is going to have to reciprocate, attack back.
I don't think he's the type of guy who's just going to sort of take it.
And that creates a lot of acrimony on the Republican side.
Why? Because the ordinary Republican, me included, Debbie included, we like Trump and we like DeSantis.
So we don't want to see this kind of...
It's not that we don't want to see rivalry.
It's not that we don't want to see competition.
It's not that we don't want to see policy debate.
But this kind of strafing of the other guy...
I think is regrettable coming from either side.
And of course, when DeSantis does it, and he's, I think, going to do it, is he's going to say, well, I didn't start it.
I was just being the governor, being in my second term, and then along comes Trump, and he keeps attacking me every day, so what do you expect me to do?
And in that sense, he would have a point.
One of the observations Debbie made the other day, which I think is very valid, is she's like, look, this is also a way for Trump to make Enemies.
And an enemy here is different than someone who's merely a rival.
Think, for example, I think back to 1980, Reagan standing up on the podium.
There were like seven other rivals in New Hampshire.
All wanted, of course, to be president, George H.W. Bush included.
And Reagan sparred with all of them, but he never alienated any of them to the point where he couldn't call them up, where he couldn't bring them into the administration.
Of course, George H.W. Bush was the second greatest vote-getter, and he ended up being the vice presidential nominee.
So this is actually the model.
I think this is the case.
There are some cases in which perhaps Trump has got a new formula that Reagan didn't have, at least Reagan didn't have, Applicable to our time.
But there are some things that Trump can also learn from Reagan, and this, I think, is one of them.
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Ron DeSantis is in Israel right now.
Seems to be on a kind of globetrotting expedition.
And I don't know the exact purpose of it, but the kind of obvious purpose to infer is that he wants to show that there is a foreign policy dimension.
Think of it. You're the governor of a state.
You're the CEO of that state.
But that means you're dealing with domestic issues.
In fact, even issues like immigration are somewhat outside of your control.
Not entirely, but that's a federal matter.
And moreover, all of foreign policy is a national, not a state issue.
And the president is the commander in chief.
So DeSantis, I think, doesn't want to go into the campaign with the, you know, have you ever been to Israel?
No, I haven't. Have you ever been to Poland?
No, I haven't. So I think he wants to show, I've been to these places.
And moreover, I've met with the leaders of those countries.
I've been able to see for myself what's going on.
I'm developing a broader horizon than merely the state of Florida.
So this seems to be the purpose of it.
Meanwhile, in Florida, the Disney Corporation has filed a lawsuit against DeSantis and also against the new state oversight board claiming that the state of Florida is engaging in targeted retaliation against Disney.
Now, let's look at what the nature of this lawsuit is.
The lawsuit basically says that the government is punishing Disney for expressing an unpopular political viewpoint And this violates Disney's constitutional rights.
Now, right there, you have to stop and ask, wait a minute.
Are you saying Mickey Mouse has constitutional rights?
What? But yes, corporations do have some rights.
Now, corporations don't have the same rights that you or I have.
We're citizens of the country.
Disney is not a citizen in that sense.
So it can't claim the same degree of constitutional protection as you and I could.
At the same time, corporations can enter into contracts and those contracts are entitled to due process of law.
Disney also has free speech rights.
Corporations have free speech rights.
They're able to express what they think as a corporate entity.
So this is the essence of Disney's contract.
They're saying that in reliance of these contracts that we made with the state of Florida, And inconsistent with our right to free speech, we have been taking certain political positions.
Now let's back up so we can understand the background here.
Basically, this all started with the state of Florida passing this Parental Rights in Education Act.
This was in March of 2022.
And the basic idea was very simple.
We don't want this perverted sexual indoctrination of our children.
We're going to stop it. And so at a very young age, you can't do it at all.
And at an older age, you can do it.
You can engage in sex education, but it has to be under parental observation.
Parents have certain rights.
They can complain. They can protest.
And if they protest, a certain process has to...
It has to be followed.
So age-appropriate sex education is really what the bill is all about.
I think it's an eminently sensible bill.
And of course, the left screams and goes, this is a don't say gay bill.
And oh, this is a bill that is preventing sex education altogether.
None of that is really the case.
Nevertheless, the Disney Corporation, after first staying out of it, and by the way, Disney in the past also kind of stayed out of this kind of content.
Disney would not show gays in their movies.
There was some discussion years ago about whether Disney was dropping or some of the activists at Disney were putting subliminal sexual messages into Disney films, but they certainly weren't doing it overtly.
But here what you have, and I think this is probably the result of a kind of employee pressure at Disney.
Disney, by the way, is absolutely full of gays and bisexuals and transsexuals and who knows what else.
But in any event, these guys obviously put pressure on the company and the company came out vehemently against this Florida bill.
And basically, this got into a political fight with Ron DeSantis and the Republicans who control the legislature.
So it's a matter of, hey, listen, you can come out against us, but we can come out against you.
Now, it's not clear to me that this kind of a political fight, think of it, a powerful corporation takes on the political establishment of a state that it happens to be in, and the state retaliates by saying, all right, well, we have an oversight board.
I don't see anything unconstitutional about that.
The state of Florida is not interfering with Disney's right to speak.
Disney can speak all at once.
It can continue speaking. It could actually make all its films about gay characters if at once.
In fact, it has been doing that.
There's been more kind of explicit gay imagery.
In Disney's 2022 film Lightyear, there was a sort of same-sex kiss in that film.
And so Disney is going all out.
So where are its free speech rights being violated?
I really don't see it.
Now, Disney may have a little bit of a stronger case with regard to contracts.
But again, contracts aren't eternal.
Contracts can be made surreptitiously or not following due process.
The state of Florida has the ability to void certain types of contracts.
Contracts with the state based on new legislative measures that revise the earlier contracts.
So all of this is a little bit murky and it's gonna go to court and we're gonna see where it goes.
But I think it shows a combativeness on the part of Disney.
Disney could back down and basically make peace or try to make peace with the state of Florida.
They've decided to up the ante and guess what?
It's very much in Ron DeSantis' interest, I think, to continue this fight, to intensify the fight.
The more that he can show that he can bring this kind of woke corporation that's become a sicko entity, spreading disgusting values, just not only in America, but to some degree all over the world.
If Ron DeSantis shows that he can bring Disney, this kind of new perverted Mickey Mouse to its knees, I think it will...
Do him a lot of political good, particularly as he seeks the Republican nomination in 2024.
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Feel the difference. A new whistleblower appeared before the Republican Congress yesterday and offered some startling evidence and made some startling accusations.
And her name is Tara Lee Rodas, R-O-D-A-S. And she testified before the House Judiciary Committee.
The issue was immigration.
And we know and have known for some time about the porous border.
We know about the Biden administration shenanigans, the willing cooperation with cartels, the gangs coming over into this country, the drugs coming over, the sex trafficking that can occur with the migrants themselves.
And all of this is just repulsive, and why the Republican House has not already begun impeachment proceedings of Mayorkas is beyond me.
This is where Republicans tend to be kind of straight-laced.
They're like, well, how has Mayorkas violated the law?
Well, the law is being massively flouted.
And the fact that this isn't just Mayorkas, it's just Biden policy.
Well, who's the representative of that policy?
It's Mayorkas. Well, Tara Lee Rodas takes all of this to a new level where she says that a large number of the migrant children who are coming over, these are the so-called unaccompanied minors.
And let's remember that the unaccompanied minors are a key part of the immigration debate.
Why? Because the unaccompanied minors are where public sympathy for the illegal migrants is generated.
No one has a lot of sympathy for some able-bodied 37-year-old who's coming over.
That guy could be a gangster, who knows what.
You're talking about able-bodied males who are able to some degree anyway to provide for themselves the way the rest of the world does in other countries.
But when you're talking about kids coming and they're five years old and seven years old and nine years old, obviously you feel a sense of human sympathy and there are people in the country who say, well, maybe we should make some provision, some allowance for these children and isn't there a way for them to be adopted in this country?
