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Sept. 5, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:34
STOPPING AT NOTHING Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep657
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Guys, it's really good to be back after a week off.
And coming up, I'll discuss the movement underway to get Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot, even in the absence of any criminal conviction.
I'll show it's because they're More than a little scared of what Trump will do if he returns to office.
Author Joe Allen joins me.
We're going to talk about this strange and maybe terrifying concept of transhumanism.
And I'll begin a mini course on Alexander Solzhenitsyn's great classic.
It's called The Gulag Archipelago.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe.
Also, if you're listening on Rumble, and there's a little red button on the top left-hand corner that says join.
If you click that, you can check out my Locals channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
There is a movement underway that has been gathering steam, mainly driven by the Democrats and the left, but also with the participation of some of the Never Trumpers.
And it's a movement to block Donald Trump from getting on the ballot in all 50 states in 2024.
Now, this is not a movement that says, hey, if Trump is in jail, he can't run.
It's not a movement that says if Trump is convicted, he can't run.
The theme of this movement, which is a legal movement and a political movement and also a movement that is publicized and promulgated by the media, it is that Trump is ineligible to run now.
In other words, he has already disqualified himself from being on the ballot and that state officials at the state level Secretaries of State, election officials can, in fact, just take his name off the ballot.
I mean, this is such an outlandish and radical idea that it deserves to be explored in some detail.
Now, the advocates of this I would say unorthodox view, say that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which is called the Disqualifications Clause, this was a clause that was put into the Constitution after the Civil War, it bars individuals who have, quote, engaged in insurrection or rebellion against America or aided in such from holding office.
But it's also important to realize that there is another clause that comes right after that allows Congress to, quote, remove such disability via a congressional vote of two-thirds in each chamber.
And as it turns out, Congress did, in fact, do that in two laws.
So, in other words, shortly after the Civil War, Congress removed this so-called disqualification clause.
Why? Because think about it.
All the southern states began to make their way back in the Union.
And was Congress going to say that all the people who fought for the Confederacy or were on the wrong side of the Civil War could never in the future run for office, even in the South?
Can't represent their own states?
So Congress decided, no, they're not going to say that.
Once these states were readmitted, they, in a sense, nullified the Disqualification Clause.
So in 1872, there was the Amnesty Act, which removed the Section 3 Disqualification and basically said that with certain exceptions, by and large, people who were in the military or people who even had served in both the Union or the Confederate Army could run for office.
In 1898, there was a second Amnesty Act that basically even removed the qualification.
So this disqualification clause, historically speaking, was overturned, was invalidated by Congress.
Now, Congress cannot normally invalidate the Constitution, but remember the Constitution itself had a clause that gave Congress this kind of power as to whether or not this act is to be We're good to go.
On the part of people on the left to keep certain candidates, I believe there was even an effort to disqualify Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for re-election on the basis of the fact that, oh, she made remarks supportive of the January 6th insurrectionists, so she is herself an insurrectionist.
By the way, none of these efforts succeeded.
And I don't think that they're likely to succeed even with Trump, but this is not to say that they're not going to be attempted.
Let's think about it this way.
When you think of all the blue states, it's a simple fact that even though Trump has not been charged, he's not been found guilty, he's not going to be found guilty of insurrection or incitement or rebellion, nevertheless, there are going to be some election officials in some states.
They could be in California.
They could be in Hawaii, in Colorado, in Oregon.
I mean, think of all the different election officials in all the different states.
It only takes officials in charge of one state or two states or four states to go, okay, well, you know what?
We're just going to leave Trump off the ballot.
And then what? Well, then it's going to go to the court.
And state courts are going to have to weigh in on this and probably ultimately would have to go to the Supreme Court.
Now, There are a number of legal analysts, including Jonathan Durley, who have weighed in on this, and they do not think that this will, you may say, hold water.
They don't think it's going to survive ultimate scrutiny.
But let's remember, again, ultimate scrutiny comes sort of at the end.
There's a whole process of In which you go to court, the court makes a decision, then you appeal, the appellate court makes a decision, then you appeal to the Supreme Court.
So here is another, in my view, disruptive tactic that the left is using.
I mean, the left's tactics here are of the shotgun variety.
Let's charge. Let's not just take one big charge against Trump.
Let's find the worst thing that he did and go after him because he might get acquitted.
Let's have 91 charges because we're pretty sure we'll get convictions on one or at least some of those.
And similarly here, let's try keeping him off the ballot because even if we get thwarted at the best case scenario, he gets back on the ballot.
So these are all...
Well, they're election interference schemes.
And so, in a sense, when the left says our democracy is in peril, I have to agree our democracy is in peril from them.
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I want to talk about what a Trump presidency, let's call it Trump 47, would be like compared to the Trump presidency that we already had, Trump 45.
In other words, will 47 be a replay of 45?
Now there's some people go, well, that would be great.
Let's think about the Trump economy.
Let's think about some of the great deals that Trump made on energy.
Let's think about the way in which Trump handled foreign policy.
What would be wrong with a replay?
Well, I think there would be some things that would be wrong.
And here we have to turn to the critics of Trump who have been highlighting these points.
Trump complains about the Justice Department.
Well, why didn't he do anything about the Justice Department when he was in office?
Why didn't he fire Christopher Wray?
Why didn't he fire Comey?
Why did he appoint Sessions?
Why did he appoint Bill Barr?
These are all Trump's own appointments.
And if Trump is going to give us a replay of that, well, we're going to get More of the same maybe on the good side from Trump, but we'll also get more of the same on the bad side.
In other words, they will be hounding Trump from his own Justice Department during his own second term, and this would be an unmitigated disaster because it shows that the lawfare, the kind of police tape tactics that we have been seeing unleashed under Biden, tactics that we hope can be dismantled and overturned under Trump, would nevertheless somehow continue.
So, 47 cannot be, must not be, should not be a replay of 45.
But the good news is it doesn't look like it is.
Now, I don't underestimate for a moment the difficulty of Trump making it to the White House.
Trump becoming 47, becoming the 47th president.
We're going to talk about that a lot over the next several weeks and months.
But at this point, I'm just talking about what would Trump do if he were able to get across the finish line, if he were able to surmount all these difficulties and make his way back into the Oval Office.
I, for one, think that that is quite possible.
In fact, if you look at even current polls taken by unfriendly sources, Trump is running basically even with Biden.
And Trump running even with Biden basically means that Trump wins because Trump is running even with Biden on a 50-50 basis in the general vote.
So Trump doesn't need the popular vote to win the presidency.
By and large, when Trump won in 2016, he was trailing Hillary Clinton badly.
And when he almost won, or at least a virtually tied election in 2020, with just a few votes making the difference, again, Trump was...
Dramatically behind Biden in these very same surveys.
Now, here's an article in the New Republic, Trump's sickening plans for an all-out war on immigrants.
Well, first of all, we're not even talking about immigrants.
We're talking about illegals.
And this is the... The first maneuver of the left is to relabel illegals as immigrants.
I mean, I'm an immigrant, but I'm not illegal.
Trump has no all-out war against me.
No one's even claiming that.
So we're talking really about the fact that Trump has a plan to undo the horrible effects of a porous and open border that we've had under Biden and that will result probably at the end of four years in 8 million illegals, 8 million more illegals because there are millions and millions of illegals already here before Biden.
And so you have had this flagrant disregard of US immigration law by the executive branch itself.
Well, Trump wants to undo that and undo that through a number of ways.
The border wall, floating barriers in the Rio Grande, deploying the Coast Guard and the Navy, blocking drug smugglers, ending birthright citizenship for children born in the US.
Now, not ending birthright citizenship for people who are legally here who have children, but ending birthright citizenship for illegals.
Think about it. You break the law, you come across the border to have a kid who then is rewarded with American citizenship for your illegality.
Well, Trump's like, that shouldn't be the case.
Now, it doesn't mean that Trump will...
And certainly not on day one be able to do all these things.
But it looks like Trump is systematically laying out an agenda that says this is not going to be a replay of Trump 45.
He's going to...
Fire armies of federal bureaucrats.
He's going to redo—there's a mechanism called Schedule F that allows you to essentially convert career bureaucrats who make policy into political appointees, which, of course, means you can then promptly fire them.
So, to me, this raises a rather appetizing prospect, liquidating the massive bureaucracy.
That has turned Washington D.C. into a one-party apparatus.
Think about it. If you fire the bureaucrats, they're going to have to leave Washington D.C. Real estate values in D.C. will collapse, which probably will be a good thing for the country.
D.C.'s strangled hold over the rest of the country will be weaker.
The corresponding power of state and local governments will be stronger.
So Trump has gone much further than this.
He's talked about eliminating the Department of Education, not just necessarily getting rid of federal agencies, but decentralizing them.
Suddenly, the FBI is not all run out of D.C. It's run out of local offices.
Suddenly, even administrative agencies are run out of their local offices, giving state and local governments far more say in how these agencies operate, operate according to local conditions, the unleashing of energy, greater care to political appointments, releasing things like, where's the Nashville trans shooters manifesto?
Who Who killed JFK? There's all this stuff that is sort of, who was Ray Epps?
All this stuff that the government manages somehow to bottle up, to hide, to conceal from the American public.
And yet it is of public relevance.
And so even though you make petitions to get the information, you never get it.
So what we need from Trump is a kind of Well, some people have called it a retribution presidency, and I don't think I would think of it purely in a revenge capacity, although revenge is certainly something that Trump, I think, thinks about probably every day.
It's going to be, I think, a more informed, active, and energetic presidency, particularly taking on the bowels of the D.C. establishment and what many people call the swamp, and that is something that the country very much needs.
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There's some good news on the free speech front.
A Louisiana man named Waylon Bailey was facing charges.
I mean, think about this. This is a guy who was arrested under an anti-terrorism law for doing nothing more than posting a satirical meme and a satirical reference on social media.
Now, let's look at what he posted.
And this was, this is this Waylon Bailey guy.
He goes, share, share, share.
Just in. And he's talking about a parish in Louisiana.
Repeat this parish. Sheriff's Office has issued an order if deputies come into contact with, quote, the infected.
He means the infected with COVID. Shoot on sight.
Shoot on sight. Shoot the infected.
And then he goes on to say, Lord, have mercy on us all.
But then he has a couple of hashtags.
COVID-19, but instead of the number 19, he has 19.
And then he has, we need you, Brad Pitt.
Now, what does he mean by Brad Pitt?
Well, this is a reference to the Brad Pitt movie that was called World War Z, in which there's a kind of Welcome to my show!
And this is all intended as a kind of satire.
Now, maybe satire in bad taste.
I don't know. It's not clear to me it's in all that bad taste.
The important thing is, I don't think any reasonable person can look at this and think that this guy is either advocating violence.
He clearly is not.
He's not a fan of hunting down the infected.
He's actually presenting that as a sort of dystopia.
So, anyone who knows how to read, has a certain sense of literary illusion or imagination, can see that there's really nothing here.
And we're not just talking about this guy being, you know, deplatformed or he's got a strike against him on Twitter.
No. He gets the good old FBI treatment.
They raid his house.
They send in a SWAT team and they arrest him.
And he's facing charges that he is somehow promoting terrorism, which of course is laughable and it's absurd.
So... So the criminal charges were dropped against him.
I think they realized there is no way to make any progress on this.
But he then had a lawsuit, a kind of civil rights lawsuit, which was upheld by a local court, a district court, which basically said that he had defamed the sheriff.
He had violated the sheriff's civil rights.
And no, he didn't have a First Amendment defense against this so-called defamation.
He appealed, and that's what we're now talking about.
It went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Fifth Circuit Court said, no, no, no, this is not going to work.
Judge Dana Douglas, representing a unanimous panel, says the First Amendment unfailingly shelters humor, encompassing jokes, parody, satire, etc., regardless of whether or not you think they are in bad taste.
In other words, there is a First Amendment right to do this kind of thing.
And this would seem so obvious that we are in a very odd situation that these things are even being litigated in the court.
Part of it is we've seen a collapse of the We're good to go.
They've become a useless organization or largely useless when it comes to free speech and civil liberties as understood in the normal sense.
And so what happened in this case is a conservative group called the Institute for Justice took up this guy's case, fought on the free speech grounds and was successful.
So hopefully this kind of verdict...
has the right kind of chilling effect.
In other words, it chills other people from trying to use the law as a weapon to suppress the First Amendment or to use the law to arrest people for doing nothing more than exercising their free speech rights.
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Get 40% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. Hey guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is Joe Allen, and he is the author of a very interesting book called Dark Eon, Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity.
That's what we're going to be talking about.
Joe has written for Chronicles, The Federalist, Human Events, The National Pulse.
He has a master's degree from Boston University where he studied cognitive science and human evolution as they pertain to religion.
He's also a transhumanism editor at Steve Bannon's War Room.
By the way, the website is just joebot.xyz.
Joe, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. Transhumanism, that will be an unfamiliar word to many people, so let's begin by defining it.
What is transhumanism?
Dinesh, very good to be here.
Thank you very much. Transhumanism is an idea of what to do with technology.
We have all of these technologies that threaten radical transformation, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, robotics, automation in general, genetic engineering.
The question is, what do you do with them?
How do you apply them correctly?
Transhumanism offers different scenarios, but they all move towards the same direction.
That is radical transformation, radical augmentation, to the point that they believe that the human species will in fact branch off Transhumanism is anything but communists at its core.
Yeah, let's talk about humanism for a moment.
And you correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that humanism is a kind of worldview.
You can find some roots of it maybe at the ancient Greeks and Romans, but it developed in the Renaissance.
And the basic idea here was that in the medieval era...
You sort of had God at the center and man at the margin.
Humanism sort of intellectually puts man at the center and looks at nature and technology as being at the service of man.
Am I right in thinking that transhumanism is an effort to sort of repudiate all that and say that we can somehow get beyond humanity or We can build a new type of humanity, maybe that's not even human in any recognizable sense that we would recognize from the past.
Is transhumanism an effort to sort of go beyond human beings?
100%. That's the clearly defined goal.
Max Moore perhaps put it the best, simply saying that it is a philosophy of life that seeks to use science and technology to radically improve the human being.
And that sounds very general, but that link to humanism that you mentioned, I would say that humanism represents a sort of bridge from traditionalist ways of thinking, believing, acting in the world, That being across the planet, from the great civilizations of China and India on over to the West.
But with that freedom allowed for in humanism, the freedom from traditionalist loyalties, ways of thinking, the hierarchy of being, I think, ultimately, some men found themselves quite alone and maybe disappointed with themselves.
And transhumanism really grows out of that.
And it's not a new idea, per se.
It certainly goes back to the early 1900s.
And there are inklings of it even in the Renaissance with figures like Francis Bacon.
You definitely have this movement, exactly as you say, this movement from traditionalism to humanism, and then very quickly on, a certain subset of thinkers who decided that humanity is not enough.
And I argue, along with many others, that transhumanism in some sense represents a return to the traditionalist aspiration to transcending what is human, but rather than doing so by way of God or God's Or even Mother Nature or any sort of supernatural conception of a spirit.
They simply hold up technology as the highest earthly power and ultimately, in their view, the highest power in the universe come the great future they predict.
I mean, what you're saying is very interesting, which is that there was a vulnerability in humanism itself, because humanism, by seeing man or humans as somehow self-sufficient, cut humans off from a kind of transcendent moral order, and that creates a sort of loneliness, if you will.
And you're saying that we go, is this all there is?
Humanity, that's all we got?
And transhumanism is coming along with a kind of subconscious A spiritual promise of a new kind in which they're basically saying, oh no, we can do better than humanity, but this time not by appealing to the other world and not by appealing to God, but by appealing to technology.
Would that be a correct summary?
You know, a very succinct way of putting it, when Ray Kurzweil was asked if he believed in God, does God exist?
Kurzweil hit back, no, not yet.
Not yet. Meaning that a new type of God may be in the offing in the future, right?
This is absolutely the goal of those in the most extreme wings of transhumanism.
And I'm not talking about guys in their basement.
I'm talking about people like Sam Altman, people like Elon Musk, people like Larry Page, and in fact, many who exist within the more experimental reaches of the military-industrial complex.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with author Joe Allen, the book, Dark Eon, Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity.
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I'm back with author Joe Allen, his website joebot, J-O-E-B-O-T dot X-Y-Z, the book Dark Aeon, Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity.
Joe, you mentioned that this transhumanist idea, which is, as you say, now being promoted by very influential people in modern society, a lot of people with a lot of money, a lot of people deeply embedded in science and technology, This has become sort of their gospel, if I can use this term.
But there are some people who might say, well, listen, you know, ever since man invented the wheel, ever since we got telescopes and even the glasses that are on my nose right now, we have found ways through technology to augment nature.
So when nature shows some deficiencies, I can't see very well if it's far away.
I use this technology known as a pair of glasses.
And what is What's new or different about these new technologies that make them different from the wheel, the plow, the telephone, the computer, the airplane, and other technologies which in some ways have obviously transformed human civilization?
You know, one of the real inspirations for my book was David Noble's The Religion of Technology.
And I returned to it a number of times, and it really did inform the way in which I approached both transhumanism and technology in general.
His central thesis was that the ideas we have about technology really grew out of traditional Christianity.
The monks of the medieval period Discussing things such as the grindstone or the windmill in terms of a blessing from God that would alleviate the toil and labor of human beings.
But very quickly, in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, when humans started looking around their cities and seeing we are becoming something quite different than our agrarian predecessors, ideas about the future began cropping up.
What will this look like in 100 years?
Some of those ideas were very radical.
Samuel Butler, writing in New Zealand in the late 1800s, believed that these machines would eventually be imbued with a life of their own.
I would say that the real difference between the traditional conception of what these technologies offer in regard to what St. Augustine would say is really just an entertainment, or again, a way to alleviate suffering or toil.
What they're talking about now is technology as a salvific principle in and of itself.
So all of the great goals of religion, be it salvation, be it The heaven promised through salvation, be it a higher intelligence that can answer the critical questions in life, be that the extension of one's life through healing.
The things that traditionally have been the purview of the spiritual are quickly becoming technological.
And so I think that that observation of a gradual movement of technology augmenting human beings, that's true.
But with more and more advanced technologies, I think that the possibility of transhumanists realizing their fantasies are becoming much more relevant.
And I think we're at a point where we're going to have to decide, do we adopt these technologies?
If we do, do we adopt them in the ways that they're being presented?
And if not, what do we do?
Well, Joe, let's sort of bring this down to earth a little bit because it seems obvious to me that there are ways in which you could alter even the chemistry, for example, of human beings, right?
And you can do that with all kinds of injections and vaccines and perhaps even ways to manipulate genetics at the very early level.
But take something so simple as the human lifespan.
I mean, granted that the human lifespan has increased pretty dramatically over the past several centuries.
The simple truth of it is, not many people live to be 100 years old.
And we were hearing even 30 years ago, oh, the human lifespan is going to double and so on.
Is there any prospect to take something as simple as the human lifespan?
Because it seems to me that no matter what we do to fiddle around with the earth and the planet, if the simple truth of it is we're going to be inside the ground within a hundred years, issues of immortality, of your ultimate destiny, of repentance and salvation can't very easily be wished away, can they?
I don't believe so. I think what we'll actually see is the development of a very kind of perverse culture around these technologies, more so than already exists now.
You know, one of the real problems, and I'm just going to use an analogy here, one of the real problems in human life has been always how to find a mate.
How do I find a mate and form a family or at least have children?
Now that problem has been solved for millions upon hundreds of millions of men by way of digital pornography and various other implements that basically stop that short.
They satisfy that desire and yet what comes out the other end.
It's something very malformed, very perverse.
Expand that out to any of the radical technologies that I just mentioned from artificial intelligence to robotics to genetic engineering itself and various other biochemical ways of intervening in the human body.
I think that there will, of course, be upsides.
If there weren't upsides, no one would want any of this anyway.
But I think that the downsides are already tremendous.
And I think the downsides going forward will not only be much more glaring, but in fact, quite a bit more dangerous than they already are.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, final segment with Joe Allen.
The book we're talking about is called Dark Eon, A-E-O-N, and the website Jobot, J-O-E-B-O-T dot X-Y-Z. Hey guys, with my big new movie coming out next month, this is a perfect time to check out and I hope to join my Locals channel.
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I'm back with author Joe Allen.
We're talking about this remarkable and strange idea of transhumanism.
One of the points you make, Joe, in the book is that there might be people who say, well, this is sort of a centralized plot, a kind of a communist scheme.
It's all coming from the left.
It's an effort on the part of the left to gain iron control, not just over America, but over humanity.
You point out that it's actually much bigger than that, and there are libertarian strains and perhaps even religious strains that push this transhumanism.
I've noticed, for example, in the technological world, there are lots of people who sort of have the philosophy, if it can be done, We should do it.
So if you would say, for example, to some of these guys, look, I know how to cross a human being with a pig to give you a pig man.
They go, oh wow, well let's try that.
So in other words, there is no ethical or moral limit on these technologies because there are people who believe that if it can be done, it ought to be done.
And there are those people already operating.
The example you just gave, the pig man, there are humanized pigs that have been genetically modified in order to express human genes.
Same with mice. Same with the human monkey chimera, in which you have two different types of cells, human and monkey, growing in a small vat.
These ideas, I think that really, if you want to think about the ideology under transhumanism, maybe that is the most important, that notion that if it can be done, it should be.
Transhumanists, by and large, think of it as this eruption of potentiality out of the raw forces of nature.
And that is what we are, in fact, a process in the middle of, that human beings are a kind of stepping stone or a bridge to something else.
It's very Nietzschean. In fact, many transhumanists rely on Nietzsche for the philosophical underpinning.
But it branches out in all of these different directions.
So there are transhumanists such as Ray Kurzweil, who you could say his ideology is a direct inversion of the overall traditional Christian ideology.
You simply put technology in place of those traditional Christian concepts.
creation, salvation, eschatology.
And then on the other hand, you have those who are much more of a Gnostic bent.
Ben Goertzel would be a good example. Or you hear echoes of it in a man, Zoltan Istvan, who once ran 2016 for president with the Transhumanist Party.
This idea that the body and that the material is inherently flawed, and that the goal of human life is to escape and do something perfect, That perfection in Gnosticism is this eternal spiritual realm.
In transhumanism, oftentimes from direct adoption and inversion, transhumanism basically takes the same concept and says, the material is flawed.
We must transcend it by way of technology.
Therefore, we must create this crystalline spiritual realm to transcend into.
What do you think should be done about all this, Joe?
Because it seems like some of this is a, I won't say an unstoppable train, but it seems like it's going on in so many different areas.
By and large, people are working independently in labs to do this and to do that.
I myself am a little pessimistic that the kind of archaic tools of regulation or congressional legislation could effectively stop this.
And even if it did, it would only stop it in the United States.
What are you trying to achieve and what do you think we should do individually, collectively, as a society to deal with this?
You know, in my book, my primary focus is on the individual and the communal level.
I do think that there are legislative moves that can be made.
I believe that data privacy is one really big one.
Neuro rights, without going too far into that, will be important in the coming decade.
And a number of other things, such as antitrust legislation, so that these monopolies aren't basically forcing us into an ideological corner.
But In general, I think that the approach that we're going to have to take is, how do we live, if we reject this futuristic vision, even the perverse, kind of a half-baked version that's inevitably going to occur, if we reject it, how do we survive outside of that system?
When everybody is using digital currency, how do you survive outside of that digital system?
When everyone has to have a smartphone in order to function in any meaningful way, what if you want to reject that?
Right now, I think anybody in an advanced society is going to have a tremendous problem with that.
You have to make concessions.
But the two things that I see going forward are this.
One, the system is not going away, as you say.
It's not a conspiracy. It is a tendency.
And it is a cultural shift that is global, and there's no stopping it here.
There's no stopping it there. How do you survive in it?
How do you move forward rejecting it?
And the second is, what do you really do in a society that upholds that there is really a religious shift in A detectable religious shift that upholds technology as the highest power.
How do you get along with your neighbors in such a scenario?
If your kids' friends literally have a best friend as a robot, and I don't think that is unthinkable in the coming decade, what do you do?
Those are left as questions, but I do offer my own suggestions, the biggest being stay human to your core, cling to your traditional roots.
This is great stuff.
Very interesting and stuff that we really need to be thinking about and probably are not sufficiently doing so.
And your book is a great place to start, Dark Eon, Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity.
Joe Allen, thanks for joining me.
Dinesh, thank you very much. Guys, I've been giving some thought over the past few weeks about a good book or topic or series for extended discussion, typically toward the end of each podcast.
And I think I'm going to do a study, a kind of mini course, on a great work by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
It's called The Gulag Archipelago.
Now, this is a book from another time and another place, from the early to mid 20th century, written by a great Russian writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1970.
And it is about a totalitarian Soviet regime that at the first glance seems to bear little resemblance, some would say no resemblance, to what's happening in America today.
I beg to differ.
As most of you know, I'm doing a film that's coming out shortly.
It's called Police State.
And the film deals with the emerging police state in America.
And for this reason, I think it is appropriate for us to consider one of the great classics of the 20th century.
By looking at what happened in another society, we get some insight into what's happening not only there, but also here.
Solzhenitsyn himself makes this point in a very short sort of foreword or pre-word that he writes to the latest translation.
This was done, of course, while Solzhenitsyn was still alive.
And he says that if it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid.
He's almost like he's talking directly to us from, as it is now, from the grave.
And then he goes, but it is very difficult.
He says, there is always this fallacious belief, quote, it would not be the same here.
Here such things are impossible.
And think of all the Americans who go, I don't really want to hear about the Soviet Union because...
What does this have to do with America?
We're a completely different society, different culture, different history, different founding, different experience of liberty.
The Russians sort of never really had freedom.
They were under the czars even before communism.
So what does Soviet and Russian experience have to teach us?
And continues Solzhenitsyn, Alas, the evil of the 20th century is possible everywhere on earth.
And I think he could have added possible not only everywhere, but at any time.
So, tyranny to that degree lurks around the corner.
And one reason for this, by the way, one reason why things can always happen, always turn for the bad, is as Solzhenitsyn himself puts it in one of the greatest lines in this work, the Gulag Archipelago, he says, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.
That alone is a line worth thinking about, and I've been thinking about it off and on for many years.
A little bit about Solzhenitsyn's bio.
He was born in a place called Kislovdusk, Russia, 1918, so a little over a century ago.
He was a student of mathematics and physics, so trained in the sciences.
And then when World War II broke out, he joined the Red Army.
He fought, obviously, on the Russian side, and it turned out to be the Soviet side against the invading armies from Germany.
And after the war in 1945, he was imprisoned for eight years.
Why? Because he made some negative remarks about Stalin that were reported to the authorities.
This is something he talks about, although rather briefly in the Gulag Archipelago, one may seem that for a guy who was in the Gulag, who had extensive experiences over eight years...
That this would be a kind of personal, autobiographical memoir.
But no, it is in fact a kind of systematic history of the Gulag.
He has included in it the experiences of hundreds, even thousands of people.
He gives names and dates and places.
He says right in the beginning of the book, this is...
What I'm telling you is not nonfiction.
Every single detail, every single person.
Now, in some cases, he was forced either not to give a name or to give only a first name or to change a name.
But even when he changes a name, that is a reflection of a real person.
And he has their experiences, he has their diaries, or he has it from firsthand testimony from somebody else who was, for example, in a cell or in a prison camp with them.
Solzhenitsyn's own experience is described in the book, mainly his arrest, and he has very arresting things to say about it, but he doesn't go into great detail.
In the end, it's almost as if he's saying, this is really not about me, or I was only one among many, and I want to tell the full story of the camps.
And he calls it a, it is both an historical and, in Solzhenitsyn's own words, a literary investigation.
Solzhenitsyn was...
He was rehabilitated in 1956 when Khrushchev denounced Stalin.
But he was still forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union because he condemned Soviet censorship in 1974.
He went to West Germany.
Then he came to America. He lived in Vermont for many years.
And only in 1994, after all charges were dropped against him, his name was completely clear.
This was, by the way, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn went back to Russia, where he died.
And his works, we're going to be talking about The Gulag Archipelago, the other works well known, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Kanso Ward, but the greatest of them all, the one we'll be discussing and we'll pick it up tomorrow.
Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, written in three parts, but I'm going to be looking at an abridged version by Harville Press that is abridged by a guy named Edward Erickson.
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