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May 8, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:49
MORTGAGING OUR FUTURE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep574
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Coming up, I'll reveal how the Biden administration is punishing people with good credit who try to get mortgages in order to subsidize people with bad credit.
I'll argue that the famous 1960s slogan about San Francisco needs to be rewritten to Are You Leaving San Francisco?
And swimming star Riley Gaines joins me.
We're going to talk about her experience competing in women's sports and also speaking out in favor of women's rights.
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The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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I want to talk about a new, just horrific policy that the Biden regime has put into effect.
And this is a policy and rule that requires credit agencies to penalize people with good credit Who are getting mortgages and to give the benefit to people with bad credit.
I mean, think about it. In a society, by and large, you want to encourage productive behavior.
You want to discourage bad behavior.
In this case, not paying your bills.
And yet for the Biden administration, it's the opposite.
And so what we're talking about here is the is a rule that has been put into effect by the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
It's called FHFA, which allows consumers with lower credit, bad credit ratings, and less money for a down payment to get better mortgage rates than they otherwise would have.
And now this is obviously going to impose a cost.
So who's going to bear the cost?
Well, it turns out the costs are being passed on to those with good credit.
And this is such a preposterous and really evil scheme that even an Obama official, this is the former Obama housing chief, A guy named Stevens.
And he goes, this is not a good idea.
Because he says that, by and large, what you're doing is, this is convoluted, he says, the entire discipline and credit risk pricing structure that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have followed since their inception.
So Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, these giant entities that basically deal with mortgages across the country, And of course, the principle of mortgage is really simple.
If you have good credit, you should be able to, and you're putting a big chunk of money down, so you're buying a $300,000 house, you're like, okay, listen, I'll put 20% down, I have really good credit, you get a better rate.
But what the Biden administration is saying is that, no, we want to encourage more new and first-time and minority homebuyers.
Those people, by and large, typically have bad credit.
So what do we want to do?
We want to make it easier for them to get mortgages, so we got to give them a better rate, then they're going to be more likely to do it.
But hey, there's a price to be paid here, and so we're going to impose it.
This is nothing more than taking the same logic that they use with taxes.
Basically, if you make more money, we're going to penalize you for it by charging you, by making you pay a higher proportion of your income in taxes.
And now this is extending to mortgages.
And so this guy, Stevens, this Obama official, he goes, the mortgage industry is outraged because he says, he says, he's quoting from an executive with a mortgage company.
He goes, so I guess we have to teach borrowers to worsen their credit before they apply for a mortgage to get...
So the intention here, which is, by the way, good intentions in this area almost always lead to bad results.
You might remember the kind of mortgage crash of 2008.
Well, what brought it about was not because there was sort of reckless behavior by banks.
Well, the reckless behavior by banks, to put it differently, was caused by Government agencies pressuring the banks to change their lending standards.
Why? In order to, by and large, make credit available to people who didn't deserve credit, to make mortgage loans available to people who didn't really qualify for them.
So by strong-arming the banks into doing that, by and large the government got this result which is basically a massive default by people who bought houses that they couldn't afford and then no surprise couldn't make the payments.
Banks began to then repossess those houses but there were so many of them it was not easy to sell.
So housing prices then begin to crash.
So this is what happens when you let progressives run an economy.
They operate without regard to market principles and they do a very common thing which is they punish good behavior and they reward bad behavior.
We're seeing this again.
This goes beyond mortgages.
Look at crime policies.
By and large, if you subsidize crime, you get more of it.
And on the other hand, if you discourage, demoralize and defund the police, fewer people want to become cops and the streets become more dangerous.
So I see this.
The Biden people are trying to make it sound like this change in credit is no big deal.
To quote them, they're saying, in effect, quote, we are increased pricing support for purchase borrowers limited by income or by wealth.
So basically, we're trying to help these people.
And they come with, quote, minimal fee changes.
Well, it's about $40 a month for a typical family that has good credit.
Their mortgage is going to kick up $40 more.
But $40 a month adds up.
So that's $500 a year.
And think about the value of that kind of thing over, let's say, the life of a mortgage.
So over 30 years, you're talking about not an insignificant amount of money.
And frankly, if it was an insignificant amount of money, they wouldn't have to pass the rule in the first place.
