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July 27, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:50
NOT SO FAST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep630
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Coming up, I'll reveal how the judge saw right through the Biden DOJ scheme to let Hunter Biden off the hook.
The New Republic tells us what it fears most about a second Trump term, and all I can say is I can't wait.
Chase Banks shuts down a prominent doctor's account, and this reminds me of the time they did this to me.
I'll show how New York is, quote, helping minority students by artificially raising their academic scores.
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It's really fascinating to see the way in which the Biden family crime story, which is a story about bribery, about selling political influence, it's sort of gone from a rumor, an allegation, a claim, to now being a thoroughly documented Crime scheme.
A thoroughly documented fact.
And this has put the Democrats and the media in a very awkward position because they were very dismissive of the story.
There's nothing here. This is old news.
And apparently they had focus tested this kind of slogan.
This is old news. But there's all kinds of new news coming out.
All kinds of corroborating detail, multiplicity of sources.
So it doesn't matter. You can't go after one guy because it's not up to one guy.
Okay, you go after the IRS whistleblower.
What about the FBI confidential informant?
You go after that guy. What about Hunter Biden's business partner?
So what you have is...
Multiple prongs of evidence coming together.
And so there's now kind of a strange silence.
I see in the news articles half-heartedly they talk about still unverified, still unsubstantiated.
And they're going to keep going with that for a little bit.
But let's just say that the noose is tightening around the Biden crime family, starting with Joe Biden.
Hunter Biden went to court hoping to close out this plea deal.
It's kind of a sweetheart deal that was made basically with the prosecutor in Delaware and with the Biden DOJ cheering from the background.
And by the way, don't get the idea that this is simply a protection scheme for Hunter Biden.
It's really about protecting Joe Biden.
It's about separating Hunter from Joe.
It's about saying Hunter will take the rap.
Hunter will plead guilty.
And this way, everything is shut down and nothing gets to Joe.
That's the key to the whole scheme.
And it goes to the judge.
And the judge says, nyet.
Now, what is kind of cool about this whole thing is that right before it went to the judge, and this really reveals the duplicity of the Hunter Biden legal team, one of Hunter Biden's lawyers, We're good to go.
Don't just look at the filings.
Pay attention to what's happening all around us.
Here's the detail for you to look at.
So, the Hunter Biden people thought, this is a very inconvenient amicus brief.
How can we get it out of the record?
Well, they called, or one of them called over to the clerk and said, you know, pretending to be Someone else and said, hey, you've got to take down—she pretended to be an aide to the Republican congressman.
And she said, look, look, we want to take this down because it has confidential information that we really can't have in this filing.
So, fortunately, this was busted.
This was then reported to the judge.
Now, the Hunter Biden legal team said, oh, we didn't really mean to do that.
We didn't really do that.
We weren't passing ourselves off as somebody else.
Rather, this is all a kind of a misunderstanding.
Well, How is it a misunderstanding?
You call the court.
You actually give the name of the Republican congressman.
You say that you work for him.
And you say, we want to take down this amicus brief.
So you were clearly trying something very underhanded.
So fortunately, the judge, I think, was put on alert.
This is Judge Noriega.
She recognized that something fishy is going on.
And then she begins to look at this plea deal.
And she realizes that And she asks, in fact, the prosecuting attorney, she goes, what is the precedent for this kind of a deal, for giving this kind of an easy out to Hunter Biden?
And the prosecutors go, well, there's no precedent.
In other words, this has never been done before.
Now, judges often give a lot of discretion to prosecutors to make these kinds of deals.
But I think in this case, the judges looked and realized that this deal is a kind of a camouflage because it takes a gun charge and then it takes a separate tax charge and it tries to marry the two together and get Hunter Biden off the hook once and for all on all of this stuff.
And then, apparently, there are ongoing investigations into Hunter Biden, even stuff that is not covered by this plea agreement.
And so the judge goes, wait a minute, are you saying that Hunter Biden can never be prosecuted for anything else that's going on in terms of ongoing investigations?
And the Justice Department, embarrassed by all the stuff that's going on and all the public disclosures regarding Hunter Biden, goes, no, no, no, we're not saying that.
This only applies to these charges.
And then the Hunter Biden lawyers jump up and go, what?
We thought that Hunter Biden was completely protected from any future charges, and you're telling us now that it's only these charges and you can bring new charges against him?
Well, then there's no deal.
And so there's a kind of really beautiful breakdown of communication between the prosecutors and the Hunter Biden lawyers, and the judge throws up her hands and basically goes, listen...
You guys go back to the drawing board.
This is not going to work. I'm not going to accept this as is.
And in fact, there are elements of this deal, including the hitching of the gun charge, that may even be unconstitutional.
And in fact, would torpedo the whole deal if that were the case.
So you need to go back to the drawing board, come back to me in a few weeks or perhaps in a couple of months, and show me how this is actually going to work.
So essentially, the Hunter Biden plea deal for now is off.
I think they're going to try to see if they can restructure it.
But it's good news that this group of crooks, which is to say the Bidens with Joe Biden at the head of the triangle or at the head of the circle, that this hasn't gone through and given them the kind of protection that the Democrats and the media are desperately seeking.
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We often talk and I talk on the podcast about the outrages that are being perpetrated by But we've got to remember that on the left, there is a kind of equivalent fear.
Or at least an equivalent articulated fear that a second Trump term would be the end of the republic, the end of democracy, a complete nightmare scenario for the left.
And we have to look at why they think this, because there seems to be, to me, a kind of deranged Trump derangement syndrome here.
But let's look at the supposed rationale.
There's an article in the New Republic I'm going to take as my sample document of Horrors a new Trump term would bring.
And in the headline, it's so preposterous.
Goodbye, NATO. Don't ask, don't tell, repeal.
Goodbye, democracy.
Why aren't people listening?
So this writer is clearly in an agitated frame of mind.
And he begins with a premise that I find very strange.
People forget just how awful the Trump presidency was.
And I go, wait, start right there.
Didn't we have economic stability?
Weren't we strong on the international front?
But that's not what he's talking about at all.
He doesn't care about any of that.
He talks about corruption, again, unspecified corruption, pandering to religious extremists, not even clear what he means by that, weaponization of government for personal vendettas.
Trump is supposed to have done that.
Trump, think how crazy this is.
The justice system and the police agencies of government were against Trump even during Trump's term.
So what's he even talking about?
Degradation of our democracy.
Utterly incoherent statement.
What does that actually mean? How is our democracy degraded by having a guy elected who's carrying out the duties of his office?
And the constant assault on the rights of women, persons of color, and LGBTQ people.
Trump was actually pretty pro-LGBTQ. There were no assaults on women or people of color.
There were isolated arguments about this phrase or that phrase, or you shouldn't call it the Chinese virus, but this hardly constitutes an assault on people of color.
But the writer goes on to say, start with the premise that things were really bad under Trump, and now he says they're going to be even worse because Trump didn't sort of know entirely what he was doing.
He was unfamiliar with government.
Quote, this time they're coming in with a plan.
And then think of what kind of damage Trump is going to do.
Let's look at what these items of damage are, because when you read them, you actually realize that these things are all, by and large, fantastic.
Number one. Re-institute Schedule F for federal employees, which allows the administration to fire any federal employee who has policymaking authority.
In other words, lots of career bureaucrats who are left-wingers and push policy changes, but they can't be fired because they act like they're just career bureaucrats, just administrators.
All they are is administrators.
They're not making policy, but in fact they are.
So this is a wonderful idea to get rid of all these sneaky swamp rats who are promoting a left-wing ideological agenda while pretending not to.
Excellent first step.
Second of all. Imagine an FDA filled with far-right Catholic appointees looking for every imaginable way to end access to birth control.
Birth control? Abortion?
Good idea. And gender-affirming care?
Very good idea. But again, something that we think is a sensible policy from the left's point of view, this is a complete nightmare.
For them, the right to abortion is like a sacrament.
It has to be protected.
And similarly, affirming LGBTQ is basically what the government is here to do.
Or imagine the Department of Justice investigating internet service providers for hosting or disseminating information about abortion.
Imagine the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigating discrimination only against whites, men, and Christians.
Now how laughable is this?
It's one thing to say that you have the EEOC, the Equal Employment Commission, that says, look, we're not merely going to investigate discrimination against blacks and minorities.
We're going to investigate discrimination across the board.
In other words, you cannot discriminate against anyone on the basis of race.
This is, in fact, the conservative position.
This is what Trump is talking about.
They exaggerated to mean that somehow investigating discrimination against whites means not investigating discrimination against blacks.
So a laughable misrepresentation.
Quote, the result will likely be many transgender individuals seeking to leave the country.
Leave the country.
They have it really good here.
The White House is lighted pink.
All these corporate institutions are bowing before them.
So it's hard to see where they would find a more hospitable environment.
And then the killer and laugh out loud statement, Trump intends to fully weaponize government against his enemies, both personal and political.
This is, of course, what the left has been relentlessly doing, even though Merrick Garland with a straight face goes, oh, no, we are applying justice equally under the law.
The left is worried that we'll do the same thing.
So I don't think Republicans will do the same thing.
Republicans are very reluctant to do the same thing.
Trump, of all the Republicans, might actually do it.
And if he does it, it would be well-deserved.
Why? Because the Democrats invented this approach, and the way to teach them to stop doing it is to do it to them.
So, in a sense, this fear is somewhat justified, but it's justified mainly because this is a systemic attack that was coined, developed, in a way perfected by the left.
And finally, the writer goes, Trump is going to remove the women and gays from the military.
Again, this is preposterous.
The military has fully integrated women.
This is their arguments about what women can do versus what men can do.
Nor is Trump going to remove gays in the military.
He didn't do it before. Why would he do it now?
So it's another thing to say that Trump is going to stop a lot of the propaganda that's being perpetrated on military bases, often with military kids.
The military is not a social laboratory.
I think Trump does recognize this.
So anyway, this article is hysterical from start to finish, but it really shows that the left has worked themselves up into a frenzy.
And in some ways, if we think that 2024 is an existential election on which hinges the future of the country, listening to their rhetoric, so do they.
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There seems to be a real change underway in the Republican Party, both at the national and at the state level, to do early voting.
To, quote, bank your vote.
And also to do, where legal, ballot harvesting.
In other words, ballot collection.
People collecting other people's ballots.
In some states, you can collect ballots of family members.
In other states, you can collect anyone's ballot.
Like... California, and take it down, put it in a ballot dropbox or deliver it to City Hall.
And the Republicans have been against this.
We have to only go back to not only 2020, but even 2022.
Think of 2020 where the Republican rhetoric is, we've got to have a single election day.
Everybody should vote on Election Day.
If there are these early voting laws, they're bad.
Don't do that. Don't fall for that.
Just vote on Election Day.
Number two, ballot harvesting is evil.
Ballot harvesting is not the way we should be doing elections.
People should deliver their own ballots.
And it's not that Republicans have sort of had a conversion in the sense that they think, okay, now ballot harvesting is wonderful.
No, it's more that Republicans have realized that in a system where, first of all, you don't have a uniform system of voting.
States make their own laws.
And in different states, these laws are different.
There are red states and there are blue states.
So some of what Republicans want can be brought into effect in red states.
But even red states have early voting.
Here in Texas, for example, there's early voting.
Debbie and I typically vote early.
And so we don't see anything wrong with early voting per se.
In theory, we prefer a single election day, but we also recognize that there's nothing wrong.
In fact, Debbie's a bit of a germaphobe, and since election day, long lines, people are, you know, essentially crowded back to back against each other.
She's like, let's just go vote early.
There's going to be hardly anyone there.
Or a small line in and out very quickly, so it's convenient to do it that way, and I see nothing wrong in principle with it.
Now, ballot harvesting, I would rather not have it, but when you have it, the point is Republicans are realizing we need to do it too.
We cannot let the Democrats vote early, bank millions of votes, and then they collect ballots and we don't.
This is like going into, you know, a football game and saying, listen, we're only going to score points in the fourth quarter.
We're going to let the Democrats score points the whole game and rack them up and put them on the board.
We'll stay at zero, but then we'll make an all-out effort in the fourth quarter.
Well, this is not a good way to win games.
And so the RNC has created a Bank Your Vote program, and the RNC is apparently ratcheting up tremendously its Secure the Election efforts for 2024.
And now Trump has gotten behind it.
There's an article in Breitbart.
Trump says, quote, we may not like the current system, but we need to master the rules and beat the Democrats at their own game, and then we can make our own rules.
So Trump is not writing off the idea that election laws can be changed.
He's saying, listen, we don't have the power to change them.
We actually need to win the election so we have overwhelming majorities.
Then you can change the laws.
Then you can change the way that things are done.
So he says, we want to get our ballots turned in early so Democrats can't rig the polls against us on Election Day.
We cannot let that happen.
They rigged the election in 2020.
We cannot let that happen in 2024.
So here I think Trump is articulating what the vast majority of the GOP base thinks, including me.
And that is, we have to tighten the process, but at the same time, we have to play by their rules.
In places like California and Oregon, and even in places like Georgia, you can deliver ballots for your family members.
So, you know, we all have members of our family who are either lazy or not very political.
It's like, hey, listen, you know what?
Make sure they vote, collect their ballots, take them down, drop them off.
That's legal in Georgia.
Why not do it?
Now, I... I cannot verify based on personal knowledge that all of this is being done to the extent it needs to be done.
But it does seem like Trump, who you'd expect that there would be some coordination here between the GOP political campaigns and the RNC. What are you doing to secure election integrity?
And Trump, for one, seems to believe that the RNC is doing.
Well, my feeling is that probably the RNC is not doing enough.
But it is doing more than it did last time, which may not be great.
They're starting with a terrible record of doing close to nothing or very little.
And if they're doing more, I guess we can be grateful for a ratcheting up of efforts.
But my guess is that, and we still have some months to get this right, there's still a long way for the RNC to go.
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I want to talk about Chase Bank.
This is JPMorgan Chase and its continuing efforts to debank or remove accounts of people whose opinions that don't fit in with the prevailing narrative.
And this happened to me several years ago.
And when I look back, not just my campaign finance case, but some of these episodes that I thought were peculiar at the time, I didn't attach too much importance to them in some ways because I thought, well, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
And it didn't make a whole lot of difference for me, but when I see that these efforts are now being continued, they're being amplified, they're getting worse, they're becoming more systemic, and then we see kind of dark clouds on the horizon, and I'll explain what I mean.
So first, a little bit about my experience.
I walk into Chase. I've been banking at Chase.
And the manager, whom I know, says to me, Dinesh, it's very strange, but come over here.
I want to show you something. And it turns out they closed my account.
And he goes, I've been trying to call and find out because I know you.
You're a good customer. And he goes, there's no explanation.
It just comes from the central office, closed this account, and dead silence.
And I've been trying to get reasons, and they won't give any reasons.
And I was like, wow, this is really weird.
Well, maybe it has something to do with my campaign finance case.
Maybe the FBI obtained my bank records.
It freaked out the people at Chase.
And he goes, no, we have ways of dealing with all this kind of stuff.
They often make requests for records.
We provide records where we legally have to.
It's not a reason to close somebody's account, particularly if they don't.
You know, continue to be a good customer and they are abiding, you know, they essentially are, in my case, you know, restored all my rights even to pardon.
And yet, no, I can't bank at Chase, not ever.
And now, fast forward to the present, and here is this guy, Joseph Mercola.
Who's created this Mercola Market.
Now, this is a natural health food guy, but he's a credentialed doctor, but he's been a critic of the COVID vaccines.
He's a critic of the efficacy of the vaccine.
And guess what? He discovers that Chase not only shuts down his business bank account, but they shut down the account of the CEO and the CFO and his family members, including his spouse and his child.
And he goes, I tried to find out the reason, and there was no reason.
So... So he says, listen, you know, and this was the case with me.
I was like, well, this is absolutely crazy, but I'll just go across the street.
And of course, I had other bank accounts, and now I've got bank accounts with multiple banks, no problem at all.
And so in my case, there wasn't a heavy cost because I'm like, I just won't do business with Chase.
But apparently in the case of Mercola Market, the CFO, a woman named Amalia Legaspi, Has her husband in the Philippines.
He suffers from dementia.
She's trying to send funds to the guy.
She can't do it because her account has been closed.
And similarly, she's having problems with dealing with college payments for her son for the same reason.
So my point is, this is a punitive step being taken by Chase.
And again, for what reason?
What job is it of Chase's to go after this guy because of his view on COVID vaccines?
Is this a case, again, where the government is putting them up to it?
Or is it the case where you just have a woke bank deciding, listen, let's just kick the people off whose opinions we don't like.
Now, they're not doing it to every random individual, but they're doing it to high-profile people that they want to make an example of.
That's, I think, what was going on here.
And when Mercola tried to find out what's the reason, they said, for legal reasons, we really cannot.
Now, all of this is really significant because, first of all, it's not just Chase.
It's been going on with other places, and it's going on in other parts of the world.
There's been a scandal in Britain and also one in Canada.
In Britain, Nigel Farage had his bank account closed by NatWest, and it turned out that there was a collaboration between the CEO of NatWest and government officials to get this guy essentially debanked.
In Canada, you had the Freedom Convoy guys.
These are truckers who are protesting against COVID policies.
Many of them found that their bank accounts had been frozen or had been closed.
So this is retaliation through the banking system for having unpopular opinions.
And all of this, I think, is very relevant because...
Think about where the Biden administration wants to go with this.
They want to go toward a move in the direction of these central bank digital currencies.
That's the CBDC. Now, the CBDC is something that is kind of being investigated by the Federal Reserve.
They're sort of looking into it.
But imagine if you had a national central bank digital currency.
Well, then, essentially, you would be able to do to everyone...
What Chase is doing to isolated customers.
So you can see a tremendous ramping up of the system of using the banking system.
By the way, China has perfected this.
China has created essentially a financial system where when you try to go and go to an amusement park, Can't do it.
You've been canceled, in effect.
So you're canceled not just from social media.
You're canceled from functioning as a normal individual in society.
It's difficult for you to take vacations.
It's difficult for you to gain access to and spend your own money.
Are we there yet?
Well, no, we aren't.
But the reason I want to highlight these incidents is because they are worrying signposts as to where things could go.
And that's the problem with what Chase did to me.
That's the problem with what Chase is doing to Dr.
Joseph Mercola. We need to stop this now before things get out of hand.
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Feel the difference. I want to continue a topic that I touched on a day or two ago, and this is Elon Musk's idea for an expanded Twitter that's, well, no longer Twitter, but now a new brand, a new platform called X, Which is an everything app.
What's an everything app? Well, it's an app where you can buy stuff.
It's an app where you can upload photos.
It's an app where you can communicate with old college friends.
It's an app where you can put up videos, including long-form videos, this podcast, movies.
And so you're now talking about a very versatile app, which becomes a one-stop app.
It's a place for people not just to engage and debate and communicate, which is kind of what Twitter has been traditionally, a place to opine and a place to argue and a place to do threads of information.
But think of Twitter as a place now where you can pay your mortgage.
Think of Twitter as a place where you can pay your bills.
Or rearrange your investments.
You can do stock trades.
You can buy a pair of pants.
Or you can even buy a new car.
So this would be a completely different Twitter, a completely different vision for X. And this apparently is what Elon Musk has in mind.
And I thought, wow, this is very ambitious and, in a sense, very original.
Musk is talking about almost combining Amazon and YouTube and perhaps even Google and Meta or Facebook and Twitter and having a kind of all-in-one type of app.
But there's a very interesting article in Barron's which tells me something I didn't know, which is that this already is the case with an app in China that is called WeChat.
And this app, WeChat, dominates the Chinese internet.
It has over a billion users.
Think about it. A billion Chinese are on this single app.
But they don't just use the app for social media.
They use the app for chat, for argument, for payments, for games, and a host of other types of functions.
Now, this is not to say that China doesn't have its own sort of Twitter.
They have Twitter.
It's called Sina Weibo.
But Chinese Twitter or Chinese Sina Weibo is limited to what Twitter is now.
Whereas it looks like what Elon Musk has in mind for X is what the Chinese have created with WeChat.
Now, this WeChat app was started in 2011 by a group called Tencent.
Tencent had a pre-existing chat program, which was kind of a desktop chat.
It was called QQ. But What Tencent figured out, which is what a lot of other Chinese apps trying to do the same thing did not figure out, is how do you install a complete and comprehensive payment system into QQ or into the newly created WeChat?
How do we do that? And they figured out how to do it.
And what happened is that there were a ton of Chinese, I mean millions of Chinese, at that point, who were just starting to earn money, who didn't have a proper, they might have had a bank account, but some of them didn't have bank accounts, others had bank accounts, but they didn't have sophisticated ways in which they could, for example, invest in stocks or trade.
And so what happened is that WeChat came along at exactly the right time.
And so what happened is that as people began to, more and more Chinese began to use mobile phones, basically the mobile phone became their wallet.
Because instead of having credit cards, which is what we have, which is an old system here that we've had for decades, the Chinese went straight from having no cards and just having maybe a bank account or no bank at all to WeChat.
And then they were like, wow, we'll do it all here.
So the phone became, at the early stage, a kind of one-stop place to order stuff, to buy stuff, and all on this single app.
So the question for Elon Musk is that here in America, we do have a well-established banking system.
You don't have a lot of people in America now who are unbanked or don't have banking.
Credit cards are very widespread.
As you know, you have kids who show up for college.
They're not earning any money.
But hey, would you like to have a credit card?
Here are some preferential terms.
So the credit card systems work really hard at a very young age to get people habituated to using credit cards.
And so the question is, in this environment, and also, by the way, in an environment where there's now a lot of regulation, when WeChat was started in China, this whole sphere was kind of the...
You could almost call it the Chinese Wild West.
Companies were just doing all kinds of stuff, and there weren't a lot of government authorities, as there are now in China, but also in the United States, looking over what's going on and looking with some skepticism at an effort to combine the functions of platforms.
In other words, the idea is that this is a way that you...
We're trying to create a monopoly because you're saying to the customer that, hey, if you want to buy this product, you have to use this particular banking system.
So the bottom line of it is this is going to be tricky to do.
It's not going to be as easy as perhaps I thought and maybe even Elon Musk thought.
But Elon Musk has very good lawyers and he has very good people working for him.
So I'm sure he recognizes that he is trying to do now what WeChat did in China more than a decade ago, but he's trying to do it in a new We're good to go.
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Don't forget to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. The public schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts are trying to help out.
Minority students.
They claim that minority students, particularly low-income minority students, are not doing as well as middle-class students.
They're not doing as well as white students, as Asian students.
And so they've come up with an excellent, and I use the word excellent sarcastically, remedy.
And that is stop offering advanced math in middle school.
Now, this is the equivalent of saying the way to make sure that whites are...
I'm not demoralized by not being able to play basketball is stop offering basketball in school.
This way blacks can't play and whites can't play and everybody's ego is appropriately massaged.
So I use the analogy only to kind of flip the scales a little bit because this is just downright absurd.
And it's happening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where you have a lot of educated parents, and even the educated liberal parents are not happy about this.
So there's a guy, Martin Udengard, he's profiled in the Boston Globe.
He goes, listen, I want more from my kid.
He's a smart kid. He's a rising sixth grader.
And he needs to take, the next step for him is to take Algebra 1.
But he can't take Algebra 1 because the Cambridge Public Schools have decided, let's not offer Algebra 1 because if we don't offer Algebra 1, the white and Asian students won't do better than the lower middle class black students.
So... You know, I don't even want to parse the illogic of all that, but this guy is like, listen, I'm going to have to homeschool my kid, or I'm going to have to send him to private school, which is not easy for me to afford, but I'm going to do it because he can't take Algebra 1 in middle school.
Now, the point of all this is the reason it's important in middle school is because if you don't take decent math in middle school, you can't take advanced math in high school.
And that means that you can't do well on the math advanced placement tests, which means that you are disadvantaged in applying to colleges.
So, ultimately, this is a merit system.
And you don't get rid of the merit system completely.
You're just sort of putting your head in the sand in middle school.
But it has long-term reverberations because, again, if kids are held back at the middle, they're not going to be able to grow in high school to where they need to be.
So, the district's aim was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color and their more affluent peers.
But think about it. It has the exact opposite effect.
Why? Because, well, let me give my own example.
I show up to the United States and I am starting out at the bottom.
Am I low income? I'm actually lower than low income.
I'm at the bottom of the barrel in terms of income.
I'm also a minority, but what I need is I need the opportunity to be able to work hard and do well in school so I can get into a good college and improve my life.
So, how do I do that?
Well, I need to have good math.
So imagine if I show up in the Cambridge schools.
I'm like, listen, I've taken all the prerequisites.
I'm ready now for Algebra 1.
Sorry, Dinesh, we don't offer Algebra 1 because you are a disadvantaged student.
You are low-income.
You're not going to have the same chance to do as well because on average, low-income minority students and persons of color don't do as well.
And I'd be like... What kind of madness are you telling me?
It doesn't matter if on average one group does better than the others.
You need to offer ladders of opportunity for people who can do the work.
No one is saying that kids who can't do the work have got to be forced into Algebra 1.
They're not. It is merely being offered so that if there are kids who can do the work, they're given a chance to study at their own level.
But of course, this going back down to the 80s and 90s, initially an attack on tracking.
And tracking was nothing more than sorting kids into their own level of ability so that they could study at their own pace.
A classic problem that teachers have, and Debbie as a teacher has had this herself, you've got kids in the class who are at different levels.
And you always have the problem, what do I do?
Do I teach to the smart kids?
And then the kids in the middle are like, huh, what?
I didn't get it, tell me again.
And the kids at the bottom are like, I don't even know what you're talking about.
Okay, should I teach to the middle?
Well, if I teach to the middle, then the kids at the bottom are still like, I still don't get it.
And the kids who are in front are like, that's so easy.
I don't even need to pay attention.
Let me sort of just twiddle my thumbs or doodle or draw cartoons or these days go on my phone because I've already got this.
I don't need to listen to the teacher.
So this is a pedagogic conundrum.
And tracking was intended to make the problem easier by saying, all right, why don't we take the kids who can do algebra one and have them do algebra one?
And the kids who need to do the next level of math to get into algebra one, well, let's put them into that level.
So tracking is hardly a way to hold anyone back.
In fact, on the contrary, it's a way to help people get to the level that they need to be at.
But this district, the Cambridge Public Schools, are dug in.
Quote, we have a huge focus on addressing the academic achievement gaps and the opportunity gaps.
The school superintendent, Victoria Greer, one thing the district is not interested in doing is perpetuating those gaps.
So we're not going to offer courses that give a chance for the upper-income white and, you know, with Asians, you're not even talking about upper-income Asians, because middle-income and lower-income Asians also do well on test scores.
We're not going to have an opportunity for these stronger kids to demonstrate that they know more, and we do it by not offering the courses in the first place.
I want to talk about how the data that supports climate change is produced.
Now, this is not something we often pay attention to, but in an era where there is now increasing distrust of institutions, we want to know the methodology.
Think of the analogy, for example, to health.
Most of us, me included, for a long time, we go to the doctor, Doctor goes, you need a test.
And we don't think of saying, well, why do I need this test?
What does this test really do?
Is there another way to accomplish the same goal without doing the test?
No, we defer to the superior knowledge and intelligence and discretionary recommendations of the guy in the white coat.
Or if someone comes to you and says, research shows that, for example, sucralose is very bad for you, and so these artificial sweeteners, at least some of them, should not be consumed.
You're like, oh, well, research shows.
Well, I maybe should cut back on these artificial sweeteners because that's what the real...
Well, but now we're getting a little bit more skeptical, and so we're like, what is the research?
Where was that research published?
What is the criticism of that research?
And so, just saying that something is research or peer-reviewed doesn't really do it, because we've come to believe that there are ideological nostrums that can be smuggled into the name of academia.
Oh, academics demonstrates this or demonstrates that.
Not necessarily that. Let's see the proof.
I'm not just going to go with this is what the conclusion is.
I want to see the step-by-step reasoning from a kind of accepted axiom, almost like the old propositions of Euclid.
I'll begin with something I can accept as just one line that can be drawn between two points.
And again, even that is true conditionally.
That's true on a flat plane.
In a circle or in a non-Euclidean structure, you can draw more than one line through two points.
But nevertheless, you start with something that you can accept and then you work step by step by a series of indubitable logical moves.
Well, I say all this because we get these claims that are made on behalf of climate change.
Just the hardest... Recently there was one by Ilhan Omar.
This is the hottest season.
We've had some of the hottest days in 120,000 years.
I thought to myself, this is really very interesting.
All of recorded history is 3,000 years.
So how is it possible to tell?
Who was there to observe?
What kind of measurements were being made?
How do you get to the idea?
And so I actually said, all right, well, let's test this.
And I kind of tweeted back at Ilhan Omar.
I said, well, okay, well, you tell me what the temperature was on this day.
Let's just say a given day in July, 20,000 years ago.
Or 60,000 years ago?
Or since you say 120,000 years, 119,000 years ago this exact day, 119,000 years ago, what was the temperature?
If you're going to say that this was the hottest, it has to be compared to some other temperature.
Well, what was that temperature, and how do you know?
Turns out, dead silence, no reply.
She has no idea.
She was basically just referring again to a study, but when you look at the study, the study is not a real study.
In fact, the study has to fess up and say, in effect, this is not based on any kind of observational evidence.
This is based upon, in effect, a model.
A model. So what's a model?
A model is really a kind of algorithm, and you put certain inputs into the model.
You put certain assumptions into the model.
And the point is, when you put certain assumptions into the model, then you get a result that you could have forecast.
In fact, the reason you put these assumptions is to get that result.
And so, for example, let's take...
Let's take it in a very simplified way, and this is basically how they do this.
When they're talking about rising temperatures these days, they're not talking about the fact that they have been going around measuring these temperatures, because in fact, when you go based on measured temperatures, the temperatures aren't rising.
In fact, we have seen hot decades, hot years since the turn of the last century.
We've seen colder decades and colder years.
And so there is no uniform trend.
And so this is a serious problem for the climate change people because, after all, human beings have been using more and more carbon, more and more fossil fuels.
And so if there was a one-to-one relationship, this is man-made climate change, you would expect to see a kind of straight-up line of...
A warming trend.
Warmer, warmer, warmer, warmer.
But the reason it's not like that is it's quite possible, in fact, it's overwhelmingly likely that many other factors are also involved, so that the human factor becomes one among many, and that muddies the whole thesis.
And this is why the beauty of a computer model is you are throwing out the real world.
You're not making any real-world measurements.
You're not providing any real empirical data.
It's GIGO. GIGO is basically an acronym for garbage in, garbage out.
And so, if you say, for example, let's start with the assumption that more CO2 produces more warming.
Human beings have been producing more CO2. Therefore, there has to be more warming.
Well, that's a good example of isolating your assumptions and narrowing down what you're looking at, and then you're, well, has the sun been the same as it was 20,000 years ago?
Was the sun exactly the same?
Was it emitting the same amount of heat, let's say, for example, as it did 119,000 years ago?
Once you remove all these other factors that can have a huge impact on On climate change, what you do is you have a neat model that tells you exactly what you wanted to, quote, know.
But that's only because of the assumptions that you put into the system in the first place.
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