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June 26, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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CLOSING IN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep608
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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.
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Coming up, the walls are closing in on Joe Biden.
I'll give you some new information about the IRS whistleblower and also about Biden's secret phone.
I'll try to make sense of the bizarre mutiny that wasn't in Russia, asking whether there are some parallels to the January 6th bogus insurrection.
And I'll review an article insisting the 2020 election was rigged, but the article leaves out the most important proof.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
I'm Dinesh D'Souza.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The corruption of the Biden family is notorious, and I've talked about it a number of times now on the podcast.
What's going on with the House is an inquiry that Republicans, being sticklers, is trying to pin everything down and leave Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
Very little room to wriggle their way out.
Democrats are We're notorious for being able to get away, stay one step ahead of the posse, always come up with plausible explanations or implausible explanations.
But nevertheless, the media acts like they're unbelievably plausible.
And so this is what we're dealing with.
Well, the latest information comes out of an IRS. Well, there are two IRS whistleblowers.
The one who has been named is a guy named Gary Shapley.
And it turns out that this guy is highly credible, is actually a Democrat, although not very active in politics, someone who is doing his job.
And what this guy has revealed is a bombshell text An email that was sent by Hunter Biden to a guy named Henry Zhao, who's the CEO of Harvest Fund Management, which is essentially a financial operation in China.
These are Hunter Biden's Chinese business partners.
And what's interesting about this message is that it directly references Joe Biden.
So I'm going to read it.
In fact, I saw that Trump, who recently spoke in Michigan, was reading in his kind of unique Trumpian way, reading the text.
But here we go. I'm sitting here with my father.
This is Hunter Biden talking.
And we would like to understand why the commitment, i.e.
financial commitment, made has not been fulfilled.
Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight.
And Z, if I get a call, Z meaning Zhao, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me, his dad, Joe Biden, and every person he knows, Joe Biden's willing to use all his influence.
And my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.
I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.
So let's think back to Joe Biden.
I have no knowledge. I have no involvement in my son's business dealings.
That is quite clearly untrue.
Now... I don't know.
I'm now quoting from her.
Photos from Hunter Biden's laptop placed the president's son at the Biden family's Wilmington, Delaware home on the same day the WhatsApp message was sent, July 30, 2017.
In other words, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden were together under the same roof.
So when Hunter Biden says, my father is sitting right here, His father was in fact in the house and was most likely also in the room.
Now, the remarkable thing is that right after this text was sent, $5.1 million moves from Chinese accounts into the Biden LLC. And so,
not only was there a demand for the money, but the money was then actually paid, and then $1 million was quickly transferred into Hunter Biden's own LLC. So, the money is not only moving into America, into the Biden LLCs, but it's now moving into the Biden family accounts.
Now, here's Christopher Clark, an attorney representing Hunter Biden.
He goes, quote, It is dangerously misleading to make any conclusions or inferences based on this document.
So you can see here that he's trying to protect...
Well, it turns out not so much Hunter Biden.
He's trying to protect Joe Biden because this is what he says next.
Any verifiable words or actions of my client in the midst of a horrible addiction...
The addiction. He just said that because he said, no, this is not a reflection of an addiction.
This is a reflection of somebody who's trying to collect on a bill, on an invoice, on money due or money promised.
But he goes, any verifiable words or actions of my client in the midst of a horrible addiction are solely his own and have no connection to anyone in his family.
So quite clearly what's happening here is Hunter Biden's attorney is trying to protect Joe Biden.
Basically saying my client is speaking only for himself.
It doesn't necessarily mean Joe Biden was in the room.
Now, I saw a clip on social media.
This is Kevin McCarthy.
He was being interviewed.
And I think he realizes that this is now going into impeachment territory.
I don't think he's fully sold on impeachment for Joe Biden, but he does seem to be sold on impeachment for Merrick Garland.
Why? Because Merrick Garland is the guy who's been obstructing this whole process.
And when we come back in the next segment, I'll talk about Merrick Garland and the way he's been obstructing it and the way in which the IRS whistleblower is hitting back at Merrick Garland's apparent falsehoods.
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I'm continuing my discussion on...
On Biden family corruption and the attempts by Merrick Garland to block any indictments and also efforts by the House to get to the bottom of the matter.
Now, when the IRS whistleblower came forward, he We're good to go.
This is a guy that wanted to bring investigations, searches, and possibly an indictment in Washington, D.C. Because Washington, D.C. was, of course, the venue of Joe Biden's corruption.
Where did it occur out of?
Well, it occurred Joe Biden was living in the vice presidential residence.
Hunter Biden was also doing business in D.C. So it seemed like the logical place to do this.
But evidently, Matthew Graves...
The guy, by the way, who's prosecuting the January 6th cases, so a very powerful guy inside the DOJ, told David Weiss, I'm not going to allow you to bring any indictments in Washington, D.C. Now, this flatly contradicts what Merrick Garland had testified, which is that David Weiss had complete authority.
This is a guy who could follow the investigation wherever it led, could bring indictments wherever appropriate.
So, Merrick Garland here appears to be flatly lying in stating that, no, no, no, there's no pressure on this guy David Weiss and that this kind of sweetheart deal that he made with Hunter Biden that was of his own volition, he was not blocked or stymied in any way.
Now, the whistleblower, who is, of course, the source of the claim that Merrick Garland and the DOJ have been blocking Weiss, has now released a statement, and the statement is kind of a bombshell.
Why? Because it names six additional witnesses.
So this Gary Shapley saying, look, don't take my word for it.
It's not that I'm saying that the DOJ or Merrick Garland or Matthew Graves, there were a whole bunch of key people high up in the investigation who were present when these statements were made.
They have direct knowledge of it.
So I'm going to actually read his statement because it's the kind of statement that provides chapter and verse.
It provides detail.
It's the kind of thing when cops are investigating a crime or a murder, they have a witness.
They want to know if the witness is credible.
So what they ask is things that maybe the witness would not directly be in a position to know.
Like, what was the murder weapon?
Or, how did you know this guy?
Or, where do you think this guy was on the day of the murder?
And if the witness can provide information that can be independently corroborated by other facts or other witnesses, then you go, wow, this guy is obviously telling the truth.
So here goes the...
Here goes the whistleblower.
In an October 7th, 2022 meeting at the Delaware US Attorney's Office, US Attorney David Weiss told six witnesses he did not have the authority to charge in other districts and had thus requested special counsel status.
Those six witnesses include Baltimore FBI Special Agent in Charge Tom Soboszynski, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Raiisha Hawley, IRS Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gary Shapley, and Special Agent in Charge Daryl Waldron, who also independently and contemporaneously corroborated Mr. Shapley's account in an email, now public exhibit number 10, following page 148 of his testimony transcript.
So, Shapley goes on to say, I don't know really here why these lies are being told or why David Weiss would make a statement like this Let's just say David Weiss had, as Merrick Garland says, the authority to go ahead and indict and prosecute wherever he wants.
Why would David Weiss, in a private meeting with key IRS and FBI people, say, hey, listen, I don't have that authority?
So, all of this is, I think, building a strong case that there is not only a crime here or a series of crimes, crimes committed at the highest levels of government, but the crimes are accompanied by a cover-up By the Attorney General.
So the Attorney General here is a crook.
He's a crook who is either crooked in and of itself, which is to say that he's somehow involved in all this, but more likely, he's simply doing a kind of consigliary task.
He's kind of like a mafia lawyer.
Remember the godfather, the...
The mafia lawyer is the guy who himself doesn't engage in any corruption or violence.
He seems to be clean-cut.
He wears a suit. He's the guy who goes out to see the guy from Hollywood.
Hey, listen, I need you to give this guy a role in the movie.
The guy refuses to do it, and his horse ends up beheaded.
This is Merrick Garland.
He's basically a thug, but he's a thug in rimmed glasses and a three-piece suit.
He's a thug who speaks in a measured voice, but...
Make no mistake about it.
He is actively involved in suppressing the truth from coming out.
So we have a Justice Department here that's gone rogue.
We've talked before about the FBI having gone rogue.
But it's even more serious because the Justice Department is on top of the FBI, in charge of the FBI, and covers a lot more ground than just the FBI. So we're dealing with criminality at the highest levels of the government.
And the only question is, will the House have the tenacity to nail it down, to document it, We're good to go.
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I don't know if you have been following the Russian insurrection.
And I gotta say that this is a very bizarre event that we have to approach very cautiously and very skeptically.
Cautiously because what you see is different than what may be the case.
And the second thing is we are not experts on this sort of thing.
I'm certainly not.
I don't pretend to be.
There are a lot of people who pose as experts who aren't experts at all.
In fact, these are people who went from being, you know, experts on classified documents to being experts on the technology of submersibles to then being experts on civil war in Russia and the so-called Wagner Battalion or Wagner Group.
But we have to try to make sense of what's going on because, of course, it's relevant to the war in Ukraine and it's relevant, of course, to U.S. aid to Ukraine.
So let's start with what we saw and what seemed to be going on and then let's go to what really appears to be the fact of the matter.
What you see going on was tanks From this group called the Wagner Group.
I guess I'll just call them Wagner Group.
And the Wagner Group is a group of mercenaries.
Now, these are mercenaries who have been fighting on the Russian side of the war.
And in fact, they have been some of the frontline troops in fighting against the Ukrainians.
And yet, it appeared that they were in a massive mutiny against Putin, against Russia.
And the leader of this group, a guy named Prigozhin, was leading this mutiny.
And it looked like this guy was going to take Moscow.
His... His troops and his tanks seize control of the southern Russian city.
It's called Rostov-on-Don, Rostov-on-the-Don River, and appear to do this with no resistance.
Now, the no resistance part of it should have been a little bit strange.
The Russians are not defending their own towns, which are being taken over by some mutinous group.
And then these guys are rolling toward Moscow.
And again, there's no fighting.
You just see the tanks rolling, and so...
There were people on social media, in fact, some people on the right saying, hey guys, listen, this is a real insurrection.
As contrasted with the January 6th bogus insurrection, you didn't see it with the Russian tanks, guys in animal skins or people running off with Putin's desk or any of that sort of silliness.
This appeared to be, as I say, a real military operation, and all the neocons were going wild and kind of cheering on.
Think of it. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been blasting the Wagner Group for its brutality.
These people are savages.
They're barbarians. They're fighting against the Ukrainians.
And then suddenly, oh, there's a mutiny.
Oh, these people are wonderful.
Let's support them.
You know, David Frum, my kind of ex-friend from my DC days, he's like, we should now prepare for the end of the war.
The West should now lay out its conditions and offer the Russians peace in exchange for this and that.
So here's this kind of pundit pretending to be a strategist.
But there were some real strategists.
Michael McFaul at Stanford, for example, also cheering on the mutiny, acting as if Russia is about to crumble.
And then as these troops are going toward Moscow, and again, the funny thing about it was, well, you know, Putin was playing along with all this.
Putin comes on and I see him and he's very solemn and he basically makes a statement, something to the effect of, you know...
This is a rebellion and rebellions won't be tolerated in Russia.
And so it sounded like Putin was a little bit alarmed and was mobilizing.
There was even some talk about Putin being evacuated from Moscow.
Again, only a report.
I don't take any of this at face value.
Or Putin is bringing air defenses now to deal with this rebellion.
And then as these tanks are going toward Moscow, they stop.
And then, really, I won't say without firing a shot, but let's just say without a single casualty, without a single fight, without a single battle, these tanks turn around and they start, the whole thing's over.
Basically, this guy, pre-Goshen, says, I'm done.
He goes, I had some grievances, but they've now been addressed.
Apparently, there was a negotiation that was conducted between this Prigozhin fellow and Putin.
The outcome of it is that Prigozhin will now retire from the Wagner Group.
He's going to move Belarus, I think.
Yes, Belarus.
So he's essentially now in exile, or Belarus is gonna be, kind of take it, take over his safety.
Now, if this was all genuine, I would say, in fact, here's, I saw David Petraeus, former CIA director.
Pergozhin kept his life, but lost the Wagner Group, and he should be very careful around open windows in his new surroundings in Belarus where he is going.
So this is David Petraeus.
Again, taking all of this at face value.
But it's not clear to me that it should be taken Here's also Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, again taking this at face value.
Quote, Now, when I come back in the next segment, I'm going to talk about a much more likely explanation for the whole thing, which is that it was staged.
There was no real rebellion.
There was no real fighting.
Well, we know there wasn't any real fighting.
Essentially, this was a war that Putin won, quote, without firing a shot.
And the question becomes, why would something like this be staged?
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I suggested in the last segment that the Prygosian rebellion, the Wagner group's mutiny in Russia might, and I emphasize the word might, I'm trying like everybody else to make sense of an event that otherwise doesn't make any sense.
If this guy genuinely staged or organized a massive revolt against Putin...
First of all, why would he do it and not carry it through?
You would think he would carry it through because he would know that Putin doesn't brook dissent very easily.
Putin has ruthlessly cracked down on dissent in Russia, and this guy's life would be in obvious danger.
So if he's willing to take the risk of doing it, you'd think he would have tried to see it through.
But instead, you have sort of these two adversaries.
It's almost like one of these things where you see now almost, you know, two guys are pretending to have a massive fight, and then they kind of hug and embrace at the end, almost like a staged boxing match where the boxers, of course, hug each other at the end, suggesting that it was all a game.
Now, was this all a game and if so, a game to what end?
Well, one of the ends could be, think about it this way, let's say that you're Vladimir Putin and you want to tease out, you want to flesh out dissent within your own military units.
What better way than to say, okay, we have a rebellion and then people who actually are against Putin in the armed forces go, I'm joining the rebellion, here's my chance, I'm going to jump on board and then Putin knows, oh, it's that guy and that guy and that guy and that guy.
Meanwhile, the leader of the so-called rebellion is in with Putin.
In other words, think of it. This is a guy that has been fighting on Putin's side of the war.
And he has been not only fighting, he's on the front lines.
This is a guy that was thought of before this rebellion as Putin's own man.
This is a guy who goes to Russian prisons and gives speeches basically telling the prisoners, listen, you have a chance to get out of prison, but the way to get out of prison is to join the military and you've got to go on the front line.
And he then usually ends his speeches with, I'm giving you five minutes to decide.
So either you stay in prison or you take me up on my offer.
So this is a very powerful man in Russia who has the ability to make these kinds of deals with Russian convicts.
Moreover, there's a remarkable article in the Hollywood Reporter that I stumbled upon yesterday that corroborates the idea that this guy...
Evgeny Prigozhin is, in fact, a kind of actor.
And why do I say that?
Because it turns out he's an actor.
He is an actor. And he's also a movie maker.
I'm going to read the title of the article from The Hollywood Reporter.
Before he turned on Putin, let's put that in brackets because The Hollywood Reporter doesn't know anything about that, Evgeny Prigozhin made Hollywood-style propaganda films to sell his war.
Wow! So I dive in to get all the details, and it turns out that Putin has been, had launched a major kind of, not just a kind of typical propaganda effort that you see where the government is putting out brochures and putting out all kinds of leaflets and so on,
or social media posts, but apparently Putin has been trying to have a culture-wide offensive to promote Russian culture and Russian ideas, and also to rewrite the At least in a manner favorable to Russia, Russian history.
Now, by itself, there's nothing all that unusual about this, because think about it.
World War II movies make heroes out of the Americans and the British, and so it's pretty normal for a country to make movies which tend to glorify its own citizens.
But evidently, the Wagner Group and this guy Pregosian were very active in this whole effort.
And so, for example, in 2021, they made a movie called Tourist, which is about a group of mercenaries.
Think about it. The Wagner group is made up of mercenaries fighting in Central Africa.
And the movie was actually pretty highly rated.
You can look it up on IMDb, which is the kind of movie site here in America.
And... And it's got pretty favorable ratings.
This guy, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was apparently a very, he was a hot dog kind of tycoon in Russia, believe it or not.
He then became a sort of a warlord.
He then pivoted into making movies.
He's apparently had a criminal record.
But by the time he became friends with Putin, he owned food and construction companies, and he became part of Putin's inner circle.
He recruited a thousand or so mercenaries that have been fighting for the Wagner Group, and they've been making sort of Rambo-type films, but with Russian heroes.
So evidently, a lot of the plots of these films, these are noble, kind of patriotic Russians who on the international stage are ensnared by all kinds of wicked American and European capitalists who try to con them, but their natural heroism kicks in.
In 2021, Prigozhin released a movie called Granit, G-R-A-N-I-T, where, again, a hero named Granit leads a band of Russian mercenaries against Islamic terrorists in Mozambique.
So the point I want to make is that this is a guy who makes war, and he also makes movies.
Now, he doesn't star in his own movies, but he's a producer of these movies, so all of this supports the idea that this could very well have been some kind of theatrically staged operation.
I don't know this to be true for a fact, but it seems to me to make more sense of the facts on the ground.
A fake mutant.
So it turns out it's a little bit like January 6th.
This was also a bogus insurrection.
And again, an insurrection in which people came armed, but nobody got shot.
There weren't any fights.
Nobody got killed.
And then the two guys who were supposedly fighting decided to make up.
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Feel the difference. There's an interesting article in the New York Post by a writer I do like and admire.
His name is Michael Goodwin.
He's a very punchy columnist and he has an ability to kind of distill things in a very readable way.
At the same time, this is a guy I've noticed over the years is craving sort of respectability.
He's always trying to distinguish himself, if you will, from...
What he considers to be more outlandish or more conspiratorial ideas, as if to build more credibility for what he's saying.
And his latest article is sort of a classic example, so I want to analyze.
And it's called, Donald Trump's 2020 election loss was an inside job.
I'm thinking to myself, yeah, absolutely.
This was an inside job on so many different levels.
I mean, level one was the Zuckerberg intervention with half a billion dollars.
The changing of the laws, that's number two.
The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop and the Hunter Biden, Joe Biden story, number three.
2000 mules, number four, and I could go on.
Multiple ways in which the left engineered this outcome in 2020.
But Goodwin doesn't really want to go there.
He wants to sort of narrow the field a little bit, and it's very cunning the way he does it.
So let's go through his article.
Score half a point for Donald Trump.
Right away, Goodwin is sort of appealing to the never-Trumpers or the moderates.
I'm going to give a little bit of credit to Trump, but not the full credit.
Quote, So, let's turn out to see how Goodwin can prove this.
The dirty deity, writes, didn't happen in offices in Arizona or Georgia, where Republicans supposedly were banished while Democrats counted duffel bags full of late-arriving votes.
Now here, Goodwin is being a little bit sly by picking one of the largely discredited theories of voter fraud, the so-called duffel bags under the desk.
First of all, there were no duffel bags, as far as I know, under the desk in Arizona.
And yet, Goodwin pretends like there are.
The duffel bag they were talking about was, of course, in Georgia.
But that's not the only way in which fraud could have occurred in Arizona or Georgia, and yet Goodwin doesn't address any of it.
He acts like, well, since an explanation has been provided for the duffel bag in Fulton County, we can basically declare that there's no election or no meaningful, no substantial, not enough to make a difference election fraud in those two states.
Quote, Nor did Trump lose because computers were wired to rob him of victory.
Now, I would declare this statement unproven.
We don't know if there was a rigging of the machines.
I haven't seen any satisfactory proof that there was.
But I wouldn't say, on the other hand, that there wasn't.
And yet, here's Goodwin, who doesn't know one way or the other, proclaiming authoritatively about the fact that there was no fraud by the machines.
Now, Goodwin goes on.
To then zoom into the Hunter Biden scandal, and he talks about the fact that the FBI and the IRS both knew that there was massive fraud that had been committed by Hunter Biden, at least, and possibly by Joe Biden.
And they knew this before the 2020 election.
In fact, they knew this way back in 2017, right after Joe Biden completed his term as vice president.
The IRS had apparently pushed to have further investigations, further searches, but, and now quoting from the IRS whistleblower Shapley, whom I mentioned earlier, quote, Career DOJ officials drag their feet on the IRS taking these investigative steps.
So what Goodwin is getting at, and he's quite right about this, is that right before the election, they all go into a huddle to protect Biden.
Now, in fairness, the DOJ does have a rule, but the rule is a rule that right before the election, we don't get into these kinds of investigations because it seems too eerily timed to influence the election, so to avoid even the appearance of meddling with an election.
But see here, they were meddling an election.
They were meddling an election by not taking the steps to go after the Bidens.
Shapley also said that his team was blocked from seeing Hunter Biden's laptop, even though the FBI had authenticated it in 2019.
So basically, Goodwin is now saying that the election was rigged, but it was rigged for one reason and one reason alone.
It was rigged because there was criminal bribery going on with the Biden family.
The FBI knew, the IRS knew, and yet career people and political people inside those departments decided let's protect the Bidens.
I think that that is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't people inside those departments decided, let's protect the Bidens. I think that that is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough because quite clearly the rigging of the 2020 election occurred at multiple levels. So kudos to Michael Goodwin for identifying one of those levels. But see, part of the problem here also is that with Goodwin being a columnist for the New York Post and with Rupert Murdoch being such a savage opponent of Trump, it could be that all these guys are tap-dancing a little bit because they need to keep
Rupert Murdoch happy.
They don't want to come out all the way and say Trump was right across the board and so they go as Goodwin does in this article, Trump was half right.
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The war in Ukraine is often portrayed in the media by the left and also by some of the neoconservatives as a war between liberal values on the one hand, that's Ukraine, and illiberal or authoritarian values on the Putin or the Russian side.
Now, it certainly is an illiberal act for Russia to have invaded Ukraine, but is it really true that Ukraine represents liberalism?
I want to argue that that is not true.
It's not true in Ukraine.
And in fact, the Ukraine war is producing illiberalism in the West and specifically also in the United States.
So it's making our societies more illiberal.
I mentioned, I guess, a couple of days ago how Ukraine was cooperating with digital platforms and submitting censorship requests.
This is a guy who's a critic of the Ukraine war.
He's spreading misinformation about us where misinformation is defined as not being on the Ukrainian side.
And so that's one example of illiberalism being promoted inside of Ukraine because there's massive censorship within Ukraine, but also the Ukrainians censoring Americans and Westerners in the West who are speaking out against the Ukraine war.
Now, here is a woman named...
Well, she has a Russian name, Elena Kolbosnikova.
She's apparently somebody who is of Russian origin and she lives in Germany.
And she has been defending Putin, defending the Russian side and basically saying that the Russians are not in the wrong.
Now, there is a respectable argument to this effect, but the point is not whether it's respectable or not.
The point is that this is a woman who should be able to say what she thinks and organize, if she wants, a peace rally, and yet she was hauled before a court, a German court in the city of Cologne, and fined about $1,000 for what she said.
The court basically said that she had, quote, endorsed and supported the Russian war, quote, in a way that was perceptible to others.
And my point is so.
But see, here's the point.
This is really what Kolbosnikova said.
She said the invasion of Ukraine was, quote, necessary.
And she told a television channel, Russia is not the aggressor.
Again, the question is not the truth or falsity of what she said, but the simple issue of being able to speak your mind.
Now, it should be noted that Germany, and in fact many European countries, do not have the same free speech rights that we have.
They don't have a First Amendment.
And so, very often in those countries, there's a kind of a balancing act.
Yeah, you have the right to speak, you have the freedom to say what you want, but that freedom has got to be balanced against other rights.
The right of others not to be to feel safe, maybe the public safety, maybe some definitions of the common good.
And so on. And so here we see the way in which West Germany is acting in a manifestly illiberal way.
I mean, think about it. This is an unemployed mother of two.
In fact, the judge had to take that into account.
He was going to the prosecutors that asked for a prison sentence.
But the judge goes, this is an unemployed mom.
I'm not going to put her in prison.
So he gave her a thousand dollar fine.
And but my point is the principle of it.
It's crazy that somebody, an ordinary citizen, speaking out on a TV show or speaking out in a rally is going to get hauled on a criminal charge and then fined.
Here's another example.
This is Elizabeth Gilbert, and you may or may not know the name.
Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of a book that was turned into a very successful film called Eat, Pray, Love.
Welcome to my show!
The Soviets in the early part of the 20th century are doing forced industrialization and the family decides to fight against them.
So that's the storyline. You may think, so what's the big deal?
It's set in Siberia.
Well, it turns out that when Elizabeth Gilbert put up a notice that the book was due to be released, a bunch of people went on the site called Goodreads.
Now, these are leftists.
And they began to give the book one-star reviews, even though the book hadn't come out yet.
So they obviously hadn't read it.
And their point was that the book is, quote, supporting Russia and venerating Russian nationalism, and it speaks in a kind of patriotic way about Russia.
And so this is a treacherous act, and this woman needs to be denounced.
Now, the worst part of it is that Elizabeth Gilbert, who has the publishing clout, to resist this kind of nonsense and say, don't be ridiculous.
This is not even about the Ukraine war.
In fact, it's not even about the 21st century.
I'm talking about Russia 100 years ago.
But no, Gilbert releases a video on Twitter delaying the publication of the book, at least for the time being.
And so this is really what happens.
What you get is illiberalism, and in this case, pressure for her to withdraw the book, and then she basically pulls the book, at least temporarily.
And think about it. This is a book by an American author about Siberia, about Russians, but it's set in another century, and it has no plausible connection to the current world.
And maybe it's virtue signaling on the part of Elizabeth Gilbert.
Maybe it's the fact that she got a little afraid that she would become suddenly a sort of a target.
But this is terrible.
It's terrible. Why? Because think of what it leads to.
If you can somehow not have books about Russia, even if unconnected, what?
Tolstoy? What? Dostoevsky?
What? Chekhov? Gogol?
The greatest writers of the And here, as I say, we're not even talking about a Russian writer.
We're talking about an American writer.
All of this is coming at a time when Zelensky has been talking about canceling the upcoming election in Ukraine.
He says, we're under war. I might talk about this more tomorrow, the idea that we're under war so we can't have an election until the war is over.
And so illiberalism in Ukraine, illiberalism as I mentioned a moment ago in Germany, and then illiberalism involving an American author, Elizabeth Gilbert.
The left has been on a crusade against the conservative justices of the Supreme Court, largely as a result of a series of rulings, perhaps starting with the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v.
Wade. But there are other important rulings, the ruling on the EPA, for example, and a forthcoming ruling that I'm very Anxiously watching and excited about.
It's the ruling on affirmative action, affirmative action in the universities, but possibly affirmative action also affecting the workplace.
I just saw a study of medical schools which looks at the admit rates for blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians at different levels of test scores and it is amazing. If you go to very mediocre scores you find that no Asians get in, virtually none, virtually no whites get in.
A sprinkling of Hispanics get in and a large number of blacks get in with absolutely, I won't say room temperature, but very low scores that normally would never get you into medical school.
Think about it. What this means is that these are people who are going on to...
Presumably critically important jobs in medicine, and they don't have the academic credentials to be moved forward.
Very disturbing at so many different levels.
But anyway, ProPublica is a so-called research group.
Now, it's an ideological hit operation because their research is tailored to support the arguments of the left.
They've done attacks on 2,000 mules.
They did the attack on Clarence Thomas, and more recently, an attack on Alito.
Now, they can attack They're not smart enough to attack the decisions of somebody like Alito, so they're basically implying that this is a guy who's a recipient of gifts that he hasn't disclosed.
And the remarkable thing here is not the ProPublica article, which is a major yawner.
In fact, it almost mirrors the Clarence Thomas article, except with Alito, the violations, so-called, appear to be much more minor.
He took a ride on somebody's private jet that he...
Has been seen on a number of occasions with a man, actually kind of a right-wing tycoon, but a little bit of a never-Trumper, though, named Singer.
And that Singer has some LLCs or business interests that have come before the court in various ways, or he's been involved in litigation that could come before the court.
And so the idea is that Alito is somehow acting in an improper way.
Now, the truth of it is if you apply the same standard to left-wing justices and just start looking back at left-wing justices now and in the past, you'll find that they all have done this.
And the point is that the this is, well, I'll let Alito speak for himself, because in a rather remarkable op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Alito actually decided to answer the critique, answer this claim by ProPublica, and he answers it at a number of levels.
First of all, he says that...
He has spoken to Mr.
Singer, quote, And then he goes on to say, quote, So that's the key point here.
The idea is that somehow the singer guy has business before the court and he's trying to influence Alito.
And Alito goes, And as I will discuss, he allowed me to occupy what would otherwise have been an unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska.
Now, what I find quite interesting is the way that Alito drills into this.
And he goes on to say that the instructions for completing financial disclosure tell judges, quote, And hospitality is defined, this is how judges think, let's go to the definition, hospitality extended for a non-business purpose by one, not a corporation or organization, on properties or facilities owned by a person.
And then Alito goes into the definition of the word facility.
He goes facility, he looks at Random House Webster on a bridge, says something designed, built, installed to serve a specific function, affording a convenience or service, transportation facilities, and And something that permits the easier performance of an action.
He goes on to say that the legal use of this term is similar.
Black's law, dictionary, blah, blah, blah.
And so what he's getting at here is that if some guy gives you access to his facility, in this case, it is a seat on a plane.
And again, Alito's point is, hey, listen, the guy's plane seats a whole bunch of people.
It's not as if they kicked somebody else off or somebody was paying or he was charging people and I didn't get charged.
No, there was an empty seat and I essentially hitched a ride.
And then he goes, the flight to Alaska was the only occasion when I have accepted transportation for a purely social event.
And in doing so, I followed what I understood to be standard practice.
It seems kind of silly.
And I think this is Alito's wry purpose in writing this op-ed.
It's almost like somebody is, you know, making an accusation that's so preposterous, like...
And so what Alito's doing is he's taking the accusation literally.
And he's looking at the rules.
He's looking at the definition of words.
And at the end of it, he's shrugging his shoulders and saying, which I think most people would say after reading the article, this is no big deal.
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