So they know it's a significant amount of money.
And for me, this is bad in itself, but also indicative of just a broad pattern of bad policies that are being implemented by the Biden administration.
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Feel the difference. You probably know the song from the 1960s, Are You Going to San Francisco?
Well, not a whole lot of people are going to San Francisco these days.
In fact, if the song was written today, you'd probably want to rewrite it, Are You Leaving San Francisco?
Now, major retail corporations are decamping out of San Francisco.
And some of them are decamping out of California.
But you don't actually have to leave California to be able to function because, quite frankly, in fact, I saw a video this morning on social media and it had to do with the...
With a retail outlet in Tiburon, which is basically right there.
It's a suburb of San Francisco.
And guess what? While San Francisco is in ruins and is crime ridden, it's ridden with these aggressive homeless characters, Tiburon is completely fine.
In fact, they were showing a video of a retail store and nothing is actually behind bars.
Nothing is actually behind the glass.
You have free access to the stuff that's in the store.
And at the same time, in San Francisco, as a result of just horrendous policies, Nordstrom is now leaving San Francisco.
Wow. Walgreens is already out of there.
CVS is gone. Whole Foods is gone from the downtown.
Abercrombie& Fritch is gone.
Saks is gone. Anthropologie, Office Depot has relocated.
Crate& Barrel has closed its store.
The Gap is closing its store soon.
So you basically have an exodus from the once fashionable, once chic, And not only is you have this retail kind of exile or retail departure from San Francisco, you're now beginning to see that the office buildings in San Francisco downtown are emptying out.
Think about that. So San Francisco's California Street.
By the way, the street itself is like four miles.
It runs right through the heart of the city, right through Chinatown.
And typically, it's the heart of the financial district, banks, insurance companies, high-tech companies.
It was once thought to be almost like the headquarters of the global tech economy.
To take a simple example, and I'm now quoting from the Wall Street Journal, one building at 350 California Street, it's a 22-floor glass and stone tower.
It was worth $300 million in 2019.
It's now for sale, and they're expecting to get $80 million.
So, in other words, this is an 80% decline in value of that building.
Now, why? The reason the building is not worthless, but it's declined, it's plummeted in value, is because nobody's occupying the offices.
Now, it should be said in fairness that some of this is the effect of post-COVID, which is to say, after COVID, people work at home, they're staying at home, they aren't coming back to work, or now they come back to work one day a week.
And this is a problem nationwide.
It's also a problem in other cities.
San Francisco has been hit the hardest.
And the reason it's been hit the hardest is because, first of all, a lot of the tech people are not coming back to work in the old way.
And number two, it's because San Francisco has policies that have encouraged crime, have encouraged homelessness, and that has basically made the city an unattractive place to be.
Many of the prominent corporate tenants are not even waiting for their leases to end before they move out.
They're subletting their offices if they can get rid of them.
And the lack of filling up the office space in San Francisco is causing retailers to get out of there.
And small businesses, restaurants are closing down.
So nearly 30% of San Francisco's office space is vacant.
And essentially, when this happens, you have to reprice everything, which means that, you know, it used to be when you'd get an office building in San Francisco, they would give you three months of free rent.
Now, new tenants who come to San Francisco are saying, we want 18 months of free rent.
And that's just a sign of a city that is deteriorating, of a city that's basically on its way down.
San Francisco may, it turns out, end up the way of Detroit.
And again, there's a reverberating effect.
As I mentioned, when you have offices that are empty, now there are people who don't go to restaurants.
But guess what? It's also the case that these offices are financed by banks.
So banks will make loans and the loans are aimed at financing these office buildings and suddenly the banks realize that the people who run these office buildings are not going to be able to pay the bank back the principal and the interest.
And so banks like Wells Fargo Which have bankrolled a bunch of buildings in San Francisco, suddenly have now got to put this sort of, we don't expect to get this money back on their balance sheets.
That causes banking stocks to go down.
So this is a very bad situation.
The San Francisco mayor, London Breed, who's a liberal, but she's trying to like...
She's now trying to realize, I've got a problem here.
So she's actually called for, let's get a few more cops on the street.
Let's try to do something about the homeless problem.
She's offering some tax incentives for businesses to relocate to San Francisco.
But as often happens, this is like too little and too late.
The problem is you've just got a deeply left-wing apparatus, a control structure running that city.
And so you get one bad policy on top of another.
I've talked separately and we'll talk again about this reparations bill that's making its way through, not specifically San Francisco, but California more generally.
There's also been a lot of hate crime against Asian Americans in San Francisco.
So I'm quoting here a guy who runs a real estate firm.
He goes, there's a lot of hate crime against Asian Americans, by the way, most of it, frankly, by blacks.
And we've had many Asian Americans on our team who refuse to come to the office.
So this This is another reason the offices are empty.
The Asian guys who work in these are like, we're not coming into work.
We'll work at home if you want.
And if not, we're going to go look for another job.
So all of this means that San Francisco is a city, again, it could have pulled through.
It could have survived COVID and recovered as some other cities are recovering.
The problem, again, is just bad democratic policies enacted at the local level.
And so San Francisco to that degree is getting What it voted for.
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do it. The perspective of outsiders who come to a country is always kind of illuminating because you get a window into your own society that is being offered by someone who is encountering it with the background of a different society and also with seeing things in a way clearly for with fresh eyes. Now we have a history in America for example going back to Tocqueville of the outsider in this case, in that case the Frenchman who made trenchant
observations about America in his book Democracy in America.
We're in a different era now, the age of social media.
And I've come across a social media account of a young Chinese woman.
She looks to be, at least from the picture, probably in her early 20s.
And she's encountering the West by moving here for the first time.
And she came with sort of bright-eyed and full of promise, a sort of idea of expecting one kind of America, one kind of West.
And she's encountered another.
And so I'm just going to read you a few of her posts because I think that they're amusing, but they're also in some ways very telling and very eye-opening about the way in which I think many people around the world who are peering into the West and into America are now responding to American culture.
So here's a post.
This actually goes back to last year.
The woman's name is Wei W-E-I Wu.
Now, I show this to Debbie and Debbie goes, are you sure, Dinesh, this is not a parody account?
And I scroll down the account because there's distinctive kind of insignia of a parody account.
And there are parody accounts, normally fairly easy to detect.
They have, first of all, they use very strange names, which if you keep reciting them, you can realize where the parody comes from.
I don't think it's a parody account, but I'm not entirely positive.
In fact, for what I'm about to say, it doesn't really matter.
So here's Wei Wu. She goes, going to Detroit tomorrow, see friend.
Very excite.
First time travel to Detroit.
So part of it is you have someone speaking in broken English, and this is part of what makes this even funnier.
Then she evidently arrives in Detroit.
I arrive in Detroit now.
I will never come to Detroit again.
Detroit is America's butthole.
Very disgusting place.
Hard to disagree for anyone who actually has been to Detroit.
And then there's a background to all this.
And this is, I think, what makes this interesting.
I leave China because too corrupt.
No free speech. Everyone afraid.
Now West slowly be like China.
Free speech, not respect.
People afraid. And then she goes, I'm not quiet.
I speak up. I value free speech.
And this, again, is pointing to the fact that there is a blurring now of the distinction between free and unfree societies.
A distinction that I took for granted when I, for example, came to the United States in the late 1970s, where I've come to the free world.
I'm now part of the free world.
And of course, the socialist world, the Soviet world is the unfree world.
But now you have to, you can't say that except in a highly qualified sense.
Wei Wu obviously has some exposure to Canada.
I now work intern job in Toronto.
Almost four days now. All company Indian and Chinese.
My English speaking skill decrease.
Now I speak English with Indian sound.
Nobody understand. And then in a little more...
I think profound and interesting vein.
In Toronto downtown, everyone walk head down.
Everyone eyes all dead.
Everyone depressed.
This is a very sad city.
Everyone sad because everyone knows something wrong.
No one know what is wrong, but something wrong.
Now, this actually I found observationally to be also true.
By the way, when I made Death of a Nation and was in Prague, the people in Prague, remember, this is now decades after the fall of communism, still have this kind of hangdog, defeated look, almost as if 70 years or at least 40 years of communism post-World War II has broken the national spirit of Prague.
And now you see this also in American cities for the first time.
The kind of optimistic, Reaganite, upbeat mood is gone, and people just seem a little bit downcast.
And downcast in not just the sense of a mood, but in the sense of a kind of enduring temperament.
