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June 7, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MAFIA BOSS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep595
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Coming up, I'll argue that the FBI's insistence on hiding the name of the FBI whistleblower Seems to suggest we have a mafia don in the White House.
I'll highlight the Biden regime's complicity in the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline.
And attorney Kelly Shackelford joins me.
We're going to talk about recent cases affirming religious liberty.
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I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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So it looks like the FBI Director Christopher Wray is going to be held and voted in a contempt of Congress.
I'll come back in a moment to what that means.
But let's look at why.
The House Oversight Committee is looking for a document that ties the Biden family to a huge international bribery racket, a bribe that involves over $5 million that is supposedly from a single country, and there's a lot more around that.
So this is corruption on the grand scale.
And the FBI knows about it, and the FBI appears to be hiding it.
The FBI will not show this document to the House Oversight Committee, and so Congressman James Comer has said, fine, if you won't do that, remember you are accountable to us.
We have oversight over you.
We are the legislative branch.
We have separation of powers.
And so your refusal is going to Cause you to be held in contempt.
Now, the FBI says that there is an ongoing investigation and therefore they need this document and they're relying on the confidential source who drew attention to this document.
And so they're pretending like we can't give it to you because like we're really working on it.
But hey, you can continue to work on it and still provide it to the congressional investigators at the same time.
So this argument makes no sense.
Then the FBI says, well, we fear, and I'm quoting Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, quote, just left meeting for House oversight.
The FBI is afraid their informant will be killed if unmasked, based on the info he has brought forward about the Biden family.
And this, of course, raises the question, can't the FBI protect somebody who's in danger like this?
If the FBI can't protect them, who can?
What's the point of, like, witness protection and all kinds of mechanisms that we have for protecting people who are in a vulnerable position?
But to me, the even more interesting question is, when it says they're afraid the informant will be killed, killed by whom?
Killed by... The Democrats?
Killed by Schumer?
Killed by Pelosi? Killed by Biden himself?
Does Biden have a group of goons at his disposal that he can unleash?
Hey, listen, rub out that guy.
Of course, we heard rumors about all this going on in the Clinton years as one after the other Clinton critics dropped dead and there were Theories, unsubstantiated, but nevertheless, the Clintons must have this kind of assassination squad at their disposal.
I'm not saying they do, but the point I'm trying to make is, how can the FBI say this with a straight face?
Do we have a murderer in the White House that we need to worry about?
All of this is the unavoidable implication of saying, hey, gee, we can't tell you about this Biden corruption because that guy, the whistleblower, we fear he's going to be finished off.
Now, Congressman Raskin, the Democrat, and a number of media outlets, including the Washington Post, have said, wait a minute, this is all a lot of do-about-nothing because this investigation has already occurred and it is now closed.
The FBI found there was nothing there.
And this is, in fact, factually untrue.
In fact, of all people, it was the former Attorney General Bill Barr who came out and said, no, it's not closed.
We actually took this investigation, which is open, and we referred it to the FBI in Delaware to look into it.
And so the idea that this was a closed, this was a done deal, this was a settled investigation, it turns out that there may have been little smoke, but there was no fire, this turns out not to be factual at all.
So the Democrats here with their media allies are covering I think?
They've worked in coordination to promote digital censorship.
They're now working in coordination to protect the corruption of the Biden family.
So, I know that there are conservatives who go, so what?
Well, yeah, they're going to hold Ray in contempt of Congress, but does that mean the guy's going to have to step down?
Does that mean he's going to have to go to jail?
No, it doesn't mean that, but here's what it does mean.
When you hold somebody in contempt of Congress, you then provide a referral to the DOJ to prosecute them.
Now, this is at the DOJ's discretion, and so my prediction is the DOJ looks at it and they go, well, we don't think that there's a good reason.
Why? Because...
Merrick Garland is basically Biden's consigliere.
So he's part of the corrupt circle himself.
But if he refuses to act on this contempt of Congress citation, then I think you can begin impeachment proceedings both against Wray and against Merrick Garland.
And that means you have an impeachment vote in the House, you have a trial in the Senate, and all of this is a magnificent way It is unavoidable for the major media to have to put cameras in there to cover this.
So this is a way to bring everything to center stage and everything before the American people.
A big part of our case in 2024 is to showcase to the American people the wickedness of this regime, the wickedness of these police agencies of government, the wickedness of the media.
So we've got gangsters, basically, to a large degree, running the country.
It's just... Seems disheartening to have to say it, but there it is.
Gangsters running the United States, in that sense, we're not that different than third-world despotisms.
Yeah, we have a lot of the outward trappings of democracy and the outward trappings of legal procedure.
Oh, yeah, look, there's a judge, and he's wearing judicial robes, and there's a jury.
But at the end of the day, it's barbarism in terms of the actual content of what's going on.
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The US government is now one of the most widespread purveyors of disinformation in the world.
I'm not saying that we are number one.
Maybe China is number one.
There are many other sources of disinformation.
But the idea that they put out disinformation and we put out truth is pure nonsense.
Now, when the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up, Welcome to my show!
Biden was basically saying that as far as he knew, as far as he knew, the Russians were behind this.
Now, there's an article, new in the Washington Post, quote, And it says that although the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged in September of 2022, the CIA in June of 2022, months earlier, knew, not just knew in general they're going to do it, but had detailed plans of how they were going to do it.
And this was then reported to the White House, so Joe Biden knew about it.
So we can start with the simple fact that when Joe Biden goes out there with a straight face, this is a deliberate act of sabotage, he knew that the Russians were not behind it.
Well, leave aside the fact the Russians have no motive to blow up their own pipeline.
But he knew that it was our team, you could say, i.e.
the Ukrainians, who supposedly had been planning to do this and were about to do it and then, in fact, went ahead.
Again, I use the word supposedly, and I'll come back and explain why, did this.
Now, let's think of what the U.S. government is now admitting.
Our official position is that we knew that the Special Operations Forces by the Ukraine were going to do this.
But who are these Special Operations Forces?
Well, it turns out these are people that are being trained by us.
So it's the US military, it's our CIA that is working hand-in-hand with these special operations.
We train them.
And so we can't pretend that we have nothing to do with this.
Even taking our official story at face value, the US government is actively involved.
And actively involved in doing what?
Think about the significance of this.
It's not just an attack on the Russians.
It's an attack on a pipeline that was part of a deal between Russia and Germany.
For Russia to sell oil to Germany.
So we're blowing up the ability of one of our own allies, Germany, to have access to energy.
And in fact, there was, immediately following the blowing up of the pipeline, a kind of energy crisis and an energy shortage which continues to this day in Europe.
So this seems, even, again, taking the official narrative at face value to be reckless, to be irresponsible, to qualify to some degree as an act of international terrorism.
And again, the defense that, well, we knew about it, we had the plans, these are guys that we have trained, but we didn't do it, doesn't really make sense.
There's a preposterous line here in the Washington Post article, and that is, the White House declined to comment on a detailed set of questions, quote, including whether U.S. officials tried to stop the mission from proceeding.
So they're not saying we tried to, and they're not saying we didn't.
This kind of coyness, I mean, and think about it, this article is based upon a straight-out leak from the intelligence agencies to the Washington Post.
The Washington Post guy is like a typist.
He's a stenographer. He's getting dictation from these agencies.
This is what the article is.
So what we're getting here into the guise of media is straight out U.S. government propaganda.
But you know what's the biggest propaganda of all?
I don't even think that any of what I just told you is even true.
And what I mean by that is the idea that the Ukrainians...
Think about this. You have a country that is really thousands of miles away.
The idea... It's a 10,000-mile journey from Ukraine to the site where the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged.
Are you telling me that the Ukrainian Navy was able to, undetected, send these commandos and sail without anyone's knowledge?
10,000 miles roundtrip blew up the Nord Stream pipeline with their own Navy SEALs?
Well, guess what? The Ukrainians don't have any Navy SEALs.
And guess what? Ukraine doesn't have a Navy.
So there's no way they could have done this.
My point is that the United States, I think, is behind this.
We're trying to blame it on the Ukrainians.
They're the ones who were invaded. They're the ones who had to fight back.
But the truth of it is even the official narrative, even the correction to the official narrative that's being put out today doesn't make any sense at all.
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Back to the podcast, our friend Kelly Shackelford, President and CEO of the First Liberty Institute.
Kelly is a constitutional scholar.
He's argued multiple cases before the Supreme Court, testified before the U.S. House and Senate.
He's won numerous landmark First Amendment and religious liberty cases.
The website, by the way, firstliberty.org.
Kelly, welcome back to the podcast.
Good to have you.
We were talking just a moment ago about the fact that we're waiting for the Supreme Court to come out with a big decision in a case involving a postal worker.
Tell us the facts of the case and what the stakes are.
Yeah, it's one of those sleeper cases that a lot of people aren't paying attention to.
Gerald Groff was on the mission field for many years and then came back and he had a strong belief that he was not allowed to work on the Sabbath.
And so he looked for a job where he wouldn't have to work on Sundays and postal service was a great idea.
And then all of a sudden they started adding Amazon deliveries on Sunday and they wanted him to work on Sunday.
He said he couldn't. And, you know, he appealed to a federal law.
There's a federal law that protects everybody's religious freedom in the workplace.
And in fact, it requires the employers to accommodate their religious beliefs if you can do so.
And they could, but the Postal Service decided that they would stop doing that, and so that's where the lawsuit started.
So most people look at this and they think, oh, you know, Sabbath cases.
I know there's some certain religions that have, you know, seven-day Adventists maybe and Orthodox Jews, but it's actually big because it's bringing up a precedent that's 46 years old, where 46 years ago the Supreme Court really Essentially redrafted the statute and redefined words in a way that is just totally violates common sense.
It's obvious it was not truthful.
And all the justices realize this now.
And so it's pretty clear that that is going to change.
And so what's going to happen is when this decision comes down, most likely there's going to be a restoration of protection for religious freedom in the workplace.
It's just nobody's sure how far they're going to go, but it's clear they're going to go in the direction of more protection because this old decision was just false and it was misreading the statute on purpose.
And for you and me, what we originally, you know, think about, we think Sabbath, but it's bigger because think of all the woke corporations who are punishing people of faith because they won't go along with their new program, essentially religion.
This is going to add protection to all those people around the country now.
They're going to have more protection to say, look, you know, you can have your religion however you want, but you can't violate my faith and my ability to live out my faith.
And so this Gerald Groff case is, I think, a really important case to watch.
We felt like the oral argument went really well a couple of months ago, and the decision will have to be out by the end of June.
So it's one to keep your eyes on for sure.
Eli, this is all very good news and fascinating.
I've noticed that in some recent cases, the court, instead of the very predictable 5-4 or 6-3 decisions, has been going 8-1, 9-0, which is to say that even Sotomayor, even Kagan, are voting with the conservatives.
That was certainly true very recently of the decision that came out involving unions and the condoning of violence.
Do you think that on the religious liberty front we are beginning to see something that is not just a court majority but something approaching a court unanimity?
I don't know. I think what people don't realize, Dinesh, is that most of the court's opinions will come out maybe 9-0 or 8-1 because they're not those really hot-button issues.
It's the handful of hot-button issues cases that tend to divide the court.
And, for instance, in this case, this might seem a little counterproductive, but I think you'll understand when I explain it.
If I get a 9-0 or 8-1 opinion in our Groff case, I'm going to be disappointed because that means that it was watered down to make everybody happy.
I would rather have a really solid protective of religious freedom decision that might end up being 6-3 or 5-4 because it's actually going to provide more protection.
So I do think in these cases, And we're going to see that.
You're going to see it in the affirmative action case that comes down.
You're going to see it in the case on the authority of legislatures in these elections, the Moore case.
So there's some of these big cases that come down.
I would predict those are going to be Moore, 6-3 or 5-4.
But I do think people don't realize there is a lot of unanimity on the court and following the law.
It's just people focus on the hot button cases.
Well, you just made an important point I do want to highlight, and that is that sometimes if you're trying to get everyone on board, they begin to bargain with you and they say, well, let's limit this decision just to this case or to cases that exactly resemble this case.
we don't want a broad religious liberty decision that might cut into cases involving diversity, equity, and inclusion or the trans issue. So you're saying it might actually be helpful if the court majority holds firm on those things and drafts a broadly worded decision. Let's take a pause when we come back more with Kelly Shackelford, President and CEO of First Liberty Institute.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Kelly Shackelford, President and CEO of First Liberty Institute.
We're talking about religious freedom.
The website, by the way, firstliberty.org.
And Kelly, you were telling me that most of us are familiar with the decision involving Coach Kennedy.
That was a win for religious freedom, but it was perhaps a bigger win than many people realize.
Can you spell out why that was such a landmark decision with kind of a wide ripple effect?
Yeah, I mean, most people know Coach Kennedy was the coach who, after the game, went to the center of the field and went to a knee and gave a 20- or 30-second prayer thanking God for the privilege of coaching those young men.
And that he was ordered not to do that again, and he was, in fact, fired when he went to a knee.
And most people know he won.
After seven years of litigation, we finally got to the Supreme Court.
He lost every step of the way.
He lived in the Ninth Circuit.
God bless him. And we won in the Supreme Court.
And he is back on the team.
He's a coach. And this fall, he will go to a knee.
And there'll probably be a thousand TV cameras there as he goes to a knee and says a prayer.
That's what most people know.
But what they don't know is what was in the decision.
And that is, there's a case called Lemon.
And this goes back, it's the same court that was 1971, same court essentially gave us Roe v.
Wade. We have an establishment clause because our founders didn't want us to ever establish a national church that we would all have to support because that would take away from religious freedom.
But in 71, in this Lemon case, they said, no, we think it means a lot more than that.
We think it means separation of church and state.
So wherever government is, religion can't be.
Of course, government's everywhere.
We think it means that you can bring a lawsuit if you're offended.
Well, you can't bring a lawsuit if you're offended.
Only religion. And so that's why our whole lives we've seen all these attacks on nativity scenes and, you know, a Ten Commandments monument.
And if there's any sort of religious activity at school, it's like a fire's broken out.
Why? Because any of those things are in the Constitution?
No, because of this Lemon case.
It's been cited over 7,000 times in the last 50 years and has created all this sort of hostility to religion and religious expression in public.
And so, you know, four years ago, we actually had a case, I don't know if you remember this, it was the Bladensburg Cross.
It was a memorial that had been put up almost 100 years by moms who lost their sons in World War I. And there was a lawsuit by the American Humanists, and sure enough, at the Federal Court of Appeals, two Obama judges and a Clinton judge, it was two to one, we lost, and they said it was unconstitutional.
One of the judges said, why don't we just cut the arms off the cross, that way nobody will be offended, and we won't have to tear it down.
So we went to the Supreme Court, but by now, Pavanagh was new on the court and Gorsuch.
And we thought, you know, we're not only going to go for protecting this memorial, I think it's time to go after Lemon.
And so we did.
And we won the case 7-2, but 5-4, five of the justices refused to follow Lemon for the first time.
And it was really a sort of a crack in the armor.
But I told our staff, it's going to take us maybe 10 or 15 years to get this thing drug into all the other areas like schools and everything else and stop Lemon.
And three years later, there we were with Coach Kennedy at the Supreme Court.
And we were like, you know, there's never been a case at the Supreme Court on the rights of either teachers or coaches and their faith at school.
So if we go for the get rid of Lemon Grand Slam, it might...
We lose our case because we're too aggressive.
So we didn't push that argument.
Midway through the oral argument, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch start saying, you know, I think it's time we get rid of Lemon.
And we're just standing there shocked.
I mean, our eyes are as big as silver dollars.
Can't believe that this discussion is going.
And surely enough, in the opinion, you know, just right at the beginning, they say Lemon is gone.
Lemon's over. I mean, that is 50 years, 7,000 citations.
You know, best way I can describe this is, you know, one of my guys came in the office and one of my more aggressive attorneys and said, I need $20 million.
And I said, what do you mean you need $20 million?
He said, we've got to go into every community, open every one of these cases.
So everywhere that crosses went down, they come back up now.
Everywhere that Ten Commandments are in the closet, they come back out.
Everywhere that prayer was taken out, it comes back in.
And I said, no, no, I'm with you.
But this is not us taking back the country.
People now in their own communities can take back their country.
We've already won. They just need to know that they now have the freedom that they didn't know they have now to bring all these things back, to restore faith in America across the landscape.
And so I see it, Dinesh, as almost the opposite of Antifa tearing down statues.
This is putting it back up.
Of who we are. And it's a major shift.
It's a 50-year shift in the law.
It's in favor of religious freedom and religious expression in public.
The limit is the government can never coerce anybody with regard to religion.
But this idea that they have to shut down all religious activity is over.
And so the things that people have been trained for 50 years that they can't do, like have a nativity scene or have a prayer at the school board meeting, that's all over.
That's all protected now.
And people just don't know it.
So it's the opposite.
We're always on defense. This is offense.
We've already won. It's just a matter of people in their own communities taking their communities back.
I mean, wasn't the key to Lemmon, Kelly, the idea that you could only have a religious event or symbol or display if it had a secular purpose?
I mean, how crazy is that?
So, if you put up Moses, you can talk about the impact of Moses on Western civilization, but you couldn't talk about the Ten Commandments because that's, quote, religious.
And what you're saying is that that bedrock structure, which has been around for 50 years, has now been capsized.
In some ways, it's, I think, just as significant as the overturning of Roe, a bad decision with polluting effects throughout the law that has now been happily uprooted.
Let's take a pause when we come back, our final segment with Kelly Shackelford.
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It's time. I'm back with Kelly Shackelford, President and CEO of First Liberty Institute.
We're talking about religious freedom.
Kelly, just this morning, I was just kind of scrolling through social media.
I see this remarkable scene.
This is in Montgomery County, Maryland, where apparently they're pushing all kinds of trans and LBGTQ propaganda in the schools.
I guess it's Pride Month.
And a large group of Muslim families are out there screaming and basically demanding the right to opt out of all those programs.
And there's a kind of a confrontation between the activists who are, by the way, mainly older and white.
And then on the other hand, these Muslim families making a case in the name of religious liberty.
And my question is, hey, number one, there's probably some more business for you if you're In other words, this would seem to me to be a very interesting case to take up because you've got Muslims defending their religious freedom, except in this case, their religious freedom coincides with ours.
Yeah, this is a big conflict around the country right now with all these school districts that are getting woke and teaching all kinds of things that violate the faith of most Americans.
I guess one of the things, and I just saw in the news last night that there was actually a fight of some sort outside of school district in California between Armenian people who are very strong in their faith and Antifa who was outside pushing, the school district was pushing this thing.
I think we're going to see a lot more conflict because of the really the radical nature of what people are trying to do in the schools to children.
What I would want people to know is, you're actually protected as parents.
There is a fundamental right in this country, a fundamental constitutional right, which is the highest level of constitutional protection, for parents to direct the upbringing and the education of their children.
This goes back to the cases from the 1920s and the 1930s and forward.
And in fact, the Supreme Court said, look, they talked about Sparta and places where children were children of the state.
And they said, those are very different We're good to go.
And in Yoder, what they did is they tried to tell the Amish they had to come to school until they were through the seventh or eighth grade.
And the Amish said no.
And they objected both on their parental rights and their religious freedom.
The Supreme Court sided with the Amish.
And they said, look, they have a right to opt out.
You can't force them to be in your government school if it violates their faith because they control the upbringing and the education of their children.
So people need to realize, don't be intimidated out by these government officials thinking that, oh, when you drop your kids off, you don't have any rights over your kids.
False. You are the authority over your kids, not the government.
It's not children of the state in this country.
Well, this is actually very reassuring because I, well, I vaguely remember the Wisconsin versus Yoda, if I remember from my college days a long time ago.
But you're saying that that is still settled law in the country.
And that when, I mean, you hear a lot of rhetoric here about, you know, keep your hands off our children and so on.
But the people who are saying that are speaking of children in a collective sense, as if the children belong to the state.
Our children.
Yes. Now, if you ask the Armenians, they probably wouldn't immediately see this as a religious fight.
They would probably see it as cultural or they're traditional people or this is the way that they've always been.
But isn't it a fact that most of these cultures evolved around religious lines?
In other words, I think it was the philosopher Leo Strauss who pointed out that the word culture is rooted in the word cult.
And cult, of course, means religion.
So that these are religious battles, even if they're not explicitly classified as such.
Yeah, and Dinesh, the cases actually refer to these rights, parental rights and religious freedom, as hybrid rights.
So they're almost stronger. They're almost combining two fundamental constitutional rights because it's rare.
There are instances where people are exercising their parental rights and it has nothing to do with their faith or their beliefs, but that's rare.
Most people, their beliefs about raising their children and these big moral issues with their children come out of their faith perspective as well.
So it's almost always that combination and it's a very powerful protection.
And it's just a matter of people not being sort of intimidated out of standing and being the parents.
And going bigger, because I know you like to do this, it really is the difference between a totalitarian society and an oppressive society, a Marxist society, And our society, these intermediary institutions, our children are not children of the state.
The parents stand between.
The same thing with the church.
There are these institutions that protect the individual from the power of the state that are crucial if you're going to have a free society like we do.
Kelly, I'm going to do one more segment with you, with your permission, and that's because I want you to explain how First Liberty is organized.
It's very important for people to understand how we build these countervailing structures and institutions.
So we'll be right back. Bank failures, record inflation, spy balloons, mass layoffs.
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I'm back with Kelly Shackelford, President and CEO, First Liberty Institute.
The website is firstliberty.org.
We've been talking about religious freedom, but Kelly, you know, most people recognize that litigation is an extremely costly business.
It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases millions of dollars, and they think to themselves, wow, this is really a very difficult road for us to go on.
The left seems to engage in all kinds of lawfare, but they appear to have a massively funded mechanism for doing that.
You have built an organization that can take on multiple cases at a time, but you've got a very kind of creative structure for doing this in a way that can attract donors and at the same time mobilize resources in a very efficient way.
Can you talk a little bit just about how First Liberty is organized?
Yeah, it's different.
I mean, if you look at most nonprofit legal groups, and I don't care if they're left-wing or right-wing, they have the same model, which is raise as much money as you can raise, use that money to hire as many attorneys as you can, and then put them in an office in L.A. or New York or somewhere, and then fly them around the country and cover your cases.
That is not our model.
Our model is there's all these people of faith who went to law school because they wanted to stand for what was right.
And 30 years later, these are now the best litigators at the best law firms in the country, really the best law firms in the world.
And they've done honorable work for their clients, but they've never gotten to do a case for their faith or their country.
And so we sit down with those top attorneys and we say, look, on our staff, we have, you know, the top legal minds, you know, from graduates from Harvard Law School, Chicago, all the best law schools, and all they do is religious freedom.
We've got a media team that'll come around you. If we give you everything you need here, are you willing to give your time and bring your firm on one of these cases?
And they're like, you know, putting their hand up and saying, hey, you know, I've been waiting for 34 years to do something like this.
Count me in. And you can imagine that first time they get to do that case.
I mean, all their talents, all their gifts, all their training lined up for the first time in their life.
With a real passion for their faith and their country, it is unlike anything they've ever felt.
It's kind of unfair, but we now know we have them for the rest of their lives as one of our volunteer attorneys.
And they're the big partner.
They give cover to the younger attorneys.
So if you were to go through the top 100 law firms, you'd find that most of those firms don't just donate their time.
They'll fight each other over who gets to donate their time.
And my goal in this, like you said, was to have more ability to do more.
So like last year, we had 621 legal matters.
And our cases seem to grow every year.
But the only reason we can do that is because of this model.
On the average case, for every $100,000 we spend, we get $600,000 donated in time.
So it's like a six-to-one leveraging.
But what I really didn't count on was the win-loss ratio.
And that is, if you watch the nonprofit legal world, They are created to fight big problems, industry, government, something.
If they win 40% of their cases, they're actually really good because they're really making an impact.
Our win rate now, 24 years in a row, every single year has been above 90%.
And it's, you know, it's God's favor on what we're doing, but it's also this method is the way to do it.
It's how corporations do their cases, right?
I mean, if Ford Motor Company gets sued in, you know, Alabama, they do not send the Detroit attorneys for Ford to Alabama to do the case.
We get the best law firm who knows the judge, who knows the community, and has the respect there, and they team up.
And that's what we do. So every one of our cases, like we talked about Coach Kennedy earlier, Coach Kennedy, who argued that case at the Supreme Court?
Well, it was our team, but the guy who argued it We're good to go.
It blesses the clients who can never afford this type of representation.
And the result is a victory that blesses everybody else.
It provides freedom and protection for them.
So it really is a wonderful model and allows us to do so much more than we could do otherwise as a non-profit.
It seems like one other aspect that you had mentioned earlier, you had alluded to, was the notion that you have to pick your fights carefully, and you've got to frame the issue you want to bring before the court.
If you try to be too ambitious, it's a little bit of a risk that you try to go for more, and you didn't get what you wanted.
On the other hand, if you're too parsimonious, or you frame things too narrowly, you might win the case, but without the wider ramifications that you're That's the reason you're bringing the case in the first place.
Is that an accurate description of the kind of tactical issue you face?
Well, well spoken.
And you can imagine what an advantage it is for us.
Think of all the other nonprofit legal groups.
They go into some other place and they're foreigners.
We have on the ground law firms who are litigating there every day working with us so they can tell us, no, you don't want to file here because this particular judge happens to be hostile to this argument or whatever.
So it's a huge advantage to have these teams where we can put together a dream team anywhere in the country in 30 minutes.
And the intel and the experience and the background they have.
And when they go into court and they look at the judge, I mean, they were in first grade together.
You know, they lost a tooth together in first grade.
So that's a huge advantage tactically to know where to file, where not to file, when to file, what arguments to make, how far you can go.
And we always look not only at where we're starting, but where are we going to end up?
Because we can lose below with judges who are going to do the wrong thing as long as we're going to win the precedent where we're going to end up on appeal.
And you can't count on the Supreme Court because they only take less than 1% of the cases that are sent up to them.
And so you've got to count on that place right below that, which will be your final resting place unless the Supreme Court takes your case.
Very smart. Kelly Shackelford, thanks so much for joining me, guys.
The website FirstLiberty.org.
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I'm talking about the motives for religious unbelief for skepticism.
And I want to go all the way back to ancient Greece.
And in doing this, I'm relying on an interesting book written by, well, a friend of mine, a professor of moral philosophy.
His name is Benjamin Weicker.
His book is called Moral Darwinism.
And he begins the book not with a discussion of Darwin, but of the ancient materialists.
Who were the ancient materialists?
Well, they were guys like Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius.
Now, Democritus is the guy who sort of first postulated the idea of atoms.
And Democritus had no evidence for this, but he sort of made it up.
But he said, at the smallest level, I think everything is a small particle.
And these small particles are all that exist in the universe.
Now, leave aside the rather interesting, I would say, coincidence that Democritus proved, to some degree, to be right.
But Democritus' point was that there is nothing other than these atoms.
He was a materialist in that fundamental sense.
And so were Epicurus and Lucretius.
Now, what's interesting is that when you probe why they found this materialist philosophy so interesting, they fess up.
And they fess up and say, in effect, we don't have proof of any of this, but the reason we like is it gets rid of the gods.
Wow. Wow.
Here is Epicurus.
He says that, He seems to recognize that immortality is something that humans, as part of their nature, aspire to long for, and he's like, we've got to get rid of that one.
Lucretius says, He wants to remove, quote, the heavy yoke of religion.
Why? Because he says religion saddles human beings with ideas of duty, of responsibility.
To come back to Epicurus, he says that the idea of the gods creates, quote, anxiety, anxiousness in human beings.
I suppose that's because gods threaten to punish us for our misdeeds, both in this life and in the next.
And an Epicurus says, well, yeah, if there's another life that comes after this one, there could be some suffering in that life.
He doesn't know that there is, but he says there could be.
And so he goes, the good news about having a purely material reality is we don't have to worry about any of that.
We can focus kind of on pleasure in this life.
Now, when we say the word pleasure and the English word Epicureanism sort of means the pleasure-loving life, And we might think that Epicurus was some kind of a wild hedonist, you know, crazy parties, drinking, orgies.
But no, Epicurus, in fact, wasn't like that at all.
He was what we would call a little bit of a hermit.
Why? Because Epicurus said, look, there is pleasure and then there is pain.
And so if you want to maximize pleasure, one good way to do that is to really focus on minimizing pain.
And Epicurus said that when you undertake a risky life, an adventurous life, a lot of times things fall out from under you.
You get injured or your plans get blasted to pieces.
And so you then experience a lot of trauma and a lot of pain.
So for Epicurus, the way to maximize pleasure in life is to...
To have a high degree of self-control, to eat very simple food, essentially to rely on the simple pleasures of eating modestly and sleeping.
So Epicurus was more concerned with minimizing suffering, what he calls freedom from disturbance.
And Epicurus says that even when you die, it's kind of a nice thing, he goes, because our soul, basically, not our soul, but the atoms in our body, they kind of dissipate and there is no soul to kind of experience this, oh gosh, life has come to an end, or to endure the consequences of a life the consequences of a life to come.
So here is Epicurus developing, you'd have to call it a purely naturalistic philosophy, naturalistic as opposed to supernatural, in order to liberate man from what he saw as the tyranny of the gods.
And Lucretius is pretty much in the same camp.
If you read Lucretius' long poem, which I haven't done in 30 years, but nevertheless, it's a poem celebrating nature.
And Lucretius in that poem talks about, quote, unloosing the soul from the tight knot of religion.
And so Weicker, kind of, Benjamin Weicker, the author I mentioned earlier, sums it up.
He goes, a materialist cosmos must necessarily yield a materialistic nature.
And then Weicker goes on to trace a very interesting connection between these early materialist philosophers and the Darwinism of the 19th century, which I'm going to talk about tomorrow, how Darwinism itself is weirdly appealing to naturalists and skeptics and atheists, even though it would seem to put forward a very repulsive idea of human beings reduced
to the level of the beasts. But the good news from the atheist point of view is that if humans are reduced to the level of the beasts, well, guess what?
One of the things that beasts don't have is morality.
Beasts don't follow an external code of morality.
There's no Ten Commandments for the monkeys or Ten Commandments for rats or for deer, for that matter.
Essentially, it's nature all the way.
It's a naturalistic instinct that drives beasts.
And so if human beings are beasts with nothing special, no soul, no distinguishing feature, then ultimately human beings too become liberated both from religion and from morality.
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