Well as it turns out, this so-called placement of the children has turned out to be a highly dubious business.
What do I mean? What do I mean is that the government doesn't really know what to do with all these children.
Many times the children are coming with adults who kind of grab the kid and go, yeah, I'm coming over with the kid.
And then the moment that they get over the border, they abandon the kid.
And the kid is now in the charge of the U.S. government.
and the US government wants to sort of, in a very crass way, get rid of these kids. By that I mean put them somewhere. You can't put them, the government doesn't have itself facilities to look after these children. And so what they do is they work with these foster care agencies and so on. But here's the bad news and here's what Tara Lee Rodas is divulging.
There are all these sex trafficking rings in the United States that have decided here is a kind of easy and ready supply of children that if we just, quote, adopt them, we can then just stick them right into the sex trafficking ring or we can sell them into child slavery.
They'll be put to work.
Without pay, or they'll be used by pedophiles.
And so pedophile rings are signing up for the U.S. government's approved kind of foster care program.
And the Biden administration, this is the crushing point, is aware of this.
It's not exactly a secret.
In fact, when Tara Lee Rodas came upon it, she reported it to her superiors and said, look, It's very obvious this is what's going on.
We have become the middleman.
We have become the broker.
We have become the agent of taking innocent children and putting them into sex trafficking rings.
We are facilitating this process.
We cannot pretend to ignore it.
It's going on right in front of us.
We have to stop it. And guess what?
Far from stopping it, her superiors in the Biden regime decided, we're going to try to stop her.
We're going to stop Tara Lee Rodas from blowing the whistle.
And this is when she decided, I can't do this.
I've got to become a whistleblower.
I've got to speak out against this kind of a madness.
So this gives you a window into how depraved and wicked these people are.
Again, I'm not saying that the Mayorkas and the Biden regime is doing the sex trafficking, but I'm saying they're knowledgeable about it.
And they know that the only reason it can occur is because they are themselves facilitating and, in fact, have accelerated these kids coming across the border, The kids are being used as a kind of shield, if you will, by adults who need to get over the border themselves.
And then the kids become pawns in that kind of a game.
And then they are sacrificed, if you will, at the altar of these pedophiles or at the altar of the sex trafficking operation.
It's all sick.
It's all deeply depraved.
I'm really glad that it's now coming out.
But again, the question I have, and it's a question we have with all these hearings is, so what now?
Because it seems like the media doesn't cover these kinds of things.
They're like, well, you know what?
I guess that's the price you pay for the Democrats' political objectives with the border.
And hey, what are we going to do with these kids if not stick them in these?
So I think that a country that does this kind of thing knowingly is forfeiting its moral authority.
Not just in the world, but also before its own citizens.
It changes the relationship between citizens and their government.
And at some level, the sheer speechless or sputtering outrage that we feel can't just be.
It's directed against the Biden regime, yes.
But to some degree, it's also putting the country, both nationally and internationally, in a very bad light.
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I want to talk about a lively and quite interesting exchange that occurred on CNN between Don Lemon and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Vivek Ramaswamy, who was on this podcast, gosh, what, a week or so, a couple of weeks ago.
And Vivek is this young Indian-American guy running for president.
And CNN invited him to come on, and he got into it with Don Lemon.
And the reason I bring this up is for a couple of reasons.
Well, one reason is that it looks to be one of the sort of last straws that got Don Lemon fired.
And so I want to talk about it from that angle.
What happened and what is it about that exchange that caused the CNN people to go, oh, that's it.
Don, you're out of here.
But then second, I want to do something that very few people have done, and that is to look at what they were arguing about.
Because that in itself is also interesting. They were discussing the civil rights movement, they were discussing who has a right to speak about civil rights, is this the special prerogative of blacks, do Indian Americans get to weigh in, should Indian Americans just sort of shut up and be grateful that the civil rights movement delivered the goods for them too?
So all of this is at issue here.
But let's sort of just start with the incident itself, because Lemon was sitting alongside his co-host, this is Poppy Harlow, and something very interesting happened. He got into it with Vivek Ramaswamy, and you can kind of watch the female co-host, Poppy Harlow, kind of her body language as she pulls back, and she kind of like pulls up her phone.
She begins to look away.
You can see she's very clearly signaling to the audience, but also to her CNN bosses, I want no part of this.
And she distances herself from her own co-host, and that is the unspoken text of what's going on.
Now, evidently, CNN has been trying really hard to get Republicans to come on CNN. You might remember I spoke about this some months ago.
Chris Licht, the head of CNN, had been hanging out with a Republican in the Republican Senate gallery.
He had been talking to Republican senators, and his basic point is, why won't you come on CNN? They go, because we don't trust CNN. He goes, well, why?
You should be able to trust CNN. We should be able to ask you fair questions and They're like, we don't get a chance to even give our answer.
Well, you should be able to give an answer.
Even if CNN is liberal, even if we don't agree with you, you should be able to have your point of view heard.
And I think this is something that's quite important to Chris Lake.
He doesn't want CNN to be seen, as it has been seen, rightly, as a complete propaganda outlet.
I think he's trying to rebalance it slightly, anyway, toward the middle.
So think about it. Well, you know what?
Here's young Vivek Ramaswamy.
He seems game for an argument.
He'll do it. And sure enough, Vivek is game.
And Vivek is a very glib, fast-talking, smart guy.
So he's not afraid of Don Lemon or anybody at CNN for that matter.
And so Vivek goes on, and yet they kind of diss Vivek.
They interrupt him. Don Lemon keeps lecturing him as if to say, you have no right to speak on this topic.
And Vivek holds his ground, by the way, but I think you could see from Papiharlo's reaction, she was kind of recoiling at the way that Don Lemon was badgering Ramaswamy.
And apparently he was also kind of rude to Papiharlo.
At the end of the exchange, she wants to kind of move on, and he kind of turns to her and sort of snaps at her.
So evidently, all of this, all of this body language, plus the rude behavior to Ramaswamy, and then of course, Don Lemon is known to be kind of rude to his coworkers, and there have been a lot of complaints made against him by a number of female staffers at CNN.
Evidently, all of this came to a head, and CNN decided enough is enough, and they rather unceremoniously gave Lemon the boot.
Now, After they gave Lemon the boot, Ro Khanna, who's an Indian-American congressman from California, I believe, he goes, Don Lemon was right.
As an Indian-American, I was profoundly embarrassed by Vivek lecturing a black man about black history.
The truth is that the black civil rights movement paved the way for the 1965 Immigration Act so that Vivek's family or mine could come to America.
We owe the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But, of course, this is true as far as it goes, but it misses what they were arguing about.
Vivek wasn't arguing about whether or not other minorities or immigrants owe a debt to the civil rights movement.
The real issue was Vivek was basically saying, hey, listen, the civil rights movement came about in part because blacks were in a position to defend themselves, and so the NRA... Which has fought through the decades for the rights of people, of Americans, including black Americans, to own guns.
That is an untold chapter of the history of the civil rights movement.
And Don Lemon was like, that's nonsense.
That's not really true.
So when we come back in the next segment, I will discuss whether it is true and also whether there are things that Vivek could have said to strengthen his argument that he didn't, in fact, say.
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I'm continuing my discussion of Don Lemon and Vivek Ramaswamy.
And here's Don Lemon to Ramaswamy.
When you have black skin and you live in this country, then you can disagree with me.
What? Don Lemon is implying that only blacks can discuss civil rights.
And this, of course, is rank nonsense.
The simple truth of it is anyone can discuss civil rights.
Now, a black guy can say, well, you haven't lived it like I have.
And of course, the answer to that is, well, you haven't lived it either.
Did Don Lemon live under slavery?
Did he live under segregation?
Not at all. So then Don Lemon could come back and say, well, yeah, but my grandfather did and his ancestors did.
And so through family lore, I have heard more about it and it's a little more personal for me.
And all of that is fair enough, but it still doesn't disqualify other people from participating in the debate.
Maybe what Don Lemon means is that I can speak with greater personal emotion about this.
Now, what were they arguing about?
Vivek Ramaswamy was making a point, and it is a valid point, although a limited point, that in the decades immediately following slavery, when the Democratic Party in the South unleashed a campaign of terror against blacks, the Ku Klux Klan was part of that, And it was suppressing the black vote.
It was terrorizing blacks into silence and submission.
And you'd have these robed Klansmen and gangsters who'd show up at the cabins and huts of black guys and try to grab them, rob them, lynch them, terrorize them.
And what was the only ally at that time that blacks had?
Well, Vivek's point is it wasn't the cops, because the cops were very often in league with the bad guys, with the gangsters, or they were indifferent.
They just stayed away.
The only ally that a black guy had in those circumstances was his trusty rifle.
Now, this is a point that black civil rights leaders have made in the past, and Vivek is right about this.
But I think what Vivek didn't say that I wish he had gone on to say is that, hey, Don, you belong to a party, the Democratic Party, that perpetrated the most heinous crimes against blacks.
Who do you think held the vast, vast majority of the slaves in captivity?
It was Democrats. Who do you think founded the Ku Klux Klan?
It was Democrats. Who do you think conducted those campaigns of terror and lynching?
It was Democrats. So, at the very least, you should acknowledge, if you're claiming that your ancestors were victims, you should also claim that the party you now support was the victimizer.
So, I texted Vivek after this exchange and I go, Hey Vivek, you need to watch Hillary's America.
You need to watch Death of a Nation because you are right.
In the points that you made with Lemon, but you could have gone a lot further.
You could have brought up, you could have dredged up the sordid history of the Democratic Party.
Now again, Don Lemon has a comeback.
He could have said, well, you know, the party switched sides, Vivek.
And first of all, that's not even true.
If you look at the ideology, say, of Abraham Lincoln, his positions in favor of markets, of capitalism, of upward mobility, his nationalism, all of it resonates with what Republicans believe today.
Where's the party switch? If the parties had switched, we would believe the opposite things of what Lincoln believed, but in fact, we believe the same things.
But even if the parties had somehow mysteriously switched sides, it wouldn't mean that the crimes of the Democrats transfer to the Republicans.
It's kind of like saying, you live across the street from me.
You had a murder ring in your house and killed 10 people in your basement.
Then in some weird transaction, I buy your house and you buy my house.
So you move into my house, I move into yours.
But it doesn't mean I killed those people.
You did. So the fact that we, quote, switch sides doesn't change the historical culpability of who did what to whom.
So this is the point I think that Vivek Ramaswamy could have had as a very strong point.
And by the way, it's the kind of point that's never heard on CNN. So these kinds of media appearances by Republicans should be seized as an opportunity.
Hey, if Chris Licht wants to have me on, I'd be delighted to go on CNN, and I would, you know, make mincemeat of these hosts.
I think this is the reason they won't have me on.
They used to have me on in the old, more balanced CNN days, when I'd get on, and I've been on with Don Lemon, I've been on with so many other of the CNN hosts, but since CNN pivoted left, And now they're, well, drifting slightly back to the center, but they're still very much on the far left.
Hey, listen, Don Lemon may be gone, and, you know, Chris Cuomo's gone, Brian Stelter's gone.
So CNN has been, you may say, draining the swamp, but it's still full of swamp creatures.
I mean, Poppy Harlow is a swamp creature.
Jake Tapper, the...
All of them, really, almost without exception.
They have one or two token Republicans, but these are never Trump types, Rick Santorum types.
Republicans who sometimes have some decent things to say, but are sort of unreliable on key issues that Republicans care deeply about.
So, kudos to Vivek Ramaswamy for going on CNN. Kudos for helping to end Don Lemon's career.
That alone is quite an accomplishment.
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I recently gave a talk at the University of Texas in San Antonio.
It was the first campus talk I've done in, gosh, what honey, about two and a half years, I guess really since COVID, before COVID-19.
What happened is right after COVID, the campuses have been kind of immobilized, demobilized.
A lot of them went to online classes.
So some of them have gotten back into normal operations, but still the idea of bringing in speakers from the outside, it's only now kind of starting up.
And of course, I have the daily podcast.
Debbie keeps reminding me, see, campus lectures are typically in the middle of the week.
Yeah. Whereas when I speak to Republican clubs, Reagan dinners, Lincoln dinners, those tend to be on the weekend.
It's a little easier for me to pull that off, a little harder for me on a Tuesday or Wednesday to march off to a campus.
So in any event, I did do this talk.
It was sponsored by the Turning Point chapter at UT San Antonio.
We had a nice crowd, actually an interesting mix, mostly students, but also a mix of people from the community.
And there was a fairly heavy police presence.
I think the police had, the campus police, had checked out turning point events on other campuses.
And I think some of those have gotten kind of raucous.
I was kind of ready for anything.
But as it turned out, it was people were, you know, I'd call them Texas well-behaved.
You had leftists there, and they asked questions, but they asked questions respectfully.
The only time one guy got kind of shouted down, not shouted down, but like shouted at by people in the audience was he had like a list of questions and he wasn't like letting up and it was like, come on, you've had your chance, let somebody else talk.
Well, one of the questions that was asked to me by someone on the left, but they were genuinely asking.
This is, you know, when people ask questions, sometimes they just ask to show me up.
Like, Dinesh, I know more than you.
Let me expose you as a charlatan.
And that doesn't really work.
But they try that. But in this case, the student simply asked, what is conservatism?
I think it was a black kid who asked.
And just what is conservatism?
And I want to kind of share my answer because it's kind of worth thinking about.
We get caught up in day-to-day issues and we don't step back.
And what does conservatism mean and what does it mean today?
And I answered it in two ways to say, look, there is a kind of classic or traditional definition of conservatism.
I'm going to give you that. And then there's a sort of modern American definition.
I'm going to give you that. So the classic definition of conservatism is just this.
To conserve.
But to conserve means that over the long space of history, a long period of time, many things have been tried.
And some have worked and some have failed.
So the wisdom of conservatism is, let's look to the long example of the past.
Not just what happened yesterday, or even 10 years ago, or even 100 years ago.
Let's look back deep within the resources of our civilization.
Or even humanity.
And look at time-tested ways of doing things that are successful and conserve that.
So conservatism is past-oriented, but it's not based upon something happened before, so let's do it again.
It's also not based upon...
Something is a tradition so that automatically makes it good.
There obviously have been traditions of slavery, of anti-Semitism.
There are bad traditions we have no intention of retaining.
But look at the past as a tried and true measure of what does work and what doesn't and learn from it.
That's the conservative insight.
Think of the progressive idea is let's base our strategy on the future.
Wait. Wait. The future hasn't even occurred.
So you can come up with a blueprint.
You can come up with a utopia.
You can come up with a dream.
But how do you know if that dream is going to work?
How do you know if you can convert it successfully into reality?
How do you know if it's congruent with human nature?
So classic conservatism values the past more than, you may say, the quote, lessons of the future, because there are no lessons of the future.
The future hasn't occurred yet.
Now, in America, conservatism means something a little bit more concrete.
We had a revolution, the American Revolution, and conservatism in the modern American sense means conserving not just the past, any past, but specifically the principles of the American Revolution.
And what are those?
Well, they have to do with separation of powers, the republican form of government, which is accountability in the end to the people, representative democracy, the appreciation and implementation of a written constitution, checks and balances.
I mean, one of the biggest problems in our society today is checks and balances have sort of broken down.
Judges are supposed to be a check on prosecutors.
In the case of January 6th defendants, they're not.
The media is supposed to be a check on the legislative and the executive branch and many times they're not.
So individual rights, our rights in the Bill of Rights clearly specified their rights against the state, their rights against the government.
Congress shall not do this and Congress shall not do that.
And our rights to conscience and free speech and equal treatment under the law.
So this is the complex organism of government.
Which has over 200 years, again, proven itself to be successful, to be in conformity with human nature, to bring out the best in people.
This is what, at a time when these principles are gravely endangered, in which this constitutional arrangement is being just chucked aside by the left and by the Democrats, this is what we are now trying to conserve.
I'm continuing and might conclude today my discussion of the supposed historical crimes of religion.
Then I will turn to the...
I've talked about the Crusades.
I've talked about the Inquisition.
I've talked about the Salem witch trials.
Let's talk now about the Thirty Years' War, a very bloody conflict that rent much of Europe, caused a lot of deaths, a lot of destruction.
Now this was a conflict that involved the Holy Roman Empire and also the Protestant states in Germany.
It lasted, no surprise, 30 years, 1618 to 1648.
Now here's the point, religious motives were initially present in the war.
It was a kind of a Catholic-Protestant conflict, but those motives quickly gave way to ethnic motives and also to power struggles between countries that were jostling for influence.
The emerging states, nation-states of Europe, were getting more powerful.
Each one wanted to be top dog.
So look at the actions of Catholic France.
Catholic France initially was on the Catholic side, but then they began to worry as the Catholics were winning that the Holy Roman Empire was becoming too powerful.
And so France switched sides, and under the influence of Cardinal Richelieu, the French began to back the Protestant states now to weaken the Holy Roman Empire.
So this is a classic example of how you can't make this a simple religious fight.
There was a lot of Machiavellian realpolitik involved.
And I think as we look around the world even today, and certainly over the past 30 years, we see that many of the conflicts that are classified as religious are ethnic rivalries.
Think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Is it a religious conflict?
Well, not really.
There's a religious element to it in that Orthodox Jews believe, based on the Bible, God gave us this land.
This is theologically assigned to us.
So those elements are present.
But listen, Zionism, the movement for the preservation of Israel, and I think for most Israelis today, this is a political fight.
In fact, the early Zionists were socialists.
They were secular people. They didn't come out of the Orthodox wing of Judaism.
Similarly, for the Palestinians, the argument is that when the Jews went into the diaspora, there were Muslim farmers who moved in here.
This is our land. We've had it for a long time, and it was seized by force after 1948.
So, you can see here, both sides, really, the predominant wings on both the Israeli side and the Palestinian side are secular.
If you look at the conflict in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, the same thing.
Yeah, for a long time we kept reading this is a Catholic-Protestant fight.
And again, there's a Catholic-Protestant ethnic element.
But you can kind of tell that this is an ethnic conflict.
I'll tell you a joke that I heard from all people, Christopher Hitchens.
The joke that he tells actually undermines his own argument.
He was trying to make the point that Northern Ireland is a kind of a cesspool of religious conflict but here's the joke.
A guy's walking down the street in Belfast.
A gunman jumps out of a doorway, points a gun at him and says, Protestant or Catholic?
And the guy goes, I'm an atheist.
To which the gunman says, Catholic atheist or Protestant atheist?
So this is the joke. And of course, the joke boomerangs on Hitchens for the simple reason that the point of the joke is that religion isn't really the issue.
The issue is simply kind of which team do you belong to?
It doesn't matter what your convictions are.
So this isn't a fight over the Bible or transubstantiation or any kind of point of doctrine.
This is a fight about autonomy and power, which group gets to rule over the country.
Now, none of this is to deny that there aren't That religion can't be a source of self-righteousness and that that can sometimes lead to persecution.
Obviously, historically, we've seen such persecution in the Christian fold.
Even today in the Muslim world, violence in the name of religion is a serious problem.
But let me conclude this discussion with a...
Just a brief vignette from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, where Christ himself shows up in front of the Grand Inquisitor.
It's the middle of the Inquisition.
Christ shows up, and the Inquisitor recognizes Christ.
But even though his actions are in the name of Christ, he grabs Christ and puts him into prison.
And Dostoevsky's question is, why?
And the Grand Inquisitor says, that's because Christ is a peacemaker.
He's kind of out of sync with Inquisition ideology, if you will.
Here's Jesus in Matthew 7, So this is the spirit of Christ.
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