And then she goes, I walked downtown last night, and this is very harsh, but I'm going to read it anyway.
All women sluts.
Never be mothers. If be mother, child is pervert.
Slut and pervert is great danger.
West want to survive?
Ban slut and pervert.
This is Wu Wei talking.
And elsewhere, she basically says that sluts and perverts need to be sent to the moon.
Sent sluts and perverts to the moon.
Then she's working at a tech company.
Today, work plan special training day.
Sensitivity and diversity class.
I do not go.
I'm very sensitive and diverse.
No need for training.
And then she goes...
I'm doing final exams.
All day study.
In library, many girls wear clothes show too much skin.
Why come to library?
If you want to be hooker, don't come to library.
Every guy distracted.
I'm never distracted.
I'm focused on goal.
Build rocket. Send perverts to the moon.
Intern job very stupid.
I come to learn engineering.
Now company teach oppression and sensitive training.
I came for practical math work.
Why teach me sensitive to many genders?
Why teach girl oppressed by boys?
Why teach penis and vagina?
Why teach me to be pervert?
I know many girls.
This is the last one. They tell me they are sad.
They cannot find good men.
They don't know why.
I know answer.
They drink beer.
They smoke drugs.
They party all the time.
They sleep with so many men.
Of course you can't find good men.
You live like cheap prostitutes.
Now look, take this with a grain of salt, but you're getting, I think, here, admittedly here in stark form, a broader perspective that I think is pretty widely shared.
It's certainly intensely believed across the Islamic world, but also in traditional cultures in Asia and Africa.
They look at the West, a West which once seemed so bright and shiny and full of promise, a West that represented the Upward mobility and opportunity but also living a prosperous life in a decent and orderly society.
They're seeing what has happened, the unraveling of American culture and as you can learn from Wu Wei, they don't like it.
I don't know about you, it takes a lot to shock me these days, but to see our judicial system resemble a third world banana republic, to see trusted American companies embrace insane and destructive, woke ideologies is frankly a little depressing.
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Again, patriotmobile.com slash Dinesh or call the number 878-PATRIOT. Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, someone you might have encountered on social media or on television, Riley Gaines. She's a 12-time All-American swimmer with a whole bunch of titles.
She's a successful female swimmer at University of Kentucky.
She has the ambition of pursuing a degree in dentistry, but her life was changed when she was forced to share a locker room and then compete against biological male Leah Thomas at the 2022 NCAA Women's Swimming Championship.
Riley, thanks for joining me.
Great to have you.
Let me start by asking you to say a little bit about yourself.
How you got into swimming?
And when did you first encounter this issue at all?
Absolutely. So I just graduated last year from University of Kentucky.
I was 22 when I graduated, but I started swimming when I was four years old.
So I dedicated 18 years of my life to my sport.
You didn't get to go to prom.
You don't get to go on vacation.
You don't get to, when we were in college, you don't get to come home for Christmas or Thanksgiving or summers.
So to say my world really revolved around my sport is an understatement.
I'm going to go.
My senior year.
Sorry. No, sorry, Riley.
I was going to say that, is this something that you saw as more than an extracurricular activity, a hobby?
Was it kind of the gateway to a career?
Absolutely, it was.
As I mentioned, it was what my world revolved around, what my parents' world revolved around.
It altered all of our schedules.
And that was not unique to just myself.
If you want to compete at that level that I was competing, where you're trying out for the Olympics, you're accomplishing amazing things, that's what you have to be willing to do.
There's really no other way to get to that point.
So yeah, it was really my lifeline.
But my senior year, which was last year, I had made it my goal to win a national title, which is, of course, becoming the fastest woman in the country in my event.
And I was right on pace to do so.
About halfway through my senior year, I was ranked third in the nation behind one amazing female athlete who I knew very well.
Because like in most sports, you're top-tier athletes who You know of each other, regardless of where you compete, because you've grown up competing against each other.
And she was in second, but the girl, the girl who was in first, I had never heard of before.
And this was, of course, the first time I became aware of a swimmer named Leah Thomas.
And for all I knew at the time, I thought this was a female who came out of nowhere her senior year from University of Pennsylvania to post-nation leading times and all of the freestyle events from the 100 freestyle, which is a sprint.
And every freestyle event in between until the mile, which is long distance.
And so if you think about your Olympic runners, your best 200 meter runners, not your best marathon runner, but that's what we were seeing in Leah Thomas.
So there was lots of red flags and lots of head scratching, but it never once occurred to me that this could be a male until an article came out disclosing that Leah Thomas was formerly Will Thomas and swam three years on the men's team at University of Pennsylvania before deciding to transition to the women's team.
And this was a, when this individual performed or competed in the men's division, he was evidently a mediocre swimmer, right?
He was not a, he wasn't breaking records, he wasn't winning titles, he was kind of an okay swimmer, and then somehow the transition occurs, and suddenly, basically, it's this guy is, or this now, Leah Thomas is ahead of the pack.
Absolutely. Mediocre at best.
I mean, this was a male swimmer who was ranked 462nd among the nation when competing against the men at best.
And now, just the next year, trailing the women.
And when I say trailing, I mean beating everyone in the entire country by multiple seconds.
And in swimming, even one second.
That's a lot because this is a sport that's measured down to the hundredth of a second.
So to have one person beating everyone else in the country by multiple seconds...
Was an anomaly for sure.
But you're saying that when you first actually swam against Leah Thomas, there was nothing obvious that indicated that this, in fact, was a biological male who had transitioned.
You didn't know that at the time.
I hadn't competed against Thomas until March, until we raced the NCAA Championship, so I had no idea what Thomas looked like.
But based off of physical appearance, you would, in fact, be able to tell this as a male because he's 6'4".
The long extremities, the obvious difference in foot size, there was a lot of differences, including muscle definition.
There was a lot of differences just from a physical appearance that would make Thomas stick out like a sore thumb.
Let's take a pause.
Riley, when we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about your encounter with Leah Thomas also in the locker room.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with swimmer and athlete Riley Gaines.
We're talking about the controversies about competition and biological males competing as females.
By the way, her website is rileygaines.com.
Riley, when you first encountered Leah Thomas in person, was it initially in the swimming race itself or was it initially in the locker room?
Describe that actual experience.
So the first time I encountered Leah Thomas, we get to the pool a couple days early.
This is a week-long meet.
So you get there a couple days early.
You kind of get used to the pool.
And I saw Leah on the pool deck.
And again, as I mentioned in the previous segment, it was obvious that this was a male.
In regards to the locker room, before our competition, of course, I'll kind of set the scene.
A swimming locker room is not necessarily a place of modesty.
These suits you put on, they take about 15 minutes to put on.
They're so skin tight and 15 minutes of which you're fully exposed.
But growing up a swimmer, you almost feel comfortable being vulnerable in that environment because you've grown up doing it.
And typically, of course, it's all women and that's uncomfortable in and of itself, but you become comfortable being vulnerable.
I can't even tell you the sheer feeling of belittlement, betrayal.
Of course, it's awkward. It's embarrassing.
It's uncomfortable to put a male in that space.
A male when we were not forewarned, we would be sharing a locker room.
No one told us.
No one asked for our consent.
We did not give our consent.
The only time we became aware that we would be sharing that changing space when it was too late and Leo was dropping his clothes, undressing, fully intact and exposing male genitalia, watching other girls undress.
That's how we became aware that we would be sharing a locker room. And that's why I say it felt like betrayal.
The people who were supposed to be protecting us, our coaches, our parents, the NCAA, people with political power, even police departments, they failed tremendously. And the word to really describe that entire experience is traumatic.
And Riley, would be fair to say that these are not feelings that they seem to me to be so utterly obvious and normal.
They're not feelings limited to you, right?
You're not the only one who went, oh my gosh, and everybody else was like, Riley, this is no big deal.
In other words, you're describing a shared feeling of outrage on the part of all the girls in the locker room, right?
Absolutely. Absolutely, I am.
They wanted us to take the approach that it was no big deal.
They did everything in their power to gaslight us, to emotionally blackmail us, to...
And when I say they, I mean the NCAA and I mean our universities in particular.
They wanted us to feel wrong for feeling uncomfortable.
But we as the women in that changing space, it was a unanimous feeling of uncomfort, of whispers and talks and grumbles of anger and frustration from these girls who just like myself had worked our entire lives to get there.
We were all mad.
It appears as if this past year I've been this lone voice, lone face fighting for this, but I speak for so, so many.
Now, that alone is to me revealing because what it's really showing is that the social intimidation has to a large degree worked.
I mean, it seems to take somebody of almost supreme boldness and bravery to say, okay, I realize I'm going to get attacked.
I realize I'm going to get all this pressure, but I'm going to speak out.
But it seems like a lot of other people do feel the same way, but they're intimidated.
Now, why are they so intimidated?
Is it just because of the kind of gang assault of these powerful institutions in our culture?
Yeah, I definitely think that's a big part of it.
I've talked to Leah Thomas' teammates at University of Pennsylvania at Great Links.
They were forced every week to go to mandatory LGBTQ education meetings to learn about how just by being cisgender they were oppressing Leah Thomas.
When they were initially concerned about the locker room at the beginning of the season, and they sent an email to their administration expressing their discomfort, their administration responded back with, if you feel uncomfortable seeing Maljana Tellia, here are some counseling resources that you should seek.
They were told that they are not allowed to take a stance because their school has already taken their stance for them.
They were told you will never get a job.
You will never get into grad school.
You will lose all your friends.
You'll lose your scholarship if you speak up.
So these girls, I think there was a lot of social pressure.
That on top of, they see me speak out.
And just a few weeks ago, I went to San Francisco State University where I was physically attacked.
I was ambushed. I was held for hostage.
And they don't want to put themselves in that position.
They don't want to be labeled any kind of names.
And so they figure it's easier to just kind of step back.
They don't want to ruffle feathers or step on toes.
Describe, I saw on social media the video of the San Francisco, you know, all these people crowding in the hallway and kind of putting you up against the door.
Describe how that came about.
I went to San Francisco State to deliver a speech on entirely my experience and why I think it's unfair to allow men to compete in women's sports and share our changing spaces.
I delivered my speech, but it was only after the speech where I was met with a mob of protesters who rushed into the room.
They turned the lights off. They rushed to the front of the room.
An officer eventually stepped in and got me out of the room into the hallway, to which we were only met with hundreds of more protesters in the stairway, so we couldn't exit the building.
So I ultimately was barricaded in a room along that same hallway for over three hours, where in these three hours, they were yelling...
Awful, hateful, vengeful, violent, terrible things.
And both myself and the officers, they were demanding I pay them money if I wanted to make it home safely.
They said it's only fair if I want to make it home safe, then I have to pay them to leave.
And again, in these moments, I truly feared for my life just hearing about hearing them verbally say and showing actions of what they wanted to do to me and what they would have done to me if officers weren't present.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with athlete Riley Gaines.
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I'm back with championship swimmer athlete Riley Gaines, 12-time All-American swimmer.
You can follow her.
Her website is rileygaines.com.
She's also been a spokesman for the Independent Women's Forum.
Riley, this whole phenomenon that you've been almost reluctantly drawn into, talk about why you're doing it.
And by that, I mean, it seems to take, I should say, almost superhuman tenacity to step forward.
You're obviously pretty fearless.
You go to environments where they try to surround you.
They call you these horrible names.
A normal person would go, gee, I don't really need this, and I need to retreat into the background.
Clearly, you're not a retreater.
Talk about where you get those resources, and what are you trying to achieve?
It would have been really easy for me this past year to essentially ride off into the sunset.
I married.
I was ready to go to dental school.
I scored the top percentile of the DAT, which is the dental admissions test.
And I was ready to go.
I was ready to continue on with the plans that I'd made for myself, plans that would have set me apart in that way.
But after dealing with this injustice and really personally seeing how this affected the women at that meet, the women who felt terribly silenced, I only saw it necessary for someone to speak up.
And for a while I waited for it to be someone else.
I waited for a coach to say something.
I waited for a parent, someone with political power, anyone else to do something.
But that's not what we were seeing.
And it finally hit me that if we as female athletes weren't willing to stick up for ourselves, we shouldn't expect someone else to stick up for us.
This has to come from us.
And so I kind of rerouted my life plans.
And this past year, I've been dedicated to enacting change.
I've been traveling state to state, testifying in front of state legislature, doing any podcast, any interview, whether that be a hostile environment or whether that be someone where I'm essentially preaching to the choir.
