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May 30, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:15
DEBTOR NATION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep589
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth. Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, I'll examine the content of the debt extension deal and spell out the dire implications of the U.S. becoming the world's largest debtor nation.
I'll argue the Supreme Court's recent EPA decision is a big victory for democracy and property rights.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey joins me.
We're going to talk about developments in his important censorship case against the Biden administration.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to the podcast.
I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
America needs this voice.
America needs this voice.
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The House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has announced that he has worked out a deal with the Biden White House on this debt ceiling, on extending the debt ceiling and preventing the government from going into a shutdown or a default on the debt.
Now, Biden has been warning that a default on the debt will be catastrophic and he has also said he's not going to negotiate.
In other words, you basically have to just go along because otherwise we're just going to go into a collapse, almost implying that Republicans are forced to do this.
Kevin McCarthy sort of did call that bluff, and eventually the Biden people came to the negotiating table.
But the question is, who got the better of this deal?
And I gotta say that I think on the balance, the answer is Biden did.
And this itself is a little shocking, because you've got this decrepit Biden.
You've got a guy who basically I don't even think could really put his pants on, doesn't seem often to know where he is.
Now, I'm not saying that he isn't surrounded by shrewd negotiators, but this is a case where the Republicans held all the cards because the Republicans could hold out.
True, the media would then, if there's a default, the Republicans are to blame.
They're the obstinate ones. Who cares?
The bottom line of it is people generally, when things turn south, if there's an economic slowdown or shutdown, they blame the president.
He's in charge. He didn't work it out.
Not to mention the fact that if he says, I'm not going to negotiate, then who's to blame for a deal not going through?
So I think that Here was a case where Kevin McCarthy could have driven a really hard bargain.
And here's where Republicans tend to fail.
They have an opportunity, the cards are in their hands, and then they make what is at best a kind of pallid, mediocre, give away too much type of deal.
This is not to say that there are not some good things in the deal.
There are some good things in it.
There are some caps on spending, although not on defense spending.
The reason for that, by the way, is that there are several Republicans who are strongly in favor of Ukraine.
you know, they've inherited a sort of anti-Russianism all the way back from Soviet days.
There are new allowances in the deal that open up energy permits that were previously closed off by the Biden administration. There are some work requirements that have been extended. So in other words, you get government entitlements, but not without a work requirement. Democrats have been fighting to have no work requirements. And finally, Democrats were trying to sneak in some tax hikes and the tax hikes are basically shut out.
So there are going to be no new taxes.
But that's the good news, and it's not good enough news, in my view.
If you look at the Republican proposal, it had a lot of great ideas.
Cut $131 billion in spending.
The real cut that McCarthy seems to have agreed to, a modest A modest cut, a two-year freeze in spending, and even that seems to be questionable.
There are $12 billion in top-line cuts, but arguably that's being negated by other spending.
The strong work requirements that Republicans had in mind for SNAP, also for Medicaid, it turns out that those were watered down.
So there are some work requirements, but they're pretty minor.
Number three, the Republicans had the idea of shutting down Biden's half a trillion dollar student loan bailout.
And guess what?
They didn't do it. The student loan bailout is...
It's largely upheld.
There are some expiration dates set for some of the you don't have to pay until the summer.
So in some cases, the Biden people have agreed, all right, well, we're going to let that expire.
People are going to have to start paying their loans.
What about the big $80 billion that was given to the IRS to hire these 87,000 new IRS agents?
Well, guess what? Modest cuts to the IRS, but no repudiation of these 87,000 agents.
In fact, when I say modest cuts, the modest cuts are for the IRS to determine where to cut.
So they can decide, well, we'll keep all the agents.
We're just going to cut something over here.
And again, these cuts are quite modest.
They're really not what Kevin McCarthy should have gone for.
And then finally, Republicans wanted to reclaim $50 billion in unspent COVID funding, and the Biden people agreed, okay, well, we're going to let you reclaim $28 billion.
Now, think about it. This is supposed to be a great victory.
This is COVID money that was not spent.
So why isn't all of it returned to the Treasury?
But again, for Biden, it's like, well, we'll give half of it back.
So this is overall a bad situation.
Let's remember the big picture of it is this, and that is that government spending rose dramatically under COVID. It basically went up.
From around $2 trillion to almost $6 trillion, so a $2 trillion increase.
And the bad news about this deal is now it sets that kind of a foundation for the future.
So in other words, we're talking about continually running up the national debt.
We're talking about trillions of dollars of new spending.
I'll talk more about this, but the national debt, which is around $30 trillion, could go up to $35, $40, $50 trillion.
And this is, I think it was DeSantis who said, this is a country spending its way toward bankruptcy.
Because, and again, you know, Debbie was talking to me about it.
She's like, well, what would be the implications of a government shutdown with essential services?
I'm like, no, essential services would not be affected.
And moreover, who cares?
I mean, think about it.
If you have a normal family budget and you're spending, what?
You're making, let's say, $100,000 and you're spending $130,000 every year.
Well, that has to stop.
And people can't say, well, we've got to borrow more so we can continue the spending.
Otherwise, my car payment is going to be affected.
Who cares if your car payment is affected?
Maybe you can't afford to have a car.
Maybe you should be taking the bus.
But the bottom line of it is, this is the money you have coming in, and that's the money that you have to spend.
So this is the attitude that Republicans should take but don't take.
And so Kevin McCarthy is running around saying, I got a good deal.
And so I've held the line.
I've stopped the Biden train.
I think a lot of this is really bluster.
I think when you look at the concrete results of the deal...
Well, it's not such a good deal.
I think Republicans could have done a lot better.
I'm seeing even moderate Republicans like Nancy Pace, who's come on this podcast saying, I'm not going to vote for this deal.
Now, I don't know if they have the power to stop the deal.
Why? Because, of course, the Democrats are going to be for it.
The Democrats realize that Biden made this deal, so they're going to be all in on it.
The Republicans don't have a big majority in the House.
So I don't know how they're going to stop this deal, but I think that this is a case where I'm not going to say that Kevin McCarthy sold us out or Kevin McCarthy gave away the store, but I do think that he made a far less advantageous deal than he could have.
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Some good news coming out of the Supreme Court.
An important decision limiting the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency or the EPA. And, you know, these regulatory agencies have enormous power.
You build an extension to your house and they come and say, basically, you got to take that down because, hey, it's adjoining a pond that we have classified as a wetland.
And so this now comes under environmental protection.
You need permits to be able to do this construction, even though it is on land that you purchased.
Why? Because the land is adjacent to our adjoining land that we claim, we meaning the U.S. government claims, is under special environmental protection.
So this is how the EPA throws its weight around.
Now, the Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling last June kind of whacked down the EPA on the Clean Air Act.
That was an important decision involving greenhouse emissions from coal and gas-fired plants.
But the EPA, of course, they've not just got the Clean Air Act, but they also have the Clean Water Act.
The Clean Water Act of 1972.
Now, here's what the case was about.
Basically, a couple named the Sacketts, S-A-C-K-E-T-T, they bought some property and they were building on that property.
And the EPA shows up and says, you can't do it.
Why? Because your property is adjoining or adjacent to a wetland.
And so this goes to the court.
The court decides in favor of the EPA. It's appealed up.
It goes all the way to the Supreme Court.
And the EPA is basically saying that this couple cannot do what it wants with its own property.
And interestingly enough, the case hinges upon the meaning of the word adjacent.
So adjacent means...
Next to, attached to.
And the issue is, if your property is adjacent to a wetland, are you covered ultimately by the EPA's rules governing the wetland?
EPA says yes. Sackett say no.
Now... The Supreme Court decides, and this is what's really significant, the decision is 9-0.
9-0 against the EPA, which means that even the three liberal justices agree that the Sackett should be able to build on their own property.
And remember, this isn't just about this one couple and building on their property.
The reason these cases go before the court is First of all, The Sackets weren't doing anything of this kind.
It's one thing if they were, like, dumping millions of pounds of sewage into a pond that somehow fed into, let's say, a lake or a river or even the ocean itself.
But none of that is really even going on.
These guys are trying to build on their own property.
So Justice Alito basically goes, listen, the Clean Water Act extends to wetlands.
That are indistinguishable from the waters of the United States.
So think about it. A wetland is a marsh or a pond, but it has to be part of the property of the U.S. government.
That's what they mean by the waters of the United States.
And then he goes on to say the wetlands on the Sackett's property are distinguishable, which is to say separate from any possibly covered waters.
And so... Here's the Supreme Court saying to the EPA, hey, listen, just because you have a delegated congressional administrative authority to regulate wetlands doesn't mean that you can lord it over the people of the United States and just decide, you know what? I think I'm going to call, you know, Dinesh lives near a pond.
I'm just going to call Dinesh's property a wetland.
I'm going to show up.
Remember, we are living in an age, and this is very disturbing, and not a lot of Americans even know this, where groups like the EPA and the Post Office have SWAT teams.
They actually have people with guns who can show up to your property and essentially force you to do something.
And it's all because of, not because you're a criminal, not because you even broke the law, but because you're going against an administrative regulation that they have passed for themselves, essentially giving themselves more power.
Yeah, we made a rule the other day deciding this, and so you're in violation of rule number 3874.
So I think what the Supreme Court is saying is, no, listen, wait a minute.
The authority to regulate comes from Congress.
Congress can delegate some administrative authority to the EPA. So, for example, you can regulate wetlands.
But that doesn't mean you get to say what is a wetland.
It means that a wetland covers a certain definition, and that's the waters of the United States and property adjacent to those waters.
And it doesn't go beyond that.
Ultimately here, I think the Supreme Court is being faithful, not just to the Constitution, but to the intent of the statute.
The law itself, the Clean Water Act, as passed in 1972, didn't mean to classify the whole country or virtually the whole country as some sort of a wetland.
No, the idea was a wetland is a wetland, and the EPA has its authority.
It stretches pretty far, but now the Supreme Court has said no further.
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Use discount code AMERICA. What's going on with the Texas House and its decision to impeach the Attorney General of the state of Texas, Ken Paxton?
Very strange. This is a Republican House.
A Republican House led by a guy who is kind of a rhino, kind of a moderate Republican.
His name is Dade Phelan.
And all of this developed in a very odd way.
I saw a tweet by Ken Paxton which attached a video showing, not just saying, but showing that Dade Phelan is conducting business at the house and he is manifestly intoxicated.
He's manifestly drunk.
He's slurring his words. He doesn't seem to know what he's saying.
And then right after that, The House has a presentation of evidence by some investigators.
Now, these investigators supposedly are Democrats, but they put forward that Ken Paxton has obstructed justice and he has violated his oath of office and he needs to be impeached.
And almost overnight, with virtually, well, not virtually, with no debate at all, and by no debate I mean no trial, no presentation of evidence, no cross-examination of witnesses, nothing of the sort, you have a very lopsided vote, 121 to 23, to impeach Paxton.
And it now goes to the Senate for a trial.
Now, the politics in the Senate are somewhat different.
The Senate is presided over by the lieutenant governor, and you need a two-thirds vote to get Paxton out of office, and I consider that at this stage to be quite unlikely.
But still, it has an immediate effect because Paxton, in effect, is immobilized.
He cannot exercise his duties until the Senate vote takes place, and that's going to happen sometime in July or August.
So essentially, Paxton is immobilized for the summer.
And so, the enemies of Paxton have already, to some degree, gotten their way.
Now, who are these enemies and what really is their motive?
Is this really a case that focuses on some of Paxton's misdeeds?
Now, there are alleged misdeeds.
One of the misdeeds is that Paxton came to the Texas House and asked for an appropriation of money to apparently pay off somebody who had filed a kind of wrongful conduct lawsuit against Paxton.
And the house was evidently outraged about it and did not appropriate the money.
But again, this hardly seems to me an impeachable offense tax.
Paxton, whatever the so-called wrongful conduct says, should we basically get rid of this suit by paying this person off, comes to the legislature.
The legislature goes, no, and you think that would basically be the end of the matter.
Paxton has to handle the matter some other way.
The things that disturbed me about all this is that not only was there no trial, but evidently the selling point of this impeachment was, we really don't know what the facts are, guys.
Let's vote for impeachment so the facts can come out in the Senate trial.
So this is sort of like, we don't like the guy, so let's just impeach him.
And a little reminiscent, in a way, of the Trump impeachment.
There was no basis for it.
