All Episodes
Previous Next
July 17, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:46
GEORGIA SHOWDOWN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep622
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This episode is brought to you by my friend, Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, Trump is demanding that the Fulton County DA, Fannie Willis, be disqualified from her political campaign to prosecute him for questioning the results of the 2020 election in that state.
I'll talk about that. I want to chuckle over the hype and subsequent freefall of Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter alternative called Threads.
And evolutionary biologist Colin Wright joins me.
We're going to talk about males and females and what his work has to say about that.
If you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to the channel.
I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Donald Trump and his lawyers are asking the Georgia Supreme Court To throw out a special grand jury report in Georgia and also disqualify Fannie Willis.
Fannie Willis is the Fulton County District Attorney from a prosecution that she is getting ready to launch against Trump.
Now, this is an investigation that Fannie Willis has been doing since early 2021.
She is a Democrat.
She is a leftist. She is resolute in her desire to get Trump.
In that sense, she resembles, for example, the Attorney General in New York who was trying to do the same thing, campaigned on doing the same thing.
And also there's a judge in Georgia.
His name is Robert McBurney.
He's the Fulton County Superior Court judge.
And he seems to be very sympathetic to Fannie Willis.
And he seems to be someone who doesn't really, is not on Trump's side.
Let's put it that way. And so Trump has already made one prior effort to ask Judge McBurney to recuse himself from the case.
And he's like, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that.
So the case is before Judge McBurney, so Trump has no option there.
But I think he's realized that, look, this is kind of a system that appears to be sort of rigged.
You've got a left-wing prosecutor that's trying to find something, anything, to go after Trump.
You've got a judge that seems to be willing to let her do that.
And so Trump is like, this is a farce.
This would not be happening if it was anyone other than Trump.
And this is a biased and a rigged proceeding.
So Trump, of course, can go to Judge McBurney and say, I want you to recognize this, but what are the chances of that happening?
Answer, very low.
And so Trump has decided, let's take it to the Georgia Supreme Court.
I'm now quoting from Trump's attorneys.
Nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable.
And the all but unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.
Now, to back up and give you an idea of what this case is all about, it's all about whether or not somehow Trump and his allies were trying to undermine the legitimate election process in Georgia or to cast as illegitimate the election process in Georgia in the 2020 election.
Now, what did Trump really do here?
Well, the answer is he called the Secretary of State, Raffensperger, and now that I think about it, because the case is so dependent on this phone call, I'm going to print out a transcript of this call and do an analysis of it, perhaps in tomorrow's podcast.
But in the event, Trump calls Raffensperger, and at one point he says, and it's very clear, the context here is that Trump is saying that, look, you're not counting all the votes.
There are improprieties in the Georgia election process.
And Trump says at one point, I need you to find me these extra votes.
Now, this is obviously open to interpretation.
I think Fannie Willis and others on the left are going to say, this is Trump asking Raffensperger to somehow just kind of cough up the votes or find votes that don't exist.
I think it's clear from the context, and we'll do a deeper dive into this.
Trump is saying, no, Trump is saying the votes are there.
But because of the flawed processes in Georgia, these votes are not appropriately being counted.
And so this is supposedly Trump's great crime.
Of course, it's absurd. People are entitled to disagree about an election.
They're entitled to demand that votes be properly counted.
And so I think what's going on here is something similar to what's happening with January 6th.
The charges are excessive or in some cases absurd, but you've got ruthless prosecutors, you've got compliant judges, and then you've got juries that like to take it out, wreaking a kind of vengeance on their ideological opponents.
And this represents a real breakdown of law in the United States.
Now, what do I think are the chances of I don't know.
To say, listen, there are certain things you can do and there are certain things that you can't do.
But I can't disagree with what the Trump lawyers say here.
The whole of the process is now incurably infected and nothing that follows could be legally sound or publicly respectable.
That, I think, is indubitably true.
The debt ceiling crisis has come to a head.
The Biden administration is doing its best to force more government spending.
They've reached a settlement to get the deal done.
But our national debt continues to skyrocket.
How are you protecting your savings?
Times like these are when concerned savers like me turn to gold.
And I, like thousands of similar minded people, buy my gold from Birch Gold.
Here's the easiest way to do it.
Birch Gold will help you to convert an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold.
You don't pay a penny out of pocket.
As the BRICS group, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa band together against the dollar, more and more central banks are diversifying.
You know what they're buying? Gold.
Follow their lead.
Text Dinesh to 989898.
You'll get a free information kit on gold.
There's no obligation, just information.
Birch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Thousands of happy customers.
Birch Gold can help protect your savings, too.
Find out how. Text Dinesh to 989898 today.
The Biden administration has just announced a $39 billion student loan forgiveness that applies to over 800,000 borrowers.
And you might be, as I did, scratch my head and say, Didn't the Supreme Court just rule that the Biden administration's loan program is unconstitutional and that the president does not unilaterally have the power to, quote, forgive debt?
Now, the court, of course, did say that.
And the court, moreover, said not that loan forgiveness can't be done.
Loan forgiveness can be done.
The issue is who can do it?
Well, the answer is...
Who are the people who allocate money that the government then has in order to lend money?
The lenders are Congress.
Congress is the group that is the legislature.
They make the laws.
They make the laws for the loans, and they make the laws for the forgiveness of loans.
That was the point that the Supreme Court made.
Now, if the Supreme Court had made this kind of decision against the Republican administration, the Republican administration would go, okay, well, the court says we can't do it.
The program should be terminated.
But these being Democrats, and they're like, how do we find a way to kind of get around what the court decided?
And the answer is they've come up with something very clever.
And that is that they are now pretending like they've had a lot of administrative confusion over the way in which this program has been carried out.
And to quote the Biden administration and through its education secretary, Miguel Cardona, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that failed to keep accurate track of their progress.
So in other words, the idea is here is that we've got all this administrative muddle.
And there are students who were on a program in which they were paying not a fixed amount of money based upon an interest rate, but they were paying based upon their income level.
So in other words, you take out a loan and the government says that when you earn money, you pay a certain percentage of that money for a certain duration of time.
And the Biden people are now saying, well, we forgot to recognize that there was an end point for this period of time.
So once somebody has made 240 or 300 payments, depending on their own paperwork, they stop paying.
And so we have people who are still paying, even though they've made all these payments.
And so all we're doing now is we're not instituting a kind of Now, it should be noted...
That although Biden talked about a way to sort of get around the court's decision and many on the left were like, yeah, he can still forgive debt.
He has the power to do that and so on.
I'm now quoting Biden following the Supreme Court decision.
Today's decision has closed one path and now we're going to pursue another.
So it may seem that the Biden regime just basically has now ways where the court says X and they go, really?
Well, we're just going to do Y. Why?
But it's not really quite that bad.
Of loan forgiveness.
And it was canceling up to $20,000 of debt for 40 million borrowers.
So this new program that the Biden people is kind of like a consolation prize.
It is a fraction of what the old program was.
They're not able to do it on the scale that they had envisioned.
So now they're like, okay, well, let's do kind of this reduced program.
And I've got to say, this is probably a big pretense.
Let's pretend like we have these administrative snafus and all we're doing is like correcting the snafus.
So I would like to see this program also challenged and maybe the courts will strike this down too as simply a kind of ruse to get around what the Supreme Court decided.
But in any event, even if this program continues, it is not the original loan forgiveness program that the Biden people wanted.
The court shut them down on that score, and so they've come up now with this somewhat paltry alternative.
Debbie and I started eating better this year.
We've lost weight, but foods we can't seem to eat enough of, and it's a requirement, are veggies and fiber.
Now, there's no better way to get all your fruits and veggies plus fiber than with Balance of Nature.
This is Balance of Nature's Fiber and Spice.
It's a proprietary blend of 12 spices for digestive health.
The intense flavors and deep colors of spices are the most condensed whole food source of phytonutrition available.
It's recommended to be paired with this, the star product, fruits and veggies in a capsule.
So easy, select the whole health system for the best price.
Start your journey to better health right now.
Take advantage of Balance of Nature's Great Offer, $25 off plus free fiber and spice with your first preferred order of fruits and veggies when you use discount code AMERICA. The offer can end at any time, so act now.
Call 800-246-8751.
That's 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com.
Use discount code America.
If you think that academia is heavily populated with scam artists and frauds, frauds who nevertheless carry the title of professor and have got PhDs appended to their name, well, here's a case that would seem to support your suspicion.
It involves a very prominent researcher in the behavioral sciences.
His name is Dan Ariely.
And amazingly, this is a guy.
He's at Duke University, the Center for Advanced Hindsight, so-called.
He's also a guy who's written...
A number of New York Times bestselling books.
He's a regular at TED Talks.
So he's one of these cool academics.
And his work, oddly enough, is on honesty, cheating, and deception.
And guess what? He has been found to be culpable of dishonesty, cheating, and deception.
So nothing could be more appropriate than an honesty researcher being found to be fundamentally dishonest.
Now, what are we talking about?
We're talking about a high-profile paper that this guy wrote.
In fact, it's part of what made his reputation.
It came out 10 years ago in 2012, and the paper was about dishonesty.
It was a paper that was hailed by people at the time in the Obama administration.
In fact, it was used as a basis for a number of modifications of the way in which government agencies carry themselves out.
And it was based upon the idea, how can we get people to be more honest?
Obviously, people have a side of them that wants to be honest.
That's a sort of ethical side.
But people also want to avoid being honest.
They want to cheat. So let's say, for example, on your taxes, you don't want to disclose your full income.
And so there's a temptation to cheat.
So the idea is, how do we get people to fess up?
How do we get people to be straightforward and not to indulge in that kind of base side of them that wants to cut corners and cut the rules?
So, according to this study that was put out by this fellow Dan Ariely, by the way, with a bunch of co-authors, some three co-authors, and it was a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, so it seemed like a very respectable, thoroughly documented study.
It was supposedly based upon data.
That had been reviewed by these scholars.
And here was the basic idea.
The idea was that before you fill out a form, and let's just take your taxes as an example of that form, the question was, should you fill...
A declaration in which you profess that you're going to be honest in the way that you fill out the form.
And so what Dan Ariely and his co-authors did is they had one group of people and they had them fill out a form.
but before they fill out a form they sign the honesty declaration.
And another group of people who just fill out the form.
And the point of the study was that the first group of people turned out to be far more honest in what they reported.
So in other words, the idea is that filing this honesty declaration is almost like you telling yourself, I'm going to be honest and then your behavior follows suit.
And so you're more likely to be, in fact, honest.
And you can see why the Obama people were like, well, this is great.
Maybe when people fill out their tax returns, we should make them sign an honesty declaration because they're more likely to be able to fully disclose their income and so on.
So this is the kind of thing that made this guy seem like he had figured out a way to get people to respond to the better angels of their nature and blah, blah, blah.
Except it turns out that the data...
On which this article was based and the survey was based is apparently fake.
There's no real data.
There's no database. No one else can have access to the data.
And in science and even in the behavioral sciences, the key to data is other people have to be able to see it.
You did a survey. People want to know how many people were surveyed.
Who was surveyed?
Where are the surveys?
When did you perform the survey?
Now, when... Dan Ariely and his co-author's scheme was exposed.
The co-authors immediately jumped back and said, listen, we're not the ones that reviewed the data.
It's only Ariely.
So he's the one that's responsible.
And then when you go to Ariely, he essentially goes, quote, this is what he tells Science Magazine, I wish I had a good story and I just don't.
So he's himself admitting, in a sense, that his data is bogus.
In fact, he says that he has now written to the journal, this is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, asking them to withdraw the original article.
So this is almost a kind of confession that this data is useless.
Now, Dan Ariely doesn't say that he made this stuff up.
He says, well, he says, there was an insurance company and I got this data from some people at that insurance company, but A, I'm not going to be able to name the insurance company because now with all this controversy and scandal they may feel kind of maligned and they might sue me, so Duke has asked me not to name them. Number two, I don't have the data anymore.
Number three, the contacts that I had at the insurance company no longer work there, so I can't even reach out to them to get them to corroborate whether or not this data is sound.
Let's just say that for anybody who's looking objectively at the situation, this is academic malpractice of a high order.
Now, Duke is aware of it, whether they will do something about it.
You know, these colleges, once they have star academics, they tend to protect them.
This happened, for example, with plagiarism and Kevin Cruz at Princeton.
The plagiarism seemed blatantly obvious, and yet Princeton is like, well, it's an honest mistake.
We're not going to do anything. Similarly, Duke may come to the same conclusion.
But I guess if you're an honest researcher in the field, you've got to realize that this guy's data is suspect and it's particularly strange that a fellow who is supposedly teaching us to be more honest as a society turns out himself to be less than fully honest.
If aches and pains are your problem, Relief Factor is your solution.
Debbie and I started taking Relief Factor a couple of years ago.
We've seen a huge difference in our joints.
Just nothing short of amazing.
Aches and pains are totally gone thanks to this 100% drug-free solution called Relief Factor.
How does it work? Relief Factor supports your body's fight against inflammation.
That's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try Relief Factor become regular customers and order more because it works for them.
Debbie's a true believer she can now do exercises.
For a long time, she wasn't able to do.
So Relief Factor's been a big game-changer for her, her aunt, other members of our family, Mike here in the studio, and for many other people.
You too can benefit. Try it for yourself.
Order the three-week quick start for the discounted price of just $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com or call 800-4-RELIEF to find out more about this offer.
The number again, 800-4-RELIEF or go to relieffactor.com.
You'll feel the difference.
There's some sort of a rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
In fact, the two of them have been threatening to do a physical mixed martial arts type of cage fight with each other.
I forget who challenged who, but the other accepted.
And I've seen some venues that go, okay, well, you can come and do it here.
You can come and do it there. I don't know if this is even going to happen.
Quite frankly, it seems to me to be a little dumb.
But in any event, the rivalry is evidently not merely personal and not merely rhetorical.
It's becoming a business rivalry.
Now, you might say, well, wait a minute.
There was always a business rivalry in the sense that when Elon Musk bought Twitter, he became a rival for Zuckerberg, who owns Facebook and also Instagram.
But evidently, Zuckerberg has decided, you know what?
I'm going to teach Elon Musk a lesson.
I'm And he evidently hired some Twitter engineers to put together his own equivalent, which is called the Reds.
And Threads was recently released and Zuckerberg was trumpeting.
He put out a statement basically saying, we've hit an amazing record.
We've got 100 million registrations in the first five days.
And that truly would be impressive, except you realize that what Zuckerberg did is he essentially pushed the 1.8 billion Instagram users to sign up for Threads.
So out of the 1.8 billion, evidently 100 million said, okay, I'll do it.
And the real question is not, can you get people to sign up?
When you've got a kind of user base that big, like Instagram, you're going to be able to get a pretty impressive number.
Now, interestingly, if you follow Zuckerberg after his big announcement, oh, we got 100 million signups, he's been sort of relatively silent on the topic.
And the reason is...
That people who have been going on Threads and using Threads or just perusing Threads realize that Threads is dumb.
Threads is stupid.
Threads is not Twitter.
Threads is no threat to Twitter.
And in fact, the users of Threads are beginning to bail out already.
I mean, within a matter of days.
So Google Trends has a kind of way of measuring all this.
They have a way of measuring the amount of searches for Threads versus Twitter.
And of course, Twitter is up here.
Threads is down here. No surprise, Threads is new.
And then Threads shows a big surge.
It moves right up there. It seems to be challenging to Twitter, the same number of searches on Threads and Twitter.
But then Threads takes a major nosedive and goes down to pretty much where it started off.
So I won't say Threads is defunct or it's dead, but let's just say it is dying or it is on its back.
It's not doing very well.
Now, there have been some analysts who try to look at why this is the case.
And I see one kind of social media guy saying that this was a very premature launch by Threads, that Threads has very limited functionality, it doesn't have the versatility of Twitter, and it doesn't have a whole bunch of features.
Now, Twitter admittedly added features little by little, but that's the point.
That's what you're competing against.
You're competing against a social media platform that is very effective and very successful.
Kind of like saying if you want to start your own Amazon, you need to have something that competes with Amazon, that has the functionality, the ease, the quickness.
I order on Monday, I get it on Tuesday.
Sometimes I get it on Monday.
And if you can't do that, you're not going to be a very effective person.
You can't say, well, Amazon developed over the past 10 years, so I'm going to develop over the past 10 years.
That won't work because now we do have Amazon.
I think that another factor for why Threads is not doing well is censorship.
Who wants to be on a censored platform?
I mean, I asked this question about Facebook and Instagram also, but I guess what it is people feel like, okay, well, Instagram's harmless.
I'm just sharing photos and Facebook is harmless.
I'm just basically connecting with college friends and, you know, keeping touch with relatives and people I've lost touch of and so on.
And there's a kind of benign aspect to all that.
But anyone who wants to post interesting content is going to go, wait a minute, I don't want some owl-eyed censor looking over what I'm saying and telling me I can't say this and I can't say that.
Maybe if I'm a leftist, I'm like, yeah, I want a safe space and I'll be on this platform because I'll never see a different point of view.
And so if you have that kind of a twisted mentality, maybe you like being on a censorship platform because it's censoring your way.
It's censoring on your behalf.
I think the other thing, of course, is that Twitter is a public square.
Twitter is where debate really occurs.
And you see on Twitter, for example, all kinds of provocative threads, people providing new information.
And I don't just mean generalists who are pontificating on different types of issues, but experts.
Legal experts will talk, for example, about the Trump case.
When there was the submersible that went under the water, all kinds of technical people on Twitter were giving explanations of what could have happened or what they thought did happen.
And at the very least, as you read through these threads, you feel like, wow, at least I know whether I agree or don't agree, I know a lot more about this.
By contrast, go right now on threads and you'll see it's mainly rubbish.
It's things like breathe deeply every day or just kind of fortune cookie type observations.
There's no discussion.
There's no debate.
There really are no, even though it's called threads, there are no interesting threads on threads.
And so, in a way, I'm glad about all this because I don't think that a bad actor like Zuckerberg should be rewarded.
It would be really great to see threads kind of crash and burn.
And quite honestly, I think long term, the fate for all censorship platforms is pretty dismal.
MyPillow is celebrating its 20th year anniversary.
They've sold more than 80 million MyPillows, and Mike Lindell at MyPillow wants to thank each and every one of you by giving you the lowest price in history on his MyPillows.
You get the queen-size MyPillow for $19.98, regular price $69.98, so just $10 more.
For the king size, you get deep discounts on all the MyPillow products, and wow, you've got bed sheets, mattress toppers, MyPillow pet beds, you've got robes, mattresses, my slippers, and so much more.
This is the time to try out some of the other amazing products that you've had your eye on.
Go to MyPillow.com, use promo code Dinesh to get this amazing offer on the queen size MyPillow for $19.98 or call 800-876-0227.
The offer comes with a You just heard me talking about MyPillow products.
And, you know, one thing I want to say about Mike Lindell is that this is a guy who is very genuine.
He puts his money where his mouth is, where his beliefs are.
And this is a guy who's not afraid to charge ahead.
He takes enormous risks.
He's willing to jeopardize his business.
And from the very beginning, I recognized the way in which the left goes after people like Mike Lindell.
They want to really cripple them financially, cripple them reputationally, put them out of circulation.
And so when the boycotts began, you know, Bed Bath& Beyond, London, ultimately even Walmart stores going, we're not going to stock MyPillow.
And just think of how absurd this is.
Here's a guy. He's talking about American politics.
He's talking about elections.
What does this have to do with his pillows and his sheets and his robes and his slippers and so on?
Nothing at all. Nevertheless, it is these companies that become vehicles for the left's intolerance.
And so Mike Lindell begins to be canceled across the board.
He begins to lose the box stores.
And his business was always a kind of a dual business, which was partly to sell through the box stores, and then partly to sell direct online, also through podcasts like this one.
And Mike Lindell has been compelled over time to shift the focus of his business, or at least of the marketing and selling part of the business.
The products are the same, and they're terrific products.
We have them all over the house.
But to sell more direct.
Now interestingly, that means that Mike Lindell is going to have to phase down the part of the business that deals with the box stores.
And so, I'm seeing a bunch of articles, and this is the reason I'm talking about all this.
Here's the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
MyPillow is auctioning off equipment after losing retailers.
Now, here's The Hill.
MyPillow auctions off equipment amid, quote, massive cancellation.
Similar headlines in USA Today.
And a couple of other places.
And so I'm like, this is a little odd because, first of all, the box store cancellation goes back a year or two.
In fact, some of it came immediately after the 2020 election.
A lot of it came in 2021.
So what is it the case of now in 2023?
Suddenly, Mike Lindell is feeling the effects.
And the answer is, this is essentially bogus reporting.
Mike Lindell is not selling off his manufacturing equipment.
In fact, one cool thing about his pillows and all his equipment is it's all made here.
His products are made right here in the United States.
He employs a ton of people in his home state of Minnesota.
And so there's no indication that Mike Lindell is going out of business, that Mike Lindell is not going to be making and selling his products.
The difference is he is in the way that he does that.
So he's not relying as much on the box stores.
He's now relying directly on podcasts like this one and essentially selling online.
You know about the website. It's basically MyPillow.com, the easiest way to shop.
And you know about the promo code, which is Dinesh, D-I-N-E-S-H. I'm now reading from CBS News.
It talks about the fact that Mike Lindell is auctioning off some office equipment, including some L-shaped desks, as well as bulletin boards, stacking chairs, office chairs, and also some industrial sewing machines.
Well... Quite frankly, you could write something like this about pretty much any retailer.
Businesses change all the time.
You can write the same articles about my movie company.
Oh, Dinesh's movie companies have changed their structure.
They're using a new business plan.
Man, his earlier movies were in...
1,000 theaters.
And then when 2,000 Mules came out, that was only in 350 theaters.
Well, yeah, that's because I was worried that the movie would be canceled and you'd have Antifa showing up.
And if the theaters shut you down, the movie goes out of business.
So we had a different model of buying out these theaters.
And so my point is, all businesses adapt to changing situations.
That's what I've done after the kind of anomaly, after the problems that the theaters had in the wake of COVID.
And that's what Mike Lindell is doing now.
He's shifting the focus of his business.
And in some ways, it's quite possible that his business will be even more profitable.
I say that, why?
Because many people don't realize that when it comes to movie tickets, just like it comes to selling products, by and large, you get half of what you're selling for.
So you go into the theater, you buy a ticket for 12 bucks.
Basically, the theater keeps half and the movie producers get roughly, actually a little bit less than the other half.
Similarly, when you have retailers that sell couches or Christmas trees or any product like that, you charge $200, let's say, for the Christmas tree or maybe $500 for the couch.
By and large, the retailer is going to keep close to half.
That's roughly the model and the way that these things sort of work.
So here's Michael If he's able to sell on his website, he doesn't have to pay out that half in that way.
In fact, he can find other ways to do marketing or put that money into advertising.
So the bottom line of it is Mike Lindell seems to be hanging in there.
He seems to be doing fine.
I see no sign that he is either being intimidated or pulling back on the political front.
And he also seems to be putting money behind causes that he believes in.
He invested some money in one of our earlier movies.
I see that he's invested in other independent conservative films.
I'm sure he gives to all kinds of other causes as well.
In fact, I know at least a couple of specific cases in which he does.
So this reporting on Mike Lindell, Mike Lindell's done, he's kind of fire sailing his equipment and so on, looks to me to be a farce and looks to me to be untrue.
just another example of the left trying to give us the idea that if you stand up and speak out in conservative politics, you're somehow going to be finished.
We are in one of the most vulnerable times in US history with our markets and economy, and that calls for an expert financial advisor for your investments.
Yet most Americans are with the conventional, right out the dips in the market advisors that have kept recycling the same advice since the 1980s.
That advice will fail you now.
Luckily, my friend, Rebecca Walzer is different.
You've heard her on the podcast or seen her.
She's a tax attorney, a wealth strategist.
She has a global MBA from the London School of Economics.
She has seen what is coming and protected her clients back at the end of 2021, and she can do the same for you now.
Debbie and I did a call with Rebecca's team to talk about our investments and we're moving ahead.
Join us. Go to friendofdinesh.com to book a call with Rebecca Walser's team today.
That's friendofdinesh.com to secure your investments and your future.
Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Colin Wright.
Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist.
He's the founding editor of Reality's Last Stand.
He's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
He's also an advisor for the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine and also Atheists for Liberty.
Now, one of these days we'll maybe have a conversation on the topic of atheism, but that's for another day.
By the way, the website drdr.com Colin, C-O-L-I-N-W-R-I-G-H-T dot com.
Colin, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. Thank you.
If a guy 30 years ago or 50 years ago, who's, let's just say, in their teens, was feeling a little confused about life and confused about himself or herself, and they went in to see a therapist, and they said, you know, I'm kind of feeling a little mixed up, I'm feeling a little confused, I'm a girl, but I'm tomboyish, I like to climb trees, or I'm a boy, but I don't fit in with the boys...
And the therapist said, well, that's because you're a member of the opposite sex, and you're a female in a male's body, or the other way around.
I mean, this would be a subject of comedy.
And yet, today, it has become a topic of deadly serious.
It's a topic that sometimes leads to taking all kinds of medication, in some cases, surgeries, and So, clearly, there's been a kind of shift in our culture.
If you were to step back from the debates over who's a male and who's a female and what is a woman, can you kind of track how we got to this strange pass?
Yeah. So, I mean, it is a truly bizarre world that we find ourselves in.
I'm, I think, fairly recent to the scene.
Just in the last five years, I've been commenting on some of these cultural trends.
I mean, I saw inklings of them sort of bubbling up when I was an undergrad, but it was sort of always this fringe group of people.
No possibility that these people would ever become a dominant narrative in society.
I mean, I used to compare them to, like, flat-earthism.
How much time do we actually need to dedicate to people who are denying the roundness of the earth?
There's no possibility this is going to, you know, really catch hold and become a major problem and have policies based on this type of thing.
But I was definitely very wrong.
So, this started in academia, actually...
Quite a while back.
I mean, I think in the 60s is sort of when there was a major influx of some professors with these ideas.
But they've sort of just been relegated to these sort of hermetic disciplines.
You know, they would just publish in their own journals, citing each other.
And there wasn't a lot of attention from the outside.
You know, there was there are some attempts from these sort of reality denying ideologies to to get into things like physics This is when we had like the so-called hoax who sort of wrote this this hoax paper to sort of debunk this sort of Nonsense about physics and just the weird language they're using that just is not rooted in reality That was sort of laughed off the scientific stage because this was a quite an amazing expose But it didn't go away completely
Instead, it just sort of evolved and morphed and mutated.
And I think the reason why it's so entrenched now is because it was able to latch on to basically the rainbow flag, the gay movement, which enjoyed a lot of popularity, a lot of people, you know, whether you agree with it or not, it was still a very popular movement.
And a lot of people are afraid to just be seen on the other side of that.
So now you can't just criticize these terrible postmodern reality-denying ideas as just these ideas in isolation.
But now if you are, you're considered to be anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-everything progress, etc.
So this is where I found myself in because I started criticizing just the biology because I heard people saying things like, Sex is a social construct.
There's more than two sexes.
Or it's a spectrum. There's an infinite number of sexes.
And I pushed back on just the biology.
And then I got a tidal wave of hate directed my way, calling me a bigot, racist, homophobe, everything.
So that's sort of where we find ourselves now.
And it's kind of gotten worse since I first started talking about it.
Isn't the key difference that when we think back to the Sokol hoax that you referenced and the debates in the 80s and 90s, the critiques were coming from outside of science.
They were coming from the humanities, or they were coming from women's studies, or they're coming from gay studies.
But now, and this is the stuff that gives me pause, is you'll have the editor of a major science journal that seems kind of on board, that will endorse the idea that sex is a spectrum.
Let's start by taking a simple minute to talk about why sex is not a spectrum.
Also, it seems to me that one of the ways that this issue is fudged is by using the ambiguity of sex and gender.
So that you'll sometimes hear people who recognize it's kind of dumb to say sex is a spectrum, who will then move to saying, well, gender is a spectrum, but gender is this thing that is not clearly defined.
Talk about that. Exactly.
I mean, you hit it right on the head. They'll constantly go back and forth between sex and gender, and they'll flip-flop based on, you know, when you try to get them to adhere to a certain definition, then they'll sort of, it's either ambiguous or it's the opposite or whatever.
They just don't want to get pinned down on anything.
So, as you said...
They have this concept of gender which I would just call personality and expression, you know, this individual variation in these types of traits that people have.
You know, males can be feminine, females can be more masculine, etc.
But this sort of expression is sort of on a spectrum, you know, there's intermediates in fashion and personalities and whatever.
This is not a controversial thing.
But then that's used to then conflate it with sex to say that sex is a spectrum, which it just definitively is not, because sex is a biological trait.
It has to do with the reproductive strategy that your body has developed, either to have your primary sex organs organized around producing sperm, Or ova.
Like, these things, this is not a social construct.
This is, you know, at least 600 million years old, if not longer, is when this thing evolved.
This is, in nature, there's only two of these reproductive strategies.
So even if you can point to people who might have ambiguous-looking genitalia, certain developmental anomalies, that's still not a third sex because there's not a third type of gamete for an individual to have their reproductive anatomy organized around, if that makes sense.
You know, the conflation between sex and gender is so apparent because when you ask people, why is someone like Leah Thomas, you know, biological male, allowed to compete in the women's category, they'll say something like, oh, well, sex is a spectrum.
And then say, like, well, Leah Thomas is not sexually ambiguous in any way whatsoever.
And then it sort of flip-flops over to gender.
Well, Leah Thomas identifies as a woman, and well, what is that?
This is just femininity, et cetera, et cetera.
So, it's this constant just sort of bait-and-switch and moving the goalpost, and somehow it's been extremely effective.
So, I guess kudos to them for being able to do that.
Well, let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to dive a little more deeply into this issue of the biological difference between male and female.
I'm back with evolutionary biologist, Dr. Colin Wright.
By the way, the website drdr, C-O-L-I-N-W-R-I-G-H-T.com.
He's founding editor of Realities Last Stand, also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
We're talking about male and female.
Colin, can you give us an idea, You mentioned that all of this is fundamental sex binary between male and female, between sperm producing and overproducing.
This is very old, and I'm assuming that this is part of...
A kind of evolutionary way in which species have developed and how species reproduce.
In other words, it is hardwired into the biological nature of life.
Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between male and female on the one hand and evolution on the other?
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, back, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago, before sex has evolved, we had what were called disorganisms that produced isogamously, which means that they have equally sized gametes or sex cells,
okay? Yeah. So, over time, when there's variations in the size of these, there's sort of a ratio of the likelihood of them fertilizing a certain egg, the likelihood of two gametes coming into contact with one another.
Now, through various reasons that have to do with physics, when you do these models, like computer models, What you can see is they quickly go to this situation for the evolution of very small and very large gametes, okay? Because you have the large gametes that stay still, then you have a lot of very mobile small gametes.
And that just ensures maximum fertilization rates with also having eggs that are large enough to provision offspring, to provide enough nutrition to their offspring.
So as soon as you have this evolution of these two different sizes, that is the emergence of what we call sexes.
Because females are defined as the organism that produces the large gametes, males producing the small ones.
Because there are no intermediate sizes you can produce within one species, there isn't a third sex for an individual to be.
So even if you look at individuals like hermaphrodites, a simultaneous hermaphrodite like your common garden snail, people might try to think that this is an individual as an example of a third sex because they're producing eggs, they're producing sperm at the same time.
But really this is just an example of an individual that is utilizing both sexual strategies in There's still two sexes because those sexes are the reproductive strategies.
And so, that's kind of just the way it is.
There's two fundamental reproductive strategies.
Those can be housed in bodies different ways across different species.
But there's still those fundamentally two different things and not a third one.
So, that's sort of a broad stroke of what we have, why there's no three sexes.
And why organisms like some fungi, people say that there's thousands of sexes.
You know, those are actually isogamous species, again, same size gametes.
Those are what we call mating types, completely different from sexes, but that might be an overly technical point.
So you're saying that this sex binary is not confined to humans or even a kind of near biological relatives, but it spreads through a vast ocean, I mean, through a great deal of the animal kingdom, correct?
Yeah. Yeah, and plants as well.
So this is any species in which there are sexes, there's always only two.
There's never more than that.
So yeah, that holds across all species that have different sized gametes.
Do you think, Colin, that the receptivity to this sort of bogus argument that there are multiple sexes arises from the fact that Almost conceptually, many people have difficulty recognizing that you can make a valid generalization while at the same time acknowledging that there are all kinds of intermediaries or exceptions to the rule.
Even moving outside of this issue directly, if I were to say something like, Men are taller than women, which is quite obviously true, but it's obviously also true on average.
And you can't refute it by saying, well, you know, here's Jane, she's six feet two, here's Fred, he's four feet nine.
And yet, someone could argue, well, listen, you can't make this kind of generalization because, after all, we can find numerous exceptions to the rule.
Are we dealing here with a kind of fuzzy thinking that has taken shape in our society where people are not able to step back and say, well, yeah, sure, you've got...
Males who might have feminine characteristics, and you may have women who are really tough and strong, but this doesn't mean that there's no difference between men and women.
Yeah, there's a major conflation between what are called primary sex characteristics, which are your gonads, essentially, and the sexual characteristics directly related to reproduction, like penis and testes, or vulva, ovaries, fallopian tubes, all that stuff. Those Those are primary sex characteristics in organs.
And then there's what we call secondary sex characteristics, okay?
These are the things, the differences between males and females that arise during puberty.
You know, we have breast development in females.
Males grow taller. We got square jaws, different muscle mass distribution over our bodies, deeper voices, etc., So, in our everyday interactions, we interact with people kind of more based on our secondary sex characteristics than our primary ones.
And so, people, this is kind of their idea of what men and women are socially.
And so, they conflate this with that's what sexes are.
When in reality, you can have all kinds of different secondary sex characteristics.
You could have men with breast development.
You can have females with very deep voices.
Yeah, I think.
There's an overlap on primary sex characteristics.
So they're just focusing on the downstream consequences of sex rather than sex itself.
So that's my main contention.
That's kind of what I've been trying to educate the world on primarily.
Guys, I hope you've been learning as much from Colin Wright as I have.
Colin, we'd love to have you back.
Thanks very much for joining me.
I appreciate it. Hey, thank you for having me on.
Thank you. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection