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Oct. 23, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:06
OPENING DAY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep691
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Coming up, I'll offer a sneak preview of Police State on the movie's opening day in theaters.
Former Air Marshal Sonia Labasco joins me.
She's featured in the film.
She'll reveal a startling piece of new information about January 6th.
I'll also explore whether the $200,000 direct payment to Joe Biden is a big deal, and I'll consider the split in the GOP as revealed by the House Speaker impasse.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dimash Kudaibergen 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.
It's opening day for Police State.
And I gotta say, I'm...
Well, I don't know if excited about this movie is quite the right phrase because it is a movie with very alarming content.
Alarming content that matches the alarming content that's going on in the country.
I've said in a couple of interviews that this is not a frightening movie because of the techniques of cinematography.
It's a frightening movie because America is reaching a frightening place.
The movie couldn't be more timely.
We conceived it many months ago.
It's obviously a process of putting it all together.
It has new information on so many different fronts, new information about Trump, new information about January 6th.
In fact, a whole new way of looking at January 6th.
All kinds of ordinary people that you don't know or you maybe know of, but you don't know the details, who have come face to face with the police state, felt the hot breath of the police state on their face.
And even the things happening right around us all tie into the movie, even though they clearly came after the movie was finished.
You know, here's this young fellow Mackie, Doug Mackie, who is going to prison for seven months for making a meme, a satirical meme about Hillary Clinton.
This guy is mentioned in the movie.
Joe Biden, we find out today, and I'll talk about this, gets $200,000 by check from his brother, James Biden.
It says loan repayment, but the loan repayment thing is a scam.
There's no original loan, at least none that we know of.
So Biden corruption, that's in the movie.
The FBI told Newsweek that they have created a MAGA target category.
They're actually targeting Trump supporters.
This stuff is in the movie.
The intelligence failure that led to the Hamas attacks, not just the Israeli intelligence failure, but the U.S. intelligence failure.
Well, what's the cause of the intelligence failure if not that our intelligence agencies are looking elsewhere?
That's in the movie.
This is, again, an effort to shut down the leading candidate of the Republican Party as his campaign is getting underway.
So all of this is police state territory.
Now our theaters are filling up rapidly.
In fact, we can sort of gauge this because we measure against the metric of 2000 meals, which came out, well, about a year and a half ago, and we're selling more tickets for police state than we did for 2000 meals.
So do not delay.
If you can see the movie today, fantastic.
There are evening shows all over the country.
There are some tickets available.
Some theaters are full, but others are not.
And then more tickets for Wednesday.
That's going to be your last chance to see the movie in the theater.
It'll later be available in other ways.
There's a virtual premiere on Friday, October 27th.
So if you can't go to the theater, don't freak out.
Just go on the website, policestatefilm.net, click on the virtual premiere button.
You'll see it's out of this magnificent studio in Las Vegas.
We're going to have Forgiato Blow perform his song.
The full screening of the movie.
Live Q&A with Dan Bongino and me to follow.
And that's all for the price of a movie ticket.
So, you can't make the theater.
I totally understand. This is the next best way and the next fastest way to see the movie.
I've been doing a pretty frenetic movie tour.
And Debbie and I were in the Miami Palm Beach area.
We did Dave Rubin's podcast.
That'll be out today.
I went to Dallas and did Steven Crowder's podcast.
That'll be out today.
Debbie says, oh yes, of course I did Steve Bannon's War Room as well.
And that was live.
I'm going to be doing Glenn Beck today.
So it's kind of a flurry of getting the word out.
And it's very interesting these days.
It's not even so much. It used to be with earlier films, I'd be like focusing so much on Fox.
We'd advertise on Fox. Fox has not even contacted me.
Dead silence from Fox.
I think probably there's a ban, and this is so weird, because the topics of police state are not taboo at Fox.
But somehow I got on the taboo list, it seems, from 2000 Mules.
Anyway, I don't know, and quite honestly, I don't even care.
We're gonna make this movie successful, Fox or no Fox.
Welcome to my show!
Or hashtag PoliceStateFilm.
And if you do that on Truth Social, if you do that on Getter, or if you do that on X, formerly Twitter, I am quite likely to see it on one of those three platforms if you do the hashtag PoliceState or hashtag PoliceStateFilm.net.
See you at the movies.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast someone who is featured in the new film, Police State.
Her name is Sonia LaBosco.
She's a retired supervisory federal air marshal.
And she is also the founder of Air Marshal National Council.
The website, airmarshalnc.com, airmarshalnc.com.
Sonia, thanks for joining me.
We're all excited about the film.
I think you mentioned to me that there's going to be air marshals across the country going to see the film either today on the opening day or some on Wednesday.
That is right, Dinesh, and thank you for having us, and thank you so much for highlighting what's going on within the federal air marshal program and the continued corruption.
But yes, we've got watch parties tonight.
We're going to have watch parties on the 25th.
All across the nation, we have air marshals in 20 cities across the United States, and everyone's going to be at our watch parties watching this film's release, so we're really excited about it.
That is good stuff, Sonia.
Is a lot bigger than the FBI, and yet DHS is also involved in censorship.
They're also involved in political targeting.
Where does the air marshals fit into this larger picture?
Well, unfortunately, Dinesh, we're in a small agency called the Transportation Security Administration, which is a small element of DHS. And within TSA, they're an administrative agency, so they have no law enforcement powers.
Only the Settle Air Marshal Service, which we're a small little law enforcement group nestled inside this huge bureaucratic agency, we're the only ones that have arrest powers.
Within DHS lies TSA, then lies the Federal Air Marshal, and as you can see, the pendulum is swinging politically for all these things that are happening within the Biden administration.
Air Marshals have been in Operation Allies Welcome.
We've been put on military bases for Afghan refugees.
We were made to provide our personal identifiable information given to China for our undercover agents flying to China.
We've been taken out of the skies and put to the southwest border, another Biden administrative initiative.
And also what we're going to talk about today is regarding the political targeting of Trump supporters by the Federal Air Marshall Service.
Now, you say in the film that the, what I think people do know, and that is that the air marshal program was ramped up dramatically after 9-11, and of course the intention was really clear, and that is to follow foreign terrorists,
so foreign terrorists who had established a domestic base in this country, you know, mainly by using aircraft just the way that they did on 9-11, and And yet you saw that in the time around and after January 6th, a very peculiar redeployment of the air marshals.
Talk about that. Well, Dinesh, it was something I didn't think I would ever see in my time as a law enforcement officer.
I've been doing law enforcement since 1990 and never have we seen this political bias happen.
But after January the 6th, the FBI reached out to the TSA and they asked him for a manifest of all passengers that traveled into the National Capital Region from January the 5th to the 7th, 2021.
TSA gave the That list to the FBI, but they also took the same manifest, did not scrub the list, didn't look for any potential people that may have been innocent, and they ingested that list to a TSA national database, basing those people and stating that they are suspected domestic terrorists.
So let's be really clear what we're saying.
There were obviously people who came to D.C. within that period to go to the Trump rally.
Some of those people, a tiny minority, went into the Capitol and then later became the target of prosecution.
But I think what you're saying is that the people who went on this suspect list was anybody who went to Washington, D.C., whether it be a guy going for a business convention, a kid who's, let's say, in a divorce.
He's spending the weekend with his dad.
He flies in on January 5th.
That kid...
Is not only on the list, but is it the case that you have air marshals following that kid back and forth in future flights?
You exactly nailed it, Dinesh.
That's exactly right. If you just flew into the region, in the area, you could be there for a funeral, for a job interview.
You could be there just on vacation.
You are definitely on this list, and not only are you being followed by the air marshals in the airplane, you're being followed from your home to the aircraft, off the aircraft, off the airport property, and to your final destination.
You're being followed. I didn't realize that the air marshals do that kind of thing.
I thought that basically they kind of board the plane with a backpack and they sit down and then when you get off the plane, but you're saying the program is actually more, it makes more sense actually that there would be a, that you would actually monitor people from one point to their full destination.
I didn't realize that was what was going on.
Yes, that's correct, Dinesh.
We're writing down tag numbers, vehicles that you're in, any identifiable information or anybody that you're traveling with.
