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May 23, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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IF AMERICA DEFAULTS… Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep585
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Coming up, I'll explain the implications of an American debt default.
Also make the case why the GOP should hang tough.
Nikki Haley has some thoughts on January 6th, and they're, well, the wrong thoughts.
I'll say why. And I'll expose the World Health Organization's naked power grab in the form of a global pandemic treaty.
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and that's it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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So the United States is now in a situation where the country is facing a default on its debt.
And the Biden administration is pushing Congress, and specifically the Republicans in the House, to Now, raising the debt ceiling isn't a down payment on the debt.
It's not a solution to the debt problem.
It is authorizing the Federal Reserve and it's authorizing the executive branch of government to borrow more.
Now, The Biden regime is big spending.
They wasted a huge amount of money in the aftermath of COVID. They act with reckless fiscal disregard.
This is kind of like a family that just spends and spends.
They don't care what they make.
They are going further and further into debt.
And now they want a permission slip.
to be able to spend and spend even more.
Republicans prudently are holding out and saying, no, you have to agree to some spending restraint, to some cuts in spending, to some attachments so that if people want certain types of benefits, they're going to have to, for example, satisfy work requirements.
So Republicans are doing what Republicans do, trying to impose some fiscal responsibility and also Individual responsibility on the part of these entitlement beneficiaries.
But see, I don't think this really goes far enough because this is not solving a problem.
It's kicking a can down the road.
Because again, coming back to my analogy of a family engaging in wasteful spending, sure, the family faces a kind of crisis if They're called on the debt.
Pay now. Pay your loans now.
And if you can't pay your loans, it's going to be bad for you.
You're going to have to pay higher interest rates.
We're going to repossess your house.
We're going to take away your car.
And the family goes, well, what we really need in this situation is a chance to borrow more.
No. What you really need in the situation is an immediate tightening of the belt.
And what Republicans should be doing, I think, is going even further and basically saying, hey, if you want to crash the car because you've run out of money to spend, that's your problem.
That's what you're doing. You're the driver, Biden.
And so, frankly, if you're asking us to give you to grease your wheels or increase your speed on your accelerator so you can be even more reckless over the next several months, we are not going to be a party to that.
Now, Republicans don't like to do this.
Part of it is fear.
I'm sure Kevin McCarthy is thinking, well, what if we get blamed for the debt default?
Republicans should not worry about this at all for the simple reason that the American public, as it turns out, and there have been a whole bunch of surveys on this as an article I have in front of me from NBC News, they're very worried that the American public is not freaked out.
The title of the article is, As Debt Default Looms, America Yawns.
Well, America's right to yawn.
Why? Because what NBC wants is they want people to be like calling their congressmen, calling and saying, hey, listen, you better vote because we don't want to have a default.
We don't want interest rates to go up.
The American public rightly sees that, look, this is a partisan fight.
And not only this, there has been a lot of reckless and irresponsible behavior.
I mean, the government has huge numbers of federal buildings that are virtually empty, and they keep them open.
They heat them, they cool them, they have staff managing them.
This is how federal money is spent.
It's spent irresponsibly for the simple reason that the people spending it, it's not their money.
There's an old saying that goes back to, I think it might be Milton Friedman, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
Nobody ever washed a rental car.
Think about it. Have you ever rented a car and washed it at home or even taken it to a car wash for $15?
No, you haven't. And why?
Because it's not your car.
So you don't really care.
You're just happy to turn it right back in.
I've driven the car. I've gotten what I wanted out of it.
So this is how congressmen are.
The money that they see in the Treasury, it's not their money.
They don't really care.
And so they're happy to use that money to buy votes for themselves or just claim credit.
I'm going to build a new bridge so I can get a monument to myself and the bridge is going to be named after me.
This is the operational approach of, by the way, politicians from both parties.
So my view of the whole situation is that in this case, the Republicans are right to try to impose some fiscal restraint, but the American public is even more right in basically saying, who cares?
If the government acts irresponsibly, at some point you have to pay the price for that.
It could be now. It could be later.
I don't think that just raising debt ceilings on and on and on.
And now some of the Democrats are like, well, this was Trump spending.
Well, maybe some of it was Trump spending, but a lot of it is Biden spending.
There was no reason for the United States to do the policies we did around COVID. Other countries didn't do that.
Scandinavian countries put a bunch of doctors on TV. They go, this is the problem.
We have a virus. We recommend you social distance, but we're not going to force you.
We have a vaccine.
You can take it if you want.
Here are the advantages. Here are the disadvantages.
Here's what it will do. Here's what it won't do.
And as a result, the Scandinavian countries are thriving economically.
We, on the other hand, made stupid decisions, and now we're paying the price for it.
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use discount code America. Nikki Haley is in Iowa on the campaign trail. She is the only other Republican who has declared for president and was running for the Republican nomination. And I don't know, I guess Vivek Ramaswamy has also announced, I don't know if it's official that he's running, but he is running. And of course there are other people who have exploratory committees.
Now Nikki Haley I like and she's, well she's a fellow Asian Indian.
She was a successful governor of South Carolina.
She was a good UN ambassador.
Some people say, well, Nikki Haley's a rhino.
I don't think she's a rhino.
She's actually conservative.
Now, it's true that she likes to have a sort of establishment conservatism.
In other words, she got a little bit freaked out when there was all these attacks on the Confederate flag, and she's like, well, we won't have the Confederate flag in any public building in South Carolina, and so on.
And now she's running for president.
She's in Iowa, and she says some interesting remarks about January 6th.
It's not that I disagree with the remarks.
I just think that the remarks reflect a kind of cluelessness of the underlying context.
So she called January 6th a terrible day.
Now, it was a terrible day in the sense that, I think it is regrettable that you had a large number of people going into the Capitol at the time when this election process was being adjudicated.
Now, you might expect me to say that's because a very solemn act was going on.
The left's view, of course, is that this was a disruption of an official proceeding.
I actually think it was a disruption of a different sort.
There were prominent Republicans, Ted Cruz among them, but also many others, who were going to challenge the results of the election in several states.
And call for the states to sort of take another look at the processes that had led to these results.
And that process was stopped by the incursion into the Capitol.
Suddenly, all of that fell by the wayside.
Suddenly, it was like, okay, let's just go ahead and certify the election.
Let's just kind of move on.
This is all terrible. And so, it was a terrible day in this sense, that it prevented Republican challenges that may have gone nowhere, but on the other hand, they might have yielded some fruit.
Now, continuing with Nikki Haley, she says that those people who broke the law on January 6th, quote, should pay the price.
And once again, I'm like, yeah, but what price?
Isn't the issue...
The equal application of law isn't law only meaningful to the extent that it's evenly applied.
Of course, people who break the law should pay the price.
Well, flashing back to 2012, I broke the law and exceeding the campaign finance law.
I was from the beginning willing to acknowledge that and pay the price.
And what's the price? Well, gee, I should get the same penalty as anybody else who did the same thing.
And so similarly here, the issue with January 6th is not whether lawbreakers should pay the price.
I think even people who committed misdemeanors should get a misdemeanor and get the penalty commensurate with a misdemeanor, which is typically a warning.
Sometimes a short probation.
In extreme cases where the misdemeanor is quite serious, but nevertheless not a felony, there is a brief incarceration.
Okay, I'm going to lock you up overnight.
I'm going to lock you up for 48 hours.
But this idea of taking people who are nonviolent, confining them pre-trial before they're even convicted, put in solitary confinement for months, so people who were incarcerated for years...
I mean, doesn't Nikki Hale even know this is what's going on?
So to say this nonsense without the context, I think, reveals either a certain type of blindness, either a blindness to the facts of the situation, or a little bit of a moral blindness.
I'm quoting her now. It was not a beautiful day.
It was a terrible day.
And we don't ever want that to happen again.
Okay, whoop-dee-doo, blah, I agree.
And she's in Ankeny, Iowa, and she said, I don't know enough about each individual, but that's my rule.
If you break the law, you pay the price, so I think that's the way we need to look at it.
Well... Frankly, that's an obtuse way to look at it.
I mean, imagine a bunch of guys who have been speeding on the highway.
The speed limit is 75.
They're going, let's just say, 85.
And some of them are going 90.
And then they're arrested.
And there's a nationwide manhunt for people who have not yet been arrested to make sure you get every single one of them.
And it turns out that instead of getting a fine or instead of getting, hey, you've got to go to classes or learn better driving, they're given one to five years in prison.
We'd be like, wait a minute.
Nobody else gets that.
This is absurd. This is utterly disproportionate to what they did.
Well, here comes Nikki Haley.
Well, I think the people who broke the law need to pay the price, and that's how we should look at it.
No. The real issue here is not that.
The real issue here is these people are being singled out.
There are leftists who do far worse things, who throw Molotov cocktails at people, in some cases who commit murder, in other cases who have brutalized cops on the street, who have pulled people out of cars and beaten them to a pulp with a pool of blood on the street.
And the point is they get lesser penalties than nonviolent, I emphasize nonviolent January 6th offenders.
So Nikki Haley, it seems to me, the nature of her remarks suggests, again, either a sort of ignorance, but it's hard for me not to say it's a willful ignorance.
I just don't think she wants to go here.
She's certainly not a defender of these January 6th defendants, who need defenders, by the way.
They need defenders because they are some of the most maligned people in America, even though their offenses in reality pale compared to the offenses of the left.
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Don't forget to use the promo code D-I-N-E-S-H. In times of emergencies, we look to the government to try to respond quickly, decisively, mobilize the whole society to deal with the emergency.
And two emergencies come to mind immediately.
The first, of course, is war, some kind of national security emergency.
And the other is pandemics, a spread of a disease.
It's spreading like wildfire.
You have to act quickly.
Now, the problem with giving government emergency powers, and we've seen this repeatedly.
Historically, if we go back to World War I, there was a national emergency, and the government went way beyond its normal scope and imposed absurdly restrictive conditions, conditions that seem to have very little to do with the conduct of the war itself.
Even in World War II, when you look at the level of restrictions within the United States, some of them, of course, reasonable, but others, not reasonable.
One could even put in this context the internment of the Japanese-Americans in World War II.
I realize it's a debate, but that's the point.
It's not obvious that people who are citizens of the US from another country were fighting with.
Think about it. In World War II, we were also fighting with Italy.
We round up all the Italian-Americans in the United States and lock them up.
No, this was FDR's decision, and I think looking back on it, it's certainly debatable.
Now, the pandemic resulted in all kinds of restrictions, not only here, but around the world.
And the World Health Organization, which is not so much a governmental as a transnational and intergovernmental body, now wants to have what they call a global pandemic preparedness treaty.
Well, This is a naked power grab by the WHO. Why?
Because the WHO is basically saying, well listen, the problem with these pandemics is that they cross national borders.
And since they cross national borders, you need an international organization like, well, of course, us.
To have all this power.
And the power is to coordinate the global response of different countries.
So they want the countries to agree to a kind of international treaty, deputizing the WHO to be able to, A, decide what's an epidemic.
Right there, you've got to sort of hit the pause button because there could be things that, yeah, there's an Ebola crisis in Africa.
Does that make it a global pandemic?
Well, the WHO gets to say.
And the WHO then gets to decide what are the strategies that these countries should pursue.
Now, right away you see not only the centralized sort of dictatorial organization, but the organization itself has shown that it's worse than useless.
Let's turn to COVID. Has the WHO figured out how we got COVID, how it started, where it came from?
No. Now, the WHO will say, well, we tried to find out, but the Chinese blocked us.
Well, what good are you if you are this international organization?
Why didn't you make a global stink at the very least and try to mobilize countries around the world to put pressure on China instead of just saying, okay, well, you know, our WHO researchers got off the plane and they weren't really allowed to go to a lot of areas, so they got on another plane and flew back.
Well, that's not the kind of organization we want to entrust with global pandemics, is it?
Under the Trump administration, Trump basically said, we don't like the WHO. They've become a pawn of China.
the US is going to get out of the World Health Organization.
Of course, when Biden came in, he decided the exact opposite. Let's put the United States back in the World Health Organization. And my guess is that they are going to be, the Biden people are going to try to strengthen the power of the World Health Organization, and they'll be sympathetic to this idea of a global pandemic preparedness treaty. But a group of Republicans in the House and also in the Senate, as well as a bunch of conservative,
independent organizations, I'm thinking of organizations here like the, well, Act for America, Eagle Forum, Women's Rights Without Frontiers, Center for Security Policy, Liberty Council. So all these groups are coming together and they're basically saying, no, we should not sign any global pandemic Why? Because, first of all, we don't trust the World Health Organization.
Look at the horrible job that they did.
But also, number two, there's the concept of national sovereignty.
Wait a minute. If there's a problem, and it's, let's just say, a global pandemic, why doesn't the United States decide how are we as a country going to respond to this pandemic?
Why would we want to confer?
Why would we want to give up our ability to respond in our own way to a...
Trans-national organization that's going to adopt some kind of one-size-fits-all solution.
Why do we want to give somebody else the power to tell us what to do?
So now, the fact-checkers, who are obviously, a lot of them, just thoroughly dishonest.
They go, well, that's not really what this treaty is.
The treaty... And they're right, the treaty does pay lip service to the idea of national sovereignty.
It says things like, although we will develop general policies at the WHO, they will be applied with due accommodation at the local level.
So the WHO is not willing to say, basically, we become the dictators of the world when it comes to health.
But in effect, that's what treaties and these kinds of things do.
As a practical matter, they confer authority on the agency.
Think, for example, within the United States, when we give federal agencies like the FDA the power to coordinate decisions about, let's say, the Food and Drug Administration regarding food and drugs.
Well, they basically decide, well, from now on, we tell you what to do.
From now on, if a corporation makes a product, we decide if it's allowed or it's not allowed.
And so although the original idea might have been that we will coordinate with local health agencies, we will make these decisions cooperatively and together, you retain a good deal of discretion.
As a practical matter, all of that disappears when push comes to shove.
And there's also the issue of when you have a kind of emergency atmosphere, by and large, who goes, this is the way it's got to be, because after all, we're dealing with a global pandemic.
And I think it's wise that these Republicans and conservative organizations are now saying, not so fast.
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Consider the statement, there are only two genders.
What do we say about this statement except fact-check true?
And I'm not just talking, by the way, of human beings.
In nature, in the entire animal kingdom, there are only two genders.
Now, I agree that there are certain creatures that don't reproduce sexually.
An amoeba, for example, essentially becomes two amoebas by splitting into two.
And so, but where there is sexual reproduction, you have two genders.
And the two genders are biologically different.
They produce different kinds of, well, in the case of human beings, the males produce gametes called sperm.
The females produce eggs and ovums.
And so that's nature.
That's the way it is.
Now, There's a kid, a 12-year-old in Massachusetts, who made a t-shirt or bought a t-shirt and wore it to school, and the t-shirt very simply said, there are only two genders.
And so the school, we're now talking about Middleborough Public School, the acting principal, a woman named Heather Tucker, told the kid, his name is Liam Morrison, you gotta go home.
First she told him, you gotta change the shirt.
And he was like, no, I'm not doing it.
So the next day, Morrison comes back to school, the kid, and he has a new shirt on called, There Are Censored Genders.
So he now is, in a sense, exposing or ridiculing the school's policy that somehow tells him that he can't wear a t-shirt with a message on it.
Now, And the school basically told him, off you go.
Go back home again.
And so the kid has gotten some help from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious freedom organization, and they have filed a lawsuit against the public schools in the name of the First Amendment, but also the 14th Amendment, which has to do with equal protection as well as due process of the law.
And the school, as it turns out, allows kids to wear different types of shirts.
You can wear a shirt that says Adidas.
You can wear a shirt that says all kinds of slogans, reflects your beliefs.
And as it turns out, you can wear a shirt that says LGBTQ. You can presumably wear a shirt that goes, I am queer.
You can wear shirts that promote the trans agenda.
But evidently, you can't wear a shirt that says there are only two genders.
Now, why is that?
What is the reason for allowing one type of shirt but not the other type of shirt?
Well, the school basically says the reason is that we have a policy against hate speech.
And the policy against hate speech is a policy that I'm going to quote from it.
It prohibits clothing with messages that, quote, state, imply, or depict hate speech or imagery that target groups based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, or any other.
Now, why is it hate speech to profess your belief that there are only two genders?
I don't see any hate in the remark.
In fact, it is a statement of biological fact.
People sometimes say, follow the science.
It's a statement that follows the science, and yet it's a statement that is somehow disallowed.
And so in the lawsuit, what the Alliance Defending Freedom points out is they go, listen.
There's nothing hateful about this, not to mention the fact that there is a debate that's going on in society and in the country.
We see it, for example, in legislation in various states about how many genders are there.
So the lawsuit doesn't even take the position that there are two genders.
It takes the position that there is a debate on this subject.
And the school, far from permitting this legitimate debate, letting people take different sides of it, has already chosen a side.
The school is basically saying, no, there are multiple genders.
And any kid that wears a shirt that takes a different position or any kid that expresses an opinion that takes a different position is being hateful and can somehow be suppressed.
Suppressed to the point where, go home.
We'll send you home the next day and the next day and the next day.
So, in effect, you become suspended from school until you succumb and the kid is not willing to succumb.
I mean, this is the interesting thing about this 12-year-old.
He's a pretty tough kid, and I saw a statement by him by going, essentially, this is my point of view.
I shouldn't be forced, and so I'm going to keep doing it.
The point being, schools can basically say, I think, that you can't wear messages on your shirt, and this is why some schools have Well, the simple truth of it is, if somebody wears trans propaganda on their shirt, I could be upset by it.
You could be upset by it.
So simply giving offense is not a legitimate reason to tell somebody that they can't wear a certain type of a shirt.
So the school is now up against the wall a little bit.
They don't like fighting these kinds of cases.
My guess is they're going to try to look for some kind of a compromise.
But this is a really good example, I think, of not only a kid standing up, Probably his parents are behind him because he wouldn't be able to do this without their support.
And kudos to the Alliance Defending Freedom for also coming in and saying, listen, we're going to kind of make a case.
We're going to make an example out of this.
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Elon Musk has been publicly criticizing George Soros.
And it's not just that he's been criticizing Soros, but he has been criticizing Soros as a very dangerous person, somebody who has delusions of grandeur, as somebody who wants to, who's having a very destructive influence in the world.
And the leftists who defend Soros have decided that the way to fight back is not to defend Soros on the merits, not to say that Soros is a good guy, not to say that Soros' philanthropy and his donations are going to good purposes, but that people who criticize Soros are anti-Semitic.
Now, they were saying that before about people who use the term, including me, Soros-funded DAs.
Now, again, the epithet, Soros-funded DAs, is accurate.
Soros is funding these left-wing DAs.
Who refused to prosecute crime or decided to prosecute crime very lightly.
Soros gave a ton of money to Alvin Bragg, who's prosecuting Trump.
He's a Soros-funded DA. But now the anti-Semitic label is being applied to Elon Musk.
And Elon Musk himself has just been silent about it.
But here comes a prominent minister in the Israeli government.
His name is Amit Shai Chikli.
And I'm gonna read you his tweet, because I think it's pretty telling.
As Israel's minister entrusted on combating antisemitism, I would like to clarify that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and a role model.
Criticism of Soros, who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel Is anything but anti-Semitism quite the opposite?
So here you have a prominent figure in the Israeli government going further.
He's not just saying, hey, listen, Elon Musk is not anti-Semitic.
He's saying that Elon Musk is a friend of the Jewish people and George Soros isn't.
Now, if you want to know what he's getting at, I want to turn to an article by Alan Dershowitz in the Wall Street Journal.
Elon Musk is right about George Soros and not anti-Semitic.
And he goes on to say, this is Dershowitz, Soros is Jewish, Musk isn't.
But Musk stands falsely accused.
Soros is an active participant in politics and his Jewishness should not shield him from criticism.
And then further, now this is supporting the point that Amichai Chickley makes, no single person has done more to damage Israel's standing in the world, especially among so-called progressives, than George Soros.
And then Alan Dershowitz goes on to show that George Soros bankrolls two of the most vicious and vehement anti-Israel organizations in the world.
The first one is called, well, somewhat benignly, Human Rights Watch.
And Human Rights Watch was founded by this guy named Robert Bernstein, who died in 2019, so just a few years ago.
And Human Rights Watch basically had this sort of criteria for countries that violate human rights.
And they would sort of rank them. These are countries that promote freedom.
These are countries that violate human rights.
And they had a Set of criteria that were even-handedly applied, or mostly even-handedly applied, to different types of countries.
But then what happened is that this new guy, Kenneth Roth, who is also of Jewish origin, by the way, he became the executive director.
He has turned this group, Human Rights Watch, essentially into a battering ram as...
As Dershowitz puts it, into an organization that specializes in demonizing Israel.
So what happens here is now what you do, what Human Rights Watch does, is they tailor their criteria in such a way that it doesn't hit the Palestinians and it doesn't hit a lot of the Arab governments, but it only hits the state of Israel.
And the way you do that, this is almost like fixing an algorithm at Google where they're trying to get certain searches to come up and other searches not to come up.
So, for example, if you were to say countries that are autocratic and don't have elections, whereas countries that are democratic, Israel would look pretty good.
Why? Israel is a democratic society.
A bunch of the Arab kingdoms are not.
Saudi Arabia is not.
And a number of the other Arab countries are not as well.
So, they don't use that measure.
They'll use something like...
Which country has a population from another group that is somehow confined into what they're thinking about here as Israel's establishment of territories for the Palestinians, the requirement that Palestinians, for example, go through certain checkpoints before they can work or move freely in Israel?
You identify that as the measurement criteria, and naturally then you say, well, we don't have anything like that.
In the Arab countries, but we do have it in Israel, so Israel is the offender.
Here's Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident.
Actually, he's been a longtime member of the Israeli Gnesset, the parliament.
And he's talking about Human Rights Watch.
He goes, here is an organization created by the goodwill of the free world to fight violations of human rights, which has become a tool in the hands of dictatorial regimes to fight against democracies.
So this is the point, that this is what Soros does.
And Soros also funds, by the way, another group called J Street Super PAC. Again, it's supposed to be kind of a Jewish group, but it's a Jewish group that is left-wing and anti-Israel.
So with Soros, he is actively trying to undermine the Jewish state.
And of course, a lot of the reason for that is that the Jewish state, especially now, it's under a conservative government.
Netanyahu was an ally of Trump.
So for Soros, it's a nakedly political agenda.
And this is really Dershowitz's point, that Soros has been criticized not for anything that has to do with his Jewishness.
He's been criticized because he funds left-wing causes here at home in the United States and also abroad.
And that's fair game.
That's fair criticism. So the idea that somehow anyone who criticizes Soros is an anti-Semite is utter nonsense.
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You'll feel the difference. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson has ruled against Carrie Lake in her lawsuit seeking to demonstrate fraud, fraud insofar as Maricopa County did not do legitimate signature verification.
This was the sole issue that was allowed to go to trial, and there was a three-day trial Which concluded at the end of last week.
And now the decision has come down.
Now if you followed the trial, it was pretty obvious the judge wanted to rule this way and was biased against Lake.
And I say this because a lot of times when we think of judges, we think here's a judge and this isn't any kind of trial, a civil matter, a criminal trial, a constitutional matter.
And we think these judges are coming to the case and they have no opinion of the matter.
They're gonna listen to the, this is true of the Supreme Court, they're gonna listen to both sides, they're gonna evaluate the case on the merits.
But a lot of times a judge, and hey, I think this was true of my judge in my case, has already an idea, this is what they wanna decide.
This is how they want to come out.
So yeah, we're not going to send Dinesh to jail, but we're going to give him a severe penalty.
Maybe I'll do overnight confinement.
Now, I'll go there and listen, and something I hear might change my mind or cause me to modify my thinking.
But I already have an idea of what I want to do.
And that's what I'm saying is true here.
This guy, Peter Thompson, wanted to rule against Carrie Lake.
Now, why did he want to rule against Carrie Lake?
It could be that he knew there'd be a firestorm from the left if he didn't.
I mean, imagine if he were to say, Carrie Lake has proved her case.
So the blame would then all shift onto him and there would be probably an effort to try to recall him or defeat him the next time he comes up for election and so on.
So I think the guy, like a lot of judges, wanted to play it safe, wanted to say there's nothing to see here.
But see, the problem for him is that a lot was shown in the trial.
I mean, there were videos of people doing signature verification where they were verifying signatures, essentially devoting like A quarter of a second.
There was a video of the signatures just being scrolled, almost like you're looking through a phone book.
Verify, verify, verify, verify.
I mean, it was ridiculous.
The idea that you're taking a signature that's coming out of an envelope and then comparing it to a signature on a record, looking to see that it's the same person who signed it.
Think about it. When someone sends an absentee ballot, they're not there.
They're not showing their ID. The only thing that authenticates the vote is the comparison of the signature.
Maricopa County clearly didn't do it.
And they clearly didn't do it for a lot of signatures.
In fact, Carrie Lake's attorney, Kurt Olson, as he was summarizing the case, he goes...
11 of the signature verification workers approved 170,000 signatures at a rate of less than 0 and 2.99 seconds, so less than 3 seconds to compare a signature, and they gave it a 99.97 approval rating.
So, essentially, no meaningful signature verification.
And then when you look at the judge's decision, you see that the judge's view appears to be, it doesn't matter.
In other words, as long as there was, quote, signature verification, whether it was done well or whether it was done badly, whether they devoted one minute per signature to half a minute or one second or no time at all, he acts as if this is a purely procedural matter.
The county gets to decide what it means by signature verification.
The signature verifier can do a valid verification or can basically decide, I'm just going to sort of pretend as if all the signatures are good.
Here you go. It's all done.
The judge applied no standard whatsoever.
It could be that Arizona law doesn't require you to impose any standard.
It's hard for me to believe that we would have election rules in a state like Arizona that don't call for meaningful signature verification, because if you don't do meaningful signature verification, you're not doing signature verification.
If you ask bank tellers, for example, and To some degree, this may be the case today in some banks where you're not really comparing signatures at all.
In that case, that can't be the way that you verify the authenticity of a check.
There's got to be some other way.
Maybe you do it electronically.
Maybe there are other ways to determine the identity of the person who wrote that check.
But with voting, there are no other ways.
This is the only way.
It's not, in fact, even a perfect way because the simple truth of it is people can copy other people's signatures.
Someone can, for example, in a nursing home take other people's signatures and trace over them so you get a pretty good signature on the ballot and you fill out the ballot and send it in.
signature verification isn't going to catch that because all they're going to do is measure the trace signature against the signature on file. But nevertheless, this is one of the really important checks and balances of our election process. Now what's going to happen now? Well, Carrie Lake is going to appeal and she's going to appeal to a Supreme Court in Arizona that is more sympathetic than Judge Peter Thompson. Let's remember that this is the Supreme Court that sent the case that overruled. Peter Thompson had dismissed the case before.
There's nothing here. And the Supreme Court goes, no, there actually is something here.
You've got to have a trial to see if the signature verification was in fact done.
And now the judge goes, well, yeah, it was done.
And we'll see if the Supreme Court is okay with that and goes, yeah, we had the trial.
There's nothing more we can do.
That's one possibility. The other possibility is the Supreme Court goes, no, this is not what we mean by meaningful signature verification checking.
And then the Supreme Court will have to decide what kind of remedy is appropriate under the circumstances for Carrie Lake.
Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that is censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
And here, you can also interact directly with me.
I do a weekly Q&A every Tuesday, and no topic is off limits.
I've also uploaded some very cool films to Locals, both documentaries and feature films, both my films and also films by other independent producers.
2,000 mules is up there, and I'll have a new film out this year.
You'll be getting the inside scoop on that also on Locals.
And hey, if you're an annual subscriber, you're able to stream and watch all these films for free.