I've been getting in front of anyone who will listen to me to talk about this because, again, I saw what's at stake if someone doesn't.
I get called brave all the time.
I get called courageous. And it's weird to hear this because I don't feel brave.
I don't feel courageous for saying something as simple as men and women are different.
And so it kind of hit me that the people who call me brave were really just afraid of different things.
They might be afraid of being in kind of this environment that's not welcoming, or they might be afraid of being labeled names or whatever that might look like.
But those things don't scare me.
What scares me is not standing for the truth.
And that's what this whole issue is.
It's so much bigger than women's sports.
And I've taken a step back and I can really see that.
They're asking us to deny objective truth.
And you can pick up any George Orwell book and see how that turns out for society.
The silencing, the denying of objective truth, the changing of the language that we use.
There's so many pieces of this that point this directly to Marxism, which is terrifying.
And so, again, being able to see that, witness it firsthand and see how our systems in place are treating me for wanting to speak out.
I realize it's a lot bigger than sports and it's crucial that we feel emboldened and empowered enough to really use our voice.
I mean, it seems to me so ironic, Riley, that we had a civil rights movement which focused initially on blacks.
Then, of course, the civil rights movement focused on women.
And ironically, we see the sort of third wave, which is the LGBTQ wave, almost undoing the second wave by denying, as you say, erasing the differences between men and women.
Now, some states have been trying to step forward and pass laws.
Some... Laws, in some cases, focused on children transitioning.
In other cases, laws focused on sports.
But you had an idea recently where you put forward the idea that there's something that female athletes can do as a group if they act sort of boldly together.
Talk a little bit about what they can do just right there on the, you know, as you line up to swim for a race.
And, of course, typically the gun goes off, you dive into the pool.
What can a female athlete do or female athletes do together to make their voice heard?
Of course, legislation is a great way to make change, but there's always loopholes and it takes a while.
It's not something that's going to be implemented right away.
And so the fastest, most effective way to make change.
And it's unfortunate that it comes to this because women shouldn't have to compromise anything to compete fairly.
But if we could boycott, and I loved how you used the word together because that's how it has to be.
We have to have women coordinate and work together to say we're not competing against a man.
If a man is competing, we will not.
That is what it's going to take.
And again, I hate that it does.
There should be no sacrifice.
Women shouldn't have to sacrifice to be able to compete.
And I know it's easier said than done.
This is something that I could have done at our national championships.
I think it took me a while, again, to see what's at stake, and I wish I would have been able to coordinate that better amongst ourselves.
But it's powerful.
I mean, look at any boycott in history and you can see that it's effective.
We're seeing the same thing happen in regards to cycling over in England.
Males are competing against the women, and the women have said, we're not.
We're not going to race if men are competing.
And changes are being made.
These governing bodies are implementing rules to combat men competing in women's sports.
So it's powerful, it's effective, and we need to figure out a way that we can coordinate this.
I mean, it strikes me as a brilliant idea.
I mean, I just think, for example, about the visual of an Olympics.
You've got everybody lined up, let's just say, for the 200-meter dash, and the clock goes off, and then seven out of eight people walk off the field.
The emotional effect of that is electric.
And so it's a genius idea, I think, to visually dramatize the power of what you're saying.
Hey, Riley Gaines, great.
This has been awesome stuff.
Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
Well, thank you so much for having me on.
Appreciate it. I'm in the last sections of What's So Great About Christianity, so sort of wrapping up this week, maybe this week and early next, the mini-course we've been doing together on Christian apologetics.
The chapter I'm discussing is called Natural Law and Divine Law, The Objective Foundations of Morality.
So there are a couple of questions that come to mind.
Is there a universal or objective morality?
Number two, does that morality have a religious foundation?
And number three, how can this morality be known?
How can we figure out what it is and what is the right thing to do in a given situation?
We're accustomed to speaking of scientific laws, the laws of nature.
But the question I'm asking is, are there moral laws, not of nature, but of human nature?
Are there moral laws of human nature?
And many of us are, you know, in the way that we've been taught in school and college and ideas we've picked up in the culture, we're unwitting heirs to a philosophy that denies objective morality.
We're told very often that, hey, listen, facts are objective, but values are subjective.
This is the famous or infamous fact-value distinction or the fact-value dichotomy.
So we believe we can know scientific things, but morality is kind of a matter of perspective.
It's a matter of mere opinion.
And this is why people say things like, don't impose your beliefs on me, whereas it would be really strange for someone to say, like, don't impose your algebra on me.
Why? Because algebra is something that we obviously have in common and it's believed to have a kind of objective status.
So, the question I'm raising is, is it possible that there are more laws in nature, in the world, that are no less reliable and no less comprehensible than scientific laws?
Let me begin by noting that human beings are unique in many ways, but mostly in the fact that we are moral beings.
Think about it. We share a lot of our DNA. We share a lot of even our habits and characteristics, aspects of our physical body, aspects of our organs, with other animals.
And yet, there are some things, and I'm going to focus here on morality, that Animals really don't have in any meaningful sense.
So more than language, more than rationality, there are animals that are proto-rational, but there are no animals that really are moral.
So it's our moral nature that distinguishes humanity from actually even our closest animal relatives.
Here's the primatologist, Franz de Waal, who studies chimpanzees.
In fact, he's done a lot to emphasize how chimpanzees in many ways are similar to humans.
And this is something that you can verify by going to the local zoo.
Just watch the chimpanzees, the way they eat and the way they look at each other.
There's a kind of almost alarming or chilling identification with them.
But Franz de Waal goes, hey, morality is something that chimps don't have.
Quote, it is hard to believe that animals weigh their own interests against the rights of others, that they develop a vision of a greater good of society, or that they feel lifelong guilt about something they should not have done.
So, Frans de Waal is going, despite the kind of many similarities, this is one area of dissimilarity.
So, you know, we can say to a chimp, hey, you shouldn't have done that, or bad chimpanzee, but this is kind of a human way of speaking.
We have no basis for feeling that the chimp actually feels this way.
So, the distinction between chimps and humans points to a deeper chasm that separates human beings from the rest of the universe.
And I don't just mean living things, even non-living things.
All objects in the universe, living or non-living, function according to physical or scientific laws, right?
I mean, if you dangle a meaty bone in front of a dog, and even if the dog is just eaten, it's going to respond to the bone.
It goes for the bone. The response is a product of a kind of uncontrollable instinct.
Similarly, take a big stone on a slanted hillside and you'll notice it will automatically roll down.
It has no choice in the matter.
It is simply following or obeying, you could say, physical laws.
But notice that human beings are not like this.
Human beings live in two worlds.
We live in a physical domain, but we also live in a moral domain.
If somebody insults your mother, you don't say, well, what you do say is, you shouldn't have done that.
When a friend tells you that he deceived his business partner or family, you say, hey, you shouldn't have lied.
That was wrong. You shouldn't have done that.
These normative statements are fundamentally different from physical laws.
It makes no sense to say the earth ought to revolve around the sun, or it would be, hey, very unfair if the earth didn't do that.
A law of nature may be true or it may be false, but it cannot be broken.
As Carl Sagan puts it, nature arranges things so that its prohibitions are impossible to transgress.
Now, there are parts of our human nature that are like this.
There are certain parts of our human nature that operate according to these descriptive physical or natural laws.
Like, if you tickle me, I'm gonna laugh.
If either of us eats contaminated food, it's gonna upset our stomach.
If we're dropped from a tall tower, hey, we plummet to the ground.
So these are the laws of physics and chemistry working on us, and we have no choice in the matter.
On the other hand, There's a part of our human nature that is not descriptive but prescriptive.
And the simple proof of this is that moral norms and precepts, unlike natural laws, can be violated.
Let's look at this.
Honor thy father and mother.
Thou shalt not murder.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods.
Now none of these commandments would make any sense if we had no option.
If we didn't have a choice in the matter.
But there's even more. When you see human beings invoking the language of morals, praising and blaming, approving and disapproving, applauding and scorning, we're appealing to a standard of shared judgment that is external to ourselves.
This standard can be called the natural law or the moral law.
People sometimes say, well, what do you mean by the natural law?
Well, the natural law is that shared standard of morality that we all take for granted.
It differs from scientific laws of nature in that it tells us not what we do, but what we should do, what we ought to do.
Consequently, we are free to break these laws in a way that we are not free to violate the laws of gravity.
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