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June 1, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:55
YOU TOO, CHICK-FIL-A? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep591
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Coming up, I'll discuss the wisdom or unwisdom of trying to boycott Chick-fil-A. Daniel D'Souza-Gill joins me.
We're going to talk about Trump and his critics and also discuss how America's religious landscape is changing.
And I'll review how New York is dumbing down its public school standards.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify or watching on Rumble, please hit the subscribe button.
I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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I want to talk in this segment about boycotts of Bud Light and Target and Kohl's and Disney and now some people calling a boycott for Chick-fil-A. But before I do that, I'd like to offer a brief comment about the recent debt ceiling extension vote in the House.
It was a vote very interesting because this was a deal negotiated by Kevin McCarthy on behalf of the majority, which is the Republicans.
And normally when that happens, you find that a majority of Republicans, maybe all the Republicans, vote for the deal and Democrats vote against the deal.
But if you look at the vote, it was not the case.
You find that more Democrats voted for this deal than Republicans.
There was a substantial number of Republicans that voted against the deal.
Now, the majority of Republicans still went with McCarthy.
They kind of went with the speaker.
But nevertheless, what this means, I think, is that Republicans are deeply divided on this This may have implications for Kevin McCarthy's own future leadership in the House because a dissident faction that big has the power to topple or unseat McCarthy.
Will they do it? I'm not sure.
And I'll take up the question of how that is all developing.
But I think this was a bad vote.
I mean, it's not to say that there are not There's nothing good in this deal.
As I mentioned yesterday, there are some restrictions, some curbs on spending.
There are no new taxes.
There are some openings for energy that were previously closed off.
Some of the, there was a modification of the Biden college loan bailout so that people are going to have to start paying on their loans again.
So it's not that you can't check some boxes about some good things, but I think that this has to be seen as a failure when measured against a missed opportunity.
Republicans were in the driver's seat here.
Basically, if Republicans didn't vote for this, no deal was going to happen.
The government would shut down.
Biden would start screaming.
And see, I think that would have been the time to negotiate a much tougher deal, because then he would come back and say, they're blaming me for what's happening with the economy.
We don't want the banks to crash.
Okay, fine. If you want the banks to crash, meet us halfway.
So in other words, yeah, is this a kind of a blackmail?
Yeah, but it's good blackmail.
It's the kind of blackmail Republicans should learn to use.
And the blackmail here means nothing more than, I won't sign until you meet us halfway, at least halfway, on the conditions that we have set forward.
The Republicans actually had all these conditions.
They had a very good set of programs that they had targeted, work requirements for welfare and so on, get rid of the IRS agents, the 87,000 new IRS agent funding.
And then when Kevin McCarthy came out of the Negotiating room, he's like, well, I got a really good deal.
Well, did you get rid of the IRS agents?
Well, no. We put some modest courage.
Did you get rid of the college loan program?
Did you abolish Biden's debt forgiveness?
No, but people are going to have to start paying in two months.
So, this is playing...
A weak hand. I guess that's my point.
And I think on the balance, unfortunately, very bad for the country.
This means that the spike in government spending under COVID is now being normalized, which is to say that the country's fiscal irresponsibility, which was already bad, is now at a worse level.
And I don't see any short-term...
Which is to say that Kevin McCarthy has essentially let Biden get this deal and let Biden sort of now not have to deal with this issue for the rest of his presidency.
Let's talk about Chick-fil-A. There's a video circulating of the CEO Truett Cappy, which I find really pretty repulsive.
He's talking about the fact that white people need to repent for the sin of racism and need to wash the feet of black people.
And then there's even a video of him doing that.
Now, this is just, to me, downright disgusting.
Now, I understand that there's a kind of a Christian resonance that he's trying to give this, which is to say Jesus washed the feet of the disciples.
But Jesus didn't wash the feet of the disciples to atone for the sin of racism or anything like that.
So, this is a... Peculiar mutation of a religious symbolism, I think, to a bad end.
Why? For the simple reason that Truett Cathy, and in fact any white person living today, has no responsibility for the historical sins of slavery or segregation.
Let's remember, slavery ended in 1865.
By the way, a lot of white people gave their lives to end slavery.
Segregation ended in the 1950s and 1960s, so a whole generation and a half ago.
Does this mean that we should take Chick-fil-A and put it in the same camp as Target or Kohl's or Bud Light?
No. Why? Because Chick-fil-A, yeah, they've got some director of diversity and equity and inclusion, which I think is a bad thing.
I mean, just embracing that phrase is bad because of what comes with it and the kind of stuff that you get suckered into once you embrace that framework.
But on the other hand, this is not the same thing as taking sort of trans propaganda and putting it on, you know, onesies and putting it on clothing for one-year-olds and two-year-olds.
So even in the degree of malfeasance here, there is bad and there is worse.
I know some of the franchisees of Chick-fil-A are upset because they feel like, gee, this is going to hurt our business.
We're Christian families that run these franchises.
And I think the answer is, hey guys, listen, we're not really against Chick-fil-A. It's actually been a very good company.
Of course, it retains its Christian roots.
It's closed on Sunday for a Christian reason.
But you know what? Send the message up to corporate that you're not too happy about this diversity, this DEI business that corporate is pushing down on the franchises.
This is the way that you use leverage and you use influence to bring about a better outcome.
So am I still going to eat a Chick-fil-A? Yes.
But at the same time, I hope that we can exercise some leverage to get Chick-fil-A to correct its course.
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It's time. Guys, I'm here with my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill.
She's host of the show on Epic TV. It's called Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza Gill.
She's also the author of a couple of books, most recently, The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America, and And we were talking, what, yesterday I guess it was, about some of the back and forth between Trump and DeSantis.
And you were making the point, wait a minute, none of this may matter in the end if we don't take certain key steps.
So... Tell us what you were talking about and let's get into it a little bit.
Yeah, well, I noticed that, you know, this primary debate is really heated up a lot and everybody has their thoughts on who they want to be the candidate.
But I was looking at things in Arizona and Georgia, two states that we really need to win in 2024.
If we don't win, let's say, Michigan and Wisconsin.
And I don't know if a lot has really changed on the ground as far as us actually having what we need there in order to win those states.
Hopefully that changes because otherwise, regardless of who our nominee is, we're going to have so much fraud and there are going to be so many issues in both of those states that I'm not sure we'll be able to win anyways.
So this, I think, is a critical point, and that is that the left worked really hard after COVID to tilt the playing field.
And we know all about the Zuckerberg money.
We know about, well, there's 2,000 mules.
There's also the Democrats' heavily funded ground game.
And some of that funding, by the way, goes through these nonprofit institutions, which are supposed to stay out of politics, but evidently aren't.
I think we're good to go.
If we focused on those, then at least we'd have a chance with whoever our nominee is.
Because honestly, I think Trump or DeSantis should be able to beat Biden because Biden's been so horrible.
I mean, most people know that he has clear mental problems.
Obviously, the country's gone way downhill since Trump was president.
We had a way better economy.
Everything was really great in the country.
We had low interest rates.
People had much more flourishing lives.
We should be able to bounce back from the COVID problem, but Biden should lose regardless to one of these two.
And if he doesn't, it's mostly because we don't have the ground game in those key swing states.
Yeah, so we were talking about how do you go about all this, and I was making the point that this is not just a case for the ordinary citizen buckling up and doing more.
Yeah, if you have the time, if you're able to volunteer as a poll judge or be able to participate in the process, that's important.
But we really need a team on the Republican side, a team that involves donors and money, a team that involves lawyers that are familiar with the ups and downs of election law.
And we need strategists.
And we had strategists in the Reagan years who knew the game and knew how to fight in these closely.
These states are often close.
There's always going to be some parts of the country that are kind of balanced in the middle.
What I found really remarkable about the 2022 election is that it seems like we lost, if not all, nearly all of these very close contests.
So somehow the Democrats had enough in 2022.
And this was not because of mules.
They might have used other strategies in Arizona.
I think they used the strategy of let's muck up the machines on election day and that's going to help repress the Republican vote.
So very invidious. I'm not saying there wasn't this invidious behavior.
But what I'm saying is they also somehow are able to yank their people to the polls.
And I think it's a function of money and it's a function of lawyers and it's a function of organization.
Yeah, well, and also I think in Georgia, I mean, Kemp won by a good amount in Georgia, and he focused on some of those swing districts in Georgia.
So we should be maybe doing what he was doing to somehow win those, because you don't have to get all of Atlanta or anything.
It's just certain parts of Georgia.
And then same with Arizona. It's only certain parts we have to get.
So it should be a doable task.
I mean, we've got friends in both places, and one of the things that they've been saying, there's a turning point guy that we both know in Arizona, and he's like, look, Arizona's a critical state.
It's hard to see a pathway for a Republican to make it to the presidency without Arizona.
And he goes, and yet, after the 2020 election, you'd expect there to be a massive flurry of activity.
And he goes, I don't really see anything fundamentally changing.
I don't see the Republicans.
And he's talking here about the RNC, but he's also talking about other organizations, including organizations at the state level.
magnitude of the problem. Instead, as you say, today all the focus is, are you Trump?
Are you DeSantis? What's wrong with one? What's wrong with the other? And you're saying this big elephant is being ignored.
Yeah, and I think so many people who are just normal people, they aren't like influencers and pundits, they see the fact that fraud is the main issue.
Fixing the fraud is number one.
Number two is pushing our candidate over the top.
Because even if we have the best candidate there is, they're always going to win if they still have fraud.
Not just by pushing Biden, but pushing Fetterman.
I mean, if they can win with someone who's basically a comatose person, then obviously it doesn't matter how good our candidate is.
So we have to fix the operations.
I mean, to me, the really scary thing about the Arizona result is, in my view, we had a good candidate, Carrie Lake, who lost to a bad candidate, Katie Hobbs.
So if they can use a bad candidate to beat a good candidate, that's very bad news for the Republicans.
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As Danielle and I were talking about in the last segment, the acrimonious exchanges continue between some of the Trump MAGA people and some of the DeSantis people.
And we want to focus now on a couple of critiques of Trump that are out there.
And your kind of take on them and your answer to them, one of them has to do with Trump's response on COVID and the claim by the DeSantis people.
They're saying, well, listen, our guy did a great job on COVID and your guy didn't.
And a second critique of Trump, well, it's the way that Trump attacks people, and specifically Kayleigh McEnany, because Kayleigh McEnany, of course, was Trump's press secretary, I think, by most people's consensus, mine included.
She was a feisty and very effective press secretary defending Trump from the podium against hostile reporters.
And the idea is why, if Trump is going to go after To her, it shows that really any ally of Trump has always got to watch it because he can turn on you like on a dime.
And you were making the point that you think these criticisms are unfair to Trump.
Yeah, I think so. Because, I mean, let's take Kayleigh McEnany, for example.
I think all of us, yes, agreed.
She was a great press secretary.
That was a few years ago.
But, you know, she's a reporter now.
Now she's at Fox News.
And even Brian Kilmeade, whom I like, he said something like, you know, she doesn't speak for any particular candidate.
So in that case, I think that means that you are open to being criticized because it's not like she's still working for Trump and Trump is still supporting her.
You know, she kind of did her time as press secretary and decided she wanted to do this Fox News job.
And we know where Fox News stands on Trump.
But... But basically, you know, we can't have the situation where everybody demands undying loyalty from Trump and says, oh, you know, Trump can never criticize me for the rest of my life because I worked for Trump, yet you're free to be neutral or put out information that's sort of anti-Trump.
I mean, that's not really fair because...
She's, yeah, she's not a surrogate for Trump.
And so neither side has a continuing partnership in that sense.
It's not like a lifeblood situation.
And even if we look at someone like Sarah Sanders, I think she went on to become governor.
She doesn't say negative things about Trump.
But, you know, she's not being criticized by Trump as well.
So I think that you don't have to put yourself in that situation.
but by virtue of being at Fox News, that's gonna affect Kayleigh McEnany's views and how she acts on TV and Also the fact that she has kind of chosen that she doesn't want to be on one team She doesn't want to be pro-Trump So that means that you don't really get that Trump immunity anymore Even though we can all say in the past that she did do a good job as press secretary, you know people people change But she's had an interesting evolution because it seems that before 2016 she was anti-Trump and she has some very hostile
things She said about Trump and then again very interestingly Trump chose her because if Trump was such a you got to be loyal to me For life, it's odd that he would have picked her But he did pick her.
She rallied to his defense.
But then you're right. If you listen to Kayleigh McEnany today, she seems a little bit of a different person than the one that was up at the podium.
In other words, it's almost like she's decided to go in with the Fox philosophy.
And this does seem to be an institutional philosophy at Fox.
I don't know if they're all in with DeSantis.
They may be. But they certainly seem to be against Trump.
And Trump knows that. Yeah, certainly.
And I think also the fact that so many people at Fox control what other people say, all those kinds of things, you know, so it's not necessarily that I would say, oh my gosh, you know, Kayleigh McEnany must have come up with this master plan against Trump.
I'm sure that wasn't the case.
Right. But it just means that she's more of a mouthpiece for a company and also that No one would have immunity from Trump.
I mean, Trump is going to criticize anyone who is putting out non-factual information.
So the polling information that she put out actually wasn't correct.
So Trump was right to call her on it, is what you're saying.
He had every right to.
Yeah, I mean, probably the news organization should issue a correction or say that, you know, this was the correct information just because they are supposed to be journalists.
Make a point about COVID because of the, what about this idea that Trump sort of got it wrong on COVID, whereas, you know, DeSantis, his supporters say, was right from the start.
I think that's kind of a longer discussion, but you'd have to really go into from the very beginning, which is that COVID, it was kind of like no one really knew exactly what it was.
Trump said, we're going to shut down flights from China.
We don't want to allow this to come in.
Of course, that was when Nancy Pelosi was saying, you know, And Chinatown, all these things.
And also don't call it the China virus.
Don't call it the China virus.
So I feel like each time you look at COVID, you have to look at it in like, what time period are we talking about?
Because yeah, sure, later everybody realized we need to be open and many, many states, I think South Dakota also, Texas, other states moved in that direction of saying we have to be open, but nobody really knew that at the beginning.
So at the beginning, I think Trump thought we're going to have people dying.
I was in New York at the time, so he sent those big ships to New York basically to make sure people weren't without medical care because all the hospitals would be totally full and all this.
So I think people didn't realize how bad the situation would be.
And then when I think back to the presidential debates, I remember Trump said there's going to be a vaccine, like, very soon.
And basically, nobody believed him.
So there were a lot of articles that came out saying, oh, no, there's no way there's going to be a vaccine ready.
And then there was a vaccine ready.
So I'm not saying that I'm saying you should take the vaccine or not take the vaccine.
But basically, if you look at the timeline of how everything played out, you know, everyone was basically in that situation where we didn't really, really know how bad COVID would be.
And then I think as time went on, people realized that, yeah, actually, we do want to leave our homes and we want to do stuff.
And It's up to you if you want to take the vaccine or wear masks or whatever.
But a lot of people didn't know that.
So judge these guys by the information that was available at the time and don't use the benefit of hindsight to say, now that we know what we know now, we're going to fault you for making decisions which you obviously made without the information we currently have.
Yeah, of course. And also I think it's different if you're president versus a governor because if you're president, And you choose to do nothing, everybody would blame you if it was this lethal virus that everybody's dying on the road from.
They would say, well, Trump, why don't you do something?
So I think he was in a difficult situation of knowing what to do.
And he was getting bad information.
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There's an article in Politico about the fact that the religious landscape is undergoing massive change and this can have an important impact on the 2024 election.
To summarize the article very briefly, it is that there's been a decline of religious self-identification and religious practice in the United States over the past decade.
But it's not evenly all over the country.
Now, you might expect me to say the decline is in like the Northeast or in California.
The interesting thing here is they're talking about a religious decline in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan, We're good to go.
But the good news on the Republican front is that there seems to be a religious surge in places like Florida and Texas.
Among Hispanics, for example, both in Florida and in Texas.
For example, interestingly, church attendance dramatically up in Miami-Dade County.
Notice that Trump won Miami-Dade in 2020.
So what do you make of these changes?
First of all, what do you think is causing the religious shift?
And do you agree that it's a political...
That the political ramifications are significant.
Yeah, well, I think we're seeing an increase in just white voters in general being less religious, unfortunately.
And I'm sure in places like the Rust Belt, it's because there's a lot of depression, there's a lot of drugs.
Unfortunately, there aren't jobs there anymore.
Crime is getting worse. So just like the American fabric of social life there has really broken down.
And then I think as far as the South, I mean, a lot of Hispanic immigrants are not interested in wokeness.
They're not interested in, you know, Latinx or LGBTQ stuff and so have more traditional values.
Hopefully that continues with their kids and doesn't just die out with the first generation.
But, um, but yeah, I think that a lot of the people in the Sun Belt are gonna be kind of keeping some of that religious culture intact.
And hopefully we see that in Arizona also because it is...
Pretty clear that the Republican Party is the party of at least some sense of values.
Even if you're not Christian, the sense of, you know, these things are wrong, these things are right.
Whereas on the left, it's really anything goes.
And they pretty much make all of these other social issues their religion.
So... I mean, it's pretty obvious, and I speak at a lot of these GOP Lincoln dinners.
You can very clearly see the Republican Party is the party of patriotism.
They always have the pledge.
It's the party of God.
There's always an invocation, typically a blessing.
A pastor is brought up at the podium, sometimes a rabbi.
And it's also the party of the military and law and order, because there's usually some salute to veterans, will all people who serve in the military stand up, go to a Democratic Party event, and you notice those three things are absent.
Right. Very often no pledge, no invocation, and no sort of gesture of respect to the military.
So it's clear that we're talking here about something important in its own terms, but also something with political ramifications.
So what you're saying about the places like Michigan and Pennsylvania is that Christianity was tied in with cultural stability and civic life.
And with the breakdown of that civic life, religious attendance has eroded.
Right. Yeah, I think so.
And a lot of those areas that we even saw, unfortunately, with the pro-life bills, they didn't pass.
Like, Michigan has a really egregious one.
So I think it just shows the fact that the place has changed.
It's not the place it used to be.
And unfortunately, I think that this increasing secularization of those areas is going to mean that we have a less...
We don't have the upper hand we used to have.
Because if people who live there are so secular and they hear speeches from our kinds of people that are invoking God and those kinds of things, they're not going to...
I think what's so unfortunate about all this is that the Democrats create the problem.
They create the blight.
They create the environment in which jobs go away and little leagues disappear and community breaks down and families break down.
And then they reap the political benefits of what they've done.
Because by wrecking people's lives, they make those people more dependent on the government, less dependent, if you will, ultimately on a civic and religious structure that upheld those communities.
And the Democrats go, wow, this is working out for us pretty well.
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There are a number of studies around the country of public schools, and what they show is that the performance of our students in the schools is terrible and getting worse.
I mean, it's starting from a low baseline.
America has long fallen behind other industrialized countries, other developed countries.
And of course, we find some pretty high academic standards in some of the developing countries now, which is enabling those countries to move forward and bodes well for their performance down the road in future decades.
But I think what happened, and maybe COVID is partly responsible for this, the fact that basically under COVID and for two years, the schools stopped doing education.
They started doing masks and they started doing social distancing and all kinds of other patrols of the behavior of young people, but they were not feeding their minds.
And some of the online programs that they used as a substitute for in-person learning were just an outright joke.
So this has taken its toll.
In addition, you've got the teachers' unions who don't care about education.
Basically, there are kind of a funding mechanism for all kinds of teacher programs.
And so it's almost like the public schools have become a sort of a make-work situation where you get paid and you get raises, but it's not for doing any teaching in these schools.
And the results don't lie.
There was a study in Baltimore basically showing that, well, it's going too far to say that the entire public school population of Baltimore is made up of idiots.
But these aren't idiots because they were born dumb.
These are idiots because their teachers have made them dumb.
And the schools have made them dumb by not teaching them anything.
And so they grow up year after year learning basically nothing.
There was a frustrated mom in Baltimore recently who complained and she said, my son is in the top half of his class, even though he has failed all except three of his classes.
So think of that.
Think of what that says about the standard.
The graduating students without basic proficiency in math or in English or, quite frankly, in anything.
Now, how do schools deal with these problems?
Well, New York has a solution, and the solution is lower the standards.
I'm not actually kidding.
And what makes this really so depressing is that New York actually, at one time, had pretty good public schools.
I remember my roommate from Dartmouth went to a school in New York, and I asked him, I was like, is it a private school?
And he was like, no, no, it's a public school.
I forget if it was the Bronx School of Science, but there were a number of schools, charter schools, special schools in New York, where you had kids, very often kids from immigrant backgrounds, in the case of my roommate, a black kid, who had gone to these schools and actually gotten a decent education.
But now, says New York, one of the ways that they close the gap between the horrible performance of the public school students and the standards that they're expected to meet, well, the obvious solution would be, hey, why don't we work really hard to raise the students' performance so that it comes closer to the standards that have been set?
No, the solution is the exact opposite.
Why don't we lower the standards so that the students, the gap between the students and the standards is closed?
This is kind of like schools, and there have been some schools around the country, you can no longer give students an F. Why?
Because everybody has to pass.
So this is the way we get a 100% passing rate, not by making sure the students know the work so that they can move to the next grade.
We just make it impossible to fail them.
Number two, and this is something I think Debbie and I talked on the podcast several days ago, which was the idea that you can't give people a zero.
It doesn't matter if they don't turn in the work at all.
No zeros. You have to start at the 50% mark.
So you get essentially 50 points for, well, I won't even say showing up because you don't even have to show up to get the 50.
You can't get a zero no matter what.
Now, imagine if you ran businesses this way.
And I say this with a little trepidation because one of the problems with bad schools is that they ultimately will lead to bad civil servants and bad air traffic controllers and bad people providing customer service.
And so business quality will go down eventually because the quality of the people who are in business is going to go down with it.
So this is no solution at all.
It's a solution that makes these schools feel good.
But you know what's interesting about the fact that when New York dropped these standards, lowered their proficiency standards in math and English, there was no public outcry.
You might expect parents to go, oh my gosh, this is outrageous.
This is terrible. And yet I didn't see any of that.
And that in itself is telling.
That to me is a true sign of decadence, where you lower the standard and everybody's like, huh?
Well, we kind of expect our students to be dumb.
We kind of expect our schools not to teach anything.
So yeah, it's not any surprise, really, that they're doing this.
And that resignation, that fatalism, that acceptance of mediocrity...
I mean, I grew up with a lot of this.
And so I remember it was just, to me, frustrating and disgusting.
And it was a relief to me to get out of it and come to a country which was based on, I thought, on merit, based on the idea where a lot is expected of you.
When you go in a store, people say, how are you?
Have a nice day.
The idea of having standards of etiquette, standards of service, standards of academic proficiency, all of this defines America and all of this made America what it is.
But it seems that little by little, all of this is slipping away and the example of New York lowering its standards is a good example of that.
I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
Now on Locals, you've got Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
And hey, you can also interact with me directly.
I do a live 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'm doing a new film this year, which I'll be giving you the inside scoop on that on Locals.
If you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch all these films for free.
So check out my channel at dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
In my ongoing coverage of the state of academia, a state that is not good on the whole, I want to comment on two things that I've seen recently.
One of them is a survey of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
And the survey shows, it asks professors and instructors to describe their own political views.
It's self-description, so nobody's ascribing a label to you.
How would you describe yourself?
Are you very conservative?
Are you somewhat conservative?
Are you middle-of-the-road or moderate?
Are you liberal or are you far, extremely liberal?
And not really a big surprise, but over 75% of Harvard faculty describe themselves as either liberal or very liberal.
They're in the left camp, by their own definition.
A very tiny portion of Harvard faculty, something like 2%, 2.5%, describe themselves as conservative or very conservative.
And let's think about this. This shows that conservatism has essentially been removed, wiped out at Harvard.
Why? Because we're not just counting the English department, the History department, the Political Science department.
We're counting all departments.
Now, when I was in college a generation ago, it was kind of assumed that the conservatives could be found in Harvard Business School.
They could be found in the engineering department.
They could be found in some of the science faculties.
So that even if the English department was various species of leftists or if the history department was made up of various species of Marxists, they would be somewhat balanced out.
And not really balanced out, because after all, if you have a professor of mathematics who's a Republican, there's no republicanism that enters into mathematics.
So there was still a problem even before.
A problem of a strong ideological tilt.
But how is it possible that for a university like this, in fact, the premier university in the country, to have this kind of a lopsided structure be so ideologically imbalanced?
I don't think that this is purely the result of the fact that people who are more liberal tend to go into academia.
Some of that is true. By and large, conservatives, it's been said for a long time, tend to go into business.
Liberals tend to go into more activist arenas like media and academia.
But I think that the way you keep the conservative numbers so low is to combine that, the natural affinity, with another factor.
And that is institutionalized exclusion and intolerance.
Now, interestingly, you hear the words exclusion and intolerance a lot at Harvard, but it doesn't have to do with this.
It doesn't have to do with the one area where it actually applies.
In fact, Harvard usually, well, I think that we're still intolerant of gays.
There's still some homophobia built into our system.
So when they talk about exclusion and intolerance, that's all they're talking about, even though...
By and large, being gay, being trans is far more acceptable, far more fashionable at Harvard than, say, being a Republican or, for that matter, being an evangelical Christian.
So, the culture of intolerance is alive and well in academia.
And that's part of why I think that some of these institutions are now beyond redemption.
They've gone. They've hit a tipping point.
There's no salvaging them.
And we have to look and build alternatives.
It's not to just say that we need our people to go all to trade schools.
That's important. And those skills are important.
But on the other hand, we also need good lawyers to put on the courts and on the Supreme Court.
We also need people to go into complex areas of business and that requires business school.
And so we need the liberal arts and we also need vocational or trade education.
Let me turn to Michigan State, where there is a very interesting lawsuit.
Two Michigan State students are suing their professor.
Why? Because they claim that she was charging them, not just them, but the whole class money, to use it to fund a group that she herself controlled that promotes essentially abortion.
So these are the students, Nathan Barbieri and Nolan Radomsky, They're suing Professor Amy Wisner and the university.
Why? Because they say that their First Amendment rights are being violated.
Violated how? Because apparently Wisner said to her students, hey, listen, there are 600 students in this class, obviously a big class.
She said, the way I'm going to be teaching, I'm going to be talking about a group called the Rebellion Community.
Now, in order for you to be familiar with this group, you have to pay the $99 membership fee.
Right? So you have to join the Rebellion community in order to satisfy the class requirements.
And guess what? The Rebellion community was something that was controlled by her.
She was the creator and the controller of the Rebellion community.
And she raised this money, $60,000, through these student fees.
And guess what? She gave a bunch of this money to groups like Planned Parenthood.
So what the students are saying is, wait a minute.
We didn't agree to fund Planned Parenthood.
We don't want our money forcibly going to groups that we don't approve of.
This is making us engage in, quote, speech that we are being made to pay for.
This is our speech because our dollars are funding it and the university is making us do it and the professor is making us do it.
This seems to me outrageous conduct.
I suspect the university will try to get out of this.
We'll basically figure out a way to refund it.
Either all the students and certainly these two students who are suing, this is an outrageous violation.
Not just a violation of First Amendment rights, it's a violation of the basic contract you make with the university.
You're there to study. You're not there to enroll in activist communities and compulsorily put money where your mouth most certainly isn't.
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The number again, 888-206-2801.
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I've been talking in this section on apologetics about the rise of secular morality and its challenge or opposition to both religious morality and traditional morality.
I made the point that secular morality is rooted in the philosophy of Rousseau, the idea that we are somehow naturally or originally good.
Remember Rousseau's idea of the noble savage.
Somehow, when you're in the state of nature, you are doing fabulous.
And then along comes society, which introduces convention, and you start comparing yourself to other people, and this guy's got more than I have.
And so since Rousseau, we start getting obsessed with needs, which are not really needs.
We just want to be like the next guy.
And so society begins to change and tarnish and corrupt our nature.
And says Rousseau, the solution is to go back to our original nature.
Now, not really to go back to the primitive state, not to live in a hut or to live in an igloo, not to roam around with the animals and the bears, not that.
But what Rousseau says is you can recover the original state of nature as a state of mind.
And so this is secular morality, the idea that we have an inner self, the idea that we are inward beings with inner depths, and that we dig deep within ourselves to find this sort of inner being that is the true arbiter of what it is right and wrong for us to do.
I made the point that this secular morality preserves the idea of morality.
It's not like anything goes or pure relativism or do what you want.
The idea is that there is a right thing to do, but that right thing to do is determined by you.
You, the inner self, is the arbiter, the referee, and the sort of final source.
You don't use the inner self as a channel to God or to an external code, rather the inner self becomes itself the authority.
Now, what is the appeal of all this?
It may sound all a little bit strange, and I think certainly if you go outside of Western culture, it is strange.
If I were to go to my dad or my grandfather and try to explain this secular morality to them, they'd be like, what are you talking about?
This idea that there's an inner being that lives inside of you, Dinesh?
Have you lost your mind? But in Western culture, it's very comprehensible.
Why? Because it arises out of a tradition that's now a couple of hundred years old, And these sort of bohemian communities that developed first in places like Schwabing in Munich in Germany, on the left bank of Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, San Francisco.
Ultimately, the morality cultivated in these kind of deviant bohemian communities went mainstream in America in the 1960s.
So this secular morality is now, well, it's half a century old.
It's no longer. I've been calling it a new morality.
It's new by the sort of standards of history.
Fifty years is not a big sweep in the long reach of history.
But on the other hand, it is five decades.
Now, again, what do people find appealing about this idea of secular morality?
Well, one thing they find appealing is that it promotes individuality.
As I mentioned, quoting Charles Taylor, And this secular morality says that there's a unique way of being you, and only you know how to be yourself.
And so when people say the odd phrase to people, well, be yourself, it is an affirmation of this kind of individuality.
By the way, in ancient times, this idea that each of us has a sort of A peculiar and unique way of being human would have been really weird because people thought, listen, we're all human beings.
We're all on the same planet.
We all eat the same food.
We all have the same kind of physical apparatus.
Men differ from women, of course, but apart from that, so the idea that sort of you are a special being and you have a unique existence was seen as downright bizarre.
Sure, you have opinions, but the opinions are based upon the world around you.
Now, in this secular morality, the great sin, and there is one sin, is the sin against authenticity, and that is hypocrisy.
So hypocrisy means pretending to be one thing when you are actually another.
And so you notice, for example, in our popular culture, people are constantly being flayed and attacked and exposed.
Oh, he's such a hypocrite.
Hypocrisy in the ancient world was not such a big deal because it was assumed that people fall short of their own standards.
And so the idea that your standard is up here, your actual behavior is down here, there's a gap between the one and the other, so what?
In fact, there's an old idea in Christianity that everyone is a sinner and everybody falls short of the ultimate moral standard.
All are sinners, in a sense, in the eyes of God.
But in secular morality, the whole idea is that you've got to be yourself, you've got to be true to yourself, and that if you're not doing that somehow, you're living a lie.
You're living in bad faith.
And we can see why in secular morality, art becomes really important.
Why? Because, I mean, there's been art from the ancient world, of course, but art in the ancient world was seen as mimetic.
Art is copying nature.
Art is giving a representation of the world out there.
Or it's attempting to reach the transcendent.
But today, art is seen more as none of that.
The most popular art, the art that sells the most, certainly all of modern and postmodern art, is all based upon self-expression.
Which is to say, if I draw a tree, I'm not really drawing the tree the way it is out there.
I'm not just replicating what my senses are recording.
Rather, I'm portraying the tree in my own way.
Maybe the tree is portrayed...
Without leaves, so it's supposed to indicate that I feel lonely, or maybe the tree is covered with fruit, suggesting a certain exuberance of my temperament.
The tree is a reflection of my own personality.
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