If you're traveling with a business partner who was not even in D.C. during that time, that person could be flagged as a potential domestic terrorist because now they're flying with you.
So this not only hurts the individual person, it hurts their family or anyone that may be traveling with them as well.
So, I mean, what do you make of the fact, I mean, just look at the psychology of an air marshal who's a decent guy, doing a job, and they now realize, I'm following all these guys who went to D.C., regardless of the reason that they went to D.C. There's a certain type of...
Madness, I think, here.
Does the Air Martian justify that by saying, I just have a job to do, there's not much I can do about it, this is my assignment, I have to carry it out?
And why would the agency be continuing a program that is so manifestly absurd?
Well, the air marshals are quite disgusted, Dinesh.
And yes, we have ones that refuse.
We have ones that do refuse, and the agency wants to tremendously discipline them.
We have other air marshals that just go along because they're like, I can't lose my job.
They'll weaponize my clearance against me.
I'm going to lose my house.
I'm going to lose everything I have.
So they just go along with the agency when they're given these missions.
And also with the agency.
The agency knows this is illegal.
Make no mistake, TSA Administrator David Pekoski We're good to go.
a Clinton supporter, she's a holdover from Whitewater. She actually faced ethical violations for releasing Whitewater information during the probe to outside people that were outside the investigation. So you've got these unelected bureaucrats who are running our agency and they're using it for their political motivations.
And is there also a financial or bureaucratic objective in the sense that the TSA gets to hey we're part of this big campaign against domestic terrorism Obviously, we expect funding for this to flow our way.
It seems to me that police states very often, it is partly about the ideology, but it's also partly about the money.
You better believe it. TSA is one of the greediest agencies you'll ever meet.
So every one of these cases, when we know they're not factual, they'll get credit in a national database for following a suspected domestic terrorist.
So guess what that means?
That means they pump up the metrics.
When they get to Congress, they'll get billions and billions of dollars to try to showcase how well this program's worked and how many people they followed.
But at the end of the day, you will see the results are zero.
They've come up with no valid leads toward terrorism by following any of the individuals that we're following right now who are related to the January 2021 visiting of the National Capitol region.
I mean, Sonia, to me, this is such a dramatic illustration of how anyone can find themselves on this kind of a list, because there are people who think, oh, the police stayed, but you know, I'm not Trump and I didn't go in the Capitol.
It can never happen to me.
And what you're saying is, it is happening to you.
I'm telling you right now, it is happening to you.
Everything that we've talked about in this movie and police state is for real people.
I mean, none of the air marshals, we didn't want to come forward to have to expose the federal government for doing the wrong thing.
We just want to catch bad guys.
We want to go after those that hurt America on 9-11 and killed 2,977 innocent people, but we're not allowed to do that.
So, Dinesh, we've got a small association, and we're fighting the federal government to thwart another 9-11, not create one.
And right now, they've got us in a situation where they're creating a perfect storm for another 9-11.
Guys, check out Sonia Labasco and others in the new film, Police State, the website, policestatefilm.net, and Sonia's website, airmarshallnc.com.
Thank you very much, Sonia.
I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dinesh.
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There's a phrase that Larry Elder uses in 2000 Mules.
Show me the money.
And, of course, Larry Elder didn't come up with that phrase.
It goes to the film Jerry Maguire.
I guess Cuba Gooding Jr.
was the character who uses the phrase...
Talking in that film to Tom Cruise.
And this has sort of been the media's demand regarding Joe Biden.
In other words, it's not enough to show that the Biden family made all this money.
It's not enough to show that Joe Biden was in on those meetings, that he was lying about having nothing to do with his...
Families, businesses.
In fact, as we know from Hunter Biden's partner, Joe was the brand that he called into meetings, that he was present at meetings.
But nevertheless, Joe Biden himself at one point was like, where is the money?
And the media has kind of gone with that.
The left wing media, we haven't seen any money going to Joe Biden.
Except now we have.
Representative James Comer has revealed, not only revealed, but shown the check, the actual check, from James Biden, one of the Biden brothers, to Joe Biden for $200,000.
The payment has a little memo on the side which says, loan repayment.
But by and large, whenever there's corruption involved, there's always some kind of ruse underway.
So if there was a real loan, and in fact, it's kind of funny because I've seen so many people, congressmen, leftists on social media, it was a loan, duh!
Well, they think it was a loan, duh, because it says loan repayment.
And so they're acting dumb here.
They're acting like, oh, it says loan repayment, so it obviously was a loan.
Well, where's the original loan?
Joe Biden supposedly loaned $200,000 to his brother James.
Biden and James was paying it back, except...
There's no evidence that Joe Biden ever loaned $200,000 to his brother for any reason at all.
So we're going to wait to see if Joe Biden produces the original payment and not to mention the IOU that kind of memorializes this loan that supposedly James Biden was paying back to Joe Biden seemingly without interest.
But the fact of the matter is that And this is where Representative Comer is sort of on track, is that the payment occurs in 2018, right after James Biden receives, guess what, $200,000 from his influence peddling with a company called AmeriCorps.
So AmeriCorps apparently had hired James Biden.
James Biden was supposed to deliver the goods.
What goods does James Biden have to deliver?
None, except Joe Biden.
And AmeriCorps pays James Biden a fee of $200,000 and...
Right after that, James Biden turns around and writes a check for that exact same sum to his brother Joe Biden.
So think about it. It makes sense.
America is buying Joe Biden's influence.
Joe Biden naturally wants the money.
James Biden is the go-between.
The whole thing makes perfect sense.
In fact, I see here from Jonathan Turley's column that the check that James wrote to Joe Biden was on the very same day that he received the other $200,000.
This is a case where the media is now in a very awkward spot because we have Joe Biden getting the money.
Now, Turley goes on to say that despite the fact that you now have Joe Biden getting the money, you have a labyrinth of shell companies, all the different Biden family members cashing in left and right.
And by the way, to prove bribery, you don't have to prove that the money went to Joe Biden.
You simply have to prove that his family got it because family getting it is a benefit.
Imagine if, for example, I were to take bribes from somebody and the money goes to Debbie or the money goes to Danielle, the money goes to family members, but not to me.
I'm like, I didn't get a bribe.
But no, you did get a bribe because a family benefit is a benefit to you and that's been established.
There's a long tradition of law establishing this.
What John internally says is that he just thinks the media is going to try to move the goalposts once again.
Well, where do you move the goalposts to at this point?
Because now you've got Joe with the money.
So now they're going to have to say, even if Joe gets the money, that doesn't show that there needs to be further investigation.
It doesn't show that he needs to be impeached.
We actually now want to see a check to Joe Biden that is not marked loan repayment, even if there wasn't any underlying loan.
We need something like, here is a bribe.
And we need some Chinese guy's name on the check or some Ukrainian guy's name on the check.
And if you don't have that, then...
So, in other words, you can see what's going on here.
They want to protect Biden.
And what they're doing is shifting the standard.
It becomes... I mean, in the end, I suppose, you don't have any standard at all.
You basically go, well, yeah, he got these payments, and so what?
He's still the guy that we want to have in the White House.
And that's when really all the justifications, all the rationalizations break down.
and what people are saying in effect, or what the left is saying and the Democrats are saying, we're absolutely okay with having a mafia crook in the White House.
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I've been talking on the podcast off and on now for several weeks about the very important Missouri versus Biden case.
This is the case that exposes and documents widespread coordination between many agencies of the government, not just the White House, not just the CDC, but the White House and the State Department and the CDC and the group called CISA, the cybersecurity and infrastructure agency and other agencies, the Surgeon General's office, the US Centers for Disease Control,
the FBI. It's a laundry list.
And all of these coordinating with digital platforms to do censorship.
And there's an update on the case and very good news and one piece of kind of, I won't say bad news, but sort of so-so news.
So here's the so-so news or maybe mildly bad news.
And that is that the lower courts...
The US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, as well as the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, had imposed an injunction.
