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Dec. 6, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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WRAY OF DARKNESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep721
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Coming up, I'm going to review some congressional testimony, first by FBI Director Christopher Wray and then by the presidents of Harvard and MIT and Penn about anti-Semitism in the second case.
Author Harry Crocker joins me.
We're going to talk about the history of the Catholic Church and also its less than impressive current leader.
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We've just been watching some very interesting congressional testimony.
And I'm going to talk about two separate episodes of this testimony, the first involving FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is being examined, or maybe cross-examined is the right word, by Senator Mike Lee.
And then later, a little later, I'm going to talk about the congressional testimony of the presidents of elite universities, places like Harvard and Penn and MIT, and their defense of the right of activists and students to call for.
you would not believe this, genocide against Jews.
So I'll be getting to that topic shortly.
But let me start with Christopher Wray.
I think what's interesting about Mike Lee's questioning is that you...
First of all, the tone.
Mike Lee has had it.
And I think he was reflecting the kind of irritability of many of us who have had it with the FBI. And so Christopher Wray, who's kind of this polished guy...
Always, you know, got his hair combed right, flies in on a private jet, normally relies on a kind of smooth-talking, tap-dancing routine to deflect questions from senators.
But that didn't happen here.
And he was hammered time and time again.
And he's coming before the Senate, by the way.
He wants something. What does he want?
He wants a reauthorization of FISA-702.
And he does not want the FBI to have to get search warrants before conducting these so-called backdoor searches on American citizens.
So think about it.
So he's actually arguing for a consolidation of, let's just say, tyrannical practices.
And he claims it's necessary because, you know, threats of terrorism are rising.
Well, they're not rising from MAGA. They're not rising from conservatives.
They're not rising from the Heritage Foundation or Breitbart.
And yet, these are the people the FBI has been going after.
And that's what Mike Lee zoomed in on.
He talked about all the abuses of the FBI, one after the other, after another.
Very interestingly, Ray didn't defend himself.
He didn't go, yeah, those were justified.
Yeah, we should be looking at traditional Catholics.
Oh, yeah, we should be going after moms.
No, he was like, well, those things that you are describing happened before I put into effect some needed reforms.
And again, this is a pirouette that normally would have fooled Republican senators.
They'd be like, oh, well, we're glad we won a congratulation.
No, Mike Lee was having none of it.
He's like, no, let me tell you some cases that occurred recently after your so-called reforms.
And so this hammering of Ray, very, I think, needed.
and it I think raises the question of whether the Congress will in fact reauthorize Pfizer 702. I hope they do not. I hope that they insist and you know Christopher Rea said it was very difficult to get a warrant. Guess what? Mike Lee made the point. He goes, so what? The Constitution makes life difficult for you. The Constitution does not want to make it easy for you to spy on your fellow Americans. So Rea seems to view the Constitution as a big inconvenience and he wants Congress to
basically make it easy for him to carry out whatever he wants to do even though what he wants to do is go after the very people, Republicans, that he now wants to apparently sign on to his pet projects.
So the appropriate skepticism of Mike Lee...
I think highlighted the fact that Ray is not, well, to use a pun, he's not a ray of sunshine.
He's a ray, W-R-A-Y, he's a ray of darkness.
That's the title of our podcast today.
And then I love this comment from a guy named Cynical Publius, who basically jumps right in and I think gets to the heart of the matter.
Number one, disestablish the FBI. Two, arrest, try, and imprison Ray and his cronies for violations of civil rights.
Three, demolish the J. Edgar Hoover building.
Four, salt the empty lot where the now demolished building was with depleted uranium pellets.
I love the detail of this.
Five, erect a lead-lined fence around the now radioactive lot inscribed with the names of the tens of thousands of people whose civil rights the FBI has wantonly violated.
Five, And then six, shine a perpetual bat-signal spotlight over the empty lot reading, never again.
And then the punchline, that might be enough, not sure.
We have to go further.
So... I think this reflects the sentiment of a lot of us that this is a police agency gone rogue.
It is not all that different from a kind of KGB or an American Stasi.
And so mere reform, mere refusal to extend their privileges.
I'm really angry at the Republicans who voted to give them a new building in D.C. This is utterly abominable.
So questioning Ray in a very skeptical way is appropriate.
But I think Cynical Publius is right here that we need to go much, much further.
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I'd like to talk about what certainly everybody is talking about on X on social media.
And that is the recent appearance of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn before Congress.
And some very interesting questioning by Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican Congresswoman, who asked them a very simple question.
Is calling for the genocide of Jews...
A violation of your policies, of your university's policies and your code against harassment and bullying and hate speech and so on.
Yes or no?
And all three college presidents began their familiar, artful diversion or dodge.
And none of them were simply willing to answer yes.
Yes. What they did answer was, Which is what?
Committing genocide? You have to commit genocide?
Well, now you're in violation of our harassment policies.
You've committed genocide!
So you had this kind of truly moral bankruptcy on full display before the country.
For many people, and it's very interesting to look at the reactions of people...
An entrepreneur like Bill Ackman, who is a billionaire, this is a guy who's a Harvard guy, he's been kind of a genial middle of the road or he's very supportive of Harvard for so long.
And he's sort of like, you can see his disbelief, he can't really believe it.
And you can't really believe it because a lot of these Jewish groups, by the way, have tried to sort of make common cause with the left.
Yeah, we're a disadvantaged group like you guys are and so on.
And suddenly they find out that the Jews don't get this kind of victim treatment at all.
In fact, they get the oppressor treatment.
And a massive double standard has come into play on the campus.
So let's look at what this double standard really is.
Imagine if an Ivy League president were to say the following.
Yes, it is okay to call for the genocide of blacks, as long as you don't actually do it.
Don't do genocide of blacks or gays.
But it's okay to advocate for it.
As long as this advocacy is not repeated and constant and regular and not backed up by genocidal action...
It's okay. It's not a violation of any of our policies at all.
I mean, think of how ludicrous this is.
Think of the outrage on campus.
Forget about even calling for genocide.
All you have to say, if you just walk around campus with a sign, I don't like gays.
That's all it is. I don't like gays.
So? But nevertheless, you're going to get torrents of abuse, complaints to the faculty, you're going to be called before administrator, you're a bigot, you're a hater, because apparently what?
There's a moral obligation to like gays?
No. But nevertheless, these colleges are extremely intolerant, you have to say, of any kind of criticism of a group, as long as it's one of these designated groups.
That's blacks, that's trans, that's gays, and so on.
Muslims even. Think about Muslims.
Is it okay? Imagine if you'd ask this question.
Is it a violation of your policies to call for genocide against Muslims?
Yes or no? I think these college presidents would all say, yes it is.
You can't call for genocide against Muslims.
You can't even say you don't like Muslims.
Then you're Islamophobic.
You're a hater and so on.
So, there is a stunning and blatant hypocrisy.
And of course, a lot of times in this kind of debate, the argument stops there.
It exposes the hypocrisy.
But the problem with exposing the hypocrisy is this, and that is that There are kind of two ways to go on this.
One way you can remove a hypocrisy, remove an inconsistency, is you say, okay, well, let's now have a uniform policy.
And that is, you can't call for genocide against any group.
So if you call for genocide against Jews, that's just as bad as calling for genocide against blacks.
And so all of this should be outlawed.
All of this should be forbidden.
Or, another approach is, you basically say, alright, we are going to take a, let's call it a free speech absolutist stance, and you're going to say that if it is legal, you can say it.
And so, as long as you're making speech that's legal, including speech that is detestable, hateful, you know, intifada all the way, the Ku Klux Klan was right, whatever, Nevertheless, this speech, despicable though it may be, is nevertheless protected and should be allowed on the campus.
That would be also a consistent position, but one that gives a much wider latitude for free speech.
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I'm continuing my discussion of campus anti-Semitism.
I'm very sympathetic to students.
I see two of them, Talia Khan, a student at MIT. And she says, I was forced to leave my study group because my group members told me that the people at the Nova Music Festival deserve to die because they were partying on stolen land.
This is straight out, you know, intifada rhetoric.
She goes on to say this is the same climate of anti-Semitism that's led to the massacre of Jews through the centuries.
And then she says this is not just harassment.
This is our lives on the line.
What she seems to be suggesting is that the activists aren't just calling for the killing of Jews over there, but this could easily lead to some actions against students.
Students themselves are feeling this sense of vulnerability.
vulnerability. And this is a problem because universities must protect the physical safety of their students, the ability of their students just to be in a learning environment.
Here's another student. This is Yu Pen, Eyal Yacobi. I should not be here today.
He's actually talking at a press conference in DC. I should be taking in my senior year of college.
I am. I am here.
Because 36 hours ago, I, along with most of campus, sought refuge in our rooms as classmates and professors chanted proudly for the genocide of Jews.
So this is where the outrage is coming from.
I mean, Debbie even feels that Debbie and I got into a little bit of an argument about this because we were arguing about the amplitude of free speech.
How wide should free speech protections arise on campus?
And... And I was making the point that, look, I think that campuses should be all about free speech.
And in fact, if it is political speech, it's all the more important that that kind of speech be protected.
And I realize that sometimes that speech pushes the edge and so on.
But it... But Debbie's saying, and we're actually going to be discussing this when we get together for our weekly roundup.
But she says, hate speech is not the same as free speech, which is what we're hearing a lot of in this context.
But I do want to point out one thing.
This is actually exactly also what the left says.
They say hate speech is not free speech.
And they say that if you criticize affirmative action or you...
You attack. You say, you know, a man is a man and a woman is a woman.
You're making trans individuals feel unsafe.
You're making them feel like they don't belong here.
You're refusing to even acknowledge their basic identity.
You're making them more vulnerable to threats, if not actual violence.
So, in other words, the whole idea that words are bullets, the whole idea that criticizing a group makes you a hater and that you should be stopped from speaking, I mean, this is a mirror image of what the left says.
Now, Debbie makes the point, and I agree, that when you're actually calling for genocide, it is a whole different matter.
You're now going beyond debating affirmative action.
And the question I raised is, I said, Debbie, well, but are these activists on campus, you know, despicable as they are, I think you know I'm strongly on the Jewish side of all this and on the Israeli side, but are they calling for intifada in Israel, which is a political position, Similar to get the British out of Northern Ireland, let's say, or are they actually threatening Jews on their own campus, which is a different matter.
So the one is a political stance, the other is a targeted harassment at the Jews, Jewish students, and maybe Jewish faculty.
Now, as I thought about this, I asked myself, you know, how is it that the same activists who are so solicitous or blacks and Hispanics and Mexicans and gays and Muslims don't feel the same sympathy to Jews?
I think the answer is not only that Israel is seen as an occupying power.
That's part of it. The other part of it is that the Jews are seen as white.
This is a key point.
Because think about it. The only reason we're getting so agitated about all this is because it's Jews.
It's because of the history of antisemitism.
It's because of the backdrop of the Holocaust.
Let's just take this exact same rhetoric, genocide, and let's replace the word Jew with the word white.
I'm calling for genocide against whites because whites stole the land of the Native Americans.
Would there be the same outrage?
Would there be the same demands that these students be stopped?
Would there be all these calls like from Bill Ackman and others to fire the presidents of the universities of Harvard and MIT and Penn?
No. Why? Because this kind of rhetoric against whites is loud.
It's okay. It even gets a certain type of wink-wink sanction, like, yeah, we see what you're getting at.
You kind of have a good point over there.
So the fact that Jews, I mean, it'd be very interesting if it just so happened that you had Jews in Israel and they were all black, or they were all brown.
I think that would really confuse the whole issue.
Jews would not be so easy a target if they could not somehow be classified as white.
So I think the two strikes against the Jews from the left's point of view, first, the state of Israel is seen not as a victim, but as an oppressor, as an occupying power, preposterous though that is historically.
And second, the Jews are seen not as a, quote, minority group, but as honorary whites.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast my friend Harry Crocker, H.W. Crocker III. He is a vice president and executive editor of Regnery Publishing, my publisher.
Former speechwriter for Governor Pete Wilson.
He's written a whole bunch of books, about a half dozen of them.
And he's a former editorial writer for the San Diego Union.
But we are here to talk about his new book.
It's called Triumph, The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History.
Harry, welcome to the podcast.
I got the book.
Can't say I've read it all.
It's a massive tome, but very impressive and, of course, a really important subject.
I'm amazed that you're able to sort of bring all this history together under a single roof, so to speak.
And I don't even quite know where to begin, but I thought maybe what we could do is just look at the phases of the history of the Catholic Church and have you say a few words about each of them.
So, let's talk about the very beginning.
You have the life and death of Jesus Christ, and then you have Christian communities in the Roman Empire, but you don't have a Catholic Church.
When did the Catholic Church begin?
Well, if you're a Catholic, you think it begins at the beginning.
When people are looking at the historicity of the New Testament, I'm a very straightforward, history-based guy.
And The church predates the Gospels, right?
The letters of Paul and whatnot, they refer to an existing church.
The church is the first creation of the Christian community.
And I think it's really important for people to grasp, especially these days, because so many people, I think, just sort of dismiss the The history of the New Testament.
We're talking about all the nuns out there, at least adolescent kids who are falling away from the faith.
They do so without actually examining its bona fides, if you were.
Maybe we should go back just a little bit and tell you why I wrote this book.
Because it ties into the beginning of the church.
Which is, I wrote this book as a convert.
I originally wrote this book 20 years ago.
This book is actually an updated, expanded Revised edition.
And what I was looking for was the sort of history, Catholic history book I found hard to find, which was one that was exciting, that was like a page-turner, that captured the whole drama of the Church, which is really the history of the West in many ways.
And being a sort of overgrown adolescent myself, I wrote this book with sort of the spirit in a way of an adolescent boy who relishes Roman legions and conquistadors and crusaders and knights.
And so the book opens in that sort of fashion.
But also, even though it deals with philosophy and all the great thinkers of the church, it deals with the nitty-gritty history of the church.
And for me, the best...
The historical explanation we have for the incident described in the Gospels, the resurrection, is in fact the Christian explanation.
Because the Christian explanation that actually Jesus did arise from the dead It explains the existence of the Church.
Why did this handful of disciples go out and risk their lives, all of whom would be martyred, to establish this institution, which, because it was an institution, could be easily targeted by its enemies, which were innumerable, unless they really believed it, unless they really believed they had witnessed something miraculous.
And It's that miracle which explains, and just the power of the New Testament, as taught by the disciples, that explains the rapid spread of the church.
Throughout, first, of course, the Roman Empire, then the world.
But, you know, the existence of the church is very early.
I mean, we can see it in persecutions under the Roman emperors, especially under Nero, who targets Christians specifically.
And we can see it in references being made.
The earliest one is in the later part of the first century, where existing churches are appealing to To come to decisions on controversies.
You can see this in the letters of Paul.
Theological controversies are also part of the beginning of the church.
You need to have some authority to determine what is true.
What is true teaching of the church?
Of course, Paul, you know, upgrading Peter at one point.
So the idea that there's theological disputes, nothing new.
The idea that there is an institutional church to which we can refer these disputes, nothing new.
To my mind, to the Catholic view, it starts from the beginning.
I mean, this is really fascinating, I think, Harry, because what you're really saying is that the beginning of the Catholic Church was not the kind of formal organization of the Church in terms of ecclesiastical conferences and stuff.
The Church began with Christ, and even the Gospels were written, what, 20, 30, 40 years after Jesus' death.
So that the Church, in a way, preceded even the Gospels.
I mean, a very startling idea.
We'll be right back with Harry Crocker, the book, Triumph, the Power and Glory of the Catholic Church, a 2,000-year history.
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I'm back with author Harry Crocker, H.W. Crocker III, the book, Triumph, The Power and Glory of the Catholic Church, a 2,000-year history.
Harry, what do you think in the early centuries, and by this I mean basically from 32 A.D. to maybe 1,000 A.D., What was the most significant event in the shaping of the church?
Was it the original organization of the church into ecclesiastical synods and conferences and the papacy?
Or was it the fact that Constantine, the Roman emperor, converts...
To Christianity, and the church goes from being a rebel movement inside of the Roman Empire to now, in a sense, being, you could almost say, carried on the back of the Roman legions.
What do you think was the decisive event if you had to put your finger on it?
I'm very much in favor of the Roman legions.
Yeah. The book is very pro, I guess you could call it the hard men.
I mean, men like Constantine Men who really are in their own faith, the faith can be very simple, and Constantine viewed it very simply.
And he thought that the scandals, or rather, that the bishops arguing, Cyrix arguing, was a scandal to the church.
And that the way to resolve those scandals was to bash their heads together.
And I think, yes, I think it was Constantine's endorsement of the church that is the most significant thing.
But also, it goes beyond that.
It's under Constantine that you have the first declaration, really, of religious freedom in the ancient world.
The Romans are very tolerant in that they would incorporate different religions into their own, but you still had to offer, you know, the incense to Caesar.
It was treason not to go on with the state religion.
Constantine allows freedom of religion to all, but especially to Christians.
They're specified that Christians do not have to do this.
And you see this sort of Christian conscience, of course, begin its work in the Roman Empire.
With the banning of things like gladiatorial combats.
We should remember that in the pagan world, certain things we take for granted as virtues, they did not take for granted.
Things like mercy and charity.
All pagan relationships are based on power.
So Christianity overturns that and instead has things based on love and the value of every individual human person, which is also something new in the ancient world.
And it's why they went against collateral combat.
It's why You know, the Romans famously endorsed abortion and other...
Life was not necessarily all that important to them.
Well, the Christians pushed against that.
And there's a famous story of the Emperor Theodosius who, to punish some of his enemies, brought them into the Colosseum and had them all executed and fighting a surprise attack.
And he was called to task by the church.
And he protested being called to task and said, well, look, you know, David committed, you know, he killed tens of thousands.
And he was told, you have emulated David in his crime.
Now emulate David in his penance.
And so you have a Roman emperor doing penance before an unarmed Christian cleric.
And that is a sort of dramatic change in how...
In the world, in the Roman world, that takes place under Christianity, where it's not all just physical power anymore.
It's not just the power of the legions.
It is the moral authority of the Church.
What is your assessment, Harry, of the...
Significance of the Reformation.
And I say this because Christianity was, for all its turbulence, under one roof.
It was united in the sense that you had a single church.
You may have various reformers in the church, but it was one church.
After the Reformation, it was a church at the very best splintered.
And now there are many efforts today on the part of Catholics and conservative evangelicals to make common cause on certain issues.
But the church has been this kind of splintered entity now for more than 500 years.
As a convert to Catholicism, how do you view all this?
People have strong feelings about all this, as you know, both on the Catholic and, let's say, the evangelical side.
What kind of analytical framework can you supply to help people think about this event?
I think the primary way to think of it is as a tragedy.
I mean, before the Reformation, well, think of something like the Crusades.
Think of the Crusades.
The Crusades, there are many of them, several of them.
The Pope announces, we have a crusade I'm launching.
And knights answer his call from the entirety of Europe.
You can go to the Scandinavian countries, just recently converted.
You can go to England. You can go to France.
You can go to Germany. You can go all over Europe.
And all these knights...
We'll come together under the cross to go on what they regard as a holy war.
A holy defensive war against Islam, for the most part.
That sort of authority, the idea of living in a world where every...
A world with sort of a dynamic freedom as well.
Because remember, the Reformation is in part a reaction against the Renaissance.
The worldliness of the Renaissance.
But this sort of world that lives under a universal, unrelativistic Christian worldview.
We lost that in the splintering of the Reformation, where there was no longer...
Any central authority.
But worse than that, I think there's a lot of, even speaking as a former Episcopalian Anglican, I think people sometimes forget what was really at stake in the Reformation.
These are theological issues.
We know some of them are always in our Stola Pide, Sola Scriptura, but even things like the supremacy of the state over the church.
You think of like the Church of England.
Or the Lutheran churches in Scandinavia, these were churches that explicitly put the state over the church as part of the Reformation.
It's one reason why many of the Protestant princes supported the Reformation because it increased their power.
But also issues like free will.
You know, for Calvinists, this is a little bit of a complicated thing, the Catholic Church was resolutely in favor of free will.
So, I mean, issues like that that sometimes get forgotten When we think about, you know, papal authority or other issues like that that get more maybe headlines.
But I think the key thing is, as a tragedy, and a tragedy which, you know, inadvertently among the Reformers, but led to what?
It led to the secularism of the Enlightenment, right?
And it led to the retrenchment of the Church's authority and And power over most people's minds.
I mean, secularism, you could say, it follows historically, but you could also argue it's a consequence of the Reformation.
Yeah, I remember a line by the Protestant, well, it was Hooker, the English cleric, who was kind of warning the Catholics and the Protestants, saying, in effect, you two guys are fighting each other, but let's remember there's a third man waiting to dance on both your graves.
He was thinking about radical secularism.
We'll be right back with Harry Crocker.
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I'm back with author Harry Crocker, H.W. Crocker III, the book, Triumph, the Power and Glory of the Catholic Church, a 2,000-year history.
Harry, we're going to, for reasons of time, have to accelerate to the present.
What do you make of the current Pope Francis?
I say this because it seems to me like the Church has so many problems.
It's, of course, had so many recent scandals.
And then you had a couple of impressive popes, John Paul II and Benedict, who seemed to be trying to get the house, if you will, in order.
And then Benedict retires and you get this very peculiar fellow, Francis.
And I don't really know how to describe him.
I guess if I had to describe him, I would say that instead of being the church's missionary to the world, he seems to be the world's missionary to the church.
That's exactly right, yes.
I think a very...
Pope John Paul II was great.
Pope Benedict, great.
But as I say in the book, in football terms, he should have taken one for the team.
He should not have resigned.
He should not have retired. Delegate lots of authority.
You're all to understand. You want to be a scholar.
You always want to be a scholar. But he should have seen out his term.
And Pope... Francis, we can get all sorts of benefits of the doubt, but even if you do, it's hard not to come to certain conclusions.
One is that he is following a model which is a proven failure.
And that model is to try to, more or less what you said, bring the world into the church.
If you have a lot of people falling away from Christianity, how do you get them back?
Well, his argument seems to be, well, we try to become more like them, right?
And that's not how it works.
And we've seen that over and over again.
We've seen that with mainline Protestant churches that have collapsed.
We've seen it in the Catholic Church after Vatican II. And in fact, we know what works, and what works, especially in a time of chaos like now.
When people are going around, the world's going crazy.
Where can I find sanity?
Well, if you're that beacon of light, if you're the one institution that says, hey, guess what?
A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, and it says that in Genesis, and here are the consequences of that, and just teaches the truth.
That's all the Catholic Church The Catholic Church is, by this definition, the most conservative institution in the world because its sole purpose is to defend, guard the deposit of faith, not change it, defend and guard it, and promote it, proclaim it.
And that's what Francis should be doing.
And he's under this misapprehension, I think, that if he does that too strongly, he's being judgmental and people won't.
Won't come to the church. But I think that's just absolutely wrong.
And the other thing we've seen is his management of the church.
He's a man who talks about delegating authority.
And then there's a famous author in recent years who wrote a book called The Dictator Pope.
And with his punishment of those who disagree with him, Certain amounts of disagreement is allowed under the Catholic faith.
You can't disagree about matters of dogma, but you can certainly disagree about other judgmental things.
He's very harsh on those people.
And the analysis is that he grew up in France, Argentina, where ideology was not so important.
But obedience to Peronism was.
He's kind of a Peronist pope.
And I think that analysis of his personality is true.
He's a very confusing figure because he will walk up to the line of contradicting church teaching and Well, I mean, isn't he, in ecclesiastical and theological terms, doing sort of what the left does in political terms, which is, the left is very accommodating towards extremism kind of on its own side.
Look, for example, at this debate now going on about, you know, what people can say on campus.
So if somebody were to say, for example, you know, you know, kill all the Muslims or, you know, kill all the gays.
Oh my gosh, this guy has to be deported from campus, expelled immediately, violation of the guidelines and so on.
But if somebody says kill all the Jews, then it's like, well, you know, you didn't actually do it, did you?
You just said it, didn't you?
So context is important.
And if your words are unaccompanied by action, well, it's okay.
So, in a sense, isn't Francis, by analogy, you know, very tolerant toward the trans activists, and yeah, you're cohabiting, but we're going to marry you.
But on the other hand, if there's a conservative bishop who says, I don't like the administration of the church, okay, well, you're going to be demoted.
You're going to be removed. Yeah, I think there's some merit in that in a slightly different way.
I'm not convinced he's actually ideologically on the left side.
He just recognizes that if he takes those positions, he's popular.
The press loves him, and those are his allies within the church.
He recognizes that too.
So I think it's less ideological than it is personal.
So if you cross him personally, you're in trouble.
But I think this also explains why, at the end of the day, he will seemingly...
Give a very wide latitude to all sorts of heterodox opinions.
But at the last moment, he will pull back.
Like recently, he was warning the church in Germany, which has become very liberal.
And they, I think, thought they were operating under his blessing.
And he said, wait a second, you guys are moving to the edge of, you know, getting in big trouble.
You can't do that. And I think that's why he also kind of, I think, sometimes whiplashes the left, the liberals, who think, I thought you were with us on this.
And he only is up to the point where he thinks they're getting their praise, but he's not, yet anyways, willing to cross that line where he'd actually be violating the faith.
Very interesting stuff, Harry.
Thanks for joining me. This was really great.
The book is Triumph, The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2000-Year History.
Thanks very much.
Thank you, Josh. Solzhenitsyn is now talking about various types of charges that can be used to impose long prison sentences on people.
And he goes through a little bit of an inventory, a list.
Anti-Soviet agitation.
And I want you to think here about the kind of vagueness of these terms.
You're an anti-Soviet agitator.
Counter-revolutionary activity.
A special category for counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activity.
So you are a communist, but of the Trotskyite variety.
Suspicion of espionage.
Contacts leading to suspicion of espionage.
Dissemination of anti-Soviet sentiments.
Think of the broad category and the things you could bring under that.
Very reminiscent of some of the stuff we see in this country where you've got broad charges, things like disorderly conduct, obstruction of an official proceeding, and those can then be used and deployed very selectively when you feel like it to go after people.
Socially dangerous element.
This sounds like a speech from Joe Biden.
These people are socially dangerous.
Socially dangerous elements on the right are threatening my presidency.
Socially harmful element.
And then a member of a family or of a person convicted under one of the foregoing categories.
So you don't have to do anything.
You just have to be a member of a family of someone who has been convicted.
Also, contacts with dangerous persons.
Solzhenitsyn goes into this and he says, in effect, what do a lot of these terms even mean?
He goes, there's a death sentence that you can get for subversion.
But he goes, what is the definition of subversion?
What do you have to do to subvert?
He says, do you have to, like, blow up a railway station?
Well, we can understand that.
Is that what subversion means?
But he goes, it doesn't say.
And then he says, could you be accused of just subverting the authority of the government by, say, criticizing it?
He says, could you be subverting the authority of the government if you have a conversation in a streetcar?
Or if a girl marries a foreigner, are you somehow subverting the majesty of the homeland?
Solzhenitsyn is basically getting at the fact that once they have these broad sort of rules, they can get you if they want to.
And this is exactly what we fear about the police state emerging here, that we will have the emergence of a full superstructure similar to this, in which there are broad categories.
And let's use some that are familiar to us.
Hateful speech, enemy of the state, cult-like group, all of which then opens the door.
If you're a cult, you need to be deprogrammed.
If you're an enemy of the state, you need to be locked up because you can't be allowed to be conducting your subversive activities, to use an exact phrase coming right out of the Soviet manuals.
And then Solzhenitsyn makes another point, and that is he says that this code doesn't pretend to be a law.
It pretends to be or it portrays itself as an administrative penalty.
This may seem like a small distinction, but Solzhenitsyn goes, no, if it's a law...
And you're accused of violating the law, then at least in theory, you have to go to court.
You have to have a trial.
There has to be a judge.
There have to be some lawful procedures that are followed, and then you are found innocent or guilty according to that.
But he goes, they don't do it over here.
They don't do any of that. Now, how do they get out of it?
How do they avoid sending you to court?
Well, the answer is really simple.
They say, no, it's not a law.
These are just some administrative rules.
I mean, I think, for example, of some of our own regulatory agencies, which have set up their own internal courts.
So they go, we're going to take your property.
Why? Well, because we've decided your property is a wetland.
Well, it's not a swamp.
It's not wet. No, but it adjoins something that we've classified as a wetland.
Yeah, but you can't just take my property.
I'm going to go to court. Now, you can't go to court.
Or, to put it differently, if you want to object, we have inside of the government an administrative court, by the way, made up of our own employees.
They're going to hear your case.
I mean, this is all...
I highlight this kind of stuff because even though it is different, I'm not claiming in scale, it's the same as the Soviet Gulag, you can see that there's a family resemblance, there's a kinship with things happening in this country to some of the more outrageous stuff that Solzhenitsyn is talking about in the Gulag.
And then he makes the point that even though this is supposedly not a law, it can take away everything.
It can take away your titles, your ranks, your decorations.
It can confiscate your property.
It can imprison you.
And then along with imprisonment, you're deprived of the right to correspond with people.
You're deprived of the right to even receive presents or receive any kind of help while you're incarcerated.
So... The rule, so to speak, has the same power as the law, but you don't have a right to go to court.
One other right you don't have, and this is Solzhenitsyn, This is very Solzhenitsyn.
He seems to be giving you the kind of hierarchy...
The Minister of Affairs goes up to Stalin, but then Solzhenitsyn goes, there's one guy even ahead of Stalin who Stalin appeals to, and that is Satan.
This is a kind of a rare case.
Solzhenitsyn's rhetoric is effective because he uses it so sparingly.
There's very little, in general, sort of religious language in the Gulag Archipelago, but when it comes, it comes as a surprise, and for that reason, it's all the more effective.
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