It was just a pretext.
We kind of really think we should impeach Trump a second time, so let's just do it.
Or we really think we want to impeach Trump.
Let's just kind of find some pretext.
He made a call to this guy in the Ukraine.
Let's just make that the basis of it.
So these are frivolous impeachments, quite clearly.
And so even Ted Cruz came out.
He said, this is very disturbing.
Paxson has been really effective as attorney general.
Let's remember, this is a guy who's gone against Biden on a number of counts.
The Biden people, I'm sure, are very happy about this impeachment.
Evidently, Paxson has also been pretty effective in going after big tech and pretty effective in going after big pharma.
And here we come to the fact that big tech and big pharma are funders of Republicans no less than Democrats.
Republicans get money, and so it's possible.
I'm not saying I know this for a fact, but it's possible that there is the influence here of big tech, big pharma, and perhaps even the Biden administration using its leverage with the sort of rhinos in Texas and some of the never-Trumper, never-Paxton types.
To say, let's get rid of this guy.
Now, obviously, if Paxton were to step down or they get rid of Paxton, the governor, Greg Abbott, would appoint a replacement.
But no one can think that this is good for the agenda.
Paxton's been actually a very aggressive attorney general in a good way.
Some of the attorney generals tend to be kind of sleepy, kind of ineffective.
Paxton is not one of those.
And for these reasons, I think it is quite alarming what the Texas Republicans are doing.
They've created an inter-Nissan problem in Texas.
And I hope that Paxton is able to make a vigorous defense before the Senate.
And based on what I know now, I certainly hope that he is fully vindicated.
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It's time. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Andrew Bailey, the Attorney General of the State of Missouri.
He's the 44th Attorney General of Missouri.
He's also a combat veteran, constitutional conservative, and the state's chief legal and law enforcement official.
Andrew, welcome to the podcast.
You are embroiled in a very important censorship case against the Biden administration.
Can you talk a little bit about the basic content of the case?
Because I think it has huge implications for whether or not the censorship regime is going to continue or whether you will find a way to bring it to a halt.
Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me on.
And this is about protecting the Constitution and the constitutional rights of Missouri citizens for me.
This is the most important First Amendment case in a generation.
And we've used it to uncover a vast censorship enterprise that emanates from the White House across a spectrum of federal bureaucratic agencies where they've coerced and colluded with their cronies and woke big tech social media companies to silence Americans voices in violation of the First Amendment right to free speech, specifically targeting conservative voices. This is scary stuff.
And we've gone to court. We filed suit.
We have also obtained tens of thousands of pages in Discovery and taken numerous depositions.
And we're going to keep pushing forward.
We've asked the court for preliminary injunction that would stop Biden's use of this vast censorship enterprise to silence American voices.
All right. You said a lot there, and I want to put it in slow motion a little bit.
So, you mentioned, first of all, that we're dealing with not just the White House, but a bunch of different agencies across the swath of the federal government.
So, let's talk about some of those.
What agencies are we talking about?
Well, the court has identified that the nerve center of the vast censorship enterprise emanates from the Department of Homeland Security.
So think about that for a second.
I mean, you've got an entity that was created in the wake of 9-11 to protect Americans from foreign attack now being used to weaponize against Americans and against our right to free speech.
I mean, this is scary stuff, but we've got email exchanges between DHS, between the FBI, Department of Justice, senior communications officials at the White House that specifically say the chain of command goes all the way up to the very top levels of the White House.
But the nerve center is housed there in DHS.
All right.
Yeah. And you're talking about the collusion of these agencies.
They're working hand-in-hand with the digital platforms.
Now, with the Twitter files, there was a lot of information and, I guess, great to have because you got the sense of what the internal workings were at Twitter.
We've had, obviously, nothing like that from Facebook or Meta, nothing like that from Google, which owns YouTube.
Have you been able to get...
Twitter files type of disclosures from these other digital platforms where I suspect the censorship may even have been...
I mean, my own experience is the censorship was worse on YouTube and Facebook than on Twitter.
What are your findings to date and are you getting cooperation from these platforms?
Well, you're absolutely right.
I mean, the censorship is worse on some of the other platforms.
And thank goodness Elon Musk has revealed so much, disclosed so much publicly in the Twitter files.
And it largely corroborates the evidence we're seeing across the entire spectrum of big tech social media platforms.
And we've even got instances where the big tech social media was pushing back against the White House.
The White House would say, hey, take down this, quote unquote, COVID disinformation.
And big tech social media will say, well, now, hold on a minute.
That doesn't actually violate our terms and conditions.
And the White House says, we don't care.
Take it down anyway. So it is absolutely coercion and collusion.
You know, while campaigning, Joe Biden threatened to Remove or revoke big tech social media's immunity from civil suit.
And then certainly Jen Psaki from the White House podium has threatened with antitrust actions against big tech social media.
So that's where the coercion comes into place.
And then the collusion that we've seen at least are the email exchanges between the bureaucrats in the federal government and big tech social media that specifically targets We've got examples where there were emails that specifically target individuals like Tommy Lauren or even Tucker Carlson, where the White House would say, take down that video, take down that post.
We don't like it. And again, scary stuff.
The remedy for disfavored speech in this country has always been counter speech, not government censorship.
Now, when you talk about these platforms colluding with big tech, the government agencies, you suggested that there's an element of intimidation.
The government is saying, if you don't do this, we can do this to you in return.
We can take away your Section 230, or we can go after you with federal agencies.
But isn't it also true that there's an ideological compatibility between the personnel at, say, Facebook?
They like the Biden administration.
They want to, by and large, do what it says.
And so this is really ultimately an enterprise among allies and friends, wouldn't you say?
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, certainly we see ideological overlap there.
And again, there are instances where the White House and the federal bureaucrats were pushing big tech social media beyond its own censorship policies.
I mean, think about this. No one would accept it in this country if you picked up your cell phone and tried to make a call.
And when you started talking about something the cell phone company didn't like, they would mute you.
No one would accept that.
And yet we allow it to happen at big tech social media.
But what we're talking about here is actually worse because it's done at the behest of the government, which clearly violates the founding principles behind the First Amendment, our original understanding of why we have the freedom of speech and freedom from government censorship.
So this is a fight worth making.
I'm proud to be a part of this effort.
I'm confident in our ultimate success there at the district court level.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
By the way, you can follow him on Twitter, at AGAndrewBailey.
We're talking about the important censorship case against the Biden administration.
Andrew, may I have you talk about the Constitution?
We're obviously talking about the First Amendment, Congress shall pass no law restricting freedom of speech or of the press.
Now, that is a law that is, on the face of it, applicable to Congress or, by extension, to the government.
It doesn't, on the face of it, apply to private actors.
Facebook is a private company.
YouTube is a private company.
Obviously, Twitter is as well.
So here's my question.
What does the case have to prove?
Does it have to prove government involvement?
Does it have to prove that the government is actually directing the censorship?
I noticed that it was the FBI, I think, that put out a statement some weeks ago now, basically saying, well, you know, we just offer some advice to To these platforms, we give them a bunch of suggestions, but we don't control what they do.
So you can't say we're doing the censorship.
We're just basically almost like they're dropping some ideas into the suggestion box.
But it's a lot more than that, isn't it?
Oh, it's absolutely a lot more than that.
I mean, at the end of the day, when you had the president himself and his press secretary and others threatening to remove the immunity from civil suit for these big tech social media companies, they would suffer an enormous economic impact if that were to happen, or certainly if the federal government used antitrust laws to go after big tech social media to break up those large corporations and break up the monopoly.
I mean, that's a huge economic impact.
And so, like you pointed out, it's not just that the...
The big tech social media cronies are ideologically aligned with the White House.
They also have an economic incentive to get in line and do the president's bidding and do his minions bidding.
And that's what we've seen here.
And certainly that level of coercion and collusion is a vital element to prove in our case.
And we think we've got that evidence.
I mean, we feel confident in that because we've seen it firsthand.
And to your point, I mean, look at what the FBI did with the Hunter Biden laptop story.
We know for a fact based on discovery in this lawsuit that the Department of Justice and FBI had weekly and monthly meetings with increased frequency in the weeks and months leading up to the 2020 presidential election with big tech social media.
So they were meeting in person and those meetings became more and more frequent.