So, what's an injunction?
injunction is basically a temporary block on the Biden regime and the agencies of the Biden regime acting in any way to coerce, influence, cajole, intimidate, threaten social media platforms. The social media platforms, by the way, can do censorship on their own if they want. They simply cannot coordinate with the government to do it. So the injunction was a way of saying that even though there's an ongoing trial, it's
sufficiently clear that the Biden regime is violating the First Amendment by using a sort of surrogate form of censorship.
They can't censor directly, so they censor through the digital platforms.
And they censor who? You, me, ordinary citizens lawfully exercising our First Amendment rights.
So an injunction was in place that said, you cannot do this starting now.
So what did the Supreme Court do?
The Supreme Court comes in and they lifted the injunction, which basically means that the Biden administration can now resume coordinating with social media platforms.
That's the bad news.
Here's the good news. They said, we're gonna take the case.
Now, this is extremely good news.
And if I had to sort of give up something in exchange for that, I would happily give up the temporary effect of lifting the injunction.
In effect, the Supreme Court said, look, we're not going to disrupt the status quo.
We are going to look at this and make a decision.
The decision, of course, will not come immediately.
It's going to come next spring.
But I think it's going to be a landmark decision, equal in importance, if not more, to the affirmative action decision that came down.
Also, in the same kind of significant category as the Dobbs decision, striking down Roe versus Wade.
This is a court that is making some major changes, and I think this is an issue that they...
Clarence Thomas and Gorsuch dissented.
I think they wanted to keep the injunction in place.
But it seems like Kavanaugh and Roberts went with the liberals here and saying, no.
And I think Roberts here is playing a little bit of a game where he, I think he knows this is going to all go down.
The censorship thing is going to be smashed.
And it'll be a huge victory against the police state.
When people say, you know, how do we fight the police state?
Well, this is how. You fight the police state through We're good to go.
And I'm confident that this will be struck down pretty decisively.
5-4 for sure.
Maybe even 6-3.
And that's all coming up.
And that will be a very big victory.
Now, Alito is impatient.
And he basically says, at this time in the history of our country...
What the court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news.
That is most unfortunate.
So, who can disagree?
Because essentially, an evil, even if it is stopped eventually, you've heard the phrase, you know, justice delayed is justice denied.
And that's what's happening here.
Because it would be, there are so many people who are affected now by censorship.
There are so many people who will continue to be affected by censorship over the next several months.
And the court is basically saying, we're not going to put an immediate end to it.
Because what they could have done is they could have said, all right, injunction, stop doing it, and let's have our case.
We'll hear it in the spring, we'll decide in the spring, and we'll tell you then if you can resume.
But in the meantime, no.
What the court decided was in the meantime, yes, and then we will issue our ultimate ruling when the case comes up and the decision is made next spring.
So, I read the decisions of the lower court as well as the appellate court.
Very persuasive, very damning of what the Biden regime is doing.
But it looks like because the court is playing its own kind of, I don't know if politics is the right word or prudence is the right word, the court is sort of giving some deference, if you will, to the Biden administration temporarily.
And for that reason, justice is in fact delayed.
Let us hope it is not in the end denied.
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What is going on with the House GOP? Last we talked, the race was an issue of whether Jim Jordan would make it across the finish line.
And something very interesting and very revealing happened in the Jim Jordan vote that I want to zoom in on because it reflects something big in the Republican Party.
So, there were a couple of rounds of public voting for Jim Jordan, and he came pretty close to winning the speaker slot, but he was still...
I don't know, 15, 18, 20 votes away.
So normally the process, and this is the exact same process that Kevin McCarthy had done earlier, he cajoles people, he sits down with them, they make some deals, the members say, well, we'll vote for you if you agree to focus on these issues that are really important to me and my district.
And Jim Jordan goes, okay, I'm willing to do this.
I'm willing to do that. I'll put you on this committee.
And so I expected that process to go forward and see what happens.
But in the second and third vote, Jim Jordan seemed to lose momentum.
One or two more guys came out against him.
And then, most recently, there was a secret ballot.
Now, a secret ballot is different than a public ballot in the simple way that in a secret ballot, people can vote their true feelings without having to be politically accountable for it.
Why? Because, of course, you don't know who voted.
And so, in a secret ballot, you get to really get a look at people's true psychology, what they really think.
And when the secret ballot results came out, it was a little bit of a shock.
Because there were some 120 or so, roughly, I'm just giving very round numbers, people who voted for Jordan, but then a big number, something like 100, voted against him.
So, let's think about this.
If Jim Jordan before was losing by 18 or 20 votes, that means there were 80 other guys.
Who publicly wanted to be seen as supporting Jim Jordan.
But when it came to a secret ballot, they didn't really support him.
They didn't really support him.
And Jim Jordan, if you think about it, is one of the most popular, if not straight out the most popular figure in the GOP House.
There are some other people who are popular and have a following, but I think it's fair to say that their following is something of a niche following.
I'm thinking you have Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz.
But Jim Jordan has a broad following and he has a broad following among lots of people who are Republicans.
I think it's because he's philosophically conservative, conservative enough.
And at the same time, he's temperamentally easygoing.
He's a nice guy.
He has that kind of Reaganite combination.
And so he's popular in the Republican Party.
And you'd think he would be a pretty good choice for Speaker.
But as I mentioned, as I mentioned before, I think there were some House members that were enraged at the effort by Matt Gaetz and a few others, Nancy Mace and others, to pull the rug out from Kevin McCarthy.
And as I saw it, they were going to take it out on Jim Jordan.
Their point is Jim Jordan is the choice of this faction.
And so the one thing we're going to make sure is that they don't get their way.
We don't reward, quote, bad behavior.
And I thought perhaps that was pretty much all there was to it.
But as it turns out, no.
I don't think that anymore.
And when I look at the fact that you've got the split in the GOP House of 120 and 100 on the other side, I mean, it's almost a 50-50 split.
You have to ask what is going on.
And I think what is going on is that in the House you have two types of Republican, or to put it differently, two types of conservative.
It's not enough to just say this is a fight between MAGA and the RINOs.
No, that is too simple and too stark a way of putting it.
It is a fight between one group of people for whom conservatism is a MAGA spirit.
That is true. And who are in a more, let's call it, combat mode because they recognize the police state implications of the country.
And let's just say we have another half of the GOP That is in a...
They're conservative operationally.
They're conservative in the sense of like, don't rock the boat.
Don't get too excited.
Don't go crazy on us.
Don't, you know, don't make exaggerated claims.
Well, we're not making exaggerated claims.
The problem is that we're living in an exaggerated situation.
Things that we would have found unbelievable not that long ago are happening all around us.
So I don't think that these Republicans are divided really philosophically.
They probably would, if you go down a kind of long list of priorities, you know, which is to say taming government spending, exercising at least a modicum of fiscal restraint, if you talk about law and order, if you talk about, you know, Support for keeping America strong abroad.
I mean, there's going to be obviously some disputes over Ukraine.
We know about that. My point is that it's not so much really a radical philosophical division.
These are people who are right of center to one degree or another.
But I think what...
What makes them different is that they have a different appraisal of the situation facing the country.
For one half of the Republican Party, it's politics as usual.
In other words, we are in a normal situation and the normal Republican boilerplate is adequate to that situation.
For the other group, we're not in a normal situation and we need to act differently than we've acted before.
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Debbie has an app on her phone.
Well, maybe even more than one.
Well, I mean, I think one of them, if I remember, honey, one of them is you get briefings from the Israeli guy.
He's with the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, and he gives a sort of a sober account of what is happening that day.
And so Debbie's often either listening to it and I'm overhearing it or she's telling me about it.
But she also gets these news flashes.
And I'm not sure what site she gets them from, but it's always on WhatsApp.
But a lot of it is just the full extent of the horror of what has happened in Israel.
And some of it is just, it's almost mind-numbing to recite, and it makes your imagination kind of break down, because these are things you couldn't even have conceived of.
I mean, brutality of a level that I think would...
Well, I don't know if I should say it would make the Nazis blush, but I have made the point before that even the Nazis tried to hide their worst crimes.
Hamas boasts about it.
They put it on display.
They are excited about it.
You can sometimes hear people laughing in the background.
It's... It shows you that there is a pretty bottomless depth to which humanity can fall.
And it's not even, you know, we sometimes say, well, that's such an animalistic response.
Or, no, I mean, animals don't do this.
Animals will sometimes kill another animal to eat them.
But animals do not engage in this sadistic brutality.
Debbie's like, demons do it.
And that, of course, is true.
So, now...
Here's the Israeli Minister of Defense, Yov Galant.
He says, this should be our final maneuver in Gaza.
For the simple reason, there will be no Hamas after it.
The operation will take a month, two months, three, but in the end, there will be no Hamas.
Now, this is a striking statement because it clearly states the Israeli government's goal.
Not to level Gaza, not to massacre the civilians of Gaza, not at all, but to basically finish off Hamas.
And this is not easy, the Israelis know, because Hamas has entrenched itself in Gaza.
Hamas has a lot of support in Gaza, even though people mindlessly say, Biden, the majority of Palestinians reject Hamas.
How does he know? Where's the evidence that the majority of Palestinians in Gaza reject Hamas?
There is no such evidence.
Who won? Hamas!
Hamas was elected in Gaza.
We know that there are young people that are indoctrinated in schools in Gaza, they're indoctrinated in mosques, they're indoctrinated on the street.
So the idea that Hamas has very little support in Gaza, I think, is a pipe dream.
It's actually absurd.
But nevertheless, Israel is going to go in and root out Hamas one way or the other, and this is in fact the correct thing to do.
Not to target civilians, but I think there will be some civilian casualties.
There always are in any kind of a war.
Now I mentioned last week, I guess it was, the issue of the just war.
And one of the principles of the just war is proportionality.
The basic idea is that if my tribe comes over and kills eight people at your tribe, you can come over and kill five or eight or ten people at my tribe.
But you can't kill 100 people because that's disproportionate.
And picking up from that kind of logic, we often hear that the Israelis should not have a disproportionate response.
The idea being that they should limit their damage to the same damage that Hamas caused.
But Debbie made a really good point about this.
It sort of took me by surprise, but it's a completely valid point.
It is that, look, you want Israel to do the same thing that Hamas did?
Well, then the Israelis should go into Gaza.
They should grab civilians.
They should break their bones.
They should rape them. They should take the elderly and brutalize them.
They should pull babies out of the womb and decapitate them.
So, they should mirror Gaza.
Exactly. The crimes of Hamas.
At least that's what the logic of proportionality would suggest.
And they don't do it to any more people.
They do it to the exact same number of people that Hamas did, but they have to act in this way.
Now, obviously, there'll be all kinds of people who say, you and me included, but Israel shouldn't do that.
That is a level of brutality that should not be matched.
And I agree.
And Israel agrees. And Israel's point is, yeah, we can't do that.
We're not going to go do that to civilians in Gaza.
We're not going to do to Hamas what Hamas has done to us.
But we are fully justified, just as the U.S. was fully justified after Pearl Harbor in saying, we declare war in Japan.
We're going to make sure that the imperial regime of Japan that declared war on us, that regime, will be ended.
Not that Japan will be ended.
No, there was a lot of casualties and there was a lot of damage done by the two atomic bombs.
But the purpose of those was to bring Japan to surrender.
And it did. It was successful to that degree.
And similarly here, the goal is to defeat the force, the terrorist force called Hamas.
This is its DNA. This is what Hamas does.
So if you don't want this stuff to continue, you don't want Hamas.
The sounds of battle have been echoing in southern Israel ever since Hamas launched its barbaric attacks.
Now sirens are sounding in the north as Hezbollah launches its own rockets.
The impact is devastating.
at least 1,400 dead, 3,400 injured in Israel.
The war that began on October 7th has become deadlier.
The situation is really dire, which is why I'm partnering with our friends at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews to rush emergency relief directly to the hardest hit areas.
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in the section of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago called The Interrogation.
He now goes into a whole series of techniques of interrogation that are intended to extract confessions, breakdowns, kind of surrenders, you kind of give in and accept the outcome that they have in store for you.
And so there is no attempt here to adjudicate truth, to figure out what you really did, to match it up against even existing laws.
It's just that you're on the list, you're a target of the police state, and they're going to get you.
And they have ways, as you will find out, of getting you.
So let's look at what some of these ways are.
First of all, says Solzhenitsyn, night.
And then he says that the state has realized the great benefits of trying to get you by interviewing you at night.
I guess it's because your body is out of rhythm, your body wants to sleep, and so the normal alertness just isn't there.
And then, says Solzhenitsyn, they rely on not just threats, but also a certain type of persuasion.
But he's speaking slightly ironically, because persuasion is here a form of intimidation, a form of breaking you down.
It's not persuasion in the sense of laying forward arguments and having you sort of go along with them because you agree.
He gives you, for example, the kind of lies that they use to persuade you.
Hey, look, you're going to get a prison term, whatever happens, but if you resist, you're going to die right here in prison.
You'll lose your health. But if you go to a camp, you'll have fresh air and sunlight, so why not sign right now?
And this is, of course, a deceitful way to get you to admit to things you never even did.
Another variant of persuasion, writes Solzhenitsyn, is especially appropriate to the party member.
This is a form of persuasion used against communist party members.
Imagine it in this country being used against leftists.
Leftists who are in some way now inconvenient to the police state.
And listen to this, quote, If there are shortages and even famine in the country, then you as a Bolshevik have to make up your mind.
Can you assert that the whole party is to blame?
Or the whole Soviet government?
No, of course not. Well, then be brave and shoulder the blame yourself.
And writes Solzhenitsyn, many people did.
So what's going on here is they're cleverly using the interrogation technique against your own ideology.
You're a supporter of the regime.
Hey, I support the Biden regime.
Hey, I support the FBI. I support the DHS. Well, okay.
If you support the DHS, then are you saying that the whole FBI is wrong?
The DHS is wrong?
The Democratic Party is wrong?
The Biden regime is wrong?
Of course not. How can they all be wrong?
You've been supporting them all your life.
Why don't you just admit that you're wrong?
You are mistaken.
You have fallen out of favor.
You have harmed the cause that you profess to be allied with.
And so Solzhenitsyn, many people find this so tormenting that they go, yeah, I guess so.
Okay, I'll sign.
Wow. Wow. Foul language.
Foul language, says Solzhenitsyn, is sometimes not an effective technique, but sometimes it is.
And he says it works especially well on women.
Not only does it work especially well on women, sometimes they bring in a female interrogator and she starts using foul language that startles even the men.
The men are so taken by surprise at this kind of torrent of epithets and insults and foul language that it kind of discombobulates them.
They give in and In part because they are taken completely by surprise.
Another technique?
Psychological contrast.
So, they treat you nicely.
Here, have a glass of water.
Oh, are you uncomfortable in this chair?
Let me... And then they reverse.
They go from gentleness to harshness and back to gentleness and back to harshness.
Again, the whole idea is to produce a jolting effect.
Sometimes done by a single interrogator.
Sometimes done by more than one.
Next, humiliation.
The way that the humiliation works is they make an unexpected, degrading demand of you.
And, says Solzhenitsyn, for women, it's very often,"...take off your clothes." Naturally, right there, you're extremely uncomfortable.
Remember, Soviet society was pretty modest, and certainly in public.
And so the idea of a woman having to completely undress to nudity in front of people, she has no idea.
Not to mention people in either police or military uniforms.
Not to mention people, Solzhenitsyn says, looking through the peephole and making jeers and jokes and pointing.
So, all of this is intended, again, to produce psychological breakdown.
So, psychological torment leads to psychological breakdown, leads to confession.
Intimidation is very widely used and very varied.
And the intimidation, again, can often have a soft quality to it.
Yes, Solzhenitsyn. We've got hard labor camps now, but if you confess, you'll go to an easy camp.
That's the persuasion.
It's a little bit like what we would call now the plea bargain.
Hey, listen, you can get a lighter sentence by just admitting you did this stuff, even if you didn't do it.
And other forms of intimidation, and the one I find most telling, what he calls the revolver on the desk.
You're being interviewed, but you just notice, and suddenly your eye catches it, there's a loaded revolver on the desk.
Not that it's going to be used, it may not be used, but of course it crosses your mind that it could be used, and that is intimidation enough.
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