All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 20, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:48
DANGEROUS GRANDMAS? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep668
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, I'm going to talk about the outrageous case of two 70-year-old grandmas who face over 10 years in prison for what?
For trying to stop abortions in the nation's capital.
I'm going to marvel at Hunter Biden's chutzpah in suing the IRS to block whistleblowers from revealing his corrupt transactions.
Joel Berry, managing editor of The Babylon Bee, joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book, The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender.
I'm looking forward to making some really important discoveries about myself.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
Same if you're watching on Rumble.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want you to imagine two scenes, and I'm asking you to imagine them not because they didn't happen, but because you weren't there.
So the first scene is an abortion clinic In the Washington, D.C. area.
And you've got activists who are desperate to stop women from having abortions.
And they are activists kind of in the liberal mode.
And what I mean by the liberal mode is they're doing the same kind of stuff we see the left do all the time.
Look at the way, for example, the left will blockade the dean's office on a campus.
Or they will blockade traffic.
Look at climate protesters who blockade traffic or disrupt events from the US Open in tennis to other events.
Or they go into museums and they start defacing the glass that is covering the paintings, priceless paintings.
And they do all this because they're like...
This injustice cannot go on.
So that's the motivation of these activists, except they happen to be pro-life activists.
And I want to highlight three of them.
Jonathan Darnell, 41, from Virginia.
Gene Marshall, 73, from Kingston, Massachusetts.
And Joan Bell, 74, of Montague, New Jersey.
So that's scene number one.
And these activists are, in fact, trying to block the clinic.
And what I mean by block the clinic is they're not using any kind of violence.
They're not hitting anybody.
They're not attacking people at the clinic.
They're certainly not shooting doctors.
What are they doing? They're using their bodies.
They're using furniture. They're using ropes and chains to do their best to blockade this clinic.
And their reasoning is really simple.
This is a kind of...
Gas chamber. I mean, you have to look at it from their point of view.
The way they see it is that people are being killed in here, and we have to do our part to stop them.
Now, look, you might not agree with them, or you might think, well, listen, this is not the way.
I just saw Abby Johnson posted something about the fact that we should rely on persuasion.
We should not try to blockade the clinics.
That's not an effective tactic.
But leave aside whether it's effective or not.
Who knows whether campus protests are effective in the way that the activists intend them to be?
Who knows whether it serves the climate agenda to do the kind of blockades that climate people do?
But here's the difference.
When the left does this kind of stuff, no big deal.
You just escort them off the court.
Maybe they're guilty of trespassing.
In this case, these pro-life activists, the three people I mentioned, and notice that two of them are elderly grandmother types.
I mean, look, Jean Marshall, 73, of Kingston, Mass.
Joan Bell, 74, of Montague, New Jersey.
I believe all three are Catholic, and the reason I say that is because I saw a picture of them.
This is before the sentencing.
They were all accused of violating the FACE Act.
And you can see them praying, and there appear to be other people praying with rosaries.
So my guess is that this is a pro-life Catholic circle.
In any event, they're charged by the Biden DOJ. They're charged with violating the so-called FACE Act.
We've talked about the FACE Act before.
The FACE Act basically says you cannot interfere with reproductive services being provided.
Now, in this case, they were doing that.
They were interfering with these reproductive services.
And so perhaps they should be given some sort of penalty for trespassing or for defacing property if that's what they did.
But no, they are essentially being treated as domestic terrorists.
They are treated, and there's an FBI press release which sort of solemnly talks about them, quote, invading, invading the clinic.
They weren't invading the clinic.
They were doing their best to stop the abortions from happening there.
And look at this.
They are both facing now 11 years in prison, a $350,000 fine.
I mean, what does it do to two women in their 70s to lock them up for 11 years?
I mean, are they that kind of a danger to society?
We have people who commit horrific crimes who don't even get half that kind of a sentence.
So what strikes me here, again, is the gross disproportionality of the sentence to what they did.
And again, we always got to keep in mind that this is a country where you have activism, you have protests.
We've had protests going back to the 1960s, if not before.
I've seen numerous protests myself where people do exactly the kind of stuff that these guys are doing, and nothing happens.
The campus police show up.
They kind of basically, you know, get people to calm down or the climate protesters carefully like yanked off the pavement.
Someone comes or gets out of that car and pulls them to the side or the cops pull them to the side and they go home and they're not charged.
Or if they're charged, they're charged in a very minor way, trespassing, blocking traffic, something like that.
And in this case, you're essentially being treated as a murderer or something comparable to that for doing nothing more than trying to save human lives.
It's outrageous.
Vladimir Putin called the US dollar's drop in dominance objective and irreversible as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa formally agreed to use local currencies in trade instead of the US dollar.
It's the first shoe to fall.
As demand for the dollar weakens, the buying power of the dollar weakens.
and this is why Birch Gold Group is busier than ever.
Investors and savers like me are looking to harness the power of physical gold held in a tax-sheltered IRA. Debbie and I buy gold from Birch Gold. We trust them to help us diversify and protect our savings. Text Dinesh to 989898.
You'll get a free information kit on gold. With thousands of happy customers, an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless 5-star reviews, you can count on Birch Gold to help you navigate transitioning an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold. As the U.S. dollar continues to receive pressure from foreign countries, digital currency, and central banks, arm yourself with information on how to protect yourselves. Text Dinesh to 989898 and claim your free information
kit now. I want to talk about two January 6 cases because on the surface They appear to be somewhat similar, but in fact they couldn't be more different.
The first case involves a videographer, a journalist, We're good to go.
And the other case involves somebody whose name you'll recognize, Ray Epps.
Who is Ray Epps?
He is one of the members of the Arizona Oath Keepers.
He was very visibly present in the period leading up to January 6th.
In fact, on January 5th, you can see videos of Ray Epps.
Demanding, egging, urging, cajoling people to go inside the Capitol.
To quote him, that's where our problems are.
It's that way. And you can see him pointing to the Capitol.
And so Reheps is very actively involved in the crowd action that leads up to the breach of the Capitol.
And Reheps is now kind of finally facing a charge, but yet it's a very mysterious charge.
It's a charge of disorderly conduct.
That's it. So, let me talk about the two cases one by one, because like I say, there's a surface similarity in both cases of disorderly conduct charge, but in the case of the first guy, his name is Stephen Horne, Why is he being charged at all?
And in the second case, I'll go on to argue, is that all that Ray Epps did, a little bit of disorderly conduct?
Where are all the other charges that would seem logical in his case, and in fact, that have been applied to other people who seem to have done much less than anything Ray Epps did?
So, let me start with Stephen Horn, because this is a guy who is not only charged, but has just been convicted.
And the conviction here is a little different than with the other protesters, because no one can really say that this is a guy who is going in to disrupt the count, to obstruct what was happening in the Senate.
Why? This is a journalist.
This is a guy who has, you can look him up on social media, by the way, his...
And you can see this is a guy who covers and writes about and does journalism on a whole bunch of topics.
And apparently on January 6th, he says...
That, quote, Who can deny it was a significant event?
Who can deny that it warranted journalistic coverage?
This guy was essentially a reporter who accompanied people.
He went inside the Capitol, but his goal and his actions in the Capitol were essentially to document what happened.
And yet here he is now with a guilty verdict facing penalties connected with these four separate convictions.
Now, let's talk about Ray Epps.
Ray Epps, you would expect, would be facing serious charges.
Obstruction of justice.
Instigation. I mean, if anybody was inciting people to go inside the Capitol, there's only one guy on video you can see doing that.
It's not Trump. Trump has no statements of incitement, even remotely comparable to Ray Epps.
And Ray Epps is speaking directly to the crowd at the Capitol.
I mean, Trump is talking at the rally, which is a ways away.
And Trump is saying, let's march peacefully and patriotically toward the Capitol.
But here's Ray Epps telling people, go inside.
Go inside the Capitol.
So this guy, you would think, would be facing serious charges.
And the question is, why isn't he?
So here you've got Charlie Kirk, you've got Julie Kelly all saying this is very suspicious.
And I want to offer a theory that may explain what's really going on here.
Some people have said that Ray Epps is an agent of the cops.
He's some sort of a member of the police state.
He's an informant.
That's a possibility.
I suppose you cannot write that off.
The other possibility is that Ray Epps...
It was approached by the FBI, and he decided to cooperate with them.
I mean, think about a similar situation, not January 6th, in which you've got a bunch of guys, let's say, involved in the robbery, and one of them goes, I'll help you.
He tells the cops, I will identify the other guys.
So if Ray Epps were to tell the police or tell the FBI, look, a lot of my friends were there.
I'm an oath keeper. I know a lot of guys.
I'll tell you who was where.
I'll tell you what they were doing.
I'll give you all kinds of information.
They go, okay, in that case, you won't face any serious charges.
In exchange for the information you're giving us, we'll give you basically a slap on the wrist.
The point I'm trying to make is that that explanation would explain why We're good to go.
Very similar to Hunter Biden.
Okay, listen, you know, the cat is out of the bag.
We try to take this before the judge and get Hunter Biden off the hook, but the judge is kind of really suspicious now.
This is not good. We have to charge him with something.
So let's charge him with something that doesn't involve Joe Biden.
So there's a similarity here, I think, in the logic behind the treatment of Hunter Biden and the treatment of one Ray Epps.
You don't have to live with aches and pains.
If aches and pains are your problem, Relief Factor is your solution.
Debbie and I are proof of it.
We started taking Relief Factor a couple of years ago and what a difference we've seen in our joints.
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.
More than 1 million people have tried Relief Factor and guess what?
Over 70% have gone on to order more.
Why? Because it works for them.
Debbie's a true believer. She can now do exercises that for several years she wasn't able to do.
So Relief Factor has 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 to call, 800-4-RELIEF or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. What is the definition of chutzpah?
I always amused by that word chutzpah.
C-H-U-T-Z-P-A-H. And the term basically means a kind of effrontery, a kind of boldness, kind of who has the guts to do this.
Well, this word comes to my mind when I think about this.
Hunter Biden is filing a lawsuit against the IRS, against the IRS, alleging an unlawful release of his tax information.
Now, A few details about this.
The lawsuit is against the IRS and it alleges that two of its agents, who are the agents?
Well, they're the two prominent whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler.
And Hunter Biden is saying that they broke the law by revealing details about his personal tax information.
They violated the Privacy Act.
And to continue from a statement made by lawyers for Hunter Biden, they say, quote, IRS agents have targeted and sought to embarrass Mr.
Biden via public statements to the media in which they and their representatives disclose confidential information about a private citizen's tax matters.
Now, Hunter Biden is indeed a private citizen, but he's not any private citizen.
He's also the son of the president.
And he has been part of an elaborate scheme in which money has been filtered, not just to him, but to all the Bidens.
You have money going to Halle Biden and money going to James Biden and Frank Biden.
So there is a family racket here.
And the family racket has direct corruption implications, implications of bribery, implications of selling public policy for cash, but also there are tax implications.
Because if you're a crook and you make money, your crookery is the first part of it, but there's a second part of it.
If you make the money, it is income to you.
Whether or not the actions were illegal in the first place, and you do owe taxes on it.
And if you don't pay those taxes, there's another level of criminality, lesser to the original crime.
Of course, bribery is worse than not paying your taxes, but not paying your taxes is also a crime.
So what you have here is an investigation that is ongoing into Hunter Biden and the connections between Hunter Biden and the other family members, including one, Joe Biden.
Now, The IRS agents are whistleblowers, and there is a whistleblower classification and a whistleblower protection which suggests that these public officials have not only a right but a duty to speak out when they witness death.
When they witness corruption, when they witness collusion, when they witness agents of the government going to bat for Hunter Biden because he is the president's son.
So this is where this whole I'm a private citizen thing falls apart because Hunter Biden is getting protection because he's no ordinary private citizen.
He's getting protection not just because he's the president's son, but because the president is in on it.
And so the protection of Hunter Biden is really a way of protecting Joe Biden.
It's a way of keeping Joe Biden insulated from this criminality.
And so this is a laughable lawsuit.
It's preposterous.
It's absurd. And in a statement, the IRS whistleblowers have said, listen, we have not disclosed any confidential information except through whistleblower disclosures authorized by statute.
Once Congress released that testimony, like every American citizen, he has a right to discuss that public information.
So in other words, the whistleblowers, under the whistleblower protection and operating according to the whistleblower statute, go and tell Congress this is what's going on.
Congress calls a public hearing, and then Shapley and the other agents step forward and testify in that hearing.
That testimony is then released.
The media then asked Shapley and Ziegler to comment on what they said in the public hearing.
So the point that they're trying to make is, we have done everything by the book.
We have done everything lawfully.
We didn't take private Hunter Biden information and give it to the media or give it to any unauthorized source.
We took this information under the whistleblower statute and gave it to the people that we are supposed to give it to, congressional oversight committees.
These congressional oversight committees did what they're supposed to, which is commence an investigation, have a hearing, and then we did, subsequently, what we are completely authorized to do, speak in public, in the media, about that hearing and about what we testified to.
So this is a frivolous lawsuit, an attempt by Hunter Biden to divert attention from his own crimes, to make it seem like the government here, not the government here, but these IRS whistleblowers are the bad guys.
When the bad guy really is the guy that Hunter Biden sees every day when he looks in the mirror.
Debbie and I are on a great health journey, but we still struggle to eat enough fruits, veggies, and fiber, and you know what?
That's something that's not an option.
You gotta do it. Lucky for us, we discovered Balance of Nature, and what better way to get all your fruits and veggies plus fiber than with Balance of Nature.
This is Balance of Nature's fruits and veggies in a capsule, so easy to take, made from fresh, whole produce.
The produce is powdered after an advanced vacuum-cold process, which stabilizes the maximum nutrient content.
And this is Balance of Nature's Fiber and Spice, a proprietary blend of fiber and 12 spices for overall and digestive health.
Join Debbie and me. Start your journey to better health right now.
Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com.
You'll get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code America.
Again, that's balanceofnature.com or you can call 800-246-8751.
Get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA.
I want to talk about the poster boy of anti-racism.
This is a black guy in dreadlocks, a fellow who thinks of himself as unbelievably cool.
His name is Ibram Kendi.
And he's written books about how to be an anti-racist.
This is a guy who also has set up an anti-racism center at Boston University, lavishly funded by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation and a biotech company called Vertex.
So this guy, Ibram Kendi, thinks of himself as really sophisticated and really smart.
In fact, he's unbelievably stupid.
And a single post that he did on X, on what was then Twitter, really exposes his stupidity.
So let's consider his premise.
His premise is basically that systematic racism is everywhere.
And now I'm gonna read his post.
More than a third of white students lied about their race on college applications.
And about half of these applicants lied about being Native American.
More than three-fourths of these students who lied about their race were accepted.
So, Kendi thinks that this proves systematic racism.
But, of course, it proves the exact opposite.
Because, think about it this way.
You're going to lie in the direction of the group that is getting preferences.
Right? So, if white students are lying and saying, I'm black.
Oh, I'm Hispanic. I'm Native American.
On the minority side, notice by the way, not on the Asian side, but on the side of a number of these so-called victimized minorities and not white privilege, which is what Kendi is incessantly talking about.
So here is a guy who's obviously himself kind of an affirmative action guy, kind of a dummy, but this doesn't stop him from being the kind of...
Poster boy of anti-racism.
Well, the latest news on this, which is extremely amusing, is he started an anti-racism center.
Essentially, it produced what you would expect an anti-racism center to produce, which is academic trash.
Then after a while, it starts running short of money because people realize this is just an academic racket.
This is basically a way for, you know, Kendi to divert money to himself and give himself all kinds of authority.
And all the other scholars, they aren't really scholars, and they're hired by Kendi because they're fellow activists.
But at some point, even Kendi realizes the money is running dry, so he starts basically firing these guys and demoting them and taking away their perks.
And so what do they do? They turn around and accuse him of racism.
So this is the great thing.
A former faculty member at Kendi's Anti-Racism Center has now publicly attacked Kendi, says that he is engaged in, quote, employment violence.
So this is employment violence by terminating this guy's contract.
And he also says that Kendi's, quote, commitment to anti-racism is cosmetic and hypocritical.
Now, what I find really interesting about this is that if you listen to this language, this is Kendi's own language.
You can almost see Kendi looking at the university and basically saying, give me money.
How much? $10 million.
Okay, we'll give you $3 million.
No, your commitment to anti-racism is cosmetic and hypocritical.
After a while, they get tired of Kendi.
They go, Kendi, you've been producing academic trash.
We're going to let you go. You're engaging in employment violence against me.
So in other words, the great irony here is that Kendi, who is himself an academic joker, an academic fraud, an academic mediocrity, has invented a language of victimization, blaming everybody else, and then he hires other like-minded people like himself, and then when he lets them go, they turn around and use his language against him.
So there's a kind of delicious irony here, which is that all these terms like economic violence and cosmetic commitment are used by the left to advance their agenda.
But see, normally they're advancing their agenda against these institutions.
They're trying to cajole, pressure them, shake them down.
And now we see Kendi himself.
And there's an interesting article here in the New York Post quoting these dissenters at the center.
And they're basically saying that Kendi is a one-man operation.
He takes all this money.
Essentially, he gets to deploy it himself.
This is not really for a cause.
This is ultimately all promoting one man.
Sound familiar? Look, this is just the academic version of what the founders of BLM, Patrice Collars and the other women were doing.
They used racism to collect a whole bunch of money.
Then they laughingly deposit that money into their own bank accounts.
They go buy homes.
They go buy cars.
They live a lavish lifestyle.
All basically, I mean, ultimately for them, anti-racism is a kind of job credential.
And these are people, by the way, who would be terrified if racism were to disappear overnight, because if racism were to disappear overnight, activists like Patrice Collors and academics, I put the word in quote marks, like Ibram Kendi, would totally be out of a job.
Mike Lindell has a passion to help you get the best sleep of your life.
He didn't just stop with the MyPillow pillow, he also created the Giza Dream bedsheets.
Now, we have these, we've been using them, we love them.
The sheets look and feel great, which means an even better night's sleep, which is crucial for our overall health.
Mike found the world's best cotton called Giza.
It's ultra soft and breathable, but also extremely durable.
And Mike's latest deal, sale of the year for a limited time, you get 50% off the Giza Dream sheets, marking prices down as low as $29.98, depending on the size.
Go to mypillow.com and enter promo code Dinesh.
There you'll find not just this great offer, but also deep discounts on all the MyPillow products, the pillows, of course, but also the MyPillow 2.0 mattress topper, the MyPillow kitchen towel sets, and so much more.
The number to call, 800-876-0227.
That's 800-876-0227.
Or just go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use the promo code D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'm happy to welcome back to the podcast a friend of ours, Joel Berry.
He's the managing editor of The Babylon Bee.
By the way, you can follow him on x at Joel W. Berry.
The website, of course, babylonbee.com.
And we're going to be talking about the new book, The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender.
Joel, this is a heck of a topic for a book.
Has there been a little bit of gender identity crises going on at the Babylon Bee, people showing up for work?
There were men yesterday, there were women today, and so you decided to do a book to sort it all out?
Yeah, really, this was really a journey of self-discovery for us here at The Bee.
We were all very confused, struggling with our personal identity, and we knew we needed to start living our truth.
You know, that's really what's most important, is living your personal truth.
And so we decided to really do a deep dive into gender ideology and Really make an effort to understand what it means so that we can become better people and that we can grow into our true gender.
So what you'll find, some of the lessons we learned in this book we were able to put in there so that people who read our book can find their gender.
We have a genderator.
Where you can plug in some information and it'll give you some information back to help you determine what your gender is, who you're attracted to, what your orientation is, all this important stuff, the important things that our culture is talking about.
This just seems incredibly important because here's the point.
I mean, for thousands of years, people have taken a very...
Simplistic attitude toward gender.
I mean, basically, they just, you know, peek inside their pants and they go, well, that's what I am.
And they kind of assume that their biology is something that was kind of given.
But evidently, now we have biology and psychology running on two separate tracks.
Now, they could overlaps.
Yeah. Yeah, well, really, I think we need to really move past biology altogether.
It's a really bigoted view of the world.
And like you said, for thousands of years, we had this strange misunderstanding that there are only two genders.
And that's a really bigoted, closed-minded view.
And I think, I don't know, maybe about seven, eight years ago, they invented science.
And then science kind of told us what was really going on, that there's an infinite spectrum of genders.
And we're just now beginning to understand, really, the real truth that has been hidden from, I can't even keep a straight face, it's been hidden from us all this time.
Well, I mean, these insights could be applied to a lot of other things, right?
I mean, for example, it's been people tend to believe that human beings, for example, have two hands and two legs.
But of course, there are some people who are born with one arm.
There are people who are born with all kinds of maladies.
And so, presumably, this is a spectrum.
You can't simplistically say that we're born with two arms.
So explain to me, the Babylon Bee now has a sort of, I mean, you guys have a lot of doctors and biologists and psychologists on staff.
What is the process of consultation that led to this, I mean, this authoritative encyclopedia that you put out on the gender issue?
Well, what happened was we talked to a lot of biologists.
We talked to many very learned doctors.
We did a lot of scientific experiments here in our offices with a lot of beakers and chemicals and things like that.
And then what we ended up doing was we just ignored all that and we decided to follow our hearts.
Because that's really where the truth is found, is when you look inside.
We're millennials. We grew up with Disney cartoons, and this is what we learned our entire childhood was the message, follow your heart, and it will never lead you astray.
What you'll find in this book is just the result of us following that meandering path of whatever our heart told us that day.
And it does change every day, and that's okay.
It really doesn't matter as long as you swallow this ideology hook, line, and sinker.
That's the important thing if you want to be a good person.
Joel, you know, you guys are the, I mean, you are the experts on a topic like this.
I mean, this is so right up your alley.
It's not even funny. And it's something that I'm sure this is going to be immensely entertaining and enjoyable to so many people.
But let me ask you, kind of on a serious note, all of this started with the race issue.
You know, in other words, the discussion about the arbitrariness of distinctions was established in the 1950s and 60s over the race issue.
And it seems like what we have here is an expansion of victimology, by which I mean other groups that did not have the experience of blacks.
I mean, they were not enslaved, they were not segregated in the same way.
And nevertheless, they were, they piggybacked onto the black issue.
And they essentially said that if racial distinctions are arbitrary, then distinctions between males and females are equally arbitrary.
Distinctions of sexual preference is simply a matter of choice and so on.
So is that how we got on this strange road?
Is that what created the opportunity that you guys are now ruthlessly exploiting at the Babylon Bee, giving you all this great material for satire?
Yeah, it really is. I mean, as conservatives, we talk about cultural Marxism a lot.
But that's really what this all amounts to, is that, you know, Marxism wasn't working.
It wasn't taking root in America because we were so successful and we had so much upward mobility.
The lower class could become the middle class and the middle class could become the upper class.
And so they had to find a new innovative way to build a new proletariat for their revolution.
And so, yes, that started with race.
And then they kind of cobbled together a bunch of different identity groups to include sex, gender, sexual orientation.
And that's essentially what they're doing, is they're trying to create a homogeneous blob of acolytes who feel like they're oppressed, who feel like they are persecuted, and who are willing to blame all of their problems on whatever you want to call it, the system, the constitution, the establishment, and those kind of people will be very
obedient minions in a revolution like that.
We'll be right back with Joel Berry.
We're talking about the Babylon Bee Guide to Gender.
The website is, of course, babylonbee.com.
Guys, with the new movie coming out next month, there is no better time than to join my Locals channel.
And you can check it out for free.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you've got Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You can also interact with me directly.
I do a weekly live Q&A every Tuesday.
I did one yesterday. And no topic is off limits.
I've also uploaded some cool films to Locals, documentaries, feature films, both my films and films by other independent producers.
And you know about my new film, Police State.
Coming out the end of next month, you'll be getting the inside scoop, not to mention exclusive coverage on Locals.
And if you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch all this content, including the new film, For free.
So check out the channel. It's dinesh.locals.com.
By the way, if you're watching this podcast on Rumble at the top left-hand corner, a little red button that says join.
If you just click on that, it'll take you right to Locals to check it out.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, the website, dinesh.locals.com.
I'm back with Joel Berry, the managing editor of The Babylon Bee.
You can follow him on X, at Joel W. Berry, and the website, of course, The Babylon Bee.
We're talking about the book, The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender.
Joel, let me ask you about something that probably, you know, satire is something that when you see it, and we see the posts from The Babylon Bee, I share them on social media, they kind of make you chuckle.
The satire seems to be a way to very effectively make a point.
I don't know if you guys who do satire think about what it is.
What is satire, actually?
Is it mimicry?
Is it exaggeration?
Is it finding the thing that people are thinking about but don't really want to say?
How do you guys do it?
What's the sausage-making process here?
Yeah, it's kind of all those things.
Satire isn't pure comedy.
I mean, we do want to make people laugh, and that's important.
But we're also trying to make a point, and that involves exaggerating reality.
It involves getting in the head of a leftist to try to think about...
You know, progressivism kind of has a logical trajectory where you can kind of get in the head of a progressive.
You can kind of start to think about what's next.
What are they going to do next? What's the next ridiculous thing they might do?
And, yeah, what we find is what we come up with is this weird...
Almost alternate reality, kind of this clown world reality that is so ridiculous but also has this grain of truth to it to the point where some of our headlines come true.
We actually have a spreadsheet where we keep track.
I think we have close to 100 headlines that have come true after we publish them.
So we kind of skirt that line between truth and fiction in a funny way that really, sometimes it fools people.
Sometimes it makes a point, sometimes it makes people laugh, and we just have fun doing it.
I mean, the line between parody and reality seems to have gotten a little thinner, hasn't it?
I mean, I got a stern letter from The Atlantic, and this was a few weeks ago.
Someone had made a parody of The Atlantic, used their actual logo, and had this ridiculous article, but I thought it was from The Atlantic, because it could easily have been...
And so I sort of made fun of it, and then they wrote back and go, this is a masquerade.
This is not really from the Atlantic, and so on.
And I was like, wow, you know, if it's hard for me, and you know, I'm someone who's written in the Atlantic.
I've read it for 25 years.
If I can't tell the difference between parody, so you guys must have to deal with this, because to some degree, the craziness that you're describing is something that could conceivably happen, couldn't it?
Yes. Well, I mean, it's not a new problem, though.
I mean, G.K. Chesterton, we love G.K. Chesterton to be.
And 100 years ago, he wrote that satire has diminished in our epoch because the world has become too absurd to be satirized.
And it's always a struggle to try to stay ahead of the absurdity that we see in the news every day and try to be even more absurd than that.
Yeah. And there are times when the writers in the morning, you know, we're looking at the news, we're kind of trying to see what the topic of conversation is that day, what the news cycle is doing, we're kicking around headline ideas.
We'll sometimes come up with a great headline, only to find out that it already came true, like that morning or last week, and we have to come up with a different headline.
So we're always competing with reality.
I mean, take an example.
You're sitting around the table and you've got, of course, you're dealing with the gender phenomenon, right?
Which is to say, let's say, for example, someone goes, well, I'm not really a male.
I'm really a female.
I've always been a female.
I'm a female trapped in a male's body.
And you might think, okay, well, you know what?
What if somebody wants to become, let's say, a frog, right?
And so you go, wow, this is a great one.
Let's put this up on Babylon Bee.
But then you surf through social media and And you find that someplace, you know, it could be in New Zealand or it could be, you know, in Manchester, England, you have some guy in a frog outfit who's jumping around in a pond and he really thinks he is a frog.
And then you realize, wow!
Yeah, it's true. I mean, once you become unmoored and disconnected from the truth, you're really just opened up to anything.
I mean, it becomes bizarro world, and that's reflected in the book we wrote.
I mean, we had a lot of fun with it.
I like to say that, you know, when you look at the Babylon Bee headlines that we write, that's our writers that are most restrained and mature.
This book, we just went to town and kind of just dove off the deep end of insanity of this ideology.
And it was really fun. But the ironic thing is, is we didn't have to exaggerate gender theory that much for it to read like satire.
I mean, some of the stuff that you'll find in the book is ridiculous, but it's more or less a straight retelling of this ideology, which just is really funny to me.
What is the process of composition over at the Bee?
Is it essentially just the informal process of a bunch of guys who've got a good funny bone and a good eye for the ridiculous, and you all sit around and bounce ideas off of each other, and then some guy comes up with something and somebody else goes, well, that's not that funny.
How about this? Is that the process?
Yeah. Yeah, that's it.
I mean, we're all just regular guys.
I mean, not a lot of us are actually trained comedians here at The Bee.
We have day jobs.
We have some surgeons.
We have some engineers. We have some guys who work blue-collar jobs.
We all kind of share a common chat group.
That what I'm doing is I'm getting up early.
I'm looking at the news of the day.
I'm kind of maybe sending out a few hero stories that we want to hit on today.
And then we're just kicking back ideas back and forth, laughing our heads off, making fun of each other, punching up each other's jokes until we kind of find just the right phrasing for things.
It's just fun.
It doesn't feel like work at all.
I mean, it's a great time.
I mean, the other thing I really like about you guys is that you, it's almost like you've given rise to something that's not new historically, but new in our age, which is Christian satire.
In other words, Christianity is so often associated with, you know, pastoral kind of glumness and stuffiness.
And it's very rare, for example, there are a few pastors, by the way, who are really funny, but it's not the norm.
And you guys apply a satirical lens, not only to politics and to society, but also to the church.
Absolutely. And we think that's really important.
That's something that we've always kind of kept front and center of what we do is in addition to poking fun at the culture and poking fun at the other side, we have to be willing to turn that lens back towards ourselves and make fun of ourselves because we're all a little ridiculous.
You know, we all have our hypocrisies and our imperfections.
And, you know, especially as Christians, you know, there's There's reason for joy in what we do.
I think the dour reputation that Christians have earned over the years, it's heartening to see that kind of falling away because in a world where there's so much to be sad and frustrated and fearful about...
I think now more than ever, we need to be able to laugh and we need to remember where our hope lies.
You know, as Christians, our hope is in Jesus who is on the throne and who will win in the end.
And in the meantime, we can kind of have fun, you know, as kingdoms rise and fall and corruption happens and criminality happens and horrible things happen.
We fight for the truth.
We stand for the truth, but we can do it with joy because our hope isn't in this world.
Our hope lies somewhere else.
Boy, Joel, an excellent message for our time.
This is Joel Berry. You can follow him on X, at Joel W. Berry.
The book we're talking about, The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender.
Thank you, Joel. Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
I'm in the opening section of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and I've been focusing pretty closely on the actual language in the chapter that is titled Arrest.
I won't be going through the whole book with this level of precision or detail, But the introduction, I think, is very important, so I thought I would focus on it, do it slowly, and then I'm going to move more rapidly through the book by doing sort of snapshots of important scenes that, when put together, give you a really good feeling for what's in this book and what the book is about, and also what we can learn from the book today.
Well, in a section where Solzhenitsyn is talking uncharacteristically about his own experience, about why when arrested, and it wasn't just a moment of arrest.
He was arrested, he was transported, he was interrogated.
He never cried out for help, or he never cried out at the injustice being done.
He never brought his case to the attention of people, even though on many occasions there were bystanders, there were observers, there were onlookers.
Somehow he, well...
In a way, he censored himself, and the question he's examining here is, why did he do that?
So, here we go.
Solzhenitsyn writing about himself.
I kept silent, too, in the Polish city of Brodnika, but maybe they didn't understand Russian there.
I didn't call out one word on the streets of Bialystok, but maybe it wasn't a matter that concerned the Poles.
I didn't utter a sound at Volkhovsk Station, but there were very few people there.
Now what is Solzhenitsyn getting at?
He's getting at the mental resistance to doing the natural thing and the thing that is most likely to save you which is screaming out for help and he goes, the mind is constantly coming up with excuses for why you shouldn't do it.
He's in Poland. I can't cry out now because they don't speak Russian, these people.
Or, I can't cry out now because I'm still in Poland.
And what do the Poles care about what's happening in Russia?
And I can't cry out now because even though I am in Russia, look, there are just a handful of people at the station.
What can they do? Probably they're not going to want to get involved.
So Solzhenitsyn here is...
Explaining why, even at a time of crisis, when your best hope is to yell, people don't do that.
And then he goes on to say, I walked along the Minsk station platform besides the same bandits, meaning the guys who are escorting him, the bad guys, as if nothing were amiss.
And he says, and then he's leading people through the station, and then he sees watching the people, and now there are more of them, Muscovites, people from Moscow.
They keep coming in an endless ribbon from down there, from the depths of ignorance.
So they're coming up an escalator.
And for Solzhenitsyn, they're coming up almost from the depths of their own ignorance.
Why? Because they're Russians.
They themselves are targets of the police state.
They are vulnerable.
And yet they act as if they aren't.
Oh, I've got my briefcase.
I've got my coffee. I'm heading off to work.
It's a normal day.
This is a normal life that I'm living.
They kept coming in an endless ribbon from down there, from the depths of ignorance.
On and on, beneath the gleaming dome, reaching toward me for at least one word of truth.
So why did I keep silent?
Now, Solzhenitsyn is imagining the scene.
He's imagining as if these people are desperate to know what's going on.
They want to know, but they don't know.
And so, there's only one person right now who can tell them, at least on the scene.
That's him. He's being arrested.
And yet... His job, which is to let them know, you are all in danger.
This is like the animal warning the herd.
He goes, I didn't do it.
I never took that step.
Every man always has a handy, every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.
Now, the irony, of course, is that you're not sacrificing yourself by yelling out.
In fact, it's your best hope of having some public resistance or a public outcry or people demanding to know what's going on, and yet people, against their own interests, refuse to speak out.
Solzhenitsyn continues,"...some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry." And then he says in parentheses, So here we have...
This very interesting juxtaposition of Solzhenitsyn in the present.
This is Solzhenitsyn in the process of being arrested.
And then Solzhenitsyn, the author, the kind of wiser Solzhenitsyn, who's been through his arrest, who's served his eight years, who is now writing the book.
And Solzhenitsyn goes, look, Solzhenitsyn, the author, Solzhenitsyn, the writer, knows that...
You shouldn't worry about the fact that, hey, if I cry out, they're going to give me a stronger penalty.
They're going to be really upset.
I'm not going to have any chance to talk my way out of this.
And Solzhenitsyn's point is, if only you knew, there is no way to talk yourself out of this.
No. They're already going to give you the worst possible sentence.
There's nothing you can do at this point to make your situation worse.
And so screaming out in the small window that you have is your only chance to make things better.
And if only you knew then what Solzhenitsyn knows now.
So you almost have Solzhenitsyn looking back at his younger self and saying, Wow, Solzhenitsyn, you had a chance to cry out.
Maybe it wouldn't have worked, but maybe it would.
So why didn't you? Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection