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Jan. 25, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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HUMAN SHIELDS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep755
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Coming up in this critical election year, many swing state GOPs are desperately low on money.
It's a big problem, and I'll tell you what the implications are.
Josh Hammer, editor of Newsweek, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about the latest news from Israel, including Hamas' use of human shields and the moral question of who is responsible for the deaths of civilians in Gaza.
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.
I want to talk about a serious problem that affects the GOP's election prospects in 2024.
Now, there are all kinds of reasons to feel good about 2024.
One of them is that Joe Biden is unbelievably unpopular.
The Democratic agenda is unpopular across the board.
Trump has been surging.
DeSantis, of course, is out.
And so we might be looking at a pretty unified Republican Party if the right moves are made going into the election.
And all of this bodes pretty well.
And so, what's the obstacle?
Well, everywhere I go, people identify a single obstacle.
Of course, it is election fraud.
Dinesh, what is the GOP doing about election fraud?
Dinesh, have the problems that were outlined in 2000?
Mule's been fixed. And I talk about those things, and my basic...
The GOP has not done enough.
The Republican National Committee has, well, not done a whole lot as far as I can see at all.
And so problems in that area remain.
But it's come to my attention that there is another problem that is separate from election fraud.
And that is the problem of the mobilization of the vote.
And here's what I mean.
The way elections work is that there are energetic citizens, activists who have been following all this stuff, and these are the voters, and some of them, like Debbie, are super voters.
They vote in the midterms, they vote in the local elections, they vote every time you're given a chance to vote.
But most people aren't like that.
A lot of people will be like, I don't really feel like voting because it's raining.
Or I don't feel like voting because I've got a lot of other things to do at this time of year.
And so the point is that having a get-out-the-vote, GOTV, get-out-the-vote operation on the ground is really important.
And what does it take to do that?
Well, one of the things it takes is money.
Yes, it takes enthusiasm.
Yes, it takes volunteers.
But it also takes money.
And there's a very...
A disturbing article in Newsweek.
And this is not an article intended at attacking the GOP. It's an article that just lays out the financial condition of the GOP with a focus on swing states.
And it turns out the GOP in the swing states is not doing well.
In Arizona and Michigan, the GOP is running critically short of money.
Let's look at Michigan. As of the middle of last year, the Michigan Republican Party had less than $100,000 in its bank account.
This is the GOP for the whole state of Michigan.
It should have millions of dollars.
It has less than $100,000.
In Arizona, the Republican Party is divided and poor.
The state Republican Party in Minnesota is struggling financially.
In fact, it was, as of last note, the latest FEC filing, it was actually in debt.
It had no money.
It owed money. And the Colorado GOP is struggling as well.
In fact, it was having some problems paying its rent.
In Massachusetts, the GOP has less than $70,000 in the bank, and it owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to various vendors.
Even the Florida GOP doesn't have a whole lot of money.
Very surprising in a state where you think the GOP would be flush with cash.
So the GOP nationwide is doing pretty well.
It has a lead in governors, it's got 26, the Democrats have 24.
It has a lead in state legislators.
There are about 4,000 Republican state legislators nationwide, about 3,200 Democrats.
But you might ask, why is this problem occurring?
And there are really two answers to this situation.
One reason it's occurring is because people don't want to give money to a GOP that doesn't deliver the goods.
This is, for example, why the RNC is having trouble raising money on the national level.
And it's because there are people who go, I don't want to give to the RNC. I mean, I'm in this camp.
I don't want to give to the RNC. And the reason is, I don't like what the RNC does.
First of all, the RNC doesn't do good things that it should be doing, and it does all kinds of stupid things that it shouldn't be doing.
And a lot of this falls at the feet of Rona McDaniel, but the fact is Rona McDaniel was re-elected by the RNC. So I blame the whole RNC because it's the RNC that keeps Rona McDaniel in her position.
So that's a disgrace, and that's part of the problem.
That a party that doesn't deliver, a party that abandons its own troops on the ground, look at January 6th, for example, doesn't really deserve the enthusiastic support of people who go, what am I giving for?
It's my hard-earned money.
Aren't there plenty of other causes to give to?
And I don't just mean I can give to causes unrelated to politics.
I can give to my church or I can give to my neighbor who needs it.
There's that. But there's also other political causes.
There are other groups that are doing good things.
And so if I'm choosing between giving, for example, to the RNC, giving to another conservative group that's actually delivering the goods, that is, fighting for religious liberty, or is, I'd rather put my dollars over there.
The second problem, though, that is unrelated to this, is the following.
And that is that there is all over the country, as far as I can see, we certainly see it all over Texas, but it's true beyond Texas as well, is there is a kind of fissure, a schism, a divide between the rank-and-file GOP base, which is largely MAGA. It's not entirely MAGA, but I would say it's about 70% MAGA. And...
The donor base, which is about, I would say, 70-80%, maybe 90%, the GOP establishment.
And now this is a real problem, because essentially your money people are marching to a different drummer than the base.
Now, this is a problem financially, because what happens is, in many GOP districts, you have a guy who's running, and that's the establishment guy.
And except the establishment guy is, oh, the 2020 election wasn't stolen.
The establishment guy is like, oh, no, the border, well...
We've got to do a few things to secure it.
But impeach Mayorkas?
No, we don't need to do that. Impeach Merrick Garland?
We don't need to do that. Why waste our time impeaching Biden?
We won't get him out of office.
So this is the GOP establishment talking.
And the GOP donors are, oh, well, that guy sounds good.
He's very responsible. Let's put our money behind that guy.
And then you have another guy, let's just say a MAGA candidate, who reflects the majority of the MAGA base.
But the donor base goes, we're not going to fund that guy.
And so even though that guy might be closer to the voters, he or she cannot get their message to the voters.
Why? Because they can't buy radio ads, and they can't buy TV ads, and they can't send out multiple mailings and texts and flyers and so on.
So in other words, what you get is the GOP... Base wants one guy but ends up with the donor finance guy and then the donor finance guy turns around and betrays the base and then the base goes, we're not going to give them support any longer.
So you can see why this is a destructive dynamic.
By the way, in Brandon Gill's race, which is in Texas 26, we're sort of trying to overcome this, and we are overcoming it.
In fact, we sort of have overcome it, which is to say that the MAGA candidate, which is Brandon, he's the most right-wing of all the—there are actually 10 candidates in that race, maybe four viable candidates— But he's to the right of the other three.
So he is the most MAGA candidate in the race.
But he also has the most money.
He has the most ads. He has the most flyers.
He has the most... So he's got the ground game.
And that's really what needs to happen.
This is the mark of a party that is doing the will of its voters.
In the Democratic Party, interestingly, the base, and this is certainly true of the activist base of the Democrats, is left.
It's a left-wing base.
Now, the whole voter base of the Democratic Party isn't left.
But what happens is that the Democrats rely on the media to put out enough propaganda that the mainstream Democrats, who aren't so left-wing, end up voting for these left-wing candidates.
But the donor base of the Democratic Party and the activist base are aligned.
The donors are left-wing.
And so what you have is a different scenario on the Democratic side.
And then the problem in the Republican side is...
That the GOP doesn't have money, so it doesn't have a ground game.
The local GOPs in the swing states don't have a lot of money.
That affects their ground game.
A lot of Trump's campaign cash is going toward his legal bills.
That hurts him. He's also not going to be able to self-fund anything.
If he is drained of his own cash.
And let's just say for example, this could be very well a motive of the New York case.
Let's put massive fines against the Trump business.
So that Trump, who was a billionaire, remember Trump was able to fund a good deal of his own presidential campaign in 2016.
He would go out for donations, but he wasn't asking for donations that much.
It was kind of like, listen, give me whatever you want because I'm self-funding my campaign.
He may not be able to do that in 2024 if the left is able to put up enough legal claims and liens against Trump's finances.
And not to mention the fact that so much of Trump's time is occupied with going to court in New York and going to court over here.
And going to court over there.
So all of this is a way of saying that I foresee another potential serious problem affecting the GOP in 2024.
It's not a reason to despair, but it's a reason to recognize this is a problem and there is time to fix that problem, but we need to be aware of the problem at all levels of the GOP so that it can and will be fixed.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast.
And Josh, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
You just got back from a trip to Israel.
Tell us a little bit about your observations on the ground and where you think this conflict is at this stage.
Yeah, Dinesh, great to be back with you.
So I was there for seven days, and it was an action-packed seven days.
We were based in Jerusalem, but we traveled all throughout.
We spent some time in Tel Aviv, went to Hostage Square.
So, you know, folks have seen this long Shabbat dinner table where they had 240 seats there, one for all the hostages, very powerful.
Saw folks there singing and dancing.
We were in the Knesset, their national legislature, meeting with lawmakers.
I actually spoke at a conservative...
Conference over there, had some Knesset members and legislators right there on my panel and in the conference.
So really got a full breadth of experience.
But I think the most powerful day for me, Dinesh, was when we actually did go down south, down right near Gaza.
We went to four different communities that were hit by Hamas on October 7th.
We went to Ofakim, we went to Sterot, and then to two of the kibbutz, well, really one kibbutz and then the music festivals.
We went to Kafar Aza, which was one of the kibbutzim, the tiny villages.
Literally, I can't exaggerate this enough for the viewers.
It literally backs up against the fence.
This kibbutz is literally on the border fence, somewhat tragically and ironically, Dinesh.
The people living here actually were very left-wing, pro-peace, hippie kind of folks, actually.
In fact, the rally cry in Kafar Aza, in Hebrew, they would say, Shalom Akshav, which means peace now.
Akshav is now. And, you know, tragically, we know how that resulted.
And that was just...
Brutal. I mean, it was very difficult to be there.
I've never seen this kind of carnage up close and personal, seeing the bloodstains wiped off of the wall.
The houses look like they're bombed out.
The sofas, the couches, the children's toys, the kitchen utensils everywhere.
But honestly, Dinesh, for me, the most powerful takeaway from there in Kafaraza, and then we went to where the Nova Music Festival was nearby in Reim, where there's stakes in the ground for everyone who was killed, the hostages, these beautiful photos looking back at you from the grave.
difficult stuff.
But the biggest takeaway for me was actually the opposite of that.
Because even there, in the midst of unspeakable Nazi-esque war crimes, we came together.
And there were these two religious Jews in Kfar Aza who took guitars and started singing.
And the IDF soldiers were there.
And we all just started singing and crying together.
And it was just so beautiful.
And it was really, for me, just a reminder of what has powered the Jewish people through 5,000 years.
Well, really, I guess 3,000 to 4,000 years would be more accurate, but thousands and thousands of years, it would be the point here, of ups and downs, of pogroms, expulsions, attempts at genocide, one thing after another.
And we just power through it.
And the spirit of the Israeli soldiers I spoke with, the IDF soldiers, their spirit is incredible.
They have zero compunctions.
They are absolutely convinced that they are mission-oriented, that they have the moral high ground, I believe, of course, absolutely correctly.
And despite the depths and the depravity that I saw there in the south near Gaza Dinesh, it was actually that inspiring note that I really took away from my trip.
Josh, talk a little bit about the mechanics of the trip, because I would have thought that to go to Israel now would be quite dangerous, and that it's one thing even to go to Jerusalem, but to be going down south to the very spots where the Hamas terrorists came through.
Did you go as part of a group?
How was this organized, and I'm assuming that there was a significant level of police protection, right?
Yes. So central Israel, so to speak, which is basically defined as the Tel Aviv area or between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, you know, life there is pretty normal, honestly.
So my wife is actually originally from Kfar Sava, which is basically a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Most of her family, her uncles and aunts, cousins, they all live...
There in the Tel Aviv area, life is fairly back to normal for them, except for the ones who are still in army reserves.
And I didn't actually personally hear any sirens for rockets or anything when I was there in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
Now, when you actually went down south, that's when you started to hear things.
So I think the most interesting thing for me when we started to approach, so that day down south, we started in Ofakim, which was one of the towns that was struck by Hamas.
And when you start to get close to Ofakin, you do start to hear some gunfire and bombs being dropped in the background.
But you have to reassure yourself to feel better and not get scared.
That's the idea of striking Hamas.
It's actually not the other way around.
So, you know, that was kind of a recurring theme for my five, six, seven hours, however long I was down there.
You hear a lot of gunfire and sometimes it does sound relatively close.
But unless unless a siren actually goes off, you know, it's the good guys trying to take out the bad guys, not the other way around.
But to your question, which is an interesting logistical one.
So, yes, I went there as part of an organized trip.
The trip that I went on was co-run by the WZO, the World Zionist Organization, and a smaller group called YJC, Young Jewish Conservatives.
There's been a bunch of different delegations that they've had over there.
I actually just saw Rogan O'Hanley, D.C. Drano.
He was just over, actually, I think he was in Migdal Oz, another one of the kibbutzis.
I think he might have been there on a similar delegation.
They've had a lot of different trips down there.
But to actually access Kfar Aza or Raim, which is where we went, that was the music festival, and then the kibbutz that was slaughtered, a civilian cannot just go there. So for example, my wife's cousins cannot just drive down and casually go there. The army has to let you in.
So you have to have some sort of clearance or some sort of permission from the government.
But right now what the army has done is they have left these kibbutzes that have been slaughtered, they have left it essentially as is.
They've physically wiped away some of the bloodstains, but they have signs outside the home of Dinesh that have a photo of the person who was killed there, and then the army has a sign that says, this person was brutally slaughtered by Hamas inside this home.
And they basically left it as is to try to have a living, tragic, but a memorial and museum so people can go ahead and see it for themselves.
Let's talk about where this war is at this stage because if I follow the trajectory of it it seemed like at the very beginning after the Hamas attack there was a pretty uniform Maybe even global shriek of outrage.
And this was echoed by the Biden administration, Biden himself.
But that didn't seem to last very long.
Pretty soon, a kind of backlash developed.
And then you began to see demonstrations on campus, demonstrations in cities, finger-pointing not so much at Hamas but at Israel itself.
Israel is the colonial settler, and from the river to the sea, those kinds of slogans.
Do you interpret this as a resurgence of a new type of anti-Semitism?
What is your way for thinking about why the sympathy for Israel was so short-lived, and it seems that the sympathy for the Palestinians is going on even now?
Unfortunately, Dinesh, this is not the first time we've seen this playbook unfold.
So this has happened basically in every conflict that Israel and Hamas have had since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a bloody civil war against their Palestinian Arab brethren back in 2007.
So there was one war in 2009, then there was one in 2012.
2014 was the previously long one.
Back in 2014, what happened was Hamas brutally murdered multiple young Israeli children, and that's what precipitated the last large-scale Israeli ground invasion.
The same thing happened back then in 2014.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
The sympathy of the world at first is with Israel, and then within days, the Arabs really, the Palestinian Arabs, have just mastered the art of propaganda, as you know, Dinesh.
There was this video that surfaced that I saw early on in the conflict.
Two, three weeks in, it was in late October, maybe early November at the latest, where you have this Hamas PR guy who's talking with some compliant Western media, probably with like The Intercept or Al Jazeera or some pro-Muslim brotherhood outfit like that.
And this Hamas guy, I think he was actually even speaking in English with no translation.
He was saying, you know, our fight is the same as the Black Lives Matter fight in Ferguson, Missouri.
They do a very good job of trying to dupe very gullible Westerners into trying to think that their fight is the same as, you know, insert your XYZ far left cause of the day, whether it's Black Lives Matter, whether it's the Women's March in 2017 after Trump was inaugurated, things like that there.
And unfortunately, they really have been successful in this.
But you can go back even further.
The left really started to turn against Israel as far back as the 1967 war, which was a come from behind victory by Israel was a shocking, dare I say, even a miraculous victory by Israel.
And that was the conflict where I think a lot of the left and, you know, think about what when this was this was 1967.
It was a time of peak campus radicalism, the riots in Kent State and things like that.
That's when I think people started looking at Israel as if it was not David, but it was Goliath.
And then you have this new kind of racial components where they look at the Arabs and they say, oh, they're darker skin, therefore they must be oppressed, which, by the way, even on its own terms, I don't want to play on those terms because I don't like race.
All right.
That's a disgusting field to play on.
But even just for a second, just kind of just indulging them for a second there, the narrative falls apart on its face.
I think a lot of Westerners and Europeans and Americans, you know, think that Israelis typically look like Jerry Seinfeld or something.
Well, you know, my wife and her family are Sephardic Jews.
They're actually pretty darker-skinned.
And a plurality of Israeli Jews, you know, are considerably darker than me, considerably darker than Jerry Seinfeld.
So even on its own terms, the narrative falls apart.
But unfortunately, like I said, there's been a repeat pattern over the years.
And what I took away from my trip, Dinesh, the conversations that I had with the soldiers, with the journalists, with the media there...
They are so dead set committed to making sure that the Hamas Holocaust of October 7th cannot happen again that they are largely putting on the blinders as much as possible to all of the nonsense, all of the woke crap, for lack of a better word, that is out there.
They can't tune it out completely.
They have to try to fight it back a little bit, but they're doing the best they can to put on the blinders and just see this thing through.
Let's take a pause. We'll be right back with Josh Hammer.
We're going to talk about Israel.
senior editor at large at Newsweek and host of the Josh Hammer Show.
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I'm back with Josh Hammer of Newsweek.
You can follow him on x at Josh underscore Hammer.
Josh, we were talking about the situation in Israel and you mentioned at the end of the last segment that the Israeli, the IDF, and maybe many Israelis are...
Tuning out, if you will, the critiques that are coming from the outside, which tend to put Israel as the bad guy.
And my question is, are we seeing something kind of unique in Israel?
Israeli society was pretty politically divided, as American society is.
Netanyahu, of course, has been a controversial, to some degree, a divisive figure, perhaps in the Trumpian mode.
Is Israel now, at least on this issue Dinesh, you're asking what I think might be the most important question in all of Israeli politics right now.
And the Israeli public really is unified right now.
So unless you are on the far, far left of the Israeli political spectrum, you know, Israel's commitment, Dinesh, their commitment to free speech is actually so absolutist that they have We're good to go.
You're pretty much of one mind here.
In fact, the percentage of Israelis who say that they do not want the Palestinian authority, which is what controls Ramallah in the West Bank, they're touted by the media as the so-called moderates.
They're really not particularly moderate at all.
In fact, their chieftain, Mahmoud Abbas, is a serial Holocaust denier who praised Hitler as recently as September.
But in any event, Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden want the Palestinian authority to come in after the war Gaza and to basically rule over their...
But to give you an example as to how unified the Israeli public is, they are rejecting the possibility that the Palestinian Authority will rule over Gaza after the war by like a 4-1 or 5-1 margin.
So they are voting. We're very clear at right now.
And there is no one. There is no one who is calling for the soldiers to withdraw from Gaza.
There's really no one who is calling for a permanent ceasefire.
You'll have some fringe voices, some fringe columnists for Haaretz, which is their very far left newspaper.
Even further left, frankly, than the New York Times is there.
So you'll get maybe a columnist here or there who will say just, you know, peace now, ceasefire now.
But for the overwhelming part, regardless which political party you are, you know, even Netanyahu's primary political opposition, someone like Yair Lapid, who's a major liberal, they're still all in when it comes to Gaza.
Now, the question is how long is this going to last?
And, you know, my reading of Jewish history is that Jewish unity doesn't typically last that long.
In fact, anyone who's ever poured through, you know, rabbinical debates or has read any of the Talmud or anything, you know, you see Jews disagreeing all the time.
The old joke is, you know, three Jews, four opinions or whatever the actual catchphrase or punchline is.
So I'm sure this will not last that long.
And Netanyahu's political future is a very serious question for after the war effort, whenever that's been sufficiently prosecuted.
But for now, they really are on the same page for the most part.
Josh, let's talk about this issue of civilian casualties because it seems like the left is using a couple of very standard templates.
One of them is to announce, well, there were X number of Israelis killed in these Hamas attacks, and that number has now been exceeded by what the IDF is doing to the people in Gaza.
So that's the sort of, I would call it the errant medical, perhaps, calculus.
This is part of this larger issue of proportionality.
And I suppose there's a little bit of a common sense element to it.
If your tribe comes over to my tribe and kills 10 guys, I can come over to your tribe and kill 10 guys, but I shouldn't come in and kill 1,000 guys, because that would be disproportionate to what you did.
How do you think about and how do you respond to the idea that somehow Israel is now responsible for doing more harm to the Palestinians than the Palestinians did in the original attacks?
There's a few ways to break this down.
The first thing that I think has to be pointed out is that the media is, whether of their own ignorance or they're just willfully trying to shiv the Israelis, they're generally misreporting what the actual international law or international laws of war doctrine of proportionality actually is.
So if I understand the doctrine correctly, which I think I do, it's not actually a body count to body count population.
Rather, when you have a strike, when you are dropping a bomb, when you have some sort of attack that is going to predictably, you know, if you can reasonably foresee civilian casualties, if you can reasonably foresee collateral damage, the military objective that is gained as a result of that particular attack has to be proportional to the reasonably foreseen civilian casualties or collateral damage.
So the media is really just not reporting this.
Basically, the way that proportionality works, Dinesh, is not by just saying, oh, this many IDF soldiers have died, this many Palestinians have died.
That's not how it works. That's literally just not how the actual legal doctrine works under the laws of international law.
But having said that, there obviously has been a very high death count in Gaza relative to the population.
A very high percentage of those slain have some Hamas affiliation.
The estimates vary.
It's very hard to know for sure. It's probably a little below 50%.
The number that I've seen is around 40% or so.
But it's important to bear in mind, Vinesh, that Hamas has this wicked, wicked, truly evil strategy that they've honed in.
They've developed it. Going back to the first conflict with Israel back in 2008-2009, continuing through all the various conflicts since then, they literally launch their rockets, they store their weapons caches, they put all of their infrastructure in schools, in United Nations facilities, in UNRWA facilities, in mosques, in apartment buildings.
In 2021, there was a more minor, it wasn't a war, it was more of a series of battles between Israel and Hamas back in May of 2021.
And there was a huge kind of blow up in the international media because the IDF actually struck a building where international media organizations were located.
The Associated Press has Gaza Bureau in there.
Well, why do you think they struck it?
They weren't targeting the Associated Press.
Hamas actually had a major base of operations in there.
So what the IDF has done over the past 10 to 12 years is they've gone above and beyond to try to implement – Implement basically rules of engagement that would appease the sometimes very delicate sensibilities of Westerners in America and Europe.
So they will literally drop leaflets on buildings saying, you know, heads up, like you live in a building where Hamas has rockets stored here.
We need to take care of this.
You know, you have eight to 10 hours to leave.
They've gone above and beyond like that.
And at the end of the day, Dinesh, you have to just come back to the question, who was responsible for this?
Who was responsible for the destruction here?
Is it the side that is just trying to get by in peace, that is trying to live as a beacon of Judeo-Christian values in the most hostile and hot region in the world?
Or is it an ISIS, Al Qaeda style, Islamist, jihadist medieval death cult that committed Nazi-esque war crimes and slayed 1,500, 1,400 people roughly on October 7th, and to this day is hiding behind civilians I think it's a very straightforward question, frankly.
Josh, let's explore the rationale for the human shields because it seems to me pretty clear that if Hamas as a terrorist organization, let's just say attacks civilians in Israel, they bomb a cafe or they bomb a school bus, I know what their motive is.
Their motive is to create an atmosphere of terror.
Their motive ultimately is to suggest that they will use any kind of means at their disposal to cause havoc.
Now, what is the logic of human shields?
Is it simply that they want the Israelis to kill Palestinian civilians so that they can turn them into sort of moral exhibits to the world?
Is it a propaganda play?
Is that why they're doing it? It's a pure propaganda play.
That's exactly what it is. Hamas is evil.
I mean, anyone who has ever read, I should say, the Hamas founding charter, which was written in the late 1980s, you know, they don't hide what they stand for.
They literally say that Israel, of course, should be eradicated, that Sunni Islam, or frankly, Islamism, Sharia supremacism shall be rampant, shall be ubiquitous throughout the world.
They call for the death of every Jew throughout the world there.
By the way, Christians are not particularly far behind.
They're not huge fans of the Christians either, to put it mildly.
But this is an evil terrorist organization, and they are the most cynical people in the world because, yes, they absolutely want as many of their own people to die as possible simply to drive home international sympathy points.
Now, you might ask yourself why this organization has no interest in governing.
You know, back in 2005, when Arik Sharon engaged in the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, which is one of the worst mistakes the state of Israel has ever made in its history.
But at the time, the idea here was to give the Palestinians this beautiful, beautiful sliver of Mediterranean beachfront property.
They said, oh, the Palestinians can go make a Singapore on the Mediterranean.
They can showcase to the world what they will do there.
The Israelis even left behind greenhouses and all sorts of vegetation that the Arabs who came in to replace them could then make use of.
And since day one, Dinesh, they have never had any interest whatsoever in doing any of the above.
They have taken all of the aid.
They have taken all the supplies and the material that has flowed in from the coffers of international aid and so-called human rights organizations, and they have used it to build this elaborate subterranean terror tunnel network.
It's so complex. They jokingly refer to it there as the Gaza metro.
And they've just gone above and beyond to not take care of their own citizens, the basic quality of life there, the life expectancy, the health, every possible metric that you can basically judge someone's life there in Gaza has absolutely gone tremendously downhill. They had a higher life expectancy in Gaza, Dinesh, back in the 1970s and 80s, when Israel effectively controlled it than they do now. It's, you know, it takes a lot of effort for life expectancy to go down over the course of 45, 50 years, given all the advancements in medical technologies that really says all you need to know
about Hamas.
Amazing. Josh Hammer, thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
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I intend today to conclude my discussion of ERAS in C.S. Lewis' classic work, The Four Loves, and we do it by looking at two of the key pitfalls of ERAS,
the two areas in which ERAS I think?
And it also needs the most important kind of love, which we will come to next, which is the fourth love, agape, Christian love, the love of God as manifested in charity.
We'll get to that.
But what is the problem with eros in and of itself?
Now one of the strengths of C.S. Lewis's analysis, and this is a good thing to keep in mind whenever you're doing a critique of anything, is your critique is going to be the most effective if you are able to criticize the thing at its best.
Let's say, for example, you're trying to do a critique of politics.
You're trying to say that politics itself is not worth spending your time on.
And you say, well, that's because politicians are so low, they're so degraded, they're so corrupt.
Well, yes, at its worst, politics is like that.
But arguably there is, at least in principle, the possibility of a nobler politics, people who are not corrupt.
Let's take the politics of people who came to office and they weren't trying to get something of it themselves.
they left politics no richer or even poorer than they were when they came in.
Think of someone like Reagan. He didn't make money out of politics. Or even Jimmy Carter.
Or Truman, for example. And so, what is the critique of politics? Not at its worst, but at its best.
And that's what C.S. Lewis does. When he does a critique of Eros, he doesn't criticize the low.
I'm going to show you what's wrong with the porn industry, because that's Eros gone wrong.
Well, that's easy to do.
And Lewis isn't even going to waste any time on things like that.
He's focusing on Eros kind of at its best.
And that's what makes the critique really worth thinking about.
So, the first danger that Lewis points out is a danger that he calls idolatry.
Now, this is a little bit misleading because it seems at the first glance that what Lewis is saying is that, you know, if you love somebody too much, your eros toward them is that you are idolizing them.
You should be idolizing God, not them.
And that's actually not what Lewis is saying.
He's not saying that we sort of love too much and therefore raise the person we love on too high of a pedestal.
Not at all. What he's really saying is that we idolize or people have a tendency to idolize eros itself.
They idolize what?
That condition of kind of being in love.
It's such a sort of mystical condition that people sort of want to be in it all the time.
And in fact, when you idolize love to such a point, you then suddenly realize that if you feel a deprivation of it, you feel like I'm not in love anymore, you decide, I'll throw everything to the side in order to be in that state again.
And so, let's say, for example, you're a young girl, you have a boyfriend, he's a really good guy, he's serious about you, he's even thinking about proposing to you, and you go, wait a minute, I don't feel that I'm in love with him the way I was when he first met me, and therefore I need to dump him and look for somebody else so I can recover that feeling of being in love again.
I can discover, if you will, true eros.
And so, Lewis is kind of warning us that eros can mislead us into making bad mistakes.
And by the way, very often when you make those mistakes later, and sometimes it's only years later, you look back and you go, you know what?
That guy was actually one of the best guys and I let him go and look at my life now.
You regret the mistake at a time when it is way too late.
There's another phenomenon, very closely related, and that is you do very bad things in the name of love made me do it.
The famous example that comes immediately to my mind is Francesca in Canto V of Dante's Inferno.
But there are many examples of people who do things.
Now, some of these things can be to the beloved.
So, in other words...
You are unfaithful to your husband.
And why? Well, love made me do it.
You're unfaithful to your wife.
Why? Well, I fell in love with this other person.
Love made me do it. And again, Lewis is very alert to the fact that the people who say these things almost say it as a kind of boast.
They say it not in the sense that, you know, I was poor and therefore I stole.
Because the guy who says I was poor and therefore I stole, he knows stealing is wrong.
But he's saying that there were exigent circumstances, necessities that forced him to do something that is distasteful, that is wrong, that he wouldn't have normally done.
But the love made me do it is defiant.
It's kind of like, why would you question me?
I'm in love.
So, Lewis here is getting at the fact that love becomes a rationalizer, an excuser of very bad things.
And he says, we're not just talking about bad things that violate fidelity, that violate the marriage vows, that violate chastity.
He says, quote, they are just as likely to be acts of injustice or uncharity against the outer world.
And so, for example, you're looking after your old mom or you have children and yet you fall in love and you start neglecting your kids.
Love made me do it.
Well, this is not unfaithfulness in some sense, but what is it?
It is a failure to do your own basic duties as a parent and you're not excused from those duties by saying, love made me do it.
And so... This is the first point that Lewis wants to make.
Quote, it is for love's sake.
I've neglected my parents, left my children, cheated on my partner, failed my friend in his greatest need.
People do all kinds of bad things and appeal to the sort of vindicating power of love.
That's the first problem. Then we turn to the second problem.
And the second problem doesn't concern harm inflicted on others, but it concerns the fact that love...
Eros promises what it cannot by itself deliver.
And here what Lewis is getting at is that Eros is not Eros if it doesn't have its eye on permanence.
Because Eros ultimately is, I want to adjoin myself to this other person.
I want the two of us to become one.
I want our lives to be welded together.
And if you don't think that, Like, you're like, okay, I'm trying to, you know, pick up a woman for the night.
Well, that's not eros. That is sexual desire, but it's not eros at all.
Why? Because eros is this sort of larger thing, and so it's clearly nobler than the other.
Eros is clearly, in its intentions, noble.
Why? Because it has its eye on genuine connection, genuine relationship, and it has its eye on permanence.
And yet, says Lewis, if eros delivered, then all these relationships where people fell in love and even got married would last a lifetime.
Well, why don't they? They don't last a lifetime because, well, things happen.
That's what people, things happen.
And things do happen. But that's the point.
When things happen, ERAS is often defenseless against those things.
And yet, says Lewis, the weird thing is that ERAS doesn't really give up because after your relationship is in ruins, your marriage is broken up, you meet someone else and you go, well, this time it's permanent.
And then it breaks up again.
This time it's permanent.
This is the sort of Elizabeth Taylor principle.
Eight times a charm.
And yet there's something in Eros that sort of never learns.
It's always promising what it cannot deliver.
And Lewis says that the reason for this is that people idolize Eros itself and This is back to the idolatry theme.
And he says, if you didn't idolize Eros, if you allowed Eros to do its work, but you recognize the limitations of Eros, which is to say that Eros, in order to be Eros and in order to fulfill its promise, needs other things.
And so you realize, my relationship with my wife is rooted in this chemistry, this romantic connection.
But guess what? We also have tremendous amounts of familiarity, shared memories, affections.
That's storgi. We also are best friends.
We relate to each other.
We know each other better than anybody else.
That is philia. So here is eros, and yet it has been fortified by storgi.
It's been fortified by philia.
And we'll talk later about the introduction of the fourth element, which is the fourth love, which is agape.
All these elements come together, and then you ask...
Isn't Eros fortified in this way?
Isn't the fort much stronger now than it would have been if Eros retained, was linked only in sort of, you may say, the romantic connection, but did not have any of these other elements.
So Lewis is really saying, if you want Eros to be permanent, like Eros is promising to be, You kind of have to go beyond Eros.
You don't have to go outside of Eros in the sense that you have to reject Eros.
No. Eros is included.
But it's included now with the other loves.
And so it's not Eros against the world.
That's the way many kind of lovers see it.
Eros against the world.
No. It's all the four loves against the world.
And then the four loves can hold.
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