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Oct. 2, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:38
THE INSURRECTIONIST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep676
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Coming up, I'll make my case for why Democratic Representative Jamal Bowman should be charged just like the January 6th protesters.
But will he be? I'll explore the clash between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Representative Matt Gaetz about, tells you something about the state of the Republican Party.
And Robert Epstein, author and psychologist, joins me.
We're going to talk about the perfidy of Google and other censorship platforms.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, or watching on Rumble, please subscribe to my channel.
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.
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I want to make an announcement about the movie Police Date.
We are going to release our official trailer today.
And I'm really excited about this.
The trailer is just a more extended trailer.
Version than the teaser.
A teaser is kind of like a 90-second tease, a little glimpse of what's coming in the movie.
The trailer gives you really a fuller picture, and this is, in my view, an emotionally riveting film.
I urge you to watch it and also to share it, because that's how we get the word out.
We want people to be widely aware of the film.
I want to do my best to get the message completely out to Republicans and conservatives, but also reach independents, reach even Democrats, because this is a problem for the whole country.
Because I think if I can get some independents and Democrats to watch this movie, they'll be blown away.
So you can help me with that process by getting the word out.
Now, I also want to say that we are also putting up on the website today information about our virtual premiere.
So we will have a theatrical release of the film on two days, October 23rd and October 25th.
But we also have a virtual premiere of the film out of a magnificent studio in Las Vegas.
It's essentially a giant Zoom call.
For 2,000 Meals, I believe we had 80,000 people who sort of checked in.
We typically have some live music.
We screen the entire movie.
This virtual premiere will be followed by an audience Q&A with Dan Bongino and me.
It's going to be amazing.
And you can buy tickets to the virtual premiere, just like you can buy tickets for the theater, all on the website, which is PoliceStateFilm.net.
Now, let me turn to Representative Jamal Bowman.
And this is the guy, the Democrat, who pulled the fire alarm.
Why did he pull the fire alarm?
Because he wanted to get time.
The Democrats didn't want to have a vote.
This is all, of course, about the shutdown.
It's all about Ukraine funding.
But I'm focusing on Jamal Bowman's sort of heavy-handed tactics here.
He goes, listen, if I've Pull the alarm.
It'll create a shutdown of the whole building.
What was he doing?
Well, guess what? He's doing obstruction of an official proceeding.
A familiar term, or should be, because this is exactly what January 6th people, our protesters, are in prison for.
And of course, Trump is all over it.
He goes, basically, when will his trial begin?
He goes, when will Congressman Jamal Bowman be prosecuted and imprisoned for very dangerously pulling and setting off the main fire alarm system in order to stop a congressional vote that was going on in D.C.? Now, suddenly the left has realized, oh, oh, oh, this is a bit of a problem because we've been ruthlessly locking up these January 6th guys, in some cases, for long periods of time for this exact offense.
So now they have to come to the defense of Bowman, and Bowman has come up with a defense that makes no sense.
He basically says, in effect, that he pulled the fire alarm by mistake.
Mm-hmm. Now, how can you do this?
First of all, it is worth noting that Jamal Bowman is a former school superintendent.
He has been to innumerable fire drills.
He's acting like he misread the sign.
And I'm actually looking at the sign.
Let me look at the sign. Emergency exit only.
Push until alarm sounds.
Door will unlock in 30 seconds.
Now, there's nothing unclear about that.
In other words, only use this if there's an emergency.
If you push the alarm, the alarm will sound and the door will open.
Why? Because in an emergency, you have to be able to get out of every door.
Now, interestingly, this guy pushes the fire alarm, and does he go racing out of the door?
No, he doesn't. He actually leaves later by a different exit.
His goal was quite obviously to shut down the proceeding.
And here's the point.
Now, here's Kevin McCarthy, you know, on television, and he was like, I'm very disappointed.
This was just a disappointing tactic.
Now, we don't need this kind of rhetoric.
Here's what we need. We need the Republicans in a unified way to press forward.
For criminal charges to be brought against Representative Bowman.
I'm looking at the statute here, by the way, 18 U.S. Code 1512, obstruction of an official proceeding.
It talks about obstructing, influencing, or impeding any official proceeding or attempts to do so.
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years or both.
This guy could be facing a 20-year sentence.
Now, will he? I would predict no.
But of course, what the left is going to do is come up with gymnastics about why, oh no, he made an honest error.
Well, for the January 6th protesters, there are no such available defenses.
You obstructed the proceeding.
In fact, in some cases, people are getting locked up, are getting penalties and We're good to go.
I think this is a case where Republicans need to apply to the Democrats their own medicine.
Don't just say, oh, this was just a sneaky tactic on his part.
Follow through and demand that if no one is above the law, if the law is going to be applied evenly to everyone, it should be also to Representative Jamal Bowman.
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I just have a couple of brief words to say about this craziness that's going on between Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz.
Now, I'm not interested here in trying to referee who is right on the substance.
I mean, I could talk about that.
I guess there's an argument to be made on both sides.
So the argument to be made on Kevin McCarthy's side is that Kevin McCarthy thinks that perhaps it would be damaging to Republicans if there was a government shutdown.
Republicans need to show that they're being responsible in governance.
Kevin McCarthy also could be, as some Republicans are, supporters of the Ukraine effort.
And they believe that money should continue to go to Ukraine.
It is in our national interest to support Ukraine from what was clearly an invasion coming from the Russian side.
I don't...
I agree with that in the sense that I think that Ukraine is pretty remote from our national interests.
And so I don't object to supporting Ukraine, but what I object to is the degree, the amount of money, the sort of blank check that Zelensky seems to be demanding.
But I agree that this is a reasonable dispute that Republicans can and are having with each other, some on the Ukraine side and some not.
But evidently there's a little bit of a kamikaze-ism going on here where Matt Gaetz says, I'm going to make a motion to vacate and get Kevin McCarthy removed.
And I think Matt Gaetz's point, which is not invalid, is that Kevin McCarthy made specific pledges to Republicans in the House that I will do this and I will do that.
You remember Gaetz was part of an original faction that was not going to vote for McCarthy.
They seem to have come to some sort of a deal.
And Gates' point is he's reneging on the deal.
Now, I think from McCarthy's point of view, Matt Gates is sort of not playing on the team.
He's acting like probably he thinks like a juvenile.
He's taking his toys and running away.
And Kevin McCarthy is in an awkward position because if he has enough Republicans who are against him, he might need the votes of Democrats to stay in his job.
This is all just completely disgraceful.
And I say that because can you imagine this ever happening to Nancy Pelosi?
Can you ever see Nancy Pelosi facing such a combat within her own side?
No. She tames the progressive.
She gives them enough to keep them happy.
And they recognize that they need reciprocally to support Nancy Pelosi.
And they do. And so my question is, why can't we have this kind of arrangement on the conservative side where...
Yeah, there are people of different ideological stripes.
They're not exactly all in the same camp, but nevertheless, they're on the same side, and they're facing the same kind of threat from the other side.
Why can't they learn a little better to work together like the Democrats do?
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Dr.
Robert Epstein. He is Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
He's a Harvard PhD, former Editor-in-Chief of Psychology Today.
He's an author.
He's also taught at a number of universities, Boston University, University of California, Harvard University, and he has a tech watch project which is aimed at monitoring Google and other big tech companies, which he says, manipulating our elections and indoctrinating our children. Dr. Epstein, welcome and thanks for joining me. This is a really startling
development that we see with these online platforms.
Isn't it true that when these When these digital platforms started, they were dedicated to what seemed like a libertarian principle of open information, sharing information, uniting the world, shortening distances between people.
And all of that somehow seems to have been pushed aside.
First of all, is that an accurate description of what's happened?
And what brought about this amazing change?
That's a very accurate description.
In fact, one of the first executives to quit Google, James Whittaker, a long time ago, almost 15 years ago now, when he quit, he said that when he first joined Google, it was this amazing environment of creativity and goodwill.
And he said then he realized at some point it's changed into something else.
He said it changed into a kind of a ruthless business, an advertising company, and he just couldn't stand it anymore, and so he left.
Very few people, though, have left, believe it or not, because the money is unbelievable.
I mean, this company has likely made more millionaires and billionaires than any other company in the world.
It's very hard for people to leave there just...
Just because of the money, it's really a shame.
But yes, it's changed and so has Facebook.
And they have become ruthless companies of not only monetizing our personal data, But also, in the case of Google, of wanting to conduct very large-scale social engineering around the world, we know this from multiple leaks from the company, from whistleblowers, leaked documents and videos.
There's simply no question at all.
When I began my research on Google, which was more than 11 years ago, There still wasn't that much that was clear about what they're doing.
Now things are very clear.
And it's quite frightening.
The more we have learned about what this company and to a lesser extent some other tech companies are doing, the more concerned we've grown.
It's beyond anything envisioned in those famous novels, 1984 and Brave New World.
It's beyond anything anyone's ever envisioned.
And it's operating on a scale that no one ever envisioned either.
Literally, Google is now impacting deliberately and strategically the thoughts and behaviors of more than 5 billion people around the world, generally speaking, without anyone's knowledge, generally speaking, without even leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.
Although I have a solution to that problem.
Wow.
I'd like to come, I'd like to dive into in a moment what Google is doing and how.
But let's stay for a moment with the issue of this change that we've been talking about with these tech companies.
You mentioned that they've...
They're driven by advertising revenue and perhaps corporate motives.
But obviously, that's money.
That's one motive for why people do certain things.
But it also seems that, and this is especially true with Google, but also Facebook, with the money and with the influence and the reach comes enormous power.
And of course, we have Lord Acton, the absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Do you think that these guys...
Is it the money, or is it just the fact that they suddenly realize, guess what?
We are controlling the searches of people around the planet, and so we have this power.
Why not use it?
I think that's exactly what happened.
I think it crept up on them.
And at some point, they realized that they could, from their perspective, they could do good for the world.
And that's when the very deliberate social engineering began.
One of the videos that leaked from Google a couple of years ago is called the selfish ledger.
If you look up my name, Robert Epstein, and the selfish ledger, you'll come to a transcript of it that I made, which I've annotated.
And from there, you can get to a link that will bring you to the leaked video.
It's an eight minute video made by their advanced products division.
And it literally is about the ability that the company has to reengineer humanity.
They call it behavioral sequencing.
And they literally says, according to.
to Bye.
Google's values.
I thought it said company values.
I went back and double-checked yesterday, and it actually says according to Google's values.
So this is not my imagination.
This is quite real, and this has been confirmed again and again by whistleblowers, people who've either been fired or quit the company, like Whitaker did years ago.
The company is a frightening place.
Now, they don't see it that way, of course.
They see themselves as do-gooders.
Fine. I actually agree with a lot of their values, but I don't want that much power in the hands of a private company that is in no way accountable to the American public or to any other public anywhere in the world.
Let's take a pause. We'll be right back with Dr.
Robert Epstein. By the way, his website.
And this is a place also where you can support his work.
It's mygoogleresearch.com, mygoogleresearch.com.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with Dr.
Robert Epstein, Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
His website, mygoogleresearch.com.
Dr. Epstein...
Let's talk a little bit about you, because you mentioned at the end of the last segment that some of these values, maybe even many of them, that Google is promoting, in terms of the substance, you might agree with them.
You are actually not a conservative Republican.
You're not making an ideological critique of Google, per se.
Talk a little bit about the fact that why, as a Democrat, as someone who would be, I would say, perhaps center-left in your politics— You nevertheless see this as a big problem.
Well, first of all, I'm not a Democrat.
I definitely have been center-left, I think, my whole life.
But I don't believe in the party system.
I'm with the founding fathers on that issue with Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and others.
Jefferson actually said, if the only way I could get to heaven would be to join a party, I wouldn't go.
So, I'm anti-party, but yes, I do lean left, and I don't think the agenda Google has is necessarily a bad thing, but I put myself into a terrible position personally in doing the work that I do,
which is basically discovering new forms of manipulation that have been made possible by the internet for It's gathering evidence, overwhelming evidence, court admissible evidence showing that Google and to a lesser extent other companies are using these techniques to manipulate elections and indoctrinate children.
I've put myself into a terrible position.
I literally have friends and family that won't talk to me anymore.
I mean, no matter, you know, a lot of my friends now are, I call them right-wing conservative nutcases to their faces and they laugh.
They think I'm joking. The fact is I'm in a terrible position personally.
It's gotten worse and worse over the years.
I've actually been cut off now from mainstream media, which has been my home most of my life.
I mean, I have lots of friends in mainstream media because I used to be editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine.
And I've published in USA Today and Time Magazine and so on.
These people have cut me off completely.
So I guess I'm like Dershowitz in that sense.
I'm after the truth.
And the truth, as my team and I have discovered, is terrifying.
So that's it.
To me... That the truth is more important than my political leanings to me.
America, which I happen to love, and our system of government, which I admire more than any other, is more important than any candidate or party.
And that's what I'm after.
I'm just trying to To find out what's really going on, and I have found out, and I'm trying to let people know about what I found, and I'm trying to come up with ways of stopping these companies from doing what they're doing, which is horrendous, and operating on a scale that's never been possible before in human history.
We're talking about power that no dictator ever even imagined.
That's where we are at this point.
And so I'm just doing what I need to do, putting aside personal values, personal leanings.
And in some cases, again, this has caused tremendous trouble in my personal life.
I'm assuming that the people who are excluding you and the people who once, for example, would feature your work that are not doing it now, it's not because they have discovered that your current work is somehow riddled with errors or that you're making claims that they have somehow demonstrated to be false.
It almost appears like they know or they must know that Google is doing all this, but they approve of it.
And they go, wow, why is this guy who we thought was on our side kind of exposing this?
Because exposing it might actually bring this to an end or might in some ways undermine what Google is trying to do.
And so here's my question.
The left, going back to the 1960s, was the champion of free speech, was...
Hostile to government collusion with private institutions, did not like, for example, the concept of censorship at all.
Do you think that there has been a seismic ideological shift, in a sense in your own camp, that has now made the team more hospitable to suppression and censorship and indoctrination in a way that you can no longer or you can't stomach?
Well, it does trouble me that a lot of the suppression of content now is coming from people on the left.
That troubles me greatly.
But I do see the other side as well, because the fact is there are plenty of conservatives now who are involved in trying to remove books, From school libraries, that's been going on a very long time.
There's censorship on both sides, but it's true that the left, generally speaking, was not known for doing that.
Now, you know, the very words that we utter are being...
There's pressure on us not to speak in certain ways.
I mean, there's pressure that I've never seen before, and that kind of pressure is definitely coming from my friends, my former friends on the left.
So, you know, you're pointing to some serious problems here.
I'm trying to avoid The partisanship, I'm trying to avoid all of that and focus on the real issue here, which people are unaware of.
namely that some big tech companies, Google in particular, now have certain powers to shift people's thinking and behavior, which had never existed before. They have those powers exclusively because they're monopolies and they have no competitors. They're exercising these powers, these powers, whether you know it or not, are shifting the thinking and behavior and votes of billions of people around the world as of
2015, upwards of 20, 25% of the national elections in the world were being decided by Google. That number has gone up considerably since then. I'm just trying to just show you the scale of the problem. In 2020, Google shifted more than 6 million votes to Joe Biden, whom I supported at the time.
In 2024, if the system I've been building to stop them, which is what we call the TechWatch Project or America's digital shield, if that system is not fully implemented in 2024, in the presidential election,
Google will shift between 6.4 and 25.5 million votes to To one presidential candidate, generally speaking, without anyone knowing what they're doing and with no way to counteract what they're doing.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with Dr.
Robert Epstein. His website, mygoogleresearch.com.
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Get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Dr.
Robert Epstein, Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
His website, mygoogleresearch.com.
Dr. Epstein, you just described a moment ago, Google interfering actively, not just in the US election, but other elections around the world, shifting a not inconsequential, but actually very consequential number of votes, particularly in a relatively evenly divided election.
So perhaps providing the margin of difference.
Talk for a little bit about how you discovered, I mean, you're putting very precise numbers on this.
How do you measure this?
How do you track it, in other words?
And then talk a little bit about what can be done to stop this.
I'm assuming that there might be some people on the left who would say something like, Google's a private corporation.
They can do this if they want to.
But you're talking about election interference on a massive scale.
Yes, in fact, I want to go back to one word that you mentioned, inconsequential.
A lot of my new conservative friends are focused on things like ballot harvesting and ballot stuffing and ballot this and ballot that.
What they don't understand is all of that thinking, that obsession with these conspiracy theories is actually being pushed by Google and Facebook and to a lesser sense some other tech companies.
It's a kind of misdirection like magicians use.
No story can go viral unless these companies allow it to go viral or make it go viral.
All those stories that have obsessed people are pushed by the tech companies because they don't want you looking at them.
So what you're saying is that they're altering things before you even see it.
And so that's the invisible part of the manipulation.
And most people are looking for solutions in the wrong place.
Completely the wrong place.
And they're looking at manipulations, which are real, but they're inconsequential, to use your term.
They shift here and there a few thousand votes.
Google is shifting votes by the millions, using extremely powerful techniques which people generally can't see.
My team and I have been studying, discovering, quantifying those techniques.
Since 2013, we've been presenting our results at scientific meetings.
We've been publishing in some of the top peer-reviewed journals in the world.
The first one we discovered is called SEAM, Search Engine Manipulation Effect.
If you go to searchenginemanipulationeffect.com, you actually see our first publication on this discovery that was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.
We've discovered about a dozen of these techniques now.
We know they have this power from controlled studies.
We've also learned to do to them what they do to us and our kids 24 hours a day, and that is to track them.
So you ask, how do I know they're shifting these votes, and how do I know these exact numbers?
Because we're tracking them.
24 hours a day.
At this point in time, we are tracking Google and other platforms through the computers of more than 11,700 registered voters in all 50 states through the devices of more than 2,000 children We have so far preserved more than 45, no, excuse me, we're up to 46 million ephemeral experiences on Google and other platforms.
Ephemeral experiences, what are those?
Those are the techniques that these companies use to manipulate us.
We know that from leaked emails from Google.
Femoral experiences are those fleeting experiences we have when we see search results or search suggestions or answer boxes or news feeds.
They affect us.
They disappear. They're stored nowhere.
They're gone forever. We have learned how to preserve them and to analyze them very, very quickly.
You will soon have access to a public dashboard where we'll be showing you our findings day by day by day In real time, that's at americasdigitalshield.com.
You can go there now and see the mock-up.
It's really extraordinary. And we are collecting and analyzing these data 24 hours a day.
We are measuring the manipulation as it is occurring.
When we have done this before and shared our results with members of Congress, They have sent a threatening letter.
It's happened once so far to the CEO of Google, and Google stopped.
They literally stopped.
The same day they got that letter, they turned off all the manipulations, which include things such as sending partisan go vote reminders on their home page.
Imagine that.
For example, in the state of Florida in 2022, 100% of liberals were getting go vote reminders on Google's home page, only 59% of conservatives.
That is a blatant and massive vote manipulation because that home page is seen 500 million times a day in the United States.
If Google is doing that nationwide, and they are, in the presidential election on election day alone, that gives their candidate more than 450,000 additional votes.
So we have been studying this and using very rigorous scientific techniques.
We know the numbers, and I'm just going to repeat what I said before.
If our monitoring system is not fully implemented, and we need your help by the way, and your audience's help to make this happen.
If that is not fully implemented within the next few months, and we're getting there, we're getting close, but we need a lot more money to make this operational in all 50 states at the scale that it needs to exist.
If we do not set that system up to make these companies accountable to the public for the first time, Google alone will be able to shift between 6.4 and 25.5 million votes in 2024 in the presidential election.
This is not small-scale stuff.
This is huge.
This is not ballot stuffing.
This is worldwide social engineering.
We must stop this.
This is not optional.
This is a moral imperative.
We must stop this.
I mean, it's a clear and present danger, it seems to me, to democracy, but also, more broadly speaking, to freedom.
We've got to have you back, Dr.
Epstein. This is just so eye-opening and frightening, to be honest.
By the way, a website where people can support your work, mygoogleresearch.com.
Dr. Robert Epstein, thank you for joining me.
My pleasure.
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I'm in section two of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and he's talking about the emptying of whole groups of people, whole nations, into the prison camps that are collectively known as the Gulag.
And he starts off in this section by talking about the fact that people are arrested on the basis of lists.
In other words, the government has a list.
You get on the list one way or the other.
It could be you're an informant.
It could be that they saw your name in the newspaper.
It could be that you showed up for a rally.
It could be something you even said casually and somehow word got back.
Point is, you get on the list and then you're sort of done for.
Arrested on the basis of lists.
Free people were simply arrested and executed immediately.
So some people didn't even make it to the gulag.
They're shot before they even get there.
From January 1919 on, Farmers who don't want to go along with collectivized farming.
Collectivized farming is where you grow your crops and you turn them into the government.
The government takes your crops and then they distribute it as they see fit.
So if you resist this, you protest, you try to block what the government is doing, you'll be arrested, you'll be executed.
Next, Solzhenitsyn talks about religious people.
He goes, So, think of this. What Solzhenitsyn is getting at, these are sort of the standard groups that get targeted, and somehow the religious believers find themselves in this.
And it's kind of a good question as to why, because clearly the religious believers aren't mounting armed resistance.
They don't pose a threat in that sense.
But perhaps they pose a threat in positing a deity, a higher object of worship than the state.
And this is, in a sense, their real crime.
Monks and nuns, write Solzhenitsyn, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, sent into exile.
They arrested and sentenced active laymen.
And so, they're just going after anybody who has a religious affinity.
True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith, but for openly declaring their convictions and bringing up their children in the same spirit.
And then Solzhenitsyn ironically quotes a poet, as Tanya Kotkiewicz wrote, You can pray freely, but just so God alone can hear.
You're allowed to have faith, but you've got to keep it to yourself.
If you talk to people about it, if you post about it, if you preach about it, even if you raise your own children in that faith, that's not allowed.
The faith has got to sort of stay within you and never, you might say, exit your lips.
Now, this poet who sarcastically exposed the kind of strangeness of this government edict, you can pray by yourself, but not so anyone can hear, she gets 10 years prison time for these verses.
A person convinced he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children.
In the 20s, the religious education of children was a political crime under Article 5810.
In other words, counter-revolutionary propaganda.
And the only way out once you're arrested as a religious believer, says Solzhenitsyn, is you have to renounce your religion publicly.
And he goes, this did not happen very often.
But sometimes you have two parents who are called up on religious charges and one parent undertakes the sort of awful burden of Renouncing the faith but not renouncing the faith really but it's like I denounce my faith Why so I can now go home and look after the kids. So sometimes it's a dad who does that sometimes it's the mom He goes throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith all persons convicted of religious activity
received tenors, the longest term then given.
So Solzhenitsyn puts this word tenor in italics.
What does he mean? Ten years.
Tenor is ten years in incarceration.
And then he says, in the 20s, waves appeared that were purely national in character.
What does he mean by national?
Well, he's talking about nationalities.
Different types of ethnic or social groups are collectively targeted.
It's not that they're targeting this individual for that or another individual for.
We're targeting groups and we're rounding them up as a group.
In 1931, a grandiose trial of the Working Peasants Party was being prepared.
On the grounds that they existed as an enormous organized underground force among the rural intelligentsia, Solzhenitsyn goes on to say that, first of all, this was a complete fabrication.
There was no rural intelligence here plotting against the government, but for whatever reason, the government targets these guys.
And he says that they were accused of preparing to overthrow the dictatorship of the proletariat.
At the trial, this working peasant's party was referred to as if it was already well-known and under detention.
And then, says Solzhenitsyn, then all of a sudden, one lovely night, Stalin reconsidered.
Stalin changed his mind.
Why? Maybe we will never know.
Did he perhaps wish to save his soul?
Solzhenitsyn is here being ironic.
I wouldn't say funny, but ironic in a bitter way.
Did his sense of humor come to the fore?
Was it all so deadly, monotonous, so bitter-tasting?
So, in other words, Stalin is just worn down by all the misery of just arresting people upon people.
So, he just goes, you know what?
I'll change my mind. Let's have a moment of levity.
Let's let these guys go, if only as a joke.
But then, says Solzhenitsyn, but no one would dare accuse Stalin of having a sense of humor.
I mean, this guy, he doesn't need the relief of laughter.
He doesn't mind being a dictator through and through.
He goes, likeliest of all, Stalin simply figured out the whole countryside would soon die of famine anyway.
So why go to all the trouble?
And instantly the whole trial was called off.
So here Solzhenitsyn is highlighting the completely arbitrary, lawless nature of the police state.
The police state is a ruthless engine.
They make lists. They arrest you.
But they're not even consistent with all that.
It's not even like, okay, you know what?
We've got a system of harsh repression.
We're going to carry it out even-handedly.
Suddenly Stalin decides, well...
Eh, I'm going to let these people go.
So suddenly, in fact, they've all confessed to their crimes, so now they're allowed to repudiate their confessions.
Their crimes are essentially overturned by government edict, and they are mysteriously exonerated.
You might remember in Loudoun County, Virginia, there was a big controversy several months ago involving cases of harassment by trans individuals in the school district that were being covered up and no action taken by the administration and by the school board.
And as all of this came to light, and there became an investigation, teachers began to now talk about what was happening in the school district.
The former school superintendent, a guy named Scott Ziegler, was charged with a crime.
Now the crime is a misdemeanor, but nevertheless it's a misdemeanor which carries a possible 12 months in prison.
And the misdemeanor in this case was retaliating against a teacher who had cooperated with the Virginia investigators about what was going on in the school district.
So the teacher is a former special ed teacher named Aaron Brooks.
And what happened was, when the Republican Attorney General of Virginia, Jason Meares, began investigating this, what's going on in this school, They spoke to this teacher, his investigators did, asking her is it the fact that a bathroom rape that had occurred supposedly by a transgender perpetrator had been covered up?
And this teacher, Brooks, said, well, I don't know about that, but guess what?
I can tell you about a sexual assault that occurred that I'm personally familiar with.
That, in other words, there was a culture of tolerance in the school district for this kind of abuse.
And evidently what she was referring to was the fact that when she was in class, there was a student with disabilities who was going around basically grabbing the genitals of teachers.
What?
Well, I mean, obviously the student has intellectual disabilities, so something's going on here, but clearly something should be done about this.
The student evidently was, had targeted her, the teacher, Erin Brooks, and also the teaching assistant, a woman named Lori VanderMeulen.
And dozens of times a day, this student was grabbing their crotch, grabbing their genitals.
So they report this to the administration, and this is the part you're going to find hard to believe.
The administration, instead of approaching the student, instead of dealing with the matter, here's what they did.
They gave these teachers a block of cardboard and said, hold this in front of your genitals.
So, in other words, block the student from being able to manhandle you, so to speak, or touch you in an inappropriate way by using this cardboard.
And this was their so-called solution.
So anyway, Erin Brooks tells the government investigators this.
And right away, in motion is now a strategy to remove this teacher.
So not to remove the student causing the problems, but let's figure out how to get this teacher fired, why she's cooperating with the authorities.
And the two people involved here are the principal of the school, a woman named Diane Mackey.
Now, and also the superintendent, Scott Ziegler.
Basically, what happens is Diane Mackey makes a recommendation that the teacher should be removed, fired, and the school superintendent agrees and approves, and then the teacher is fired.
Now, interestingly, this principal, Diane Mackey, had herself, just shortly before that, given a kind of glowing recommendation to the teacher.
The teacher's doing a great job.
So, later, when they turn around to fire her, they can't say, hey, listen, we're firing you because you're cooperating with an investigation.
We're firing you because you're responding to a subpoena.
No, no. So, they act like we're firing you because you're not a very good teacher.
There have been all these reports against you.
But, of course, it came out in the trial that, no, this very same principal had glowingly evaluated the teacher, and there had been no further interaction, no further incidents, no further reason for the principal to change her assessment.
The only reason to do it was that this teacher was now cooperating, you may say, with the cops, And as a result, she had become a traitor, persona non grata.
She's not loyal to the district.
She's not helping us with the cover-up.
And so we're going to get rid of her.
So this is a terrific result.
It would be really nice to see the superintendent in handcuffs.
Actually, this is an example of how Republicans need to use power because you have genuine abuse by the Democrats.
It's It's just that a lot of times the Republican Attorney General is going to be like, well, we're not going to get into that.
It's going to look bad. We're going to be attacked in the Washington Post.
No. In this case, hold these guys accountable.
This is how you bust up their little deceitful operations.
And in a way, what's going on in Loudoun County, it's a miniature of what's going on at the national level.
This kind of corruption is now pervasive in the country.
So it's really a very good lesson to To Republican attorneys general across the country.
Look for incidents like this.
Go after these kinds of people.
Put some handcuffs on them.
Convict them. Lock them up.
This is going to help reverse not only these injustices themselves, but the overall tide of political prosecution that right now is Democratic prosecutors, Republican targets.
What we need to see? Republican prosecutors, Democratic targets.
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