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Jan. 22, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:04
THE UNSTOPPABLE TICKET ? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep752
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Coming up, I'll discuss the exit of Ron DeSantis from the presidential race, and I'll also talk about Nikki Haley going identity politics.
I'll reveal why Fannie Willis' defense that she treated her boyfriend no differently than other lawyers on the case.
Doesn't hold up. Political and theological commentator William Wolfe joins me.
We're going to talk about Beth Moore's startling claim that Christian nationalism and Christian are two distinct and not necessarily compatible concepts.
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We had some inklings over the past few days that Ron DeSantis was going to drop out of the presidential race, but I still came with a certain surprise. And I remember Debbie was like, oh he's dropped out, he's dropped out, and other people too immediately texting me and so on about this. So it was abrupt, to put it
And that's because DeSantis was a legitimate candidate with a tremendous record in Florida, a huge pile of cash, and yet something went terribly wrong for him.
I've discussed on the podcast whether...
It would have been better for him just to wait out till 2028.
I think that is correct and I think he's now come to that conclusion.
In fact, I think that an important reason for him getting out now is he can conserve his campaign cash.
He can endorse Trump early on.
And he can preserve, to the degree they still exist, his prospects for 2028.
His prospects for 2028, I think, are worse now than they would have been had he not run at all.
I think almost everybody saw him as the natural heir apparent.
And now there's been some bad blood between the Trump people, well, Trump himself, and DeSantis.
And so DeSantis' future is a little unclear.
I wanted to stir the pot a little bit, and so I posted something that I had been saying before.
By this I mean months ago, which is, what about a Trump-DeSantis ticket?
And when I said that months ago, that was before this kind of fracas between the two camps, the biting back and forth that has gone on now for many weeks.
And so I thought that if you could combine the charisma, the larger than life quality, the track record of running the country, that's Trump.
And you combine all that with the operational efficiency of DeSantis, his willingness to kind of burrow into issues and tackle issues even at a high level of detail, like the covenant with Disney and the terms of that contract, or the setting up, the taking over of a private no, I'm sorry, a public university in Florida that had a progressive tilt and then swapping it over, so now it has a conservative tilt.
That's DeSantis. And so I thought, wow, what a nice combination between the two.
Not to mention the fact that even though they both reflect a MAGA spirit, they have different styles and they appeal to a different temperament of Republican.
Now, the question is, is any of that even viable now?
And quite honestly, I don't know the answer.
If I had to bet, I would bet that Trump does not pick DeSantis as his running mate.
The question is, should he consider him?
And so this is my post.
Putting aside prejudice and preconceptions, wouldn't the unstoppable GOP ticket for 2024 be Trump DeSantis?
What do you think?
I'm just foraging for input, and the input is like all over the place.
Kerry Kellen, no, I don't.
Steve Ferguson, I advocated that way over a year ago.
Dr. Interracial, my dream team.
Babble 365? No.
Too much bad blood between DeSantis and MAGA. Mandy?
Trump? Vivek?
So right there, those are the first five responses.
By the way, all by people with big followings.
And you can see that their reactions are really all over the place.
Now, I mean, I'm a big fan of Vivek.
I think that Trump-Vivek would be actually a powerful ticket, and I'm salivating over that, if only because of the prospect of Vivek debating Kamala Harris.
Can you imagine what a treat that will be to watch?
This is, by the way, assuming that there is a debate.
I think the Democrats are getting increasingly allergic to To debates.
Notice Biden is having no debates with any of the other Democratic contenders.
Well, in fairness, even Trump stayed away from the debate.
So there's a sense here that debates, which were, again, a staple feature of American politics, have now become questionable.
Should we have a debate at all?
Now, it looks like the New Hampshire primary is going to be straight out Trump versus Nikki Haley.
And Nikki Haley is very interestingly moving sharply in the direction of identity politics.
She had an interview recently in which she said that she grew up in the American South.
She's had an experience of racism.
And here's the quote.
I was teased every day for being brown.
She also goes on to say that she was somehow prohibited or not included in beauty pageants because she is too dark or she's brown.
I'm thinking, wait a minute. Wasn't it like 1980, honey, when Vanessa Williams, who's black, became the first black Miss America?
84, Debbie says, which sounds about right.
But here's the point. If Miss America can be black, is it really the case that there's some kind of prohibition on beauty pageants because Nikki Haley is brown?
And second of all, this is what got me.
Not that I was teased one time for being brown.
I was teased every day for being brown.
Thinking to myself, you know, I came to America from Bombay and Welcome to my show!
I cannot remember one time that I was teased for being brown.
I mean, honey, you've never experienced it in my company, right?
No one teases me for being brown.
And this didn't even happen to me.
I mean, I was in Arizona, right down near the Mexican border.
I was at Dartmouth in New Hampshire.
I've lived in New York.
I've lived in California.
I've lived in D.C. So I've been all over the place.
And I've been, as I say, in...
In very conservative companies, so if you're looking for racism on the right, you're looking for racism on the far right, this is kind of what Nikki Haley is getting at, that because she was raised in the South, she experienced racism to an unexpected degree.
And I'm thinking to myself, what's going on here?
Why is Nikki Haley going in this direction?
This can't be a way to win Republican voters.
It just seems so stupid.
And yet, I think this is why it happens.
There's a certain type of strategic affirmative action on the right.
And that is that if there's someone who's a conservative, who's black, particularly like an underclass black, that person gets elevated because people are like, hey, look, even this guy likes Trump.
Even this guy has the MAGA spirit.
Or if somebody, for example, is very vocal as a woman and attacking the feminists, it's like, oh, look at her.
She's a woman and she's attacking feminism.
And I think what happens is that you have people on the right who have advanced themselves on the right through identity politics.
I tried extremely hard in my career to run away from that.
In fact, I remember years ago, when I first came to America and I was first writing articles, the Washington Post invited me to write an article on the politics of India.
And I said to them, I said, hey, you know, I'm now living in America.
I haven't followed the politics of India all that closely.
I know more about American politics than about Indian politics.
But second of all, I thought to myself, if I do that, I'm going to become the go-to Indian guy to remark about Indian things.
I'll be defined around India.
I'll be the spokesman for all issues Indian.
I don't want to do that.
So, it's important for me not to do that and to write about other topics.
Why? Because I want to establish a mainstream influence in America.
And so, by doing that, I've consistently in my career appealed to a mainstream audience.
But I think what happened with Nikki Haley, and I'm not suggesting she doesn't have a mainstream audience, but rather that when she's up against the wall, when things are getting difficult, her natural go-to is to appeal to identity politics. And it's so ironic that for a conservative movement that is now rejecting identity politics, rejecting DEI, rejecting affirmative action, we have someone contending for the presidency and for the GOP nomination
who's essentially saying, I was mistreated because I'm brown. And it's a short step from there to say, vote for me because I'm brown.
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I want to talk about the Fannie Willis scandal and why I think it's going to turn out quite well for Trump.
Now, there is of course the view that Democrats always get away with stuff.
It doesn't really matter what they do.
They somehow never seem to pay the price.
Fannie Willis gave a speech recently where she defended herself.
I think what she said is that, yes, she was wrong to have engaged in this affair, but she wants to be forgiven for that.
But, of course, she realizes it's a whole different thing to confess to the fact that she engaged in professional affairs And so she says, no, she didn't do that.
This guy was the right guy for the job.
There were two other prosecutors, and they are paid the same, she implies.
Now, apparently, they're not paid the same.
But more importantly, all the work has gone to this guy.
It's gone to Wade. It's gone to this fellow, Nathan Wade.
And the other prosecutors, who by the way are perfectly competent, one of them is Anna Cross, former DeKalb assistant DA, another is John Floyd, an expert on RICO prosecutions, but collectively those two guys have billed $116,000.
That's the scope of the work that they've done.
By contrast, Wade has billed $654,000.
Think about it. Look at the allocation over here versus the allocation over there.
Now... The amount of money that's gone to Wade has raised another interesting question, and that is the question of the grand jury.
You might remember Georgia convened a grand jury.
The grand jury went on for weeks and weeks, taking all kinds of testimony, hearing from all kinds of people.
And then I was myself surprised to learn that this grand jury is not going to decide whether to indict Trump.
They are merely going to recommend, and the recommendation can be ignored.
Now, the recommendation was to indict, and in fact, they went ahead and indicted.
But here's the point.
This kind of procedure is apparently quite rare under Georgia law.
It occurs elsewhere, but in Georgia, it's quite rare.
But think of it.
It's a major time-consuming racket to funnel a large amount of money to a lawyer who's handling all this.
So even though it's a big dog-and-pony show, witness after witness after witness, and at the end of the day, all they do is recommend, who organized that?
The answer? This guy, Wade, Fannie Willis' boyfriend.
That's how she got to final all this money to him.
Hours upon hours upon hours, I had to listen to that guy, take this guy's testimony, and so on.
And so all of this is now going before the judge.
And the question is, what is the judge going to do?
Now, the legal standard is really simple.
You don't have to show that she was intentionally corrupt.
You don't have to prove that she engaged in any kind of criminal or even unprofessional behavior.
All you have to prove is that there is a serious conflict of interest.
And there's case upon case upon case in which cases have been thrown out or dismissed or at the least the prosecutors are recused.
They're removed from the case.
And think of the implications of this.
Removing Fannie Willis from the case is not about removing Fannie Willis.
The entire district attorney's team in Fulton County, which is Fannie Willis' own team, would be disqualified.
So the judge can throw out all the charges, throw out the charges against Trump and all the other defendants on the grounds that the case is tainted.
He does have that power. Personally, I don't think he will do that.
But, what I think he will quite likely do is ask Wade and Fannie Willis to step down.
And that means that the whole prosecutorial team is now out.
And that means the case then goes to a kind of prosecuting counsel in Georgia, which has to now separately decide whether to bring the case, and if they brought the case, begin the whole thing all from the beginning.
This is very interesting because at the very least, first of all, they could decide we're not even going to go through it.
The whole thing has become too much of a mess.
We'll let the other Trump prosecutions go forward.
That's one option. The other is we will go ahead, but if you're starting now at the end of January from square one, It's very doubtful that this RICO case would even go to trial before the election.
Remember, a lot of the strategy of the Democrats was to accelerate this stuff to try to get it all in before the election because they want to see that guilty verdict emblazoned in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and then picked up everywhere.
They want that. They want television stations.
Trump was found guilty by a jury of his peers.
And so, for them, a case that is somehow delayed and punted Beyond the election becomes a huge defeat for them.
And in this case, it's a defeat produced by Fannie Willis' own unbelievable stupidity and recklessness.
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Welcome to my show!
And he is publishing his memoir, which is called Troubled, all about his life.
But what he's done is he's a very reflective guy, thinks about what it is about my life that went wrong, what it is about my life that went right.
And he begins by looking at foster care and the outcomes that occur when kids go to foster care.
And it turns out that those outcomes are pretty bad.
So, for example, foster care kids are pretty likely to drop out of school.
I say pretty likely.
Most of them do graduate.
But their graduation rate is 64%.
Now, compare this to poor kids, kids who come from the poorest backgrounds.
Their graduation rate in America is 86%.
They have a higher graduation rate than foster care.
And then you go, well, you're Dinesh, but that's because foster care kids are both poor and disadvantaged because they're not with their own family.
This is actually a fallacy.
Why? Because foster parents, in order to qualify for foster care, have got to show that they are, in general, not poor.
In other words, they have to show that they can afford to take a foster kid.
And so foster care parents tend to be middle class.
So now you're comparing middle class kids environments, but foster care kids, versus poor kids raised in poor families.
And what Rob Henderson is showing is that the kids in foster care do worse.
They do worse in graduation.
Turns out they do worse across the board.
They're more likely to get divorced.
They're more likely to take drugs.
They're more likely to commit crimes and be incarcerated.
So let's look at this.
About 8% of males who come from families in the bottom socioeconomic quintile, the bottom fifth, do time in prison or jail.
About 8%.
For males who are in foster care, 60%, more than one in two, ends up in jail.
And so this is a very remarkable finding because it...
Well, put it this way. It severely undercuts the progressive idea that the decisive factor is economic or socioeconomic, as they often like to say.
The decisive factor has to do with something that is characteristic of foster children.
But what is that?
What is that something?
And here Rob Henderson says that something is unpredictably or chaos in the experience of growing up.
Because that is inherent to foster care, right?
Even if you're placed in a middle class family, very often that is for a few months.
Then you're back into the institution, you're back into another family, and this is how And it's not just that you are bumping back and forth.
It is that very often the families themselves, the family environment that you're dealing with is unstable.
And so what do we mean by unstable?
Changes in residence.
People who are moving from one place to another.
Changes in cohabitation status.
You have a woman who's raising a child and then there's another man in her life and then another man and then another one.
That is... Almost a definition of instability.
Changes in employment status.
So, the point being that, the point that Rob Henderson is making is that children need to be raised in a stable environment.
And if that stable environment exists, then the child will, in general, develop a Those social and cultural characteristics that enable them to succeed.
That's not to say all of them will.
We're talking about averages.
We're trying to compare groups here.
But Rob Henderson's point is, and I'm now quoting him from his article, the luxury belief class likes to talk about the effects of wealth on test scores.
Few discuss the effect of instability in childhood giving rise to harmful behaviors in adulthood.
Now, this I think is all interesting in and of itself, but Rob Henderson is aware that there are some people who will say...
Yeah, but Rob or yeah, but Dinesh.
You know, so much of what we become in life is genetic.
It's inherited.
It doesn't matter whether you're poor.
It doesn't matter whether you're in foster care.
Either way, kind of your fate is in your genes.
The evidence for this is a number of studies, including so-called twin studies, that show that a lot of intelligence, a lot of physical speed, even things like whether you're likely to become divorced or whether you're going to become a smoker, a lot of those things do seem to have a genetic component.
Which I think is very interesting.
It shows that genetics plays a huge factor in our lives.
And we know this. Anyone who has kids knows, for example, that a great bit of their personality, their disposition...
Whether they're curious or not.
You can spot that very early on.
And you haven't done anything to implant those things in the kid.
They either have it or they don't.
And so the environment becomes a kind of landscape on which genetics plays itself out.
And Rob Henderson knows this.
But he does make, I think, a critical point.
And that is that even though genetics is critical...
You can't deny that changes between groups can often be explained in environmental factors.
Let's say, for example, that smoking is highly genetic.
So what? Think of it today.
There are a lot fewer people that smoke today than smoked a generation ago.
Has America's genetic pool changed so radically that that's the explanation for it?
No. Smoking has become really unfashionable, and so people are less likely to smoke.
Well, consider something like crime.
We have seen a rapid escalation of crime rates in our society.
It happened in the 70s.
Then it went down in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s.
It's escalating again today.
And think about it. Has the genetics of America changed?
Well, to some degree, yes.
You're looking, for example, at the impact of illegals or new people who have come to our society.
Okay. But even putting that to the side, even holding that constant, we see a rise in crime rates.
And obviously, the genetic pool is not responsible for that internal change in crime rates.
That's because people made it easier to commit crimes and made it easier not to get penalties for committing crimes.
So you subsidize crime.
You get more of it. That's like a law of economics.
It applies to monetary things, but it also applies to behavioral things.
If you subsidize something, you get more of it.
You coddle your children and spoil them, and you don't encourage them to be independent, what happens?
They become more dependent as adults.
They follow the behavior that they have been induced or incentivized to follow.
And so... My conclusion, looking at all this, is that...
The conservative focus on changing cultural behaviors that have to do with family structure, that have to do with stability at home, that have to do with homework habits, that have to do with parental attention, all of this is critical in determining whether or not this young person has a good life and ends up in a functional way a member of society and successful.
Or you don't have those ingredients if the culture is twisted, demented.
This is really the great sin of modern liberalism.
It is making our culture even more twisted and demented than it needs to be.
They're promoting twistedness and dementia as a way of life.
And if that happens, and we're seeing it happen, with the cultural price that's going to be paid by the society as a whole, but also by Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of young people, that damage will be incalculable.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is William Wolf.
He's a theological and political commentator.
In fact, he's sort of a veteran of politics.
He worked as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Defense Department.
He also worked in the State Department.
He's a former congressional staffer.
But... He also has deep roots in the Evangelical Christian Movement.
He has a BA in History from Covenant College, a Masters of Divinity at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
You can follow him on xwilliam__e__wolf with an e at the end, w-o-l-f-e.
William, do you go by Bill?
What's the right way to address you?
No, I go by my parental given name of William, though I will say my trolls and haters on X usually call me Bill.
Alright, so we're going to go with William.
Thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it.
You know, there's a lot going on inside the evangelical movement.
I view it sometimes partially from the outside, partly by looking at your work on X and on other platforms.
Let me begin with something that I saw on X itself.
This is from Beth Moore, the Bible teacher, the sort of Christian coach, if you will.
And she says this, she goes, It's past time to learn to distinguish between the term evangelicals as a political sect.
and believe to their bones he's the single solitary savior of the world and the totality of all Christianity has and needs to thrive count me among the latter." Now what she seems to be saying is that the that you got these evangelicals whose primary focus is political In another message she calls them Christian nationalists.
These are people who are sort of trying to make America great again.
They're putting Jesus, as she sees it, at the service of a political ideology.
And she goes, on the other hand, they're kind of the pure evangelicals, and she counts herself in this group, and supposedly these evangelicals are, I don't know, above politics?
They don't do that.
So, what is your assessment of what is going on here?
Because it looks to me, this is an effort in a very subtle way to burrow into the evangelical church, split it, Is that your assessment?
What do you make of all this?
Well, I think that's a very good way to put it.
It's been fascinating to watch the evangelical discourse surrounding American politics really over the last seven years with the rise of Donald Trump.
And a lot of the rhetoric that Beth Moore is using there is rhetoric that's been introduced into the evangelical world through secular scholars, primarily sociologists, gender historians, et cetera.
They're not theologians.
And they've come in and they've argued that evangelicals who apply the moral teachings of Christianity to our political life today are somehow no longer caring about the gospel or being evangelical.
But the reality is that Christ is Lord is one of the most political statements, is the most political statement you could ever make.
And the gospel does not stand divorced from social and political implications.
Now, this is an important distinction to make because during the rise of the social justice movement, many of the woke warriors said similar things, but their conclusions were anti-Christian conclusions.
There are genuine conclusions that can be drawn from scripture that need to be applied to the political arena.
Such as ending abortion, upholding the sanctity of marriage.
And those are the things that Beth Moore and others like her are upset about that evangelicals are waking up and getting more involved in politics these days.
And I will say it's interesting at best and hypocritical at worst for her to say things like that because after Trump won in Iowa, she had a lengthy screed on X decrying politics.
And so I'll finish up my point with this.
It seems that when you're coming to the intersection of faith and politics in the evangelical world from the left side of things, all of their political issues are gospel issues, but they want to make all of our gospel issues political issues.
So it's a very interesting sleight of hand.
Yeah, that's very well put.
Do you think that, you know, I understand that if you got some guy who's a left-wing sociologist who doesn't care about Christianity at all and is using their scholarship as a battering ram to try to sow division or confusion in the Christian camp, that's one thing. I'm assuming that Batmore is a believer.
My question is, do you think that, in her case, it is a particularistic distaste of Trump?
This is such an immoral man.
He's a liar.
In other words, it's Trump derangement syndrome.
Or do you think that Beth Moore herself deviates from the moral teachings of Christianity, doesn't particularly care about abortion, isn't that big on family values, and therefore is trying to peel those issues away from a certain type of pure evangelicalism,
as she defines it. Beth Moore is a very interesting case study of the fracturing of the liberalization of the evangelical world in America, and the Southern Baptist Convention in particular, which is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, home to about 14 million members and 40,000 churches.
Beth Moore came of age in the SBC. She was One of our most published authors for a decade, the Lifeway Christian Bookstores, sold millions of copies of her Bible study.
So, her influence and reach is vast, but when you go back through her theological history, you can see Dinesh just an increasing drifting away from being solidly grounded in Scripture.
She has very charismatic leanings where she talks about God speaking directly to her.
Now, I don't deny that a God could speak directly to a Christian, But the Reformed evangelical understanding is then you take that revelation, you submit it to the authority of Scripture.
So she's had charismatic leanings, and she's been a pretty open egalitarian.
That is, she denies the teachings that we find in Scripture, particularly in 1 Timothy 2.12, that God, in His gracious wisdom, has reserved the role of pastors and the pulpit to men.
And Paul, when he expounds on that in 1 Corinthians, he grounds it in the creation order.
And so she's been bringing egalitarianism into the SBC, which is always the first line to fall before you start going down the slippery slope of affirming LGBT agenda, the trans agenda, et cetera.
And now since she's left the SBC, her sort of interfaith and broadly ecumenical journey continues at the church that she's at recently.
They had an interfaith dialogue where they hosted a Muslim scholar who chanted from the the Quran during his appearance.
And so, you know, I don't know if I want to say that.
I wouldn't say, of course, that Beth Moore doesn't care about family values or doesn't think abortion is evil and should be ended.
However, her theological commitments are very aberrant, and they're drifting away from true Christian orthodoxy in pretty live time here.
And when somebody goes on that deconstructing journey, they almost always go in one direction, and that is to the left theologically and politically.
We've been talking, William, about Beth Moore, but it looks like this is a bigger issue.
And as you say, when you're talking about something like a male ministry in a church, this is not fundamentally a political issue, is it?
It's a theological issue.
It has to do with... What are the rules for a church as laid forth and applied through Scripture?
I think I read in your commentaries, but also elsewhere, that this came to a head because of Rick Warren's church.
Now, Rick Warren, we know, the famous pastor who wrote The Purpose Driven Life.
He's been instructing pastors around the country for a long time, very influential.
And his church was a part of the Southern Baptist Conference.
But there was a kind of parting of the ways.
Let's talk about that larger issue because, again, Beth Moore is one thing.
She's influential enough.
Rick Warren is, wouldn't you say, even more influential than Beth Moore.
Well, they've both had, you could say, an outsized, or if you look at their followers, maybe just an appropriately sized influence on the Southern Baptist Convention.
But I would say that both of them are quite at odds theologically, culturally, from the basic, you know, SBC member in the pew, your faithful followers.
Southern Baptist grandma has been going to the same church for decades who brought her children there and her grandchildren go there.
They are what we call people of the book.
They stand on God's word.
They love it. They want to defend it.
They stand on the authority and the inerrancy of scripture.
And they don't care. I don't care what the world thinks.
And this is what's very interesting here.
Someone like Rick Warren, who was a globetrotter, he would go to Davos.
He's a part of sort of the elite class.
And you know this too, Dinesh, from your time in academia.
Evangelicals have such an inferiority complex.
They want to be loved by the world, and so they compromise to try to get a seat at the table.
And so this influence of worldly compromise has really manifested itself in the Southern Baptist Convention on all the woke issues on DEI, CRT, and feminism.
And to bring it back to your original launching book there, egalitarianism is nothing more than feminism infiltrating the church and subverting the role of the pastor and trying to tear down what they view as a hierarchy.
They think that God's word is wrong, or at least we're misinterpreting it when it says that only men can be pastors and preachers.
They view that as a product of the cis, hetero, western, white, male hierarchy and patriarchy.
And so Rick Warren did unapologetically have women pastors at his church in violation of the Southern Baptist Convention's clear statement of faith or Baptist faith and message.
And Beth Moore was also regularly preaching and occupying pulpits and supporting women pastors and preachers as well.
And so the convention is sort of waking up and beginning to fight back against this, which is why we disfellowshipped I know this is really interesting, and I'll wrap it up with this, is that the Southern Baptist Convention is not trying to tell any church what they can or cannot do.
Baptists are congregational.
We believe in local church authority and autonomy.
If Rick Warren wants to have female pastors, he can have them.
Just not in the Southern Baptist Convention.
If Beth Moore wants to be a female preacher and pastor, she can be one.
Just not in the Southern Baptist Convention.
And again, egalitarianism is the tip of the spear on a whole host of liberal issues.
And so I'm glad Southern Baptists are waking up to this fight, and we need more to get involved.
It looks to me that the problem that we have here, and this is true on the theological as well as on the political right, is a sort of male emasculation problem, if I can just put it bluntly.
I mean, if you ask the typical Republican congressman, was the 2020 election stolen?
He probably has a different answer in private than in public.
In private, yeah, I saw 2,000 mules.
In public, you know, a certain kind of diffidence.
Yes, there were irregularities, but I'm not prepared to say blah blah blah.
Now, so what I'm getting at here is in that example that I just gave...
The problem is not that the guy doesn't know.
It's not that the guy doesn't believe.
It's that he is intimidated by the public criticism that's going to come from the culture, from specifically the media.
And I wonder if there's something analogous that's going on in the church as a whole.
This goes beyond the Baptists.
It goes even actually beyond the evangelicals.
It encompasses the church generally, that pastors in general, this could probably be said of Catholic priests, they're a little scared that if they preach forthrightly, That this will bring criticism from the general culture and maybe even scare some people away from the pews.
Do you think that this sort of fear factor, if I can call it that, is predominant?
Because I'm pretty sure that if you sat Rick Warren down or Beth Moore down and went through the sort of applied teachings of the church, I don't think they'd have a problem with that.
Do you? Well, I think that what you call the fear factor is very predominant.
Sometimes me and some of my other friends, we refer to these individuals as based DM bros.
That is, people will DM you and say conservative or based or hardcore things, but they will never say it in public.
Or we call them, I'm with you in private, brothers.
They'll put your hand on your shoulder and say, hey, look, I agree with you, but now's not the time to have this fight.
And what it is, Dinesh, is that there has been over the last many decades in all of Christianity is, I think, a fear in regards to the rising tide of secularism, progressivism, you know, the sexual revolution, its many manifestations.
And what it does is it's told Christian pastors, again, of any denomination, that if they're going to keep people in their churches, they have to appeal to the left.
It's called the punch right, caudal left.
Where they want to join with the media in denouncing the deplorables, denouncing Donald Trump, denouncing those backward, knuckle-dragging, Bible-thumping fundamentalists, and then play very nice with the trans activists, with the LGBT activists, with those who are subverting God's word and infiltrating his church.
And so I think some of that's beginning to be broken up a little bit.
I'm seeing more and more men, the bald men, realizing actually the fields are ripe for the harvest on the disaffected, disgruntled, conservative, non-religious side of things.
Because particularly of the biological distinction, you know, that's breaking out in our country, right?
You all have conservative non-Christians who at least still believe that men are men and women are women.
That makes them a much more, I think, fertile harvest ground for sharing the gospel.
So, yes, there's a big fear factor because they want to keep people in their churches, and so they're trying to manipulate their methods to appeal to the left.
And I'll wrap it up by saying that I'm actually not sure, Dinesh White, frankly, if we did sit Rick Warren down and Beth Moore down, particularly on the issue...
of who can be a pastor.
You know, Matt Walsh had that documentary, What is a Woman?
You know, well, we need to have a documentary, What is a Pastor?
And God's Word says only men can be pastors.
And I'm unfortunately not sure they agree with that.
Very interesting. I mean, what you're describing to me is like a Bud Light strategy.
You know, you've got an evangelical church that has a certain type of person in the audience, in the pew, if you will, and here is a company, the pastor, and he is intimidating, he's alienating the people who are the base in order to win people who, in a sense, have very little interest in what the Baptists or what the evangelicals have to offer.
I remember being struck several weeks ago, and maybe we'll wrap up on this note.
This was in Dearborn, Michigan.
There was a kind of LGBTQ rally, and a bunch of Muslims came out to protest against it.
But what was really interesting was that it was mainly a bunch of angry Muslim men.
And these Muslim men went up one by one to the podium and were very firm in asserting that this was the sort of leadership of the Muslim community.
And I was struck by the fact that if this was some sort of a Christian protest or a conservative protest, it's almost...
Sure, there have been a series of women, you know, moms, you know, grizzly bear moms coming up to the podium.
So I was just struck by the fact that in the Christian world or even in the conservative world, the women, because it's family issues, because it's feminism, the women have to lead the fight.
But when it comes to the Muslims, their men are happy to go out front.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think it's an utter shame, and it's a total rebuke and judgment upon American Christianity.
When you consider the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, if you could say the woman's original sin inclination was to be deceived, the man's original sin inclination was to be passive.
Adam should have intervened.
He should have crushed the serpent.
He should have rebuked it and stood on God's word, and he said he allowed this to happen under his watch.
And we're seeing the same thing play out now, that men in America have been emasculated.
They've been told that they're toxic.
They've been told that they can't be bold leaders.
Otherwise, they're subjugating women and others under their care.
But that's the complete inverse of what Scripture calls men to do.
And so, it all ties together.
There's a crisis of Bold, masculine, Christian leadership in the American church that's allowing the rising tide of these deconstructing ideologies to infiltrate us.
And so we need men to stand up.
And I'll give a shout out to a particular man here on your show.
Mike Law is a faithful Baptist pastor in Arlington, Virginia.
And he is the one leading the fight with this amendment we have in the Southern Baptist Convention to stop egalitarianism.
He's nobody specialed.
He's just a faithful man who stands on God's word and is willing to take the slings and arrows that come with leadership.
And so we have a big vote here in Indianapolis in June of this year to ratify his amendment.
So if you're watching this and you're a Southern Baptist, I hope to see you there.
That's awesome. Very interesting stuff.
And thank you very much for joining me.
I've been talking to William Wolfe, theological and political commentator.
Follow him on X, William underscore E underscore Wolfe.
Thanks so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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