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Oct. 30, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:47
WARNING SIGNS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep696
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Coming up, I'll survey current events to outline the warning signs of a police state.
Virginia mom and activist Stacey Langton joins me.
She's featured in the movie.
She's going to talk about her experience coming face to face with the police state.
argue that mass shootings point to a social problem.
But it's not what the left says it is.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The film Police State goes into broad streaming today and also DVD.
So it's going to be streaming on three platforms.
The first is Rumble.
The other is Salem Now, the Salem platform, SalemNow.com.
And the third is Epic TV. This is something new.
We didn't have this with 2000 Meals.
We made a deal with Epic TV to show the film on their platform.
So you can purchase it and then stream it.
You don't download it.
You stream it and it's yours.
You can stream it as often as you want.
And... And you can connect to all these platforms from the single website of the film, which is policestatefilm.net.
It has links to Salem, links to Rumble, and so on.
There's also DVDs available.
They ship out starting today.
So great time to get your DVDs.
And boy, you know, this is a good time.
I don't think it's too early to start thinking about the Christmas presents.
so load up on DVDs to share as well as have one for your own possession.
And the DVDs are being sold on Shopify, they're also being sold on Salem Now, and those links are also up on the website policestatefilm.net.
Interestingly, everywhere I look I see things that tie into the police state, and it's partly I guess because I'm looking, but it's also partly because the events all point in this direction in one way or the other.
Now, interestingly, Trump was in Iowa yesterday, and he was talking not about police state but about 2000 mules.
He goes, hey, it's getting difficult to find a copy of 2,000 mules.
But he says, Dinesh D'Souza did a great job.
And if we don't stop the cheating, you're not going to have a country.
All... True.
It's obviously essential to have voter integrity, but I'm eager for Trump to see the new film.
We've actually sent it to him.
I hope he does watch it soon, and I hope that he does comment about it.
But he's obviously a superfan of 2,000 Mules, and that is obviously also an issue very close to his heart.
Here is the World Economic Forum founder, Klaus Schwab.
He says in a recent statement, we have to get used to a total erosion of privacy.
And then he makes this remarkable statement, if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be afraid.
But, drawing on the biblical idea that we are all sinners, well, who is it that has nothing to hide?
And by nothing I'm talking about nothing in your whole life.
Because part of the openness of digital media now isn't just that they can monitor what you're saying and doing now, but what you did five years ago, ten years ago, maybe longer.
So I think that although Klaus Schwab on the surface is saying, hey listen, law-abiding people who have nothing to hide don't really have to worry, his real meaning is different.
His real meaning is since everybody has something to hide.
we all need to be very afraid. In other words, the police state, and in his case, he's talking about a global police state. This is a guy who is German-Austrian by background. This is somebody who runs the World Economic Forum, which meets in Switzerland. He's not talking about the United States. He's talking about extending the police state in Europe and in Canada and in Australia and New Zealand. And I think if he had his way, it would be
worldwide. So his real message is the police state can get anyone. They just need to know who it is. They will find what you have been quote, hiding. And by hiding, they just mean something that they can pin on you, something that they can accuse you of. You don't even necessarily have to be guilty of it. You just have to be sort of plausibly guilty because then they bring you in. They set up a proceeding, you're facing years in prison, and then they go, hey, listen, if you take a plea bargain,
you can serve out six months or you can serve out a year and you'll obviously be permanently tarred or scarred. And we will have essentially achieved our objective of defeating you, disgracing you, in a sense, taking you out of circulation as somebody that we have to put up with or deal with. The judge in the Trump case, this is Judge Chutkin, she had imposed a gag order
She then withdrew the gag order, and now she has put it back.
So again, think of this.
This is not only an interference with Trump's First Amendment rights, but it's also election interference.
Trump can speak generally about his case, but he cannot criticize Bill Barr.
Why? Because Bill Barr might be a witness.
He cannot criticize the judge.
He cannot criticize the prosecutor.
Now, if you can't criticize the judge and the prosecutor and everyone who's a potential witness, you are being gagged.
You are being shot down.
And meanwhile, by the way, the prosecutors are leaking to the media big articles about this is going to come out in trial.
This is going to come out in trial.
So they are having a free reign with the media and the judges.
You would think the judge would be, if even-handed, Hey, listen, I don't want to see another leak coming out of the prosecution's office, but you get none of that.
It's sort of understood that that's okay.
You can go after Trump, but Trump can't defend himself.
Police state stuff indeed.
And finally, you probably know about the case of Douglas Mackey, mentioned in the film, who got a seven-month sentence for making a satirical meme about Hillary Clinton.
Well, here's a video from a woman named Katrina Wong.
This goes back to 2016.
I'm going to quote from it.
Hey, Trump supporters, skip the poll lines at election 2016 and text your vote.
So she is doing the exact same thing that Mackey did.
Mackey was doing it in satire or in humor.
Presumably she is as well.
Text votes are legit.
I'll vote tomorrow on Super Wednesday.
So if what Douglas Mackey did was election interference...
What Christina Wong did is election interference by the exact same token.
It's almost a mirror image of what Douglas Mackey did.
And yet, she has not been charged.
She has not faced any legal prosecution whatsoever.
And Douglas Mackey is getting ready to turn himself in to serve seven months in prison.
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Guys, I'm really pleased to welcome to the podcast Stacey Langton.
If you've seen Police State, she is featured in the film.
She's actually a mom of six, a resident of Northern Virginia, active in local issues involving schools and school boards.
She started the Mama Grizzly movement in the fall of 2021 when she stumbled upon some very startling graphic sexually explicit books in her son's public school library in Fairfax, Virginia. By the way, her website, mamagrizzly.org.
Stacey, welcome. Great to have you. Thanks for joining me.
We were just talking a minute ago about I was asking you, have you seen the film?
Because it's one thing to do a long interview, which I did with you and another mom named Sharona Bishop.
As you noted, we talked for an hour, 45 minutes.
Talk a little bit about the experience of just watching the film.
How did you see it and when?
Well, I took my two oldest sons to the movie with me that night, and I went with a big group of friends.
And of course, it was totally sold out.
Our theater was full here in Fairfax, and it was very, you know, celebratory as far as the atmosphere.
And it was funny, you know, because I come on kind of late in the picture, but everybody was really enjoying the film because it's very dramatic and it's very...
But it's also, you know, it's a little bit scary and a little bit frightening.
And there were a lot of very emotional moments, too, where people were tearing up listening to some of the other folks that you interviewed tell their stories.
And then when I came on, everyone in the audience teared and they clapped for me, which was funny.
And then...
The bit that you used was really wonderful, and I thought it was very skillfully done, the way you sort of tied all of our little bit of our lives together and made it flow so cohesively to tell the story of what it is that can happen to you when you dare to sort of step outside of the proper lane that the government would like you to stay in.
And so it was wonderful. I really enjoyed it a lot, and everybody was really, really excited about it.
Did you find that people kind of got into it at the end and was singing the national anthem when the film closed out?
Yeah, yeah. That was a thing.
Everybody was singing with him at the end.
The man in the jail cell, you know, who sings when he hears the other prisoners singing the national anthem.
And it was very moving.
And afterwards, when I walked out of the theater, I didn't even realize Tara Rodas was there in the theater in my showing.
And so she came up to me and she said...
I saw you in the movie and I was like, oh, because I had just seen her on the screen moments before and I didn't know her at all and I'd never run into her before.
So that was really neat. We took a picture together and several people came up to us afterwards and they said it was kind of funny.
There was a couple of like kind of young teen boys who came up to us and they said, were you just in the movie just now and there?
And, you know, they were excited and we took some pictures and stuff.
So it was fun. It was a lot of fun.
You know, I gotta say, going back a decade now, when I first made Obama's America 2016, my first documentary, I was very unnerved to see myself on the big screen because it's so big.
I mean, your head is like five feet large, you know, and it's not something you're used to.
So it's quite a surreal experience.
So that's kind of why I was asking you what it felt like to be in the theater.
It sounds like you were there with people who knew you, which, of course, makes the experience that much more interesting and enjoyable.
Yeah, it definitely is surreal.
And I mean, I have to say, you know, well, when you get to hit a certain age, and I'm a woman of a certain age, it's kind of like, oh, golly, look at all the recalls or whatever.
But you know, you just kind of got to let it go at this point.
It was a lot of fun.
Stacy, you know, we have a chance here to talk in a little more detail, not a lot more detail, but a little more about your story and naturally there's only a glimpse of it in the film.
Let me start by just asking you, was there a single event that motivated you to say, hey, things are really out of control, I need to become more involved?
Was there a single event and what was that?
Yeah, there were actually two events that came in really close succession for me.
And this is what made me feel like I had to do something.
And first of all, find out.
And then when I found out, to speak up.
And that was, you know, I had come to the public school system a little bit late because we're Catholic.
And so all of my children are in private Catholic schools.
But around here, they only go K through 8th.
And so, when you have your child hit ninth grade, you have a decision to make.
Do you send them to the very expensive Catholic school, which is very far away, or do you send them to the public school, which is a mile away?
And so, that's what we chose for my two oldest sons.
They went to the public high school.
And the year that school started in 2021, you know, we started at the end of August at some point, and it was the...
School board meeting just prior to September 11th, which was around like the 9th of September.
We have a board member who is Palestinian, and she had said some very controversial things at that school board meeting, which I attended about September 11th.
And she just got, you know, fried in the press for that.
And that weekend, I was watching Newsmax, And they did a program, like a profile of another school board meeting that had sort of gotten out of hand.
And this was the one in Hudson, Ohio.
And I think it actually might have been a, like a city council meeting.
And the mayor sort of famously walks into the room and he says, you know, in remarking about a high school, like classroom assignment book that was completely sexually explicit.
And he says to them, all of you should be arrested for child pornography. And I thought, is that like what's going on? Like, that sounds weird.
And I thought, well, that's just, you know, something crazy happening in Ohio. And then the next day I saw another program that profiled a mother who I didn't know her name at the time.
I found it out later. Her name is Brandy Berkman, and she had gone to her school board meeting in Leander, Texas, and she read aloud from the book Lawn Boy.
She said, this came home in my fourth grader's backpack.
And at that point, then I had, you know, a title.
And so I turned to my son and I said, you know, why don't you bring me your school computer?
Because we have school-issued computers.
And I looked it up.
I typed in, you know, Jonathan Evason, the author's name, and sure enough, it popped up.
And I thought, well, that's crazy.
They have this book in the library.
And then the next day, I saw another video because I think a lot of things were kind of starting to percolate to the surface in the media at that point.
And I saw a video about the book Genderqueer.
And I looked that one up in the computer, and sure enough, it was available too.
And I thought, well, that's...
Crazy. And so I said to my son, I said, you know, when we go back to school on Monday, I said, I want you to come with me and let's go to the library and check the books out.
And so that's what we did.
And of course, my son, you know, I'm a mom and I'm totally embarrassing.
Right? And so we walked in after school.
And, you know, the librarian didn't care that I was there as a parent.
And she just, you know, waved us on.
And they had this enormous LGBTQ book display down the center of the library.
And it had the big rainbow over the top.
And it had all these books on the display.
And of course, Lawn Boy was sitting right there.
And so we saw Lawn Boy, but we couldn't find genderqueer.
And so we had to go ask the librarian for help.
And she said, huh, I don't know why it's not here on the LGBTQ display.
And she said, let's go to the comic book section.
So we did, which was all the way in the back of the library.
And, you know, there's a stack floor to ceiling of every comic book, which is, you know, boys' favorite books, right?
It's the comic book.
Black Panther, it's the Avengers, it's, you know, Batman and Robin, it's Superman, and genderqueer, literally sitting on the shelf.
And she pulled it off and handed it to me and she's smiling and she thinks, you know, I don't know, maybe she thought my son was genderqueer or something.
And she let us check the books out.
And so when I got home and opened it up...
Stacey, Stacey, hang on. We're just going to take a pause.
When we come back, we'll pick up your story.
Right back. Okay.
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I'm back with Northern Virginia mom, Stacey Langton.
Her website, mamagrizzly.org.
Stacey, you were talking about how you discovered these two sexually explicit books.
You were able to check them out.
You took them home.
I take it you looked inside and you were like, oh my gosh.
What did you do next?
Well, you know, when you see genderqueer, it's not just one image.
It's the entire book. There's probably a dozen really graphic images in that book.
And so at that point, I signed up to speak at a school board meeting.
At that point, I had only been attending them.
I had never spoken, but I felt like, you know, I had to say something about it because quite honestly, I thought maybe nobody knew that this was happening in our school district and maybe the board didn't know.
And so that's what I did. I went and I spoke and they didn't take it very well.
But I mean, did they in fact know about it and they saw you as a troublemaker for raising the topic?
You know, I'm not sure about that.
Quite honestly, I have some questions as to how these books get into the library system.
From what I understand now, two years later, the librarians have pretty much carte blanche.
They can purchase and bring in whatever they want.
So that's why the books don't exist in every single high school library in our system because there might be some that are like, eh, not that one.
But I don't know if the board knew what was in it.
I don't know if they had seen the images themselves, but they were very distressed when I showed them the images and they immediately shut me down.
And that's why they cut the mic and they cut the feed.
And they actually all fled the room for 20 minutes because it was so scandalous.
Now, Stacey, let's talk a little bit about the...
Police state retaliation and the kind of subtle but ominous ways that this occurs.
Would you describe the meeting where you go to an event and you just noticed that there was some strange things going on around you?
Well, you know, when the October 4th memo came out that year from Attorney General Merrick Garland, we felt like we should push back on that a little bit here as parents, and so we held a protest.
We went on Sunday, October 17th, down to the Department of Justice on Constitution Avenue, and it was a very polite protest.
We had about 45 or 50 parents show up, and there was a lot of security there.
They knew we were coming.
We had sort of advertised it beforehand.
We weren't trying to be sneaky or anything, and we did it on a non-work day, so there wouldn't be DHS employees or DOJ employees or whatever in the building.
There is a lot of police presence and a lot of Department of Homeland Security presence.
It was kind of unnerving.
And the very next day, which was Monday, my family started receiving threats.
So I just think that's a little coincidental because I didn't start getting threats immediately after I spoke at the school board meeting.
You know what I mean? I had a lot of people at the time...
Very vitriolic toward the message because they were saying I was anti-LGBT or whatever, I don't like gays or something like that, but I still hadn't received any threats.
I didn't get threats until we stood in front of the DMJ on October 17th.
And then you describe in the movie, was it a school board meeting where you saw all these unmarked cars?
Right. And that happened just a few days later.
So, you know, we were at DOJ on Sunday.
The school board meeting was Thursday night.
And at that school board meeting, we did have marked and unmarked ghost cars there.
And that was something that had never happened before.
You know, that's an unnerving thing, right?
And we even had a helicopter overhead at one point.
It kept circling and it was quite low.
It wasn't at the normal altitude going somewhere else.
It was definitely there and it was shining its spotlight down on us.
And we had a street side protest like we always did before the meetings.
And at that time also, we were holding pop-up rallies in the afternoons and in the early morning time for Glenn Youngkin, who was the candidate for governor.
And that same day in the morning, we had DHS marked vehicles at our pop-up rally for Glenn Youngkin.
So, you know, we were getting an awful lot of close monitoring and close attention.
And I just thought that was completely inappropriate because, you know, we're just a bunch of parents, like nobody's doing anything provocative.
It's not like we're throwing Molotov cocktails at a school board meeting.
But it was very, very uncomfortable, very unnerving.
And along with the threats that I was getting directly against myself and my children by name, I didn't get a lot of sleep for about a two-month time span during that time.
We'll be right back with Stacey Langton.
The website, mamagrizzly.org.
You can follow her at X. It's at mamagrizzly.org.
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I'm back with Northern Virginia mom, Stacey Langton.
Stacey, you described to me an amazing, I mean, a really just disgusting episode.
It's not in the film, but it involves people, or maybe in this case a person, who try to degrade you.
First of all, did that happen?
When did it happen? Describe the events that led up to it.
Right. So that happened from local politics here in Fairfax County.
So unfortunately here, the Fairfax GOP is not actually very conservative at all, but they're kind of run by the Uniparty, is what I would call it.
So our leadership is very weak.
They're what we would call RINOs, Republicans, and name only.
And last summer, the first school board candidate who declared and began to run was a very recent former Democrat.
And so, you know, there were quite a number of us in the party who objected to him running because we already have a 12 Democrat school board.
And we felt like, well, we don't need Coke if we already have Pepsi, right?
And that was all we knew about him at the time, was that he was a Democrat and he had actually...
Violated our party plan rules which say, you know, he was trying to switch parties at the last minute before he declared his candidacy.
He had done it two months prior.
And he had done a Democrat fundraiser in DC. Well, you can't do that.
It's against party rules.
He should have never been approved.
So in August of last summer, I spoke against him along with three other people from the GOP at the meeting, and it turned into, as our chairman called it, a barroom brawl.
And, you know, it ended up on the media.
The guy was forced out of the race because, you know, it was embarrassing for the party.
He had done some other embarrassing things, but he's a Democrat.
From that moment forward, he started a process of retaliation against me.
That escalated over time, last fall and last winter.
What I didn't know at the time, I found out this May, was he had created a fake Twitter account in my name with a photo of me as a minor child at age 16 on it.
It has my full name and likeness, and it says that I'm a porn actress.
Wow. And I mean, just for someone like you who had been, first of all, you're a traditionalist Catholic, second of all, you've been speaking out against these kinds of pornographic themes in the books.
I mean, it must have been particularly horrifying.
And this was not a completely fictional account showing a fictional personality.
You're saying he used your image.
Right. And the image is from my high school yearbook.
You know, I'm a minor, which I find especially creepy because, you know, I've done enough interviews over the last two years.
You could have just Googled my name.
You could have picked any recent photo of me.
If you're going to make a fake account, call me a porn actor.
Why use an image of me as a child?
I find that especially offensive and sick.
But it was just completely slanderous.
Obviously, I'm not a porn actress.
I've never been a porn actress.
And it's very, very harmful to my advocacy because I still go to the school board meetings.
We have school board meetings every two weeks.
It's a lottery system, so I don't get to speak every time.
But when I do, I'm there exposing other pornographic books in our school libraries.
So it's basically the worst thing you could say about me.
Is to call me, when I'm fighting porn in schools, a porn actress.
It's absurd. And it's hurtful to my family and to my children.
I have teenage boys.
They're old enough to understand.
They know what's being said about mom.
So I filed a defamation lawsuit against him.
And he's still a candidate, by the way.
The election is next week, and he's still running to represent my children on my school board.
And where does that stand now?
Did you say you're on the eve of that going to trial or the initial hearings?
Right. So when you file a lawsuit for defamation, the other party has 21 days to respond.
So he asked her an extension, which we granted him.
And then there will be a hearing tomorrow morning.
And it's for scheduling purposes for sort of like the next phase in the process.
You know, I've never had to sue anybody in my whole entire life.
And I think it's terrible that it comes to something like this.
But this is the thing about the left.
This is how the left plays politics.
They don't consider anything to be off limits.
They'll go after your family.
They'll go after your husband's job.
They'll go after your children.
They'll threaten you and your life.
And so I felt like at this point, I'm not going to sit here and lay down and take this.
That's why it had to be answered for.
That's why I filed the lawsuit.
There has to be consequences for the left doing the things they do.
And I'm gonna fight.
This is how I live.
I'm a fighter. I've never backed down from my fight against the school board.
I'm not going to back down from some Democrat.
Well, Stacey, I can't tell you how thrilled I am that you're in the movie.
You actually epitomized the spirit of the movie, which is ultimately a call not to let these bad guys get away with it.
I mean, to me, it's interesting how one of the signature hallmarks of police states is that they're able to recruit informants and sort of thugs.
In the private sphere and get them to do things that the government might like to do but maybe cannot do directly.
And so you got this guy lashing out at you in this way.
Guys, the website is mamagrizzly.org.
And Stacey Langton, thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks so much, Dinesh. Excited to see you.
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Don't forget to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. Whenever there is a mass shooting, and it has to be said that mass shootings occur with troubling regularity, there are just too many of them.
And so the fact that this is a social problem cannot really be denied.
Now, mass shootings occur in other countries, but not as much.
And of course, the left will say, well, that's because they restrict guns.
Well, mass shootings occur less in other countries, whether or not they restrict guns.
It obviously has something to do with factors that go beyond guns.
Now, historically, immigrant societies like America do tend to be more violent than non-immigrant societies.
And this has been known for a long time.
It's true, by the way, also of other immigrant societies other than the United States.
But nevertheless, these mass shootings have taken a kind of an ugly surge, and they are deeply revolting to the conscience.
I mean, it could be that these days it's partly because we see them so much more vividly.
In other words, there's video, you see the families, whereas in the old days maybe you had a print article about it and there were quotes that were in the media, but it didn't have the same emotional impact.
So that could be part of it.
But we are clearly dealing with a problem.
But what is the problem?
And what is, of course, the solution?
So from the point of view of the left, it's very clear.
The problem is the gun.
And the solution is to take away the guns.
Now, I do want to point out that this solution is on the face of it kind of odd.
Because let's agree for a moment that the problem is the gun.
The problem is not obviously guns per se.
the problem is that guy's gun, because that guy's gun was used in the mass shooting.
And so you would think that the left would be like, let's try to figure out a way to take away guns from the kind of people who do mass shootings.
But no, that's not the left's position.
The left's position is, how do we take away everybody's guns?
Now when you look at any other violation of rights in the Constitution, you see that this principle that the right is violated over here, so let's deprive everybody else of that right is never applied.
In fact, it makes absolutely no sense.
Let's take the example of the First Amendment.
Let's remember the guns are protected by the Second Amendment, but free speech is protected by the First Amendment.
All right, so now let's take a guy who...
Likes to go into crowded theaters and shout fire.
Causes a panic.
People get stampeded.
The guy is obviously abusing his free speech rights.
He's abusing his First Amendment rights.
And so, there is a kind of limit or restriction on the First Amendment.
Yeah, you have the right to free speech, but you cannot shout fire in a crowded theater.
But let's say you have a guy who keeps doing that.
Would anybody come and say, alright, well, since he is abusing his First Amendment rights, nobody should have First Amendment rights.
Let's take away everybody's free speech rights, including his, and that way he can't abuse it.
He can't go around shouting fire because no one's allowed to speak.
Now, no one says that.
No one even thinks like that because it's absurd.
The fact that you've got millions of law-abiding people exercising their free speech rights has nothing to do with the fact that this dude is abusing his rights.
And similarly, by applying the exact same logic to guns, the fact that you've got millions of law-abiding people who have guns...
Take care of their guns.
Keep their guns for self-defense.
Lawful owners of guns maybe go shooting at the range or they go hunting.
What does that have to do with the mass shooter who is abusing his gun rights?
So, I think that that analogy exposes the sheer idiocy of the left's logic or really illogic here.
Obviously, we have a problem of mental derangement, mental illness.
Now, the left has been very vocal in demanding that people who are mentally ill not be restricted, not be locked up.
You're violating their civil rights.
So it's the left that is actually giving these people permission To have, in a sense, the same rights as everybody else.
They're able to walk into a store and buy a gun, and then when they do a mass shooting, what does the left do?
They turn around and go, it wasn't the guy.
It wasn't the guy that we let out.
It wasn't the guy that we insisted has the same civil rights as the rest of you.
No, it's the gun.
The gun made him do it.
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The letter is very interesting in its own right, so I want to highlight a couple of aspects of it.
It's signed by a long list of Columbia and Barnard. Barnard is the kind of women's wing of Columbia University, Columbia and Barnard faculty. Many recognized names of prominent sociologists, historians, and so on on that
And so, the letter is intended to be kind of weighty, and it's intended to undercut what the writers see as a kind of one-sided favoritism toward Jews.
So, the letter begins by talking about the fact that there have been efforts to criticize and chill the speech of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activists.
And I find this really amusing.
These egregious forms of harassment and efforts to chill otherwise protected speech on campus are unacceptable.
So suddenly, the left has discovered the value of free speech.
Suddenly, they're like, it doesn't matter if the speech is distasteful, it doesn't matter if it makes you uncomfortable.
I mean, these are the same people who have been talking about being triggered, about safe spaces, about the fact that conservative views cannot even be imported to the campus.
First of all, they're rarely present at all because you don't have conservative faculty, but you can't even bring in speakers from the outside because students feel vulnerable, they don't feel safe.
So free speech is not important compared to these other values.
Well, now suddenly free speech is important.
Now suddenly it should be okay to say things.
It doesn't matter if they're controversial.
And so the letter calls on the administration to do more to protect all of our students while preserving Columbia University as a beacon for, quote, fostering critical thinking and opening minds to different points of view.
I mean, the sheer hypocrisy of this is just laughable.
These are people who have been shutting down alternative points of view.
They have been shutting down critical debate.
They have been taking the position that words are violence and therefore critical words are taken as a form of landing slingshots on students of color.
And so now they have become immediate converts, not only to free speech, but also to the importance of the university as a bastion for free and open critical debate.
Wow. And then the letter gets to kind of its main theme.
And its main theme is that what it wants to do, it says, is, quote, recontextualize, this is a keyword, recontextualize the events of October 7, 2023.
This is the Hamas attacks.
So, it's rather benignly described, not Hamas attacks and murderous attacks on civilians, but the events of October 7th.
Pointing out that the military operations and state violence did not begin that day, but represented a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence and it talks about an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.
So, there's an effort here to put forward a whole view of history and what is that view of history?
Well, the view of history is, well, it's a snapshot version of history.
Debbie and I were talking about this over coffee this morning and I was saying what they do is they sort of begin history in 1948.
Here comes the state of Israel.
It is an occupying force.
It takes over the country, the poor Palestinians who have been there.
And of course, they weren't really Palestinians per se before.
But nevertheless, they're now under Israeli occupation.
Now, left out of this narrative is a whole bunch of very inconvenient facts, first of all.
Under the UN resolutions of the mid-1940s that led to the formation of the State of Israel, there was a plan to have the Palestinians have their own state.
The Palestinians rejected that plan.
There was an attack on the state of Israel.
So the state of Israel began, not by its own choice, in war.
It began in war. And when you have war, you seize territory.
So the Palestinians essentially became refugees.
They left what was now the new state of Israel.
They went to Gaza and the West Bank, but Gaza and the West Bank were not part of Israel.
The West Bank is the West Bank of Jordan.
That's why it's called the West Bank.
It was the West Bank of the country of Jordan.
And the Gaza Strip was under the control of Egypt.
It was only in the 1967 war when a number of these countries, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, all came together and attacked Israel.
And Israel captured the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan, thus expanding the borders of Israel.
So, the point is again, now I guess the left could say, well that was an occupation, but this was not a colonial occupation in the same way that the British, for example, came from England to India and then just colonized the place.
Not at all. This was a case where Israel was attacked from the outside and Israel fought back and that's what happens in war.
What happens in war is the rules of the game get changed.
You risk your own territory when you try to seize somebody else's territory.
And so that's how the West Bank and Gaza came under Israeli control.
But let me kind of, to use the favorite word of this letter, recontextualize things even more.
Who were the original inhabitants of the land of Israel?
Well, they were the Jews.
The Jews are in Israel going back to what?
2000 BC? And this is not just an assertion in the Bible.
You can find the physical presence.
There's a lot of evidence of the Jews who built towns and they built cities and they built palaces.
There's the remnants of the palace of King David.
There are seals, there are artifacts, so there is a whole archaeological history there that establishes this as the original home of the Jews.
Now, the Jews were scattered, but kind of not of their own choice.
They were scattered because they were hunted, they were attacked, the Romans burned the temple, the Jews were forced to flee, and so to that degree, if you begin the story, then you get a whole different story.
I mean, think, for example, about the analogy that many people make to the American Indians.
This was originally their land.
And so, using the very logic of the left, they, in that sense, have a claim to original ownership.
And from the left's point of view, they have been displaced, they've been treated very badly.
And look, I agree.
In some of my earlier films, I've talked about the ways in which the Democratic Party abused the American Indians and still abuses them on the plantations.
In any event, the point I want to make is that the...
The efforts on the part of the Columbia faculty is, when they say we want to contextualize what is happening, they're not giving you the full context.
They're giving you a partial context that supports their narrative and leaving out the parts that don't.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is continuing his discussion of techniques of interrogation.
He's gone over a bunch of them and he is now in the section called starvation.
Now, starvation doesn't mean that they just don't deprive you of food.
That is indeed often the case.
But starvation also means that part of the way they break you down is that after you're starving, they bring in food but don't give it to you.
So Solzhenitsyn says that there was a guy...
And the interrogator Sokol placed him in front of a pot of thick borscht.
The borscht is the Russian soup, a kind of soup loaded with a kind of tangy soup with vegetables.
I believe a cold soup.
And half a loaf of white bread sliced diagonally.
This is Solzhenitsyn's kind of eye for detail.
It's sliced in a certain way.
He remembers it. The convict remembers it.
And however, he was not given a thing to eat.
And then says Shuljitzen, how ancient, how medieval, how primitive.
This whole idea just we're going to withhold food.
Or we will bring in food, show it to you, kind of tantalize you, if you will, dangle it in front of you, but you won't get it.
And writes Solzhenitsyn, the only thing new about it was it was applied in a socialist society.
So, the socialists are just saying, we can learn from medieval techniques.
They may be old, but they're very useful.
They can come in pretty handy right now.
In another case, you have a guy...
And they starve him.
And then they bring him a carafe of wine.
Now the guy doesn't want to drink the wine.
He actually is not a wine drinker.
He doesn't do it. And so they try to keep pressing him to drink, drink, drink.
And sign, drink and sign, drink and sign.
So you can see that they want to intoxicate him.
That will weaken his resistance and he will sign.
And that's the main thing. They need his signature on the piece of paper.
but Solzhenitsyn then writes, on the very first page, Tcherbadyev learned he had been on intimate terms with all the leading Japanese generals. This is the Japanese generals fighting on the Soviet side, on the Nazi side in World War II, and that he had received espionage assignments from all of them. He began to cross out whole pages.
So he doesn't go for it.
He's supposed to agree to something that obviously never happened.
He's not guilty. They're trying to frame him for espionage.
They were hoping he'd drink and then sign.
He won't do it. But, writes Solzhenitsyn, Blagenin, another Chinese Eastern Railroad man arrested with him, was put through the same thing, but he drank the wine and, in a state of pleasant intoxication, signed the confession and was shot.
So, it didn't work with the first guy, but it worked with the second guy.
And that's why they have this kind of multiplicity of techniques.
If one doesn't work, we get you another way.
Solzhenitsyn then goes into a description of various types of beatings.
Beatings of the kind that leave no marks, blows in the solar plexus, a kind of torture technique called bridling.
And then he picks up the idea that behind all of this, there is in fact a Soviet code.
In fact, he says two codes.
There's a code of a criminal code and a code of procedure.
And this is part of Soviet law.
It presumably goes back to the days or the immediate aftermath of the revolution.
But here's the interesting thing.
Even though there is a code...
The prisoners never get to see it.
They never get to know what their rights are.
And so this is a typical scene.
The principle of our interrogation consists further in depriving the accused of even a knowledge of the law.
An indictment is presented.
And here, incidentally, is how it is presented.
Sign it. It's not true.
Sign. But I'm not guilty of anything.
It turns out you are being indicted under the provisions of Articles 5810 Part 2 and 5811 of the Criminal Code.
Sign. But what do these sections say?
Let me read the code. I don't have it.
Well, get it from your department head.
He doesn't have it either. Sign.
But I want to see it. You're not supposed to see it.
It isn't written for you, but for us.
You don't need to see it.
I'll tell you what it says. These sections spell out exactly what you are guilty of.
And anyway, this is the interrogator talking.
At this point, your signature doesn't mean that you agree with the indictment, but that you have read it, that it's been presented to you.
Now, of course, the farce is that it hasn't really been presented to him at all.
He hasn't had a chance to look at it.
And so, this is the kind of browbeating that goes on.
Now, it should be said that this kind of naked violations of law is not present in America today.
I believe that if we become a full-fledged police state, it will be exactly like this.
There's a sort of numbing similarity between Yeah, I think.
But even interestingly here in the Soviet case, they're trying to observe the outward form of the law.
There is a code. Have you read the code?
Sign over here saying that you have read it.
Well, I didn't read it, but sign anyway.
Now, again, you might ask, why go through the procedures?
Why do they even care? Why do they care that he signs?
And I think a lot of it is ultimately to create a facade that some lawful procedure is being followed, even though in reality, none is.
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