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Dec. 5, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:24
DIRECT EVIDENCE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep720
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Coming up, I'll show how this House Oversight Committee can meet the left's demand for direct evidence showing Joe Biden received regular payments from a Hunter Biden entity that was a funnel for foreign bribes.
To the Biden family.
I'll consider the irony of the left's latest tactic of warning that Trump will go full authoritarian in a second term.
Look who's talking. And writer and author Shane Cashman joins me.
He's going to talk about a remarkable story detailing his undercover work with a group called Predator Poachers.
Wow. 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.
Representative James Comer at the Oversight Committee has found further evidence.
I say further evidence because this is not the first time of payments going into the accounts of Joe Biden.
So, you might remember...
Not a little while ago, there was a payment that was disguised as a loan repayment.
There seems to be no evidence that there was an original loan, and the repayment corresponded with an exact sum that came in from the Chinese.
And similarly here, the Chinese are paying money to one of Hunter Biden's companies, and the money is then funneled to Joe Biden.
Now, in the latest case, it's not a big amount of money, but what is significant is it's a recurring deposit, and it's a recurring deposit that is coming from China.
So China to Hunter Biden's company, Hunter Biden's company to Joe Biden.
Now, let's think about this.
For a long time, the left said basically, no, this may be something that is a bit messy, but it's Hunter Biden taking advantage of Joe Biden's names.
He might be theoretically selling access he doesn't even really have.
Maybe he conned the Ukrainians and the Russians and the Chinese and a whole bunch.
I mean, it's implausible.
And all these countries would be paying bribes and getting nothing in return.
But the left's point is no money is going to Joe Biden.
He's not involved.
Well, now we know he is involved.
And now we also know that money is going to him.
So to the degree the left was like, show us direct evidence of money going into Joe Biden's account.
Well, here it is.
Now, again, there's always some superficial explanation.
This is a loan repayment.
Loan repayments seem to be the recurring theme here.
And these are all repayments evidently for loans that were never made in the first place.
I saw Representative Comer.
In fact, I was on Newsmax yesterday and he was the guest before me.
And so I was listening to him talk and he was like, listen, you know, even if you could show that there was, let's say that Joe Biden made a loan of $200,000 to James Biden, but James Biden would be unable to repay the loan, but he gets $200,000 from China and then he pays that money to Joe Biden.
Comer's point is it's still corrupt.
It's still corrupt because the guy is using Chinese money to repay a loan that he should have been paying out of his own money.
And Joe Biden is the beneficiary.
Now it's been pointed out many times that to show a bribery scheme, you don't even have to show direct payments to Joe Biden.
A payment to the family is quite enough.
I mean, if you owe money to Don Corleone or you're paying a bribe to Don Corleone and you give the money to Michael Corleone and the Don goes, well, I didn't get the money.
Well, yeah, but your family did.
So bribery and the statutes in this are very clear.
Benefits received by the family that are a disguised way of paying the principal who's actually delivering the service.
Let's remember, what is the service here?
The service here is really easy.
It's political access to Joe Biden.
And Joe Biden was trafficking in political access.
Now, he's not the first one to do it.
The Clintons actually were trafficking in political access before him.
So this is a, I won't say a Democratic MO because, I mean, Jimmy Carter didn't do it and Truman didn't do it, but it is a recent kind of MO of Democratic presidents.
And so with the Clintons, they set up a nonprofit foundation and they would have the foreign money funnel into the foundation.
And then they would do favors in return.
Now, that is not as effective or direct a way of benefiting the Clintons because when you have a nonprofit foundation, you can kind of control it, but you need to have an independent board of trustees.
They sometimes have their own ideas.
They might decide to spend the money in a different way.
So it's a little bit more of a clumsy scheme as opposed to just running a straight-out family racket.
You want to pay the bribe to me?
Well, you know what? Here's my brother James.
Give it to him. Or here's my son Hunter, give it to him.
And some of that money then Hunter pays some of my bills and then some of it funnels through directly to me.
So all of this has been going on and it's now documented.
And I'm really intrigued to see the way you have a shifting line of defense for the left.
So first it was Biden knew nothing about it.
Then it was Biden knew, but he was just kind of drawn in by affection for his son.
It was his son's business.
Now it's turning out, no, Biden was part of the business.
In fact, I think it's pretty clear.
It's his business using his son.
And there's only one line of defense left, and it's the most tragic and comic, and yet I don't think it is too much for the left.
They will go here if they have to.
And that is, yeah, Biden's old influence, so what?
Think about that. Yeah, Biden's a crook, so what?
Crookedness is now a part of our political system, and for the top guy to be a crook like this and sell out the country, nevertheless, it may be distasteful, but it's not really illegal.
We can't remove him on office just because he sold out the country.
This all sounds preposterous, and of course it is.
And yet I think we are at such an ethical low in the country and a moral low and also a willingness to not just degrade conventional kind of political norms, but just degrade laws that even this line of defense, yeah, Biden did it, but so what, is not unimaginable.
And I think we very well may soon get there.
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There has been in recent days, and we've seen this in a number of places, a kind of left-wing democratic meltdown over the prospect of Trump winning next year.
Now, the left thought that they had Trump kind of exactly where they wanted him.
They pulled out all the stops, not just, of course, the two impeachments, but multiple criminal charges.
I mean, Trump is facing decades in prison, which obviously would be an effective death sentence for him.
Multiple charges, almost 100 charges in multiple jurisdictions.
And the left's view was, this is going to create a situation in which this guy's candidacy is simply untenable.
Number one, how's he even going to get the Republican nomination?
Impossible. And the left's threat was really credible.
I say credible because I think that a bunch of people jumped into the presidential race who had no chance on their own, and certainly no chance to normally beat Trump, but they were like, listen, if Trump is not on the ticket, it then opens up a whole field of opportunity and I might be the guy, I might be the one.
So there are even Republican candidates in the field that believed or maybe hoped that the left's sort of strike against Trump would be successful.
But certainly, the left's view was even if Trump somehow got the nomination, he's gonna have no chance in the general election.
Americans are not going to vote for a guy who is facing multiple criminal charges, possibly even a criminal conviction or two before the election.
Possibly even being incarcerated in the time of the campaign.
I mean, all of this is such untraveled territory that it's hard to speculate about what is going to happen, but I'm only telling you what might happen.
And yet, and yet, Trump is holding strong in the polls.
He is just wiping out the opposition in the Republican primary.
In fact, I just saw a new poll today, and this is just consistent with 30 others.
So I don't normally attach a great importance to polls.
Polls can shift.
But if I'm running against you, others. So I don't normally attach a great importance to polls. Polls can shift. But you know if I'm running against you and I've and I got 70 and you've got 25 or you've got 30 it's pretty obvious who's gonna win the election. Now if I've got 55 and you've got 45 things could shift. But Trump in the latest poll that I saw has as much as the next four Republicans combined.
So this means that he is single-handedly wiping out the whole field.
And so, in a way, you could almost say the Republican primary is close to being over...
Maybe you could chart out a theoretical scenario where Trump loses in Iowa, there's a sort of a complete shift of momentum, and Republicans start saying, okay, no, that's it, we're going to start moving in New Hampshire and in South Carolina and all the other early states, moving away from Trump, and it then creates a cascade.
I think even saying this, I feel a little silly, because this, to me, is very remote.
And so... And the left has also realized that when you have direct matchups with Joe Biden, guess what?
Trump is now pulling ahead.
For some time there, they appear to be tied and the left could take consolation.
Maybe they could take consolation on the fact that we've got some cheating plan that's going to get Biden over the top.
But as Trump pulls away...
You have the dismaying prospect that even the cheating might not be enough.
What if Trump is ahead by 8 to 10 points come next year?
Again, he isn't.
That is a sort of imaginary scenario, but it's not a scenario that is out of the realm of possibility.
Why? Because things are just so bad in the country.
They're such a mess. I was talking to a guy the other day and he's like...
You know, he's like, I wake up, I find myself a little anxious.
And he goes, I realize it's nothing to do with me.
It's not I'm not having a bad day.
It's not because I've got domestic problems or tax problems or anything like that.
It's the state of the country that is weighing on me.
So the left is aware of this.
And so they are starting to hit the panic button.
And they're starting to hit the panic button with a blizzard of articles that are so hysterical in tone that we've got to respond to them not with alarm, not with lengthy rebuttals, not with point-by-point refutations, but just with sheer amusement.
So when we come back I'm going to dive into a special issue of the Atlantic, an article that is in the Washington Post, another one in the New York Times.
These people are freaking out and it's actually kind of fun to see.
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I'm talking about the...
Freak out on the left over the prospect of Trump winning not merely the Republican nomination, but possibly even the presidency in 2024.
There's a special issue or a new issue of The Atlantic.
The kind of theme of it is if Trump wins.
And, you know, The Atlantic used to be a reputable magazine, intellectually credible magazine.
I'm largely centrist.
I would say center-left, but open to reasonable debate and open to ideas from both sides.
Going all the way back to 1991, I wrote the cover story in The Atlantic.
It was an excerpt, a very long excerpt of my book, Illiberal Education.
And I knew a bunch of guys at The Atlantic, but most of them, I think maybe all of them, have now departed.
And the place has become, well, totally different.
And you'll get a sense of it just when I talk about these articles.
I'm just going to read the headlines because they collectively give you the picture.
And the articles are really not words reading, but the headlines are important just to give you the psychological.
This is a frame of mind.
The lead article is by Jeffrey Goldberg.
It's called A Warning.
So right there you can see it's a warning.
The next article, is journalism ready?
The climate can't afford another Trump presidency.
Apparently the climate's worried too.
We're not going to be able to manage.
This is not going to go well for us.
Four more years of unchecked misogyny.
So there's going to be unchecked misogyny.
Evidently, under Biden, we may have some misogyny, but it's checked.
How Trump gets away with it.
The specter of family separation.
I think this is about the border.
So, the Atlantic's concern with the border is not hordes of people coming in, criminals coming in.
It's just that there's going to be family separation going on.
Trump will abandon NATO, an unimaginable threat.
So, this is...
This is like a CNN panel.
It's a bunch of people stomping around, trying to sort of express hysteria.
The world is ending, but it's evidently ending in different ways.
So there's the climate way.
There's the misogyny way.
There's the separating families way.
So the collective picture is supposed to be fear.
This is going to be...
The country is going to be unrecognizable.
Well, hold on. The country is unrecognizable now for many of us compared to the America of even 10 years ago, let alone 30 years ago.
So, we are trying to get to a more recognizable America and there seems little question that Trump would move us in that direction.
So all of this is just mindless hysteria, hysteria driven again by the dawning fear.
And by the way, this is a replay.
Byron York, the journalist, makes this point in the Washington Examiner.
He says, And then they were like, okay, but that's all right. Let's cool down because Trump can't beat Hillary.
There's no way he's going to win the election.
When Trump did win the election, it was, in the words of David Brooks, the New York Times writer, the greatest political shock of our lifetimes.
Now, the situation is a little different now than it was then, because in 2016, you could say all kinds of things about Trump.
He will do this. He will do that.
He'll crash the economy. He'll blow up the world.
And because people didn't know Trump and because he had never been president, people could be like, well, yeah, that's a real danger.
Or they might gullibly go along with that.
But of course, Trump has been president.
And so now to say he'll blow up the world, the point is, well, why didn't he blow up the world when he had the chance?
He'll crash the economy.
Why didn't he crash the economy when he had a chance?
The only time the economy had a big setback was due to COVID. So that doesn't really work.
And even Robert Kagan, Robert Kagan, this is an article in the Washington Post.
And by the way, it's one of the sort of hysterical articles about Trump.
You know, here it is.
A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.
We should stop pretending.
Well, first of all, where's the dictatorship?
We're running an election in 2024.
If somebody wins an election, does that make them a dictator?
No. A dictator comes to power by coup, by usurpation, typically by military force, sometimes by assassination of the previous leader.
We're talking about having a democratic election.
So, the left here is in a kind of, they're in a la-la land because what they're saying doesn't jibe with any kind of reality.
It's almost like they're creating a bubble.
And the bubble is that if we say it, it has to be true, even though when you look around, it's clearly not true.
So, January 6th was an insurrection.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. I see cops letting people in, shaking their hands, high-fiving them.
No, no, no, no, no. You've got to believe it's an insurrection.
Look only at our clips right over here.
We've taken three of them.
We keep recycling the same ones.
So, this is their mode of communication.
But let's remember, for people who do live in their bubble, this could be believable.
Now, here's Robert Kagan with a very telling admission in his Washington Post tirade against Trump.
He says... Most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with crises.
Biden cannot. On Trump's watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.
It's hard to make the case for Trump's unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.
So this is, in an otherwise unhinged article, an almost moment of rationality where Kagan, who's, by the way, a smart guy.
He's a neocon. I used to knew him in the old days in Washington, D.C. It's dawned on him that these end-of-the-world apocalyptic scenarios are going to make people think, yeah, but we had Trump for four years.
I had a chance to observe what he said and what he did.
And I didn't notice the world blowing up, did you?
I didn't notice the climate going into a tailspin, did you?
I didn't notice. In fact, things seem to have been pretty good.
There were fewer crises under Trump than now under Biden.
So, while the left is spinning this frightening or this specter of unreality aimed at creating a terrifying sense that this is what we will get, If Trump is elected, for most people it's like, I saw what he did the last time.
I'd actually like to see more of that now.
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Guys I'm happy to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is Shane Cashman.
He is a writer for the website called Scanner or scnr.com.
In fact you can follow Shane at Shane Cashman.
He's a best-selling author of Joyless Kingdom and Tales from the Inverted World.
And he does a bunch of, well, fascinating articles on all kinds of subjects.
Lost Confederate gold in Georgia, the Long Island serial killer.
Shane, thanks for joining me.
I appreciate it. Nice Christmas tree in the background.
You were just about telling Debbie and me that it's all your wife's doing and not yours.
I brought it in the house and she decorated it with our kids.
It looks beautiful.
You're getting in the spirit kind of early, which is all good stuff.
And tell me about SCNR, the scanner, as you call it.
It's a website connected with Tim.
Yeah, so this is Tim Pool's news site.
We have a newsroom.
Most of us cover daily news events, and I go out and do a lot more investigative on-the-ground reporting for it.
Yeah, let's talk about investigative reporting for a minute, Shane, because it seems like on the right side of the aisle, there's just not a whole lot of that stuff that goes on.
There are a lot of people who are in various forms of punditry, and they offer analysis and opinion of what's going on, but they don't dig out new information.
What is the importance of investigative journalism in your view?
Yeah, there's nothing better than being on the ground as close to an event as possible to talk to people who dealt with it.
Also, while keeping in mind that an eyewitness isn't always reliable, but trying to talk to as many people as possible.
I spent this year, I was in East Palestine after the train exploded.
You know, the Long Island serial killer thing, I'm out talking to victims' families.
So it's important to me after being lied to by various news outlets my entire life, I want to go out.
I want to see real people. And, you know, I share with my readers that I'm sharing my own subjective and objective points of view when it comes to my stories because, you know, I don't think objectivity is as real as we'd like it to be.
Now, typically you see in a lot of journalism and news websites a very political spin.
They cover the national debt.
They cover Biden corruption.
It seems like you've cast a pretty wide net.
I mean, if you're writing about the Long Island serial killer, lost Confederate gold, the new article we'll talk about called The Demon Hunters.
Do you see this as part of a political beat or do you see it as a much broader cultural beat?
I do both. I kind of toggle back and forth between politics and these other stories.
Sometimes there is a crossover.
I started writing for Tim.
I started writing paranormal stories.
I talked to people about UFO abductions and ghost stories.
And that slowly transitioned through opportunities I was giving into politics.
And there seems to be a very thin line between the ghouls of the paranormal world and the ghouls in DC. Really?
I mean, what an outrageous idea.
How so? What's the...
Is it... Where do I start?
Well, you know, I like covering politics, and I've always felt like there was a lot of ghoulish characters in politics.
So, you know, recently I was at the GOP debate at the Reagan Library, and I stood next to Governor Newsom, who to me seemed almost like a demonic person.
Like a real-life ghoul.
I don't understand how people are charmed by him, but knowing his policies and seeing his kind of evil villain charm in real life, I was like, this is kind of like the monsters that people tell me about, you know, on Long Island.
That's fascinating. Yeah, Debbie's a big fan of The Walking Dead and a whole bunch of these shows, and so she's really identifying with what you're saying right now.
In fact, we might be swapping out interview...
In the midstream, I might be stepping aside.
If suddenly you see an attractive woman take my place, you'll know what's going on.
Awesome, awesome. Let's talk about the demon hunters.
This is a sensitive topic, you know, child predators.
And it seems, regrettably, that we've got too many of these in our society.
Would you say that the...
The internet and the whole phenomenon of social media has enabled this kind of perversion in a completely new way.
Yeah, it's enabled in a new way, but I don't want to say that this evil demonic urge is ancient.
I think this has always been here, predates the internet.
The internet definitely accelerates it and allows these people to access your children who are extremely vulnerable on the internet if you're not vigilant enough.
Because these men are getting to these minors through Facebook, Roblox.com.
Minecraft, Instagram, and that's how they're also trading this material.
So it definitely makes it worse, but it's always been there.
Then on the flip side, the people that I went out into the field with to help capture these evil men, they then weaponized the internet back against them.
So at least it helps balance it out where these evil men are out there on the internet allowing themselves to be exposed and then people like Alex Rosen of Predator Poachers are then turning it back on them.
We'll be right back with Shane Cashman to talk more about predator poachers and just this sort of very interesting way of exposing this phenomenon and bringing it to public attention.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
I'm back with author and writer Shane Cashman.
You can follow him on X at Shane Cashman, the website scnr.com.
And Shane, you were talking about an article you wrote in which you accompanied some guys who were, you know, busting an alleged pedophile ring, people who lure these young girls.
Now talk about how you busted.
Is it that you find a girl who's maybe pretending to be young or can get away with looking young?
And then she responds to these dudes.
Talk about how this... How do you do the expose?
Right. So I was with them for a weekend in Ohio.
The first day, we had four sting operations set up, three of which went through.
And on that day, they had a decoy.
And it was a 25-year-old woman who happens to have a speech impediment and happens to be quite petite.
And she also puts makeup on her face to make herself look extremely young and went in the field, wears a COVID mask, while also wearing a Minecraft backpack and holding a doll.
She spends her time On various social media websites, infiltrating communities of men, sometimes women, who are into trading this material and or finding minors in real life.
And so she talks, she sparks up these conversations with these men of all backgrounds, all ages, rich, poor, people with great jobs, stuff like that.
Doesn't matter. And they eventually get to a point where they want to meet her in person, thinking she's either 11 or 12, like something extremely ridiculously depraved.
And we go out into the field with her, and she walks out.
The story starts out with a guy we call Henry.
She walks to his house.
He's waiting in the yard. He's a large 60-year-old man.
And she walks up to him.
She hands him the doll.
She plays very coy.
He holds the doll to his chest.
It's terrifying how brazen this is all happening on a suburban street in Ohio.
They start to walk away together.
The second they walk away, we approach them with Alex.
Alex has a team of people who live stream it.
One person films it for higher quality later on for their website.
That's partly for...
They have an audience that likes watching this.
They also... It's a part of self-defense.
If anything were to go down, they have proof of exactly what happened.
And then the decoy goes back into the car and we spend hours with these terrible men.
And Alex says, everything printed out that they've said to this decoy online, Thinking that she was 11 or 12.
Everything they want to do. Extremely explicit material.
And Alex's goal is to get them to confess to having child pornography in their possession.
In Ohio, it needs to be in their possession for them to be arrested.
The second we get the confession on tape, we call the police.
The police come. They see that.
They have the child material in their possession.
They got arrested. And that's it.
And we did that. Sometimes it takes two or three hours to kind of coax out these ridiculous confessions that are extremely hard to hear.
Typically, I'm assuming that when these guys get exposed, they immediately go into a defensive mode, and they're either going to say, it wasn't me, or they are going to...
I don't know the field enough to know what is the typical reaction of somebody caught red-handed like this.
Yeah, it's different for all of them, but there were things, a theme across a few that I saw, they attempt to have these loopholes of logic where they talk themselves out of it, like an animal trapped.
And it's trying to free themselves and it's trying all these ridiculous ways.
The first guy who I was just telling you about, he said his nephew stole his phone.
He said it wasn't him.
He kept calling his stupid talk, all these things.
But Alex has done this for four years now, where he knows that if he can kind of play the good cop, And say, hey, we can get you help, which he doesn't believe they can be helped.
But if we can get you help and almost put the blame on something else, like they blame the internet for your evil urges, they start to slowly admit.
So like after 30 minutes or an hour, you'll get small truths.
And then we know those are just small truths.
And then you work on those small truths that come into like a larger truth about exactly what they wanted to do, what their intentions were.
And then more often than not, these confessions of having the stuff in their possession.
I mean, I find this just psychologically interesting because they often say that, you know, even though you have an evil side in people, very few people will openly admit being evil.
It's sort of not like in the movies, right?
Or even in Shakespeare's Othello where Iago's like, yeah, I'm evil, you know?
But in reality, people are like, no, I'm not evil.
You know, I stole because my kids were hungry or I killed this guy because I had to, you know?
So I'm interested in these...
Clever or unclever rationalizations that people come up.
For you, it must be fascinating to observe and record and write about this process.
Yeah, it was extremely disturbing.
You know, I spent hours in literal fields standing directly across from these men as they admitted to the most heinous urges and things that they'd wanted to do in real life to who they believe were minors.
There was such a casualness with the way they were speaking.
And sometimes they would say they knew it was wrong, but I don't think they meant it.
I think they said it knowing that's what we would want to hear.
And then also on top of all that, two of the men had family either in the room with us at one point or in the house.
And the family's reactions were also terrifying because...
In the one instance, the wife was not that concerned with the news she had just heard about her husband having a desktop on his computer in the middle of the house filled with all this material.
She was more worried about the Wi-Fi router being taken by the police when the computer was confiscated and stuff like that.
So maybe that was shock that she was in, or maybe she just wasn't that surprised that she'd been living with a monster this whole time.
We'll be right back with writer Shane Cashman.
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Again, it's Dinesh.locals.com.
I'm back with author and writer Shane Cashman.
You can follow him on x at Shane Cashman.
The news website is scnr.com and that's where you can go to read the article we're talking about called the Demon Hunters.
Shane, you said something earlier, which is that these guys, these alleged predators come from all walks of life.
In other words, they're black and white and brown, I assume.
They're older and some of them are middle-aged.
They're rich and poor.
How do you read this?
Is there a warped aspect in human nature that some people just have this deviant kind of sexual impulse in which the innocence of children is somehow sexually tantalizing to them?
Yes, I think there's an ancient evil that's been in humans.
And unfortunately, it's widespread.
And it doesn't affect just one type of person.
You know, one bit of criticism I kept getting when I announced I was doing this story was that the person I was with was only catching low-hanging fruit or men with just mental disabilities.
But I've seen him catch 60-year-old men, married men, fathers.
I saw on my last day in Ohio, we caught a 23-year-old man who was a fireman.
I know he's caught men with high-paying IT jobs, men who were fathers who won custody in court of their six-year-old child who they were attempting to sell to other men in real life.
So it's just incredible and terrifying how widespread it is.
And it's at every level of every institution.
I think it's easy for some people to think, oh, it's just, you know, The easy thing would be us, the Catholic Church.
Oh, it's people and it's Democrats.
Oh, it's D.C. It's this and that.
But it's unfortunate that it's at almost every level.
It could be teachers, people down the street.
And it's so hidden that that is what's actually terrifying.
And that these people hide it so well that they can operate in daily life and have jobs and be married and have children and set things up in their neighborhood.
And I got so many messages from people after the story was published.
Saying things like, there's a man in my town who was arrested, and his family ran a daycare.
And he was celebrated in our community.
And it's just, I'm shocked.
I knew evil existed to this degree.
I didn't know that it was like, this kind of evil was this widespread, though.
And it's been quite hard to shake.
I mean, I sometimes watch these crime shows involving serial killers and so on.
And you sometimes do have these guys, really bad guys, but they're a deacon in the church.
They seem to have an outwardly normal life.
But interestingly, their family somehow, I would say typically, is completely in the dark.
Which I find a little amazing because sometimes these guys have been doing stuff for years.
And then when they're caught, the family's like, we had no idea.
But you described a moment ago a very interesting case where a guy gets busted and you said the wife was, like, not particularly flustered.
Now, I mean, that strikes me as almost as abnormal as the original perversion.
How do you account for that?
Do you think it's just a fear, a numbness, a moral depravity that somehow they both share?
What do you think it was?
Yeah. I was flipping through all those options while I was watching it go down.
Maybe she was in shock.
Maybe she had a feeling her husband was a monster this whole time.
I mean, he was so flippant about it.
He had the computer with all the stuff right in the middle of the house that everyone used.
So, you know, I don't know.
That was really bothersome to me, though, because we kind of keep a straight face for hours with these men.
You know, Alex is playing this good cop character trying to get these admissions out.
We're right behind him, keeping a straight face, just observing or filming.
And so it wasn't until the police actually showed up where they were the first people to walk into the situation and be like, what is wrong with you?
Why are you doing this? This is wrong.
You know, this is illegal. And when that happened, I actually like that was like a I teared up.
I started crying because I was like, this is the first time after three or four hours that someone has acknowledged openly how depraved this was.
The son was there as well, an adult son.
And the adult son and the father were just having a normal conversation as we waited for the police to arrive.
I couldn't believe it, just how nonchalant it all was.
I mean, I also find it interesting that these guys not only talk to you, because you think that their first impulse would be either to run away or to attack you or to clam up completely, but the idea that they go into this kind of conversational disclosure mode is itself kind of fascinating.
I mean, it might even suggest that there's a part of them, the good part of them, if you could call it that, that wants to come out and sort of admit what they did.
Do you read it the same way?
Oh yeah. Two or three of the men I saw had these weird physical reactions when we were talking to them and getting these confessions out of them.
The one man defecated himself right in front of us.
And the second guy, that same day later on, he started having heart issues and almost collapsed.
Um, so my thought was like, there is almost like a struggle of like this evil in them and whatever human part is left in them.
That's my only, that was the only way I could make sense of it.
You know, I asked Alex about that.
He said, it doesn't always happen that way.
Um, but if you watch his videos and there's many, there's a lot of men on there who have these weird maladies and they blame their evil problems, uh, on those, uh, a stroke perhaps, or, you know, a heart attack, something like that.
Even though in those admissions, if you watch them, Even Alex will find out that the urges predate the physical problems.
You know, after like two hours of talking to them, it doesn't add up.
But yeah, it was a weird thing to watch.
It's like almost like the evil and the human part trying to separate from themselves.
Fascinating stuff. Guys, the article is called The Demon Hunters.
It is on scnr.com.
And we've been talking to Shane Cashman.
You can follow him on x at Shane Cashman.
Shane, thanks very much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
We're now into a new chapter in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, and he's talking about people signing their own sentence.
So they're given a sentence.
In Solzhenitsyn's own case, it was eight years.
Eight years in prison camps for apparently saying something critical about Stalin to a friend.
How the information got out, I'm not sure.
Solzhenitsyn doesn't say.
But this is the way a police state works.
It's all very arbitrary.
Information is not easily available.
And now Solzhenitsyn describes, and he's talking about his own sentence.
And again, I think I've mentioned before, he doesn't often do this.
He doesn't talk a lot about himself in the book, but he does occasionally.
And here we go, you've got this black haired major, and he says his face showed a kind of boredom.
Why?
Because even though it's 8 years of Solzhenitsyn's life, to that guy it's nothing.
He probably handed out another sentence of 20 years 10 minutes earlier, he's gonna hand out a bunch more.
So he is used to it, he's kind of tired of it, it's to him a chore that has to be done, like taking out the trash.
And so here is Solzhenitsyn.
Leafing through the pile on the right, the major found the paper which referred to me.
He pulled it out and read it aloud to me in a bored patter.
I understood I'd been sentenced to eight years.
He said, my heart didn't give an extra half beat.
It was also everyday and routine.
Could this really be my sentence, the turning point in my life?
I would have liked to feel nervous to experience this moment to the full.
But I just couldn't. The major just pushes this paper.
It's a very routine thing.
It's like, you know, here's your lunch.
I'll fill out a form. So the major just goes, you know, this is your sentence.
Just sign over here.
And here's Solzhenitsyn.
No, I have to read it myself.
The major, almost playing with him, cat and mouse.
Do you think? Do you really think I would deceive you?
Well, go ahead, read it.
So the major's like, it's eight years.
I'm just giving it to you.
But yeah, if you want to read it, go for it.
And so Solzhenitsyn then goes on to say, to give the moment at least a little importance, I asked him with a tragic expression.
But really, this is terrible.
Eight years. What for?
Now, here, if you're reading carefully, this is almost a flashback to the opening chapter where Solzhenitsyn talks about people being arrested.
The first thing they say is, Me?
Really? What do I do?
What for? And their expectation is that they can clear the whole matter up.
Let me explain. Let me tell you all of which is completely futile.
And so it is here.
Solzhenitsyn knows this.
He knows it's futile. But somehow, a little part of him is like, Why am I getting eight years?
What did I really do?
Kind of the moment hits him.
And I could hear, he writes, how false my own words sounded.
Neither he nor I detected anything terrible.
Right there, the major showed me once again where to sign.
I signed.
I simply could not think of anything else to do.
And then the next words he hears from the jailer.
Let's move along.
So this is a chore.
You done it. Time to move on.
The sentence is done, and you've essentially, not you've signed off because you don't have any choice in the matter, but you have signed a kind of death warrant for eight years of your life.
And... And then Solzhenitsyn, again, in his very literary manner, steps back and takes the full kind of theatrical notice of the occasion.
And he says,"...in olden times they used to beat the drums and assemble a crowd when a person was given a life sentence." And here, it's like being on a list for a soap ration.
25 years and move along.
25 years and run along now.
Don't waste our time. Time to get it going.
And that's how it is." And sometimes bureaucracy comes to your defense.
And this is a very weird thing, but actually I noticed it myself when I was in the confinement center, not to compare my situation with Solzhenitsyn, where sometimes I would show up and I was expected to be there at 7, but on the paper it says 9 p.m.
So they're like, why are you here at 7?
And I'm like, well, actually, it's a mistake on the paper.
But you can't tell them that because they don't understand that.
If it says 9 on the paper, they want you to come at 9.
They're like, oh, no, no, go hang out at Starbucks or whatever.
Come back at 9. So this is a case where a bureaucratic mistake comes to your benefit.
And here's a remarkable case.
Vera... Kornieva was expecting 15 years.
She had been sentenced to 15 years.
And she saw with delight that there was a typo on the official sheet.
It read only 5.
She laughed her luminous laugh and hurried to sign before they took it back.
The officer looked at her dubiously.
Do you really understand what I read you?
Yes, yes, thank you very much.
5 years in corrective labor camps.
And off she goes. In other words, the officer thinks she's deranged.
Why would you be chuckling and laughing?
Why would you have a happy expression on getting five years?
But of course, she knows, and he doesn't know, that the sentence should have been 15.
They just goofed.
They probably left the one off the sheet.
So it's five years. Think of it.
The difference of that typographical error, 10 years of her life.
Now, obviously, five years is itself a harsh and I'm sure unfair sentence.
But five years is obviously better than 15.
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