So check out my channel, dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, dinesh.locals.com.
I'm continuing my discussion of the chapter in What's So Great About Christianity.
It's called The Ghost in the Machine, Why Man is More Than Matter.
And I'm offering a fairly detailed refutation of the idea called materialism.
Again, not materialism, which means going out to the mall and buying a bunch of stuff, but materialism referring to the idea that man is made up of only matter, that there is no such thing as the soul, that there are no immaterial substances except as a kind of extension of the material.
Now, I think that the strongest argument against materialism is the argument from free will.
So let me illustrate.
Here I am sitting at a desk and, you know, I've got a glass of water next to me.
Now I can reach over to that glass and drink the water or I can tip the glass over or I can just leave it alone.
I have choice.
It's up to me what I do.
So now...
The point being this, that I'm free to choose.
And this freedom describes a lot of things that we do in the world.
Now, it doesn't describe all the things because there are things that go on even inside of us which we're not free.
I'm not free to stop breathing while I'm asleep.
I'm not free to control the passage of food through my intestines.
But hey, I am free to pick up a glass of water and drink it if I want.
Now, obviously, once I pick up the glass, the glass will follow a trajectory determined by the laws of physics.
If I drop the glass or let my hand go, the glass will fall to the ground, again drawn by the law of gravity.
So, I'm not saying that physical or material forces aren't present.
But I'm saying that my choice to drink out of the glass, that is a free choice.
Now, how do we explain or defend this concept of free will if the world seems to be deterministic, if everything is just a movement of atoms and molecules, even our brain, which is made up of neurons.
The neurons themselves are made up of atoms and molecules.
Well, the philosopher Immanuel Kant takes on this problem and offers an argument for free will, which as far as I know is completely original with him.
Here's what he says.
We are, by our nature, moral beings.
And what Kant means is that we have concepts that we discuss and teach and talk about and practice, right and wrong, good and evil.
We hear in school and we hear in church, you ought to do this, you ought to do that.
Even in the secular world, there may be a different morality, maybe it's woke morality, virtue signaling, you ought to do this, you ought to do that.
But Kant Kant's point is, try as we can, we can't get out of this way of thinking.
Morality is an empirical fact in the world.
So if you look out of your window, you see a tree.
That's a fact. It's also a fact that we as human beings operate with a full vocabulary and a full framework of right and wrong.
So Kant says that for these moral concepts to have any meaning at all, they have to have some kind of Choice.
Why? Because ought, you ought to do something, implies can.
Think about this. When I say to you, hey, you ought to go to church on Sunday.
What I mean is, you can go to church.
If you said...
Well, I don't have a free choice in the matter.
I'm an automaton and I am moved by forces outside of my control.
Why are you telling me to go to church?
It's not up to me whether I go or not go.
So then the whole language of you ought to do this is rendered utterly meaningless.
So Kant says that at least in certain times in life and in certain decisions, we are at liberty to say yes to this and no to that.
And if we never had such a choice, then the whole concept of should or shouldn't becomes meaningless because there's no possibility of deciding one way or the other.
For anyone to recommend one course of action instead of another is pointless.
If determinism is true...
No one in the whole world could refrain from anything that he or she does, the whole of morality.
Not just this morality or that morality, not just Christian morality or Islamic morality.
Morality itself becomes an illusion.
And continues Kant, a whole vocabulary of phrase and blame, admiration and contempt, approval and disapproval would have to be eradicated.
Let's just say if someone murdered his neighbor or even exterminated a whole population, we can't then punish that guy.
We can't even criticize him.
Why? Because after all, that guy is simply acting in the manner of a computer program that may have malfunctioned or stoned and voluntarily running down a hill.
But Kant says this way of looking at things or this way of looking at human beings and looking at human thinking is not only unacceptable, it's impossible.
It's absurd. People who operate outside the sphere of morality altogether, we consider to be psychopaths.
And rather than assign them to teach philosophy or morality, we put them in straitjackets.
So we are, by our nature, moral.
And therefore, says Kant, it follows from this that we are free, at least to a certain degree, to choose between alternative courses of action because this is the only way that we can think and act morally in the world.
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