All Episodes
Previous Next
May 7, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:20
IS OBAMA THE CULPRIT? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep827
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, today's episode is called Is Obama the Culprit?
I'll consider the decline and deterioration of American institutions and ask, is Obama the guy who is to blame?
I also recall my early writings and first film on Obama to show how they have held up in the light of subsequent events.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
Hmm. America needs this voice.
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 was in Oklahoma City this past weekend, and in fact through yesterday, Monday, and I gave a lecture at a Christian school called the Herbert Armstrong University to a terrific crowd.
Some of it was from the church community and the school community, but also a bunch of people from Oklahoma City.
And one of the questions that came up that got me thinking and becomes the title of today's This podcast is over.
Obama the culprit? Is Obama the culprit? We see so much going around us. So many of us are disturbed by the trajectory of the country. So the question is, when did this kind of downhill slide, this move into political and moral chaos, this overturning of a cherished moral sentiments, when did this sort of begin?
Now, we're tempted to say it began with Obama.
I want to reflect upon this question a little bit because It seems to me that some of the traces of what we see can easily be pushed further back, and in some cases, much further back.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
I was struck, and probably many of you were struck, by the way in which the media censored the Hunter Biden story.
It seemed unbelievable that they could pull that off because we have hundreds of news organizations, thousands of journalists, and yet somehow all of them Conspired, collaborated, or at least worked in unison, worked toward the same goal, and the goal was in fact achieved, except for the New York Post, and they were able to even censor the New York Post.
This story was buried at a critical time.
So it seems like that is something new.
The media in the past might be biased, but they wouldn't do that.
They couldn't repress important facts like this from coming to public light.
Except, when we think back, let's think for example about JFK. Now JFK was, in reality, a pretty sordid character.
He was a lot like Bill Clinton.
Now, like Bill Clinton, he had good positions on certain political issues.
Remember, Bill Clinton signed welfare reform, JFK was an anti-communist, and JFK also put through a tax cut.
But JFK was a despicable individual.
He was a womanizer.
He was involved with all kinds of sordid mafia characters.
Remember, his dad was a bootlegger, and that's how the Kennedy family made their money.
And yet, you could open up the New York Times, you could listen to CBS News, Not one word about any of the sordid conduct of JFK. On the contrary, the media conjures up this idea that this is Camelot, JFK is like King Arthur, these are the Knights of the Round Table, a sort of romantic, chivalric idea.
Jackie Kennedy is the model of elegance, and the dutiful wife, and look at the lovely family.
This was mythology, and yet mythology carefully cultivated by the media.
So the point is that if we think that the media, many of these people are just shameless liars, they were shameless liars in 1960.
They were shameless liars a whole generation ago.
And when you look at the ideology that has moved us away from the American founding, the turning point is in fact not in the early 21st century, but in the early 20th century.
In other words, a hundred years ago.
If we think back to the 20th century, the progressive philosophy, which defined itself in opposition to the American founding.
The progressives were really the first people who said, the founding is a bad idea.
They invented the idea that the founders were bad guys, that the founders created an archaic model that no longer works today, that progress is defined as movement away from the founding towards some future progressive ideal.
And this is what the BLM believes.
This is what Antifa believes.
Now, BLM and Antifa are more thuggish perhaps than the refined Woodrow Wilson, who was the president of Princeton University.
But what I'm saying is that there's a common thread in the philosophy.
Prior to the progressives, no one really attacked the founders.
If we think back to the debates in the Civil War...
Some of you may have followed my exposition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Both Lincoln and Douglas revered the founding.
Both the North and the South appealed to the founding.
Both of them appealed to the Constitution.
Both of them said, in effect, that the Constitution is on our side.
And by the way, they had the same attitude toward the Bible.
Both sides appeal to the Bible.
Both sides profess to be Christians.
Both sides said, we are, in a sense, trying to enact God's will.
Lincoln himself noted the anomaly that you've got two people fighting each other desperately and to the death, and yet they both are praying to the same God.
And yet, having said all that, even though the roots, I think, go back pretty far, Obama was clearly in many ways a turning point.
One of the things that Debbie jokes about is that, you know, are we heading?
What the left has in store for us is Obama's fourth term.
Obama's fourth term!
Wow! Of course, what she means is that Obama had two terms.
We're living through Obama's third term, and Obama is sort of hoping he'll get a fourth one.
And this would be a way for Obama to really achieve his fundamental transformation of America.
I still remember when Obama was, oh, we are going to fundamentally transform...
At that time, I didn't take it all that seriously.
It seemed to me political boilerplate.
People traditionally say, we're going to make change.
Change is what people want.
That's why I'm here. So this is...
Not by itself alarming, but I think Obama meant it.
He meant, I've got a totally different America in mind.
Now, you can't actually produce this fundamental transformation in the country in a single term.
You can't even really do it.
I mean, you can sort of do it in two terms.
I think Reagan changed America in certain ways.
But four terms is a lot.
In four terms, you can change.
You could even change, just to a considerable degree, the character of a country.
I mean, FDR did that.
FDR had four terms, and no one else except FDR has had four terms.
So this would give Obama an unprecedented impact on America.
Arguably, we could look from 1980 to 2008 as being the Reagan era.
The Reagan era outlasts Reagan.
Reagan's legacy persists into the 1990s, even the early 2000s.
But since then, Arguably, it's the Obama era.
And Biden can be seen just as a sort of extension of Obama.
You remember the little clip? We actually played it in Police State, where Obama says, hey, you know, I wouldn't mind getting another term.
And he says, you know, I don't know if I really need to do it myself.
I could maybe just be with a little wireless.
I could be whispering what to do.
In other words, controlling things, even though ostensibly not being in charge.
And notice that Obama, even today, lives in Calorama.
In other words, he hasn't left Washington, D.C. One thing I find really interesting is that even though it is kind of known that the Obamaites, the Obama gang, surrounds Biden, nevertheless, you notice that there's absolutely no reporting on Obama's influence on Biden, on whether or not Obama is involved in the running of the government.
You never see anyone touch this topic.
You certainly don't see reporters camping out outside Obama's Calorama house.
Hey, Obama, have you talked to Biden?
Hey, have you put any input on what to do about the border?
Hey, who picked Kamala Harris as the vice president?
Did you have a say in that?
None of this. And so there's very little media scrutiny.
And And yet, one way to answer the question of, is Obama running the show today, is simply to ask this question.
Is the anti-colonial philosophy of Obama, which I first really exposed in my book, The Roots of Obama's Rage, I subsequently made it the centerpiece of my film, 2016, Obama's America.
And we were talking about this yesterday.
In Oklahoma City.
And I said, look, there's a very easy way to test whether this anti-colonial philosophy is still in operation.
Because the anti-colonial philosophy goes beyond the kind of normal type of democratic philosophy of progressivism.
Progressivism is the philosophy of the strong kind of domestic state.
It's the philosophy of the redistribution of income.
But anti-colonialism has a whole other dimension.
It has to do with weakening the power of America in the world.
It sees America as an evil influence in the world.
And so one way you could test the anti-colonial philosophy, even with Obama, is you make a list of all America's friends.
And you make a list of all America's enemies.
Now, a true anti-colonialist will attack our friends and support our enemies because a true anti-colonialist will be looking to diminish America's role and influence and power in the world.
And it's quite obvious that with Obama, you could almost do a checklist.
The British are our allies.
He was against the British.
Removes the Winston Churchill bust from the White House.
The Iran is our enemy.
Obama's very friendly toward Iran.
He ultimately does the Iran deal.
He's sending pallets of cash over to Iran.
We have allies in the Middle East like Mubarak, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.
Obama plays an active role in overthrowing, celebrates the Arab Spring, is happy when the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power in Egypt.
So Obama very clearly supports and advocates this anti-colonial philosophy.
But all you have to do to ask if Obama's hand is running the Biden regime is apply the same Is it the case that today, right now, if we were to make a list of our Allies, good example, Israel.
Israel, longtime ally of the United States, by and large supported by Republicans and Democratic regimes alike.
The Democrats may be more incompetent in what they do, but nevertheless, they've been supporters of Israel, and now...
The opposite. Suddenly America is turning against Israel, putting pressure on Israel.
By the way, putting no reciprocal pressure on Hamas, on the Palestinians.
It always wants Israel to stop.
Israel, don't do this.
Israel, don't kill civilians.
And so... You can see here that a major switch is underway.
Republicans continue by and large to support Israel, but the Biden regime increasingly does not.
And the same test could be applied to Iran.
It could be applied to other countries as well.
Ironically, Russia, after the end of the Cold War, was willing to cooperate with the United States.
But the United States has, in a sense, taken post-Soviet Russia, this is under Biden, and made it into an enemy.
And I say this because when Russia was communist, the left was actually favorable.
But when Russia ceased to be communist, suddenly it became our deadly enemy.
Isn't that interesting from the point of view of the left?
I'll pick this up in the next segment, but just to summarize, it seems, not based upon trying to find out if Obama's making calls to the White House or trying to identify his texts to Biden,
but just looking at what Obama did, his anti-colonial views, They seem to me to be firmly present under Biden and represent a kind of a departure from the way Democrats, at least on the issue of Israel, but perhaps on other issues as well, have thought in the past.
So we are very much living in a continuation of the Obama way of thinking.
And let's hope that we don't have, I'm not even sure the country could really endure for more years of it.
The hardest part about weight loss?
Getting started. Now, are you ready to lose weight but not sure where to start?
I understand Debbie and I were right where you are a year ago.
Let me tell you why we chose PhD Weight Loss and Nutrition and why I so highly recommend their program.
First, Dr. Ashley Lucas has her PhD in chronic disease and sports nutrition.
Her program is based on years of research and is science-based.
Second, the PhD program starts with nutrition, but it's so much more.
They know that 90% of permanent change comes from the mind and they work on eliminating the reason you gain this weight in the first place.
There are no shortcuts, no pills, no injections.
It's solid science-based nutrition and behavior change.
And finally, perhaps most important, I lost 27 pounds, Debbie lost 24.
We haven't gained the weight back.
The best thing about this program, they have an 85% success rate of their clients maintaining their weight loss for life.
They provide elevated maintenance support for you through the PhD alumni community, which will provide you the support you need to keep this weight loss for life.
So if you're ready to lose weight for the last time, Call 864-644-1900.
Or you can go online at myphdweightloss.com.
The number again to call 864-644-1900.
Everyone thinks mortgage rates are extremely high but that's not entirely true.
Mortgage rates are much lower than the average credit card rate of 22%.
Think how much interest you're going to pay On that credit card if you're only paying the minimum payment every month.
So if you're a homeowner, a cash-out refinance with American financing can help you pay off that debt and lower your monthly expenses.
And the mortgage interest is tax-deductible.
They are saving homeowners just like you an average of $854 a month.
Their salary-based mortgage consultants will show you how much you can save every month with no upfront fees, no obligation.
You may even close in as fast as 10 days and possibly delay two mortgage payments, giving you greater savings upfront.
So get the financial relief you need.
Stop living paycheck to paycheck.
Call American Financing today.
Here's the number, 888-528-1219.
Again, it's 888-528-1219.
Or you can visit AmericanFinancing.net.
When I was in Oklahoma over the last couple of days, I did a podcast and they were asking me about my first film, the 2016 Obama's America, and how that came about.
And it flashed my mind back to my first sort of...
Curiosity about Obama.
Remember when Obama was elected in 2008, took office in January of 2009, he was very much presented as a civil rights guy, kind of like he's the modern, he's like the reincarnation of Martin Luther King.
What Martin Luther King was to civil rights law, Obama would now be to, in a sense, American public policy.
And And it only took a quick reading of Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, to realize that that is not who Obama is at all.
In fact, Obama grew up in Hawaii.
He has a very different background.
And note the title of his book, Not Dreams of My Father.
Hey, I'm writing a book about my dad.
A biography, if you will.
Dreams from My Father.
So the dreams that Obama got from his dad.
I realized that Obama's philosophy was essentially one of anti-Americanism.
And when I say this stuff now, it's funny because everyone nods like, aha, yeah, what else?
You know, Dinesh, tell us something we don't know.
But the truth of it is at the time, people didn't know it.
They were a little shocked.
In fact, they thought the whole...
The thing was very bizarre.
Even conservatives, National Review, for example, those guys were like, what is Dinesh even talking about?
Why is he trying to sort of racialize this whole Obama debate?
Why is he trying to take Obama back to Africa as if he was somehow not fully American?
Is this Dinesh's version of the birther allegation against Obama?
All this mindless nonsense.
And so I thought, you know what, I need to mainstream this idea of Obama's anti-colonialism, the roots of it, where it comes from and how it plays out.
And so I went to Steve Forbes.
I was actually at a Forbes conference and I told Steve Forbes about my ideas and Steve Forbes goes, yeah, you know, why don't you write the cover story for Forbes?
And so I did.
And it caused quite a reaction.
In fact, the Obama White House was not happy at all.
In fact, this is when they first started, in a sense, identifying me as a villain.
It was before the movie.
I hadn't done a film yet.
My book came out in 2010.
But they called in the White House division of Forbes and screamed at them, Why did you publish this article?
And those guys were like, Well, it's Steve Forbes.
He does own the magazine, after all.
And then shortly after that, a guy I knew, Joe Ricketts, who is the founder of Ameritrade, a billionaire, Joe Ricketts came to me and he was like, hey Dinesh, you know, you need to get this message out to a lot of people.
I want to help you to do that.
I want you to reach a million people with your book.
And I was like, Joe, you know, that's not, books don't sell like that.
I mean, a hardcover book, if it sells 100,000 copies, it's going to be like number two on the New York Times bestseller list.
And he said, well, how do you get the message out to like a million or five million people?
And then I remember that Michael Moore had made Fahrenheit 9-11.
And so I suggested the idea of a film.
And so Joe's like, all right, Dinesh, well, go find out what it takes to make a film like this, and what's it going to cost?
And so I talked to some guys and did a little bit of research, and I told Joe, well, you know, as best I can tell, I can do this film, convert...
The book into a movie, but it'll cost about two and a half million dollars to make.
At least that's my best estimate.
And I was thinking, well, was Joe Ricketts gonna finance this?
Well, no. He writes a check.
He goes, Dinesh, here's $100,000.
Why don't you go find 24 other guys to give you the same, and then you'll have the money to make the film.
And so actually, that is what I did.
That's how I made the first film.
And I mention it now because It is interesting to go back and watch 2016 Obama's America.
By the way, the film is available.
You can find it online.
You can find it on iTunes.
I'm not sure if it's still on Amazon Prime, but if you search it, you can watch it.
And it's eye-opening to watch not only sort of in a historical sense.
It's like, did I get Obama right?
That's the first question.
looking back, was it a correct understanding of Obama and a correct prediction of what Obama's second term would look like?
Because after all, remember the film came out in 2012.
I called it 2016 Obama's America because my question was, what will America look like if we have another, meaning a second, Obama term?
So that's interesting enough.
But it's also interesting to look at the film in the light of what is happening now.
In other words, isn't it true that now, really, what, more than a decade, a decade and a half after Obama first came to office, aren't we seeing the play out, the unfurling of the Obama scheme, the Obama vision for the world?
And to respond to the National Review people, they couldn't have been more wrong because there was nothing racial about this.
I wasn't saying that there was anything specifically, quote, black about Obama.
The anti-colonial philosophy is not uniquely African.
We're not talking here about Afro-centrism.
We're talking about a worldwide philosophy.
The British, the French, they had colonies in Asia, in Africa, in Central and South America, so much of the world.
The anti-colonial movement arose in places like Ghana, but also India and Indonesia.
It was a worldwide movement against this European colonial control.
So far from it being a racial movement, it was a global movement, but it was anti-Western and it was anti-American.
Why anti-American? Because even though America didn't have colonies, America in fact was itself a colony at one time, but nevertheless America inherited the baton of the leadership of Western civilization after World War II. As British power waned and collapsed really after World War II, America became the leader of Western civilization.
And I think what's happened with Obama and the Obama agenda is that one man came in the way of it.
One man threatened it.
One man jeopardized it.
And that, of course, was Trump.
If you think back to Trump's election in 2016, it represented...
Well, it was a repudiation of Hillary, of course, when she was the rival candidate.
But it was also a repudiation of Obama.
Essentially, the American people were saying, enough of this Obama-Hillary agenda.
We don't want a continuation of what Obama has given us.
We're going in a different direction.
This is part of the reason why Trump is so loathed by these people.
He is seen as the guy who...
In a sense ruined the Obama Hillary picnic.
He's seen as the guy who threatened to undo what they were doing and stop America's march toward a certain type of socialism.
And so that's part of what makes the stakes in 2024 so high, because in a sense the question is are we going to keep going and give Obama a fourth term and the Obama agenda a chance to fully play itself out, a full transformation of America, or are we going to give Trump
Are we going to give the undoer of Obama a chance to pull us back from the brink, pull us back from the precipice, and then perhaps even, and this would have to go beyond Trump, the long road to recovery.
You might have heard Mike Lindell and MyPillow no longer have the support of their box stores or shopping channels the way they used to.
They've been part of this horrible cancel culture, and so they want to pass the savings directly onto you by having a $25 extravaganza.
Now, when Mike started MyPillow, it was just a one-product company, but with the help of his dedicated employees, Mike now has a Hundreds of products, some of which you may not even know about.
So to get the word out, I want to invite my viewers and listeners to check out their $25 extravaganza.
Great deals. Two-pack multi-use MyPillows, just $25.
MyPillow sandals, $25.
Six-pack towel sets, $25.
Brand new four-pack dish towels, you guessed it, just $25.
And for the first time ever, the premium MyPillows with the all-new Giza fabric, just $25.
By the way, orders over $75 get free shipping as well.
The amazing offer won't last long, so take advantage of it.
Call 800-876-0227.
Again, that's 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com to get the discounts, to get the free shipping.
Don't forget the promo code.
It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, if you'd like to support my work, there's an easy way.
I want you to check out my Locals channel.
I'd invite you to become a monthly or an annual subscriber.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that is censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You also get kind of a personal side of me.
You can interact with me directly.
I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday, 8 p.m. Eastern.
And so, tonight, no topic is off limits.
I also have a movie page with some cool films, including 2,000 Mules and the latest film, Police State.
By the way, if you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch this movie content for free.
It's included with your subscription.
So check out my channel. It's dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is John Walsh.
He's a candidate for Nebraska's 3rd Congressional District.
His social media, by the way, you can follow him on x at MAGA, W-A-L-Z at MAGAWals and the website MAGAWals.com.
John, thank you for joining me.
Nice to have you.
You are organizing with some others a conference that's coming up shortly, actually in a few days, and it's a conference on the role of the churches in politics.
This seems to be an area where we have confusion, we have a problem, we have a sort of either timidity on the part of the churches, but they, so many of them have conservative values, but they are holding back from the political arena.
So can you outline, flesh out a little bit more what the problem is, and then we can talk about what the churches need to do.
Oh, sure. So, well, the problem is, well, first of all, Dinesh, I really appreciate you having me on your podcast.
I am truly honored. But the problem is that our churches, our pastors, they are not educating their congregations.
They need to engage in a political discourse because...
This is how our founding fathers intended it.
If you look at, like, John Witherspoon, you know, he taught many of the signers of the Constitution, and a lot of those were pastors, and they would, you know, fulfill their role in political office, but at the same time, they're fulfilling their roles as pastors, and they're educating their congregations.
So, I mean...
What do you think, John, is the reason that the churches have abdicated that both historic and also moral responsibility?
Do you think that they have bought into a version of the doctrine of separation of church and state?
Do you think that they are intimidated by the idea that the government may come after them?
Do you think that they might be scared that there are some Democrats in my audience and they might take offense at what I'm saying?
Is it one or other or all of the above?
Well, I think the problem, it goes way back, you know, many, many years, many, many decades.
And so if you read, like, Cleon Scuson's The Naked Communist and the 45 Goals that he wrote about the communists destroying the United States, you know, one of those goals is to infiltrate the churches and to take over the churches and promote promiscuity and all kinds of immorality throughout our culture.
Yeah. And that's what they've done.
This has been their game plan for many years.
Now, as far as the churches, I think right now they hide behind the Johnson Amendment.
And I think that amendment was introduced by Lyndon Johnson in, I don't remember, 1969 or something.
And what that says is, you know, churches, essentially what it says is churches cannot condone or oppose a specifically named politician.
But they have been gaslighted.
The churches and pastors, I believe, have been gaslighted so much by the left that they're under this false supposition that they can't talk about anything in politics, and it's actually thoroughly wrong.
So, if churches had been talking, if they had been engaging in the political discourse, we wouldn't have things like abortion. We wouldn't even have like the separation of church and state that Supreme Court fabricated or God pulled out of our schools. Because the churches, and especially you go back a few decades, they had, what was it in the 1980s or 90s,
83% of the population, they were Christians. And just think of that.
83% of the population, if our churches and pastors had been educating these people on the issues, there's no way that all of the stuff that we're seeing in today's world, whatever, you know, whatever come to pass, we wouldn't be mutilizing our kids and so forth.
But I'll just slow down here a little bit, so...
So what you're saying about the Johnson Amendment, I take it, is that, look, the Johnson Amendment is something quite specific.
It basically says that the churches, and there's also the question of whether this is even a constitutional limitation, whether it's valid, but what it's saying is that You don't want the churches to be necessarily getting into specific campaigns.
We support this guy over that guy and this and so on.
But that is no prohibition or even limitation on the churches speaking about politics in general and Or applying theological and moral principles to the world that we live in today.
The church is under no legal bar from doing that, and yet you say that they have, some of them apparently think they are.
Yeah, and I would say, I would go a little further on that, Dinesh.
It's not just that the churches, you know, it's not just that the churches are in fear or claiming, you know, this is illegal.
I would say that they have a responsibility in accordance with our founding fathers, in accordance with God himself, to be educating them.
To be educating their congregations on political issues.
And like I just said, you know, this is why we've devolved into the moral decay that we have in society today.
The Johnson Amendment, just to expound a little bit.
So when President Trump was in office, he signed an executive order.
And what he did is he had the Attorney General's office go ahead and give an interpretation of what the Johnson Amendment actually states.
And so, you know, the results of that report or that study was, you know, what I had just said.
A church or pastor just can't talk about, you know, a specifically named candidate in endorsing or opposing them.
Yeah. Interesting.
Let's talk about the pro-life issue because it seems to me that that is about as a clear a case where there is a clearly specified issue.
Christian position, a position that is explicitly outlined certainly by the Catholic Church, but it's obviously also embraced by innumerable Protestant churches, evangelical churches.
And yet, I think it's probably fair to say, I mean, we live in a quite conservative part of the country.
We've been to a number of different non-denominational churches, for example, It is extremely rare for the pro-life issue to be openly preached in the pulpit.
They might have a pro-life meeting group or perhaps a pro-life ministry, but I'm talking about the issue being addressed head-on, for example, in the Sunday sermon.
That is a rarity.
Now, why is that?
Because here, as I say, we're not talking about tax rates or something that might be, it's a little less obvious where the Christian position comes out.
Here it's pretty obvious, and yet it is a topic that is taboo.
Why is that? Well, in my opinion, I think churches right now, they are so focused on Unity, right?
Or they just use that as an excuse because you can't proclaim unity.
You know, we're not going to talk about these issues.
We're not going to talk about this politically.
Well, if you claim unity, what you're doing is you're catering to, what, 10-20% of your congregation that might be from the left?
But the other 80%, you know, you're alienating them.
You're alienating the views and the people that know that, you know, this is morally God's teaching, but we're not going to discuss it.
There's resentment.
And so, when they proclaim unity, it's just a bad argument.
It's just... Yeah, it's just a bad argument.
I mean, it seems like, John, it's a failing strategy, based on what you're saying, because the churches presumably, I mean, one thing that I know that they're attentive to is they want their congregation to grow,
they want to have a strong congregation, but how do you do that Well, let's call it the Bud Light strategy of the churches, which is to say you're trying to bring in a new group, perhaps, or keep the dissidents happy,
but you're removing the rationale for why the majority of people are coming to your church, which is for moral clarity, not just about their individual lives, but also for us as a society, correct?
Yes, yes, that's absolutely correct, Anish.
So one of the things that I look at, you know, a lot of the claims with the churches and the pastors is they're so afraid of losing this tax-exempt status.
And so I look at it from this standpoint, and I'm not calling out any specific church or any specific pastor, but It's just, they tend, it's the observations of a lot of the congregation, or a lot of people that used to be in the congregations, is that the churches are prioritizing money above Christ teaching, right?
And now, you know, and they're using, they use that as an excuse not to preach the gospel.
Or how it pertains to today's society and culture.
And now, in my experience, and I've been around, there's 80 counties in this third district, and I've been around to a lot of counties.
I'm Catholic myself, and so I've been to masses where I observe it's not only about The money replacing God with, you know, this idea that we don't want to lose our tax-exempt status because of money.
But now, in the name of the unity, like I was just alluding to, now some of these pastors are pushing in, you know, these work agendas into their church.
Or, you know, the big thing here, as I see, is, you know, and I don't know if it's because they believe that people can, you know, Get around this issue, environmentalism, you know, and environmentalism is simply a religion.
And I think that, you know, maybe they're using this here because they think it's going to bring unity and everybody's, you know, wants to take care of the environment.
But then again, we look at what is the environmental agenda, you know, what is agenda 2030?
And it's about, you know, destroying us, destroying our liberties and so forth.
But Well, this is a really, John, this is an important issue.
I'm really glad you're addressing it.
By the way, there's a pro-life website put up by Nebraskans Embracing Life.
It's called chooselifenow.net.
You can follow John Walls on X at MAGA Walls, website magawalls.com.
Thank you, John Walls, for joining me.
Well, I sure appreciate it, Dinesh.
Take care and God bless you.
I'm talking about the four different folkways that have shaped American culture at its root.
And the book is called Albion Seed.
And I want to conclude today my discussion of the first of these groups, and that is the Puritans, the people who shaped, to this day, the culture of New England, of the American Northeast stretching from Maine.
probably really all the way down to Connecticut and even New York.
Now, I want to emphasize, as I close out with the Puritans, the Ideas that the Puritans had of the meaning of freedom.
And I say that because I think that there's a residue of that Puritanical philosophy even today, even from the left, even from people who are very far from the Puritans.
The Puritans were very godly, men and women.
The secular left is, well, the very opposite of that.
Nevertheless, the secular left has the Puritan...
Sensibility, the Puritan habit.
And the Puritan habit is one of imposing your will even as you chant the slogan of liberty.
So the Puritans were all about liberty.
Liberty was a very big word for them, but they meant something by it completely different from Let's say a libertarian understanding of liberty is.
A libertarian understanding is liberty means limited government.
Liberty means having a state that allows citizens or steps back and has citizens essentially enjoy the scope of their own life.
It certainly doesn't try to micromanage the lives of citizens.
Well, the Puritans did do that.
They did micromanage the lives of citizens, certainly in the respects that they considered important.
So, religious respects, moral respects, behavioral respects, social order was very important.
In fact, the For the Puritans, liberty didn't belong to individuals.
It belonged to a community.
It was a collective concept, and the Puritans sometimes even spoke specifically about collective liberty.
And this collective liberty is completely consistent with imposing restraints on individuals.
In fact, if you look at some of the rules that existed in New England towns, the historian David Hackett Fisher gives a couple of examples.
It says, for example, in one of the New England towns called Easton, no single man was allowed to marry until he had killed six blackbirds or three crows.
In other words, presumably shown his proficiency in hunting.
But the point is, they are perfectly willing to restrict your ability to marry until you have done this.
State micromanagement of the qualifications for marriage.
Magistrates were allowed to suppress pretty much any kind of behavior.
In fact, they had wide discretion about the kinds of individual behavior that could be suppressed.
Another phrase the Puritans liked to use was public liberty, which is the liberty of us as a public, as a group, to practice our faith, create our godly community, and that's the liberty that's meaningful to us.
It reminds me of a famous essay by Benjamin Constant, where it's called, On the Liberty of the Ancients Versus Those of the Moderns.
And Constant makes the point that in the ancient world, liberty was participation in government.
So the Roman Republic, for example, exhibited liberty.
Why? Because the Roman citizens were able to make the rules of the society.
But this had nothing to do with the freedom of the ordinary Roman to do whatever he wanted.
Absolutely not. In fact, very often, Rome would pass very specific ordinances.
You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't go here, you can't go there.
And the Puritans sort of, you could say that they had that understanding of liberty, as opposed to the liberty of the moderns, which is a liberty of freedom of individual action.
The historian David Fisher also points out that the Puritans used the word liberty.
When they used liberty in connection with individuals, it was a plural term.
So not liberty, but liberties.
You have certain types of liberties.
Well, what are those? Well, interestingly, those were allowances that were given by the state.
And so, for example...
In a particular area of New England, tenants were given a liberty of fishing near a particular river, and they were allowed to do that.
Now, not all citizens were allowed to do that.
Some citizens were designated and given this, quote, liberty.
So this was one of their liberties.
Liberty would be a permission by the state to do something.
And so obviously, in this sense, one person's liberty is another person's restraint because other people are prohibited from doing this.
In the Bay Colonies, gentlemen, for example, were granted the liberty of not being whipped.
So servants could be whipped, sort of people who were considered the lower orders could be whipped.
But even servants had certain types of protections.
For example, a manservant could not be given more than 20 stripes.
And that was considered, believe it or not, a liberty.
So the liberties here are nothing more than permissions or grants or allowances from the government.
It's as if the government controls you, but they can give you certain exemptions and those are called liberties.
But perhaps the most important type of liberty for the Puritans, this is not too surprising, is in a sense what they consider to be moral freedom.
The liberty of the soul.
And now again, the moral freedom doesn't mean the freedom to make your own moral choices.
Nor does it mean that morality is somehow kind of up to you, that right and wrong is what you say it is.
Nothing could be the modern concept of relativism is very far from what the Puritans believed.
So what the Puritans believed was you have the liberty or the freedom We're good to go.
And this is what the Puritans meant when they talked about religious freedom.
Today, when we talk about religious freedom, we sort of mean religious toleration, the ability of people to practice your faith, to choose what you want to believe and the churches you want to go to.
For the Puritans, it was not like this at all.
For them, religious liberty was completely consistent With persecuting the Quakers, the Catholics, the Baptists, the Presbyterians, the Anglicans, pretty much anyone who didn't agree with the Puritan view of Christianity.
There was, in most Puritan towns, a compulsory church attendance.
And so, for the Puritans, your liberty is just the liberty to serve God in the world.
Now, I outline all this because it seems to me that some elements of this...
Now, the Puritans, in a way, created a remarkable, flourishing, successful, prosperous community.
Their modern-day descendants, sadly, have lost their faith for the most part, could not be more distant from the kind of strict Christianity the Puritans exemplified and taught in their schools and also in their homes.
But the repressive habit of the Puritans, which I think in the Puritan era was used largely for good.
In other words, there were cases where the Puritans, I think, were unjust or they went too far.
But by and large, they used restraint as an attempt to form character, to form individual character and to form the character of the citizens in general.
They were very successful in doing this.
But today we have a weird combination in Formerly Puritan territories, which is to say in secular New England, where it's very permissive in many ways.
It's certainly religiously permissive, anything goes, sexually permissive, anything goes, but at the same time it is very repressive in terms of progressive or left-wing ideology.
And that repression, I think, is at least a faint inheritance from the Puritans.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection