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Nov. 14, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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ISRAEL’S PREDICAMENT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep707
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Coming up, I'll make the case for why Rona McDaniel, the poster child of GOP failure, should resign as head of the RNC. Former CIA officer and intelligence specialist Mike Baker joins me.
We're going to talk about Israel's predicament in dealing with Hamas and the Palestinians.
And I'll explore the removal of an Orthodox Catholic bishop by Pope Francis to ask, who's the real apostate?
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, 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.
The Republican Party, I gotta say, is kind of a worthless party.
I say this not as my considered...
It's certainly not a long-term judgment on the Republican Party, but it is my feeling about the Republican Party right now.
Why? Because it's so frustrating.
These are the people who are standing against the police state.
At least they should be. They are the only bulwark.
Against the police state, they are in a position, they have power to be able to improve things, change things.
Not necessarily maybe now to fix everything, but at least to put things on the road to being fixed.
And yet, they kind of won't do it.
They won't get their act together.
They have become not only content with failure, but in some ways almost proud of it.
This is, by the way, not the Republican Party that came together in 1854 with a strong resolution to develop an effective anti-slavery campaign.
This is not the party of Abraham Lincoln anymore.
It's now the party of Rona McDaniel.
It's now the party of a lot of weaklings and invertebrates.
And some people who have also just become far too contented feasting in the swamp.
Now, I'll start with Rona McDaniel because Rona McDaniel has been a horrible head of the RNC, a complete disaster.
You can tell just even listening to her that she's out of her league.
I remember thinking back to the Reagan years when we had political strategists running the RNC, and those guys were tough.
They were smart. They were cosmopolitan.
They were ruthless. They were city guys, but they had country roots.
They understood coalitions.
They were pragmatic.
And what a pathetic fall from those guys to Rona McDaniel.
Most recently, in the Virginia election, the head of the Virginia GOP, this is a guy named Larry O'Connor, Well, no, I'm sorry.
This is a guy named Rich Anderson, chairman of the RPV, the Republican Party of Virginia.
He went to Ronna McDaniel.
He said it's a very close election in a really important state.
The Virginia GOP is holding on by a thread to the lead in the House of Delegates.
They're in striking distance of taking the Senate.
He goes, we need $1 million.
I mean, a pittance.
And Rona McDaniel goes, no, I'm not doing it.
The RNC basically provided no support.
Now, later, after the humiliating losses in Virginia, Rona McDaniel is saying, well, there was a state PAC. She's implying that Youngkin had his own PAC. And, by the way, we're talking about Glenn Youngkin, who defeated the odds to beat Terry McAuliffe.
And this is a guy who has actually taken Virginia, which had been trending blue, and sort of pulled it back to the center.
He's the guy who has helped give Virginia a chance for Republicans to win.
And Rona McDaniel is blaming this guy.
When it's completely, not completely, but largely, let's say, her fault.
So this is a complete disgrace.
Anyone with Rona McDaniel's catastrophic record, 2020, 2022, now 2023, failure upon failure upon failure, I mean, failure is basically her defining characteristic, would step down.
But the obstinacy with which, I mean, these are people who are weak, need about everything except holding on to their perks, holding on to their jobs.
Complete disgrace. Vivek Ramaswamy called her out in the Republican debate, and apparently her reaction was to bash Vivek and say, basically, I'm not giving him a cent, as if it's her money.
She gets his money from donors.
It's for the advancement of the Republican cause.
I'm not going to assign any of it to Vivek because he said he wants me to resign.
That's case number one.
Now we go to case number two.
7-0 House GOP members vote to give $300 million plus to the FBI to build a new building in Washington, D.C., a magnificent headquarters.
Now, digest this for a minute.
The FBI told Newsweek that they are targeting MAGA Republicans.
They're creating a special category.
And Republicans know that they are in the crosshairs of the FBI, not to mention the other police agencies or government.
Why would you want to bankroll the very people who are criminally targeting you?
I mean, what kind of insane behavior is this?
How can someone with an R at the end of his name vote for this?
So this is the sort of sputtering frustration I feel when I read this kind of stuff.
I say to myself, we have a serious problem inside our own party, and this, of course, is disabling us from being able to block the police state.
No wonder the police state is advancing so rapidly.
The opposition against it is so divided, so confused, and so weak.
And here's my example number three.
Marjorie Taylor Greene introduces a resolution to impeach Mayorkas.
Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene may be a controversial figure.
There may be some Republicans who don't really like her style.
But you would think that this is one thing we can all agree on.
The border is wide open.
Mayorkas, every time he comes to testify...
Essentially, lie upon lie comes out of his mouth.
The border is secure.
This guy is a complete, unmitigated disgrace.
And I saw from Rasmussen today, surveys show that overwhelming majorities of Republicans, substantial majorities of independents, and even a pretty clear majority of Democrats agree that the border needs to be secure.
So if there's one thing you think Republicans could do, it's impeach Mayorkas.
But no, eight Republicans vote against it, and because the Republican majority in the House is razor thin, it fails.
It now goes to committee.
One or two Republicans, of course, in a very classic Republican idiot style, are like, well, we should impeach Mayorkas, but this is not the right way to go about it.
So the way that is actually being proposed, that is going forward, is to be set aside in favor of some other hypothetical way that has no immediate prospect of being realized.
This, alas, is the Republican Party.
We don't really have anything else.
So how frustrating it is that this is what we got.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Mike Baker.
He's a former CIA covert operations officer, current CEO of Portman Square Group, which is a global intelligence firm.
He's also the host of Black Files Declassified on Discovery Plus and the Science Channel and host of the podcast, The President's Daily Brief.
Mike, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
Let me start by asking you about this war going on with Hamas in Israel.
It seems to me in some ways kind of a unique operation because when we normally think of terrorists, we don't think of them as in possession of any kind of territory.
We think of this as kind of a network of cells or a network of operatives.
They don't rule anything.
They don't have land.
They don't govern any territory.
But it seems like in the peculiar case of Hamas, they have territory.
They're basically the ruling authority in Gaza.
And so Israel, I think, is dealing with kind of a unique situation, a terrorist operation, but one that nevertheless is a ruling authority for a whole bunch of Palestinians.
Right. It is.
You really spelled that out very well because your typical terrorist operation is you identify the target.
You create the operational game plan, essentially, for that target.
You move in, you move out. I mean, it's really...
Relatively straightforward.
We'd have to go back to ISIS when ISIS was holding territory to see something somewhat similar.
But the problem here is Hamas has been viewed since early 2006 when they kicked out the Palestinian Authority by force.
And then you ended up with this split, right?
So the West Bank governed by the Palestinian Authority, Gaza governed obviously by Hamas.
And they...
The IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, is facing a very difficult, very unique situation here, but they have a strategy, they have a game plan, and they've been implementing that, despite all the international pressure that started remarkably soon after that horrific, murderous onslaught by Hamas and southern Israel in 7 October.
The... I don't know.
Well, in Hamas's charter, it says that, you know, part of their objective, their principle, written very clearly, as it is with Iran's perspective, is the destruction of Israel, the removal of the Jewish state, the killing of Jews.
I mean, it's in their doctrine.
It's in their charter. They couldn't be more clear.
And sometimes we fail to take people at their word.
With Hamas, we should pay attention to what they say over the years because they mean it.
And But you're right.
I guess in a certain way, your explanation is actually very good.
It's like two gangs.
And while Palestinian Authority back some 17, 18 years ago was in Gaza, you did have two essential rival gangs.
And what happened was, again, Hamas won that battle with Palestinian Authority.
They ended up with the West Bank, right?
And so When we talk about the idea of, as the White House has been recently of, look, what does a post-conflict Gaza look like?
You know, Jake Sullivan, John Kirby, others in the White House have been saying, well, we've been encouraging the Palestinian Authority concept, the scenario that the Palestinian Authority will come back in and they'll rule Gaza.
Well, that's fraught with all sorts of issues.
There's all sorts of problems there.
But, you know, we have to look at something.
We have to look at something other than long-term occupation because Israel doesn't want long-term occupation of Gaza.
Yeah. Yeah.
Hamas is the ruling power in Gaza.
They held an election, I guess, a decade or more ago.
They haven't had elections since.
What is the relationship between Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza?
I mean, from what I read, Hamas is very clever at being a social service provider.
They enmesh themselves with the people.
Many times families are dependent on them.
So, in other words, they don't seem to be ruling the place dictatorially as a police state.
It appears like they've got some deep connections and maybe even support among a lot of Palestinians in Gaza.
Is that true or what's your assessment of that situation?
They do have some support, certainly, because you're talking about they have a large number of fighters, of militants who align themselves with Hamas.
And I mean, depending on the numbers that shake out at any given time up until this conflict kicked off, You could say there were perhaps 30,000 or so Hamas fighters.
So certainly, you know, you've got a circle around those individuals who also feel allegiance to Hamas.
But essentially, they've ruled ever since 2006 or so, they've ruled Gaza as an overlord, right?
They rule by power.
They have the weapons.
They control the flow of resources to the people of Gaza.
All you have to do is look at the Gaza Strip and say, okay, what improvements has Hamas made since they've been governing?
And the answer is almost none, except for the Hamas leadership.
The Hamas leadership has enriched themselves.
Many of them live very comfortably overseas.
They have a great deal of wealth, and that wealth is stolen.
All that money that is now sitting in the bank accounts of Hamas leadership was supposedly intended for the benefit of the Palestinian people.
So the idea that Hamas has been some sort of benevolent government, worried about improving the lives of the Palestinians, is nonsense.
And they've essentially... Use the Palestinian plight, as to be fair, others in the Arab world, to their benefit.
And that's why oftentimes people would say, well, how could they not have improved their conditions over all these years?
And in part, it's because...
You know, it suits the needs of Iran and others to be able to constantly point to the plight of the Palestinians because their ultimate objective is to remove the Jewish state.
If you have peace, if you have a prosperous developing situation with the Palestinians, if you have peace and prospering relationships between the Saudis and Israel, that doesn't serve Iran's purpose because that implies that We'll be right back with Mike Baker,
host of the President's Daily Brief.
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I'm back with former CIA covert operations officer, current CEO of Portman Square Group, host of the President's Daily Brief podcast, Mike Baker.
Mike, what do you think is the...
Do you think that the motivation behind the Hamas attacks was to thwart any further advancement in the Abrahamic Accords?
In other words, to throw a wrecking ball into the possibility of Israel making deals with other Arab countries because once you got the war going, it's basically the Jews against the Muslims, at least in broad stereotype, Muslim countries immediately have to back off and they're like, we can't really be siding with Israel in this situation.
Some people say terrorism does not have a purpose.
People are just maniacs.
They just like killing people.
It's a death cult, etc.
But presumably there is some strategic rationale behind it.
Do you think this is what it is?
I do. I think that was a great part of the thinking.
But I think that, I mean, it took them a while to develop this operation.
So there were other aspects of this, one of them being that they just, frankly, Hamas and their overlords, the Iranian regime, they want the end of Israel.
So that's sitting there at 30,000 feet.
But underneath that, in terms of, okay, well, You know, what was the impetus?
What were elements of that?
I think you've hit it on the head.
Look, the idea that the Saudis and Israel would normalize relations, that that could then influence other Arab countries to do the same because it brings stability and economic development to their countries, which they want, that also, underlying that, implies, there you go, Israel is a permanent structure.
It has a right to exist.
And more than anything, the Iranian regime doesn't want that to happen.
So I think that, you know, if you look at that and say, why the instability?
That's the number one reason.
But the idea of advancing further with the Abraham Accords and spreading that sort of stability, if that happens, Hamas has no reason to exist.
Hamas would lose their funding.
They would lose their ability to steal money from the Palestinian people and enrich themselves.
Same with Hezbollah.
Hezbollah would lose their primary sponsor.
And so, yes, I think that had a big part to play in this.
You mentioned, Mike, the fact that you've got this kind of Hamas leadership living abroad in luxurious hotels, and some of these guys I've read are multi-millionaires, if not billionaires.
Is there something, maybe just prudence, I don't know, that would inhibit the Israelis from saying, well, guess what?
In the wake of these kinds of attacks, presumably the orders came from the Hamas leadership, even if they were taking orders from Iran.
Why don't we consider these people competence and take them out?
Is it that Israel's like, we can't go do this in Switzerland, we can't go do this in a Western country because of the optics?
Or why wouldn't you want to target these guys and make them pay a price?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's two parts to that.
One is, on a personal level, they should pay a price.
The other is not so much the optic, but the reality of what that could then produce, right?
So if you start taking out the political leadership of Hamas that is living comfortably in Doha, then that has the potential for, that puts Qatar in a very difficult position.
Could Harden views towards Israel from some Arab countries that look down the road and say, you know what, maybe not right now during this conflict, but at some point down the road we need to have better relations.
It's good for the region to have better relations.
So I think Israel looks at it as a longer term play regarding that part of this problem, the political leadership in particular.
And the political leadership sitting over there stealing money, it's different from the commanders and the military leadership of Hamas, which is embedded in Gaza.
So there is some tension between there, and intelligence still isn't pointing very clearly to how much information the political leadership had about what was about to take place on 7 October.
Do you think, Mike, we all know that Israeli society was quite divided.
Netanyahu has been a controversial leader.
Some of the same divisions we see in the United States are also occurring in Israel, divisions also in the media.
Is Israeli society fully united, at least on this, on seeing through the war, disregarding the deafening din coming from abroad and just going, hey, we got a job to do and we're going to do it?
Yeah, so the folks I've spoken with ever since this conflict began as a result of Hamas' actions, There is a very strong sense of unity around the need to do this, the need for the IDF to resolve the Hamas question once and for all, to either degrade them so badly that they can never govern or carry out terrorist actions again or just remove them entirely.
That's a problem.
You never really reduce the risk of terror down to zero.
But is Netanyahu popular beyond that?
No. I think if we're fortunate enough to see this resolve in a peaceful manner eventually, and Hamas is off the radar screen, then I think you'll see the divisions return.
Politics is politics.
but for right now, because of the horror of what happened, because of this existential threat that they're facing from Hamas, because Hamas did this and then they said, we're going to keep doing it, right? It's not as if they said this is a one-off.
And I think what also unifies the people right now is the fact that, you know, and I'll tell you, I'm surprised.
I didn't know we had so many anti-Semitic bigots hiding under rocks, just waiting for an opportunity to pop up, right?
Whether you're talking about college campuses or the streets of Paris or London or wherever.
So I think the international reaction that you see in the media, I think that has also unified the Israeli people because now it's You know, it's kind of back to it's us, you know, or it's nobody.
No one's coming to save us.
So we have to do this ourselves.
And I think they do feel very unified right now.
We'll be right back with Mike Baker.
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Get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. I'm back with former CIA covert operations officer Mike Baker, current CEO of Portman Square Group, host of the podcast The President's Daily Brief.
Mike, I saw a post by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AOC this morning.
Where she was basically saying that what a ceasefire means is that we give up on the idea that this can be something solved militarily.
This has to be solved with kind of political, cultural, and historical awareness, as she puts it. And I remember kind of recoiling at this because I thought to myself, you can't go and inflict a grievous injury on somebody else and then when they go up in arms and plan to retaliate, you're like, cease fire! You know, there's something laughable about doing that.
It's one thing if you came to them before and said, these issues are complex, let's sit down, there is a historical dimension, and so on.
But it all rings very hollow now, does it to you?
Yeah, it does.
And for all my foreign policy and world conflict strategy, I turn to AOC. So, you know, what a wealth of experience she has in these sort of problems and understanding of these conflicts.
So, Yeah, it's totally expected to come.
And Hamas knew this would happen.
They're probably surprised at how quickly the narrative turned.
But Hamas knows this.
They have a very savvy PR shop, right?
They understand public relations.
They use this. They knew they were going to have this narrative turn very rapidly, although, again, it happened remarkably quickly, given how horrific this slaughter was.
But That's what they counted on.
They count on that.
So this idea of a ceasefire before you have the return of hostages and you have degraded Hamas to the point again where they can't govern and they can't conduct these sort of terrorist activities again in the future.
The only people who win in a ceasefire are Hamas and the Iranian regime.
That's it. Nobody else wins.
And so AOC and others calling for a ceasefire, they're basically Saying, yeah, let's kick the can down the road, you know, and we're voting for more violence, more death, more terrorism in the future.
They're not solving anything.
And so I think this is a moment in time where the White House has to understand its limitations in trying to impose violence.
Strategy on Israel because of U.S. domestic policy.
And, you know, by that I mean the White House is staring at dwindling poll numbers, you know, from Arab American community and from youth voters who are out there acting as youthful idiots on college campuses for the Hamas narrative.
And they see that.
And so part of this pressure from the White House, even, not just ALC, but others, but part of the pressure from the White House, I believe, is based on U.S. domestic policy.
And that's a very dangerous thing when you're talking about terrorism.
I mean, I was about to go right there and ask you that, because it seems at some level that everybody here does kind of know what they're doing, except the United States.
The Iranians know exactly what they're doing.
In a way, Hamas knows what it's doing.
As you say, they're strategic, they can count on the reaction, they anticipate it, they're ready for it.
The Israelis are unified, they know what they're doing, they've got a mission in front of them.
But now you've got the United States, and then this goes back to Obama.
There was the Iran deal.
Then there was the unfreezing of the $6 billion.
There's evidently some talk now about more money for Iran.
And my question is, is this just a bungling on the part of the US government?
Is it, as you say, entirely a response to domestic issues?
Or is something else afoot?
I think it's a bad recipe or combination of the bungling, the weakness under pressure from domestic issues, and the concern over the 2024 election.
Yeah, we here in the US tend to have very short attention spans, right?
The general public spent a surprisingly little amount of time horrified at the slaughter, and now a lot of those same people are out there yelling about from the river to the sea without any real understanding of what's happening or of what Hamas has not done for the people of Gaza.
And so... I think at this point in time, we need to, as if I was the president at this point, I would have a one-on-one sit down with Netanyahu and I said, okay, what is your game plan here?
What do you consider enough?
What do you consider? Because they have to make that call, right?
For us or for the UN or for anyone else to impose on Israel at this point in time, after 7 October, and after repeated statements from Hamas that they'll continue those actions, right?
You know, we're not in a position to pressure them into a ceasefire.
And again, I think a ceasefire benefits no one other than Iran and Hamas.
So I get why Israel's concerned.
Look, they've got to be concerned about opening up a second front up in, you know, northern Israel with Hezbollah.
And Hezbollah is also controlled by Iran.
So at the end of the day, it does look like if you want stability in the long term and you want development and prosper, you know, and a good life for Palestinians and others in the region, That road's going to have to lead through the Iranian regime at some point.
And I'm not saying that we turn our attention to the Iranian regime in a military way, but we better get serious about this because it's a lot easier to deal with Iran right now before they get a nuclear weapon than after they do.
But I don't think the White House has the stones or however you want to put it to go down that path.
They're desperate to keep this thing as contained as possible.
And again, for very good reasons.
You don't want a widening regional conflict.
But in a pragmatic sense, we have to understand where this problem originates from and where it will continue to emanate from.
And that's the Iranian regime.
They're not changing their ways until we put something up that resembles deterrence.
Very enlightening, Mike Baker.
Thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dinesh.
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How on earth did the Catholic Church end up with Pope Francis?
I think I know how...
The church got him, and that is there is a desire on the part of a universal church, a church that stretches across all the five or six continents, to kind of spread the wealth around, which is to say to spread the leadership around.
So, Karol Watiwa, or John Paul II, was the first Polish pope.
He was followed by Benedict.
There has been some talk for a while about an African Pope, but it wasn't to be this time.
I think they decided, okay, well, let's go South America.
Let's go to Latin America or South America.
And they got Francis.
Now, Francis comes out of a leftist political tradition in South America.
I don't know if the other cardinals that selected him knew the extent of his leftism.
Now, South America has had an economic leftism that goes back a ways.
But it looks like Francis is much worse than that.
He's not just an economic leftist.
He's not just redistribute the wealth.
That would be one thing. But he is also a cultural leftist.
He appears to be highly influenced by cultural Marxism.
This is a guy who...
You may almost say that instead of seeing himself as the church's missionary to the world, in other words, let's bring a Christian and Catholic message to the world and try to transform the culture in a Christian and Catholic direction, he sort of sees himself as the world's missionary to the church.
So, there are all these issues in the world, social justice, the issue of gay rights, the trans.
So, he goes, I will be the world's missionary.
I will take those issues that have been my political and evidently cultural interest for a long time, and I will try to move the Catholic Church and its traditional positions more toward the world.
So, very sadly, moving the Church toward the world instead of the other way around.
Now, one man who has been caught in the middle of this is an Orthodox bishop in America named Bishop Strickland.
What can we say about Bishop Strickland?
Well, he's a bishop in Texas.
He is a straight-laced guy.
He's Orthodox.
He's traditional.
He believes in the Church as it has existed for 2,000 years.
He is also an obedient Catholic, which is to say that he will take orders from the Pope.
But he has not hesitated previously to criticize the Pope, because I think he realizes that this Pope is kind of a radical.
This Pope is, in some ways, undermining.
Now, the Pope is not directly going against any of the Catholic teachings, per se.
I haven't heard the Pope say abortion is a good thing, for example.
He's not going to do that. The Pope, in that sense, remains Catholic.
He's not going to repudiate the just war.
He's not going to repudiate the idea of the sort of special status of Mary.
Whatever the ensemble of Catholic beliefs, the Pope is by and large staying within those.
But the political and cultural upheaval that he's creating, in that he's creating a sort of zone of not only acceptance, but almost enthusiasm, For all kinds of sexually perverted behavior that the Pope seems to think is, well, we got to approach it with sympathy.
I don't necessarily agree with it.
But you can tell he's trying to open the doors, an open border policy, so to speak, toward all that.
And he is going after the most traditional of the traditional Catholics.
So, for example, Catholics who like a Latin Mass, the Pope is like, I'm not really a friend of yours.
Well, why not? What's wrong with a Latin Mass?
There's nothing wrong with it at all.
You would think that the Pope would go there.
Some people would like to worship in the old way.
They think that because the church began in Latin, that the Mass, in a sense, has a certain kind of iconic quality when said in Latin.
No one is saying you shouldn't have Masses in vernacular or Masses in Italian, German, English, and so on.
but some people like to go to a Latin mass. The Pope seems to think that those people are freaks.
In other words, interestingly, another group that thinks those people are freaks is the FBI.
You might have seen that the Virginia wing of the FBI was like, being a traditionalist Catholic who likes the Latin mass is somehow a surrogate for being a potential extremist, a domestic extremist, which can then somehow lead to you becoming a domestic terrorist. And so, this is the the sort of pressure that traditional Catholics are under.
And now Bishop Strickland finds himself dismissed.
For what? Normally, it's really hard to get dismissed as a bishop unless you do something scandalous.
I mean, you're, you know, I don't know, you're sort of degrading or desecrating the sacraments or you're sort of stealing the holy water.
I mean, you have to do something outrageous to get booted.
And yet here you have an Orthodox bishop booted by the Pope who now has put a kind of temporary replacement in his place. It reminds me of something that Pope Benedict I said and he was speaking of course generally not about this specific case but he said that the smoke of Satan is now within the church and I think he meant not just the Catholic Church, the institution, but the church more broadly, the body of believers, that the church itself
will see a kind of fingerprint of Satan not just outside out there where you're fighting it in as a unified church but inside the portals, inside the pews, and inside the ruling authorities of the church itself.
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I spoke yesterday about the conversion of atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Christianity.
This is a woman raised in Somalia, and I think because of theocratic Islam and Islamic radicalism, she swung to the other extreme.
She wrote a book called Infidel.
Her point was basically all religion is bad.
I don't think she really had looked at Christianity.
Why would she? She was on the rebound, as they say, from Islam.
And so she flew into the arms of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, the so-called new atheists.
And she's a very smart woman with an academic bent.
In fact, she's married to a prominent Harvard historian, Neil Ferguson.
And so Ayaan Hirsi Ali became an atheist.
But now she says, I recognize that the real fight in the world is between the forces of tyranny and evil, including radical Islam.
And what's on the other side?
She goes, really, what's on the other side is Judeo-Christianity.
It's the Christian tradition and all our liberties in this country.
By the way, this is a theme I elucidate in my book, What's So Great About Christianity?, Even many values we consider secular, even rights and civil liberties that we think of in secular terms have their roots, are built on a Christian foundation, on a Christian rock, you might say.
And Ayaan Harsi Ali knows this now, and she's like, well, if that's the case, and I want to be fighting on the side of Western civilization for Western values, for freedom of speech, for the equal dignity of all human beings...
I need to embrace the Christianity that gave us all that.
So that's her first argument.
And her second argument is, we come into the world alone.
We leave alone. There's a kind of spiritual loneliness that we experience that nothing else can satisfy except some concept of the transcendent.
And so her second reason is to embrace Christianity, not just for society, not just for the culture war, but because it's something that provides spiritual solace.
Now, interestingly, some of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's I wouldn't say former friends because they haven't disowned her or anything.
One of them, Colin Wright, the evolutionary biologist, I had him on the podcast, gosh, a few weeks ago.
And he's one of the sort of atheists in league with Dawkins and so on.
And he goes, this is disappointing.
Her conversion had nothing to do with coming to the realization that Christianity is true, only that she believes it is useful.
No, I don't think that's right because, first of all, if you don't think that something is true, it ceases to be useful.
In other words, the utility of a belief depends upon the prior recognition that it's true.
After all, take anybody who has confidence in anything.
Let's say, for example, I have a lot of confidence in my dad because my dad is going to come to my rescue.
But I happen to know that my dad died five years ago.
He can't come to my rescue. He's not even around anymore.
So how can this belief be useful to me when I know that the underlying basis of it is untrue?
It can't be. I have to honestly believe that my dad is here.
He's going to hear about this.
He's going to come fix the problem.
And so I'm just giving a general analogy, but I think you see where I'm going.
I don't think it makes sense to say that she is defending merely the utility of Christianity.
Here, I'm looking at the comments now in response to the article.
Here's someone who says, basically, that in embracing Christianity, she's embracing this horrific concept of punishment in the afterlife and hell.
And this guy writes, let's not forget Dante's Divine Comedy and his sadistic inferno all about the never-ending punishment of the sinful.
Now, first of all, there is nothing sadistic about Dante's Inferno.
I don't know if you were present when I did a pretty long exegesis, a kind of a mini course on Dante's Inferno.
In Dante's Inferno, the punishment...
It's not just that it fits the offense.
It is that Dante is actually giving sinners what they want.
If sinners want to be out of control, then Dante's hell is that they are out of control.
They are being buffeted from side to side.
They do not have control over themselves.
If sinners are completely selfish and want to be by themselves and consider everybody else to be a kind of blot on the landscape, Dante gives you isolation.
If you're envious and you always wanted to get some other guy and scratch him and bite him and eat his head...
Then in hell, that's what you're doing.
You're grabbing the guy, you're biting his head.
And so, the profundity of Dante's Inferno is not the invention of elaborate punishments, but giving the sinner exactly what the sinner wants.
And then Steve Murray, also commenting at Ayaan Harsi Ali's article, raises the question,"'Can one accept and live by Christian values without believing in God?' And I think my answer to that question is, yes, you can, but only as long as you don't interrogate where those values are coming from.
So, in other words, is it possible to be kind without embracing Christianity?
Yes. But compassion, by the way, not just for your own child, your own friend, your own neighbor, but compassion, let's say, for someone you don't even know.
This concept of universal compassion, universal brotherhood, this is a Christian idea.
So you may not know where it comes from.
You might subscribe to it because you're a product of a Christian culture, a Christian education.
You've learned it from other people or from books that are influenced by Christianity.
So, yeah, can you be virtuous?
Can you be a good person?
Can you have Christian values without embracing a Christian foundation?
Yes, you can. But the moment you begin to investigate those values, what are they?
How did we get them?
Are they truly universal?
Does everybody have them?
Why is it that these values not only are unique to Western civilization but came into Western civilization concomitantly with Christianity?
In other words, they weren't there in pre-Christian Greece and Rome.
They came in with Christianity.
They've been here ever since.
And by the way, as our society moves away from Christianity, these very same values become more faded, more indistinct, and maybe there is a time when they will disappear altogether.
Solzhenitsyn is talking about the character and the power of the so-called blue caps, the people who run the prison camps of the Gulag.
Bye!
And he says that they have almost untrammeled power.
They can do kind of whatever they want.
So they bring in a woman, they want to have their way with her, go for it.
You bring in a man, you have his eye on your wife, the guy's wife, you can figure out a way to bring her in, terrify her, have your way with her.
So Solzhenitsyn kind of pulls out all the stops.
And it's also, it's power exercised at that level, but it's also power exercised in a petty way, too.
Here's a little detail from Solzhenitsyn that involves him.
He says,"...the counterintelligence officer of the 49th Army who arrested me wanted my cigarette case." So, he brings him in, he looks at,"...I'd like to have that cigarette case." And, writes Solzhenitsyn, it wasn't even a cigarette case, but a small German army box of a tempting scarlet, however. So a red box.
Looks good. And because of that piece, that little thing, that little cigarette box, he carried out a whole maneuver.
So Solzhenitsyn goes, he doesn't just want to just take the box.
There might be other guys and they're like, I want the box.
So he's got to come up with a scheme to get it.
So here's the scheme. As his first step, he omitted it from the list of belongings that were confiscated from me.
So they're taking everything from Solzhenitsyn.
They are making an inventory.
They're making a list. And this guy's like, don't say anything about the box.
Don't put it on the list. And then he tells Solzhenitsyn, you can keep it.
You can keep the cigarette case.
Why? Because he doesn't want it on the list.
If it's on the list, he has to then account for it.
The list of confiscated items has got to be sent to some general storehouse.
So... Writes Solzhenitsyn, he thereupon ordered me to be searched again, knowing all the time that it was all I had in my pockets.
So, after the counterintelligence officer tells Solzhenitsyn, quietly, you can keep it, he then forgets that he told him that.
He's like, I think the guy's holding something back.
Let's search him again.
And sure enough, when they search him again, he's like, um, aha, what's that?
He goes, take him away.
And then to prevent my protest, because Solzhenitsyn is going to say, wait a minute, you told me I could keep it, so before he can even say that, put him in the punishment cell.
So look at the fairly elaborate ballet that has to be conducted, the little dance for this guy just to get a hold of Solzhenitsyn's cigarette case.
Just confiscate it, take it, take it for himself.
And then Solzhenitsyn moves into a somewhat more abstract discussion, which I think is very interesting.
And he says, where did this wolf tribe appear from our people?
Does it stem from our own roots, our own blood?
Meaning, you've got this, he calls them a wolf tribe.
They're a set of human beings, but they act like wolves.
And he goes, where do we get these people?
I mean, are they Russian? Are they us?
Are they someone else? And then he goes, it is our own.
Meaning, no, it's not some foreign evil.
These are our guys.
These are fellow Russians.
And he goes on to say, and just so we don't go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself, if my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?
Right away, as Solzhenitsyn is about to say, these people are wolves, they're evil, and he knows that the reaction of people, fellow Russians, remember this, the Gulag Archipelago is written for fellow Russians.
It's also written for people in the West, but we're not its primary audience.
So Solzhenitsyn knows there are going to be Russians who go, well, you know, I'm one of the good guys.
And he goes, but before you say that, he wants to warn you, and he goes...
Well, what would it take for you to exchange places with that guy?
What would it take for you to be that guy?
He goes, it is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.
He goes on to say, I remember my third year at the university in the fall of 1938.
We young men of the Komsomol, the Komsomol is like the young communists, and Solzhenitsyn is a member.
He says, we were called before the district council of all committee.
And he goes, they basically said, you've had enough physics, mathematics, and chemistry.
It's more important for your country that you join basically the intelligence school.
In other words, you join the school of the police.
You become a blue cap.
You move into the administration of the police state.
And then Solzhenitsyn fast forwards and he goes, 25 years later we would think, well yeah, we understood the sort of arrests that were being made at the time and the fact that they were torturing people in prisons and the slime they were trying to drag us into.
And then he goes on to say, and there was something in us that said, don't join these people. You don't want to be part of them.
You might do better there, you might have more power, but you don't want to be part of this enterprise.
He goes on to say here, he describes it this way, he says, your own head can be heard saying, you must, because there's opportunity there, but inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation, I don't want to be part of it.
It makes me feel sick.
Do what you want without me.
I want no part of it.
So Solzhenitsyn accurately reports that he did not join the police and neither did others, and they recognized that something really bad was going on.
So there is a better side of human nature that goes, I don't really want to be part of it.
I may not be the solution, but I don't want to be the problem.
But then, says Solzhenitsyn, still some of us were recruited at that time, and I think if they had really put the pressure on, they could have broken everybody's resistance.
And so he goes, yeah, we said no, but had they really pressured us, they would have gotten us.
And me too, meaning, and Solzhenitsyn as well.
I too could have ended up a blue cap.
So what we're going into, and we'll pick this up next time, a very, I think, sobering and profound reflection on human nature and on the fact that there is no...
A clear line between the good people and the bad people.
Solzhenitsyn is recognizing that there is, in a sense, a little tyrant in every one of us.
And to defeat tyranny, you must defeat tyranny not only out there, but also tyranny within yourself.
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