And throughout that period of time for more than a year before the 2020 election, the FBI kept telling big tech social media that there was gonna be a disinformation campaign planted by Russian collaborators to disrupt the 2020 election.
Well, then when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, That was, they saw that as what the FBI had warned them against.
And so they were willing to suppress that story.
That was information that the American public deserved to have and needed in order to make election decisions.
And so at some point, this becomes election interference.
One of the things we saw with the Twitter files is that the censorship wasn't episodic.
It was systematic. And what I mean by that is it's one thing to say, oh, I see a particular statement by Tucker or by Tommy Lahren.
This is misinformation. It's a whole different thing to say.
We're going to comb through Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions of tweets.
We're going to pull up every tweet that references, say, election fraud or references masks or references 2,000 mules.
And we're going to then use those searches to generate vast lists of people.
And isn't it true that these big tech platforms established special portals?
Where the government could feed in names and content, and then essentially these big tech platforms would go through all that and go, yeah, strike this guy, deplatform that guy, shadow ban this guy.
So this is a collaboration that goes far beyond the occasional, here's a particularly egregious tweet, so let's get rid of that one.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. It's downright Orwellian.
Big Brother was, in fact, watching.
I mean, it's not conspiratorial when it's true, and certainly the evidence we've uncovered establishes the truth and veracity of what you're saying there, and you're absolutely right.
I mean, the example I keep going back to that I think is really, really important is when the federal government looks at the censorship policies of big tech social media and actually Pushes them beyond that, goes further, censors more than their own censorship policies.
I mean, that's where you see that kind of systematic network, that enterprise of censorship that, again, emanates from DHS, but also across other unelected federal bureaucratic agencies and all the way up to the White House.
I mean, just to help people understand what's going on here, imagine if the Trump administration had sent out regular memos to libraries around the country, providing lists of books that should be removed from the library and, in effect, banned from public circulation.
Now, when the libraries go, what?
The Trump administration goes, well, listen, we're not actually ordering you to do anything.
We're merely giving you suggestions.
You're free to follow these suggestions.
I mean, you can imagine the outrage, the magnitude of the violation of the First Amendment.
And yet, this is exactly the same thing that's happening on the digital level, isn't it?
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And certainly our founding fathers, going back to that original text, that original understanding, you know, they had lived in a colonial experience where the king controlled the printing press and controlled the information flow.
And they realized, the founding fathers certainly realized, and we agree that, you know, the right to free speech comes from God, not man.
And it's inalienable.
And that that right needs to be protected at all costs.
And that's why we have the First Amendment.
But the founders believed in freedom of speech because they understood that, you know, again, if disfavored speech, you counter that with additional speech.
More speech is better. More talking gets to the truth of the matter.
It's not the government deciding what's true.
It's people deciding what's true through free, fair and open debate.
And that's what we're fighting to protect here.
When we come back more with Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
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I'm back with Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
We're talking about his important censorship case against the Biden administration.
Andrew, the case is now in district court.
You seem to be feeling pretty good about the judge, the fair adjudication.
I'm assuming that the other side is putting up a big fight because they know the stakes involved.
Walk us through the trajectory of this.
First of all, what's the time schedule?
When will the case be concluded?
And what happens after that?
Well, we've been filing motions as we speak.
We were in court last week filing a motion for preliminary injunction to order the federal government to stop censoring speech on big tech social media platforms in violation of the First Amendment.
And one of the elements on a preliminary injunction is likelihood of success on the merits.
So the court's going to have to weigh some of the substantive evidence to say, well, Missouri is likely to succeed or not.
So it's kind of a litmus test right out of the gate there, a threshold we've got to cross over, and I'm confident that we'll get there.
And that the court will, in fact, issue that preliminary injunction.
And then we'll enter merits discovery, where we'll get additional depositions, additional documentary evidence that we've requested.
We'll have third-party subpoenas that'll go out to big tech social media platforms.
So we'll continue to push ahead and get to the merits of the case.
You know, the Department of Justice has resisted our efforts along the way, and the court has continued to strike down their requests to halt the lawsuit.
And in fact, the Department of Justice was so incensed that they moved to strike some of the factual findings that our evidence established that we submitted to the court and the court declined to do so.
So again, I like the trajectory of where we are in this case and the likelihood of success on the merits.
I mean, this I think is really important because when the Twitter files came out, a lot of people were, you know, this is great, but so what?
And therefore, what happens now?
What's the next step?
Well, the next step, as with all these things, is to move this now into a venue where the facts can be adjudicated and some determination can be made.
Do you agree that, I mean, people sometimes are frustrated the Supreme Court hasn't like jumped in and And taking a stand on this.
But that's not how the courts work.
Cases weave their way up through the system.
So all of this is a little frustrating and seems to take too long.
But nevertheless, progress is being made, is I think your message.
Yeah, absolutely. Again, we're confident that we'll get an injunction issued from the court here in the coming days, weeks, or months.
And then we'll get back to discovery and get to the substance of the case.
And yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, the judicial process moves slowly.
But I mean, look... Here's the problem.
We've seen this incredible rise in the unelected administrative state and state attorneys general are the vanguard in the fight against that ballooning, mushrooming, bureaucratic state.
And so the tool we have at our disposal to fight back is to go to court and file lawsuits.
And certainly, we have done that in this instance and do so across a number of other issues.
And it's always great to be able to partner with like-minded state attorneys general, which we've done in this case.
we partnered with Jeff Landry down in Louisiana and are proud to be working with him to hold Biden accountable on his violations of the First Amendment.
How do you think things got to this point? And I say this because I came to the United States at the age of 17. The country had a vigorous debate. It was Jimmy Carter versus Reagan and then of course later Reagan versus Mondale.
And while the debate was over sharing the economic pie and over the Soviet Union, it was my belief that by and large you have these bedrock rights in the Bill of Rights, the right to assemble, to vote, equal protection of the laws, no unreasonable search and seizure, right to conscience, and that neither party was launching an assault on those rights which which are really not even up for majority referendum.
Then it seems that somehow over the last few decades, a powerful constituency has developed that advocates censorship, at least advocates censorship when they're the ones doing the censoring, which I guess is generally the case.
I want the right to shut other people up.
How do you think that that movement, what are the roots of it, as far as you can tell, that have now, in some ways, captured some of our powerful institutions, including these digital platforms?
Yeah, I mean, it's a radical left-wing ideology that realizes that they can't win the free, fair, and open debate, that the bright light of truth shines and, you know, the cockroaches scatter.
And so that's exactly what we're seeing here.
And, you know, at the end of the day, Biden realizes that he can't get measures passed through legislation, through Congress, and he can't achieve his radical left-wing ambitions.
So he's going to use unelected federal bureaucrats to do it for him.
And certainly that's what we've exposed by shining the bright light of truth on these violations of the First Amendment.
That are occurring at the behest of the federal government on big tech social media platforms.
So, yeah, I mean, it's a radical left wing agenda.
They don't want us talking about things like this.
They would like to silence you and me and stop us from exposing their wrongdoings.
I mean, it's scary.
I mean, we used to, as a country going back in decades, like you're saying there, you know, we used to elevate the rules of the game above the players and the outcomes.
And the left has clearly jettisoned that approach.
I mean, the left was fighting for free speech in the 1960s and 70s.
Now, they were fighting more in the areas of, like, you know, this nude dancing should be considered to be free speech.
So it seems like they were trying to widen the parameters of acceptable speech and then in a perverse turn, they decided, well, there's a lot of political speech which clearly goes to the heart.
I mean, you can debate whether nude dancing is important in a democracy, but it's hard to disagree that political disagreement is essential to a democracy and yet the left censorship is focused there of all places.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, they would be the first ones to stand up and, you know, fight for smut and pornography, but then are completely silent and complicit in the violation of the First Amendment when it comes to some of the lies about COVID that are spread by the federal government or its agents or certainly the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
And so it's Orwellian.
Well, Andrew, I wish you all the well with this really important lawsuit.
We'll be following it as it develops.
Thank you, Andrew Bailey, for joining me.
Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
Look forward to talking again soon. I'm continuing my annual campaign to send children of prisoners, kids with a mom or dad in prison, to the Fresh Air and Christian Fellowship of Angel Tree Camp, operated by our friends at Prison Fellowship.
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I'm continuing my discussion of traditional morality and religion.
What I'm calling the new morality that has emerged in the United States in the last several decades, a morality that's particularly strong and powerful among young people.
This secular morality, this new morality, emerged in resistance to traditional or religious morality.
Now, what is the difference?
it's important to put our finger on the key shift.
Because sometimes people think the key shift is that people have gotten away from morality, morality is going downhill, nobody believes in morality anymore.
And that's actually not really it.
There's more of a shift in the locus or in the origin or in the source of morality.
And this is the point I want to explain.
Now, really from the beginning of America, all the way through, I would say, maybe the late 1960s, there was a general belief that there is a moral order in the universe that is external to us, that makes claims on us.
If you say, well, what's that moral order, Dinesh?
Well, think of something like the Ten Commandments.
It's a codification.
It's a list, an expression of these are the do's and don'ts that will help you to live a moral life.
Now, the key to the new morality that I've referred to is that it is no longer a reference to an external code at all.
It is rather a plumbing inside of yourself.
It is a search within yourself.
The self becomes the source or the arbiter of morality.
So when you're dealing with a problem, it doesn't even have to be explicitly a moral problem.
It can even be just a life problem, like, should I go to law school or become a poet?
Well, the answer is, you don't necessarily consult an outside authority.
Or you can, but they don't become the ultimate source of the decision.
Rather, you get people's advice.
What do you think? What do you think?
And then you sort of look inside yourself.
And you try to excavate from inwardness.
The idea that, yeah, I really feel called to be a poet, even though my parents think I should go to law school.
Nevertheless, I think I'm going to do...
This is the way to be true to myself, to fulfill my life's dreams or expectations.
There's a line in Shakespeare, Polonius says this to Laertes in Hamlet, he says,"...to thine own self be true." And that captures the essence of this new morality.
It's almost like there's a secret inhabitant of your inner self.
And that's the guide that reliably tells you what to do.
So what people are trying to do today, this new morality, is create a harmony between their outer selves and their inner selves.
So, secular morality is a quest for our best or truest self, which is believed to reside kind of within us.
Now, in some ways, this new morality, this idea of looking within, is not radically new.
And not only that, but there is a strain of it that appears to come right out of Christianity.
Traditionally, Christians have held that there are two ways of following the will of God.
One way is follow the commandments.
That's the external road.
But the second one is to listen to the voice of God within you.
Here is Luke 17, 21.
This is Jesus saying the kingdom of God is within you.
So think about that. If the kingdom of God is within you, Then you listen to God's voice, not just by looking at external sources, but by, in a sense, communicating inwardly with God, speaking through you.
Here's Augustine, the church father.
I entered into the depths of my soul, and with the eye of my soul I saw the light that never changes casting its rays over me.
So, what's Augustine saying here?
Well, he's basically saying that God is the interior light that powers our souls.
And if we continue past Augustine into the Reformation, you have this idea of the priesthood of the individual believer.
Now, what can that possibly mean?
It means that the individual believer looks within himself or herself to discover God's will.
God's will, yes, it's in the Bible, but who gets to decide what the Bible means?
Well, you read the Bible yourself.
You don't listen to someone who goes, that's what it says, that's what it means.
You read it for yourself and you go, this is what I think it means.
So, the interpretation of the Bible becomes an individual activity and an individual pursuit.
So, In this view of Christianity, outward behavior isn't enough.
I did the right thing. Well, yeah, but did you do the right thing with the right intention?
Did you do the right thing with the right motive?
That becomes important as well.
So the difference between secular morality and Christianity is not the idea of inwardness.
Christianity itself has an idea of inwardness.
The key difference is this.
In secular morality, the idea of an external moral source operating through us is removed.
So, in secular morality, we dig within ourselves, but we don't go beyond that.
There's no outer light.
Think, in other words, for Augustine, God is a sort of lamp that shines through your inner soul, and you listen to God that way, through the inward road.
But in secular morality, you listen to yourself and there's no external lamp.
You are the lamp. Your self is providing the illumination for your own journey.
So, the innovation here is to cut off the interior quest from any external source of authority, including God.
I'm going to conclude with a phrase from philosopher Charles Taylor.
I'm free when I decide for myself what concerns me rather than being shaped by external influences.
Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.
This, then, is the new morality.
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