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Dec. 13, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:57
GOOD RIDDANCE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep980
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Debbie and I will do our Friday roundup We're going to talk about Trump as the man of the year.
We're going to talk about the status of the cabinet appointments.
We'll also talk about the Daniel Penny verdict and its aftermath, and a scandal that's been brewing with the Republicans in Texas.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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.
Debbie Nye here for our Friday roundup.
Honey, you might notice that I am...
Quite matched against the background today.
Dark brown pants.
Thank goodness that you're not wearing your yellow pants.
Because the audience, the listeners and viewers may not know this, but you like to wear the same pair for a while.
Yeah.
Just saying.
Well, you know, I feel like if I wear a pair of corduroys, they don't need to be washed immediately.
I'm kind of the corduroy cop because...
Usually I'll wear them until...
It's almost like you're my check on it because at some point you'll be like, are you going to be wearing those pants again?
And that's my cue to swap them out.
Otherwise, it doesn't really occur to me.
You know, the funny thing is, when I first met you, I noticed that you had a lot of really colorful clothes, and you love corduroy pants.
I noticed you had a lot of corduroy pants, different colors.
And so, obviously those you've given away, but you always seem to replace them.
Oh yeah.
No, exactly.
Yeah.
I'm kind of heavy on the khakis and the corduroys and low on the jeans.
Yeah.
And I think that I got you to wear a pair of blue jeans, Levi's, at one point.
And then you kind of like them.
Yeah.
Yeah, I do.
I think I have a couple pairs.
Hey, let's talk about Trump.
As Man of the Year.
I mean, this is a...
You just had to sort of take it in for a moment.
Time Magazine.
Now, before that happened, there was...
On the betting sites like Polymarket, you know, the betting that Trump would be Man of the Year.
And Trump was leading...
Isn't it Person of the Year?
Or is it Man of the Year?
Well, I guess maybe it's Person of the Year.
Yeah.
Because I think you're getting it confused with Sexiest Man Alive.
Yeah.
I don't think that was in the back of my mind.
I don't think that was my point of reference, really.
I know I've been a contender in the past for this title, but I don't pay much attention to it.
But anyway, I was saying on the betting markets, Trump was like 55%, but he wasn't like...
It's actually a bad sign that you think it's inherently laughable that I would even be considered for this position.
You're my sexiest man alive, okay?
Just saying.
Okay, so listen.
So, on Polymarket, Trump was leading, but he wasn't decisively ahead.
Wow.
Right?
Kamala Harris was in the running.
Wow.
I mean, Elon Musk was in the running.
And initially, I thought, you know, the betters are kind of overestimating because they don't realize how left-wing the people at time are.
So it's not an objective measure of who has been the most influential figure this year.
That would be Trump.
But it's a matter of who they will hand out the prize to.
It's like predicting the Nobel Prize.
It has more to do with the psychology of the Nobel Committee.
Like, oh, it's the anniversary of Columbus.
Let's give it to a one-legged Native American.
You know what I mean?
That's how they think.
So you have to know their psychology.
So for this reason, I thought, but it looks like even time realized You know, you kind of have to...
Not only that, but this was the comeback of not just the year, but the century, really.
When you think back to, say, January 6th.
I told you the Democrats are, like, just so angry because here we are.
He's Time Person of the Year, and the Democrats wanted him to be serving time.
That's a good way to put it.
If they had their way...
In some ways, there's an element to them that is malicious, there's an element that's stupid, but there's also an element that's very smart.
And the element that's very smart is they realize that Trump is a formidable candidate.
If he wasn't a formidable candidate, there would be no reason to try to block him, to lock him up, to do all the lawfare.
It was all aimed at the...
all based on the recognition that this guy will be pretty tough to beat.
He has the ability to overcome scandals and mudslinging like no one else.
He's got a resilience to him, and he's able to tap into veins of the culture and reach people that Republicans traditionally can't.
So I think they knew all these things.
And you were saying, in a way, this recognition, although by itself, I don't think it's that big of a deal, but it's symbolic of something very big.
It's huge.
The symbolism is huge, simply because these people wanted to bury him, and now they have him on the cover.
It's almost like, oh, okay, we give up.
Yeah, these Never Trumpers are so, they're dug in.
I saw one of them, you know, I think her name is Sarah Longbourn or Longwell or something like this.
She was in a panel with Kellyanne Conway.
And Kellyanne Conway, always kind of sweet and demure.
But this woman was like, you know, she was getting sputtering.
And this is Sarah Longwell.
And she was like, you know, you're a bad person.
You are bad people.
And you could just see that...
And then Kellyanne just said, you know, you've got like Trump derangement 5.0, meaning you are at the upper level of Trump derangement because these people cannot get out of the hole that they've dug for themselves.
And I think the more psychotic of the never-Trumpers, this is people like Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post and Sarah Longwell.
Generally, it's the female never-Trumpers.
They ultimately internalize and believe their own rhetoric, right?
He's a fascist.
He's a Nazi.
And so, unlike some of the other guys who say those things, like Bill Kristol probably implied those things.
But he never believed it.
In a way, he's too sophisticated to believe that nonsense.
So he played along with it.
But now he's back to his usual, well, we need to organize the resistance.
Can we have a meeting?
He's probably trying to shake down the liberal billionaires one more time.
Yeah.
But these fanatics like Jennifer Rubin and Sarah Longwood can't get out of it.
Now, yesterday I thought was a very significant...
This was Trump at the...
Ringing the bell at the stock exchange.
Almost like it's a new era.
I think I took it that way.
Like ringing in the new, you know?
And you do get the sense that...
We're heading...
This is like morning in America very much in the Reagan sense.
The sense of relief people felt after Carter.
And I think that moment...
Remember, that moment was sort of a baptismal moment for me in American politics.
And I haven't seen it since.
Yeah.
No.
Certainly not with George H.W. Bush, whose campaign I worked on.
Even when W came in, it was a different mood.
We haven't had that feeling of mourning in America.
Now, the difference, I think, is, well, I guess it was the same in 1980. Just there were a lot of problems that needed to be fixed, and there are now.
I mean, they cannot be underestimated.
problems of debt, a mess in foreign policy.
The Biden people, by the way, did you see they're like giving away federal money hand and foot to like get it out the door before the Trump people come in?
I notice I keep getting these things from CVS wanting me to get a COVID vaccine.
We were talking about it this morning, and here's my theory about it.
They've got millions and millions of unused vaccines.
They have stupidly already agreed to buy these from Moderna and Pfizer.
So what are they doing?
They're paying these drugstores to get them out.
Push it out.
And so the drugstore is getting money, but not from you.
They're getting it from the government.
So this is why they're now major evangelists for the vaccine.
It has nothing to do with your health.
We've just got to realize that these institutions do not care about us at all.
No.
And, you know, also another thing, going back to the stock exchange when Trump was talking, you know, a lot of people are going to say, because he mentioned, listen, if you invest a billion dollars or more into the United States of America, we're going to make sure that we don't have we're going to make sure that we don't have any regulations that make you not be able to do business here.
You know, we're going to open up these regulations.
You're going to come, you're going to do business here because we want you to invest in the United States, right?
But, and so people are probably, oh yeah, of course, he's only catering to the billionaires.
However, he did mention a story about an old lady that went to a supermarket that was bought three apples, went to the cash register to get three apples.
And when she got there and knew how much they were, she got one apple and took it back.
And she said that the cash register, the cash, the cashier was heartbroken to see that.
To see that she couldn't afford three apples.
Right.
And Trump said, that's not going to happen under my watch.
So he's looking out for the little guy.
Well, I mean, think about it.
If you're a guy who's looking for opportunity in America or looking for a job...
The billionaire is really your friend.
Because if someone brings a billion dollars into this country, by the way, that's a thousand million dollars.
It's a very big amount of money.
They really have two choices.
What can they do?
Number one, they can spend it.
And if they spend it, what are they going to spend it on?
Building a yacht, eating out in fine restaurants, traveling places, creating jobs, by the way, everywhere.
Jobs for repair guys, people to serve on the yacht, restaurants, travel, the catering industry.
They're going to go get their hair done.
They're going to buy new clothes.
So all of this is good.
And charity.
Charity.
Yeah.
And let's say they don't do that.
Let's say they decide, I'm not going to spend all this money.
I'm going to save it.
Well, where does that money go?
Well, the saved money goes into banks.
Banks then lend it out to small businesses.
So there's more money in circulation.
Absolutely.
So for anyone to imply that this is a bad idea, most countries would beg billionaires to come.
In America, you don't have to do a whole lot to get them.
You just have to say, listen, we're not going to make it hard for you.
We're not going to torment you.
We're not going to chase you around.
We're going to give you the freedom to operate.
So I think that was actually great for Trump.
And I think the stock, look at the way the stock market has been responding.
It's great.
And look, the stock market is Wall Street.
It's not the same thing as Main Street.
But the truth of it is, if the economy does well over the next four years, it's going to be good for everybody, just like it was in the first Trump term.
I think we have the chance to have an even stronger economy the second time around than we did the first time.
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Christopher Wray just had a press conference a couple of days ago, announced his resignation.
Now, it may seem that, hey, that's obvious he's going to resign because, after all, there's a new sheriff in town, there's a new regime.
But in fact, Christopher Wray, remember Christopher Wray was actually appointed by Trump.
Mm-hmm.
And he was appointed by Trump on a 10-year term.
So he is seven years into that term.
His term is not up.
And so it's not, in fact, obvious, at least as a technical matter, that he had to leave.
But I think he saw the writing of the wall.
Let me ask you a question.
So when he nominated Cash, he...
He did it before Christopher Wray resigned.
How does that work?
I think Trump was telegraphing that I am going to fire Christopher Wray.
In fact, Trump, when he was interviewed by Kristen Welker, she asked him, she said, well, doesn't Christopher Wray have a 10-year term?
And how is it that you nominated cash?
And Trump basically said, well, the fact that I nominated cash is kind of a sign that he's going to be occupying that office.
And then Trump went on.
He was actually very, very measured about it.
He said, look, this is a guy that raided my home.
That's how he put it.
And he goes, and second, when I was shot, this is the guy who said, it's not a bullet.
It's probably shrapnel.
You know, and so I think Trump made it personal in a way, but in a way that people can understand completely.
Like this guy is, you know, he's an apparatchik and he has been of the Biden-Harris regime.
Yeah.
Oh, no doubt.
Not to mention...
Who can forget the school board moms that were terrorized by the FBI? I mean, think about it.
Not just the school board moms, but the FACE Act.
The FACE Act.
Mark Houck, who we featured in Police State.
January 6th.
The people that didn't do anything.
They went into the Capitol because it was open, and then they came out, did nothing.
And they got raided, like in the middle of the night.
Yeah.
Well, this whole business of the FBI raid, particularly, you know, again, if you're going after some guy who's a mafia guy and you say, all right, there could be, you know, capos all over and, you know, heavily armed guards.
That's why we do this at 6 a.m.
in the morning.
Well, this rulebook doesn't apply if you're talking about some family guy or some grandmother of 65 who was in the Capitol for 10 minutes.
The idea that you have a rulebook and you have to blindly follow the rulebook, I mean, you have to blame the whole senior leadership structure of the FBI. And I think these people need to be severely punished.
I mean, so, you know, the way I put it, when I tweeted this out, I said, look, you know, the rats are leaving the ship.
But guess what?
We're not going to be leaving the rats alone.
The rats are not going to get very far because the new people coming on the ship know about the rats and they have some pretty nasty plans for the rats.
And so I would like to see these people raided.
I'd like to see Christopher raided in the middle of the morning, early in the morning.
Knock him out of sleep.
Pull his wife out of the house in handcuffs.
Drag her down the steps.
uh see how he likes it no i mean with the fbi with what what the senior level fbi did is unforgivable i mean they just they they just turned this country into a police state and and for you know for and we know you know from the film but also we know from when you relay these experiences and i think a lot of the january six people have had this problem is that it is a little difficult to communicate these experiences to other people because they They can't believe it.
It brings me back to Joseph Bolanos.
He didn't do anything.
He didn't do anything.
Anything.
And they...
Anyway, I get emotional.
I mean, the lack of conscience, the sheer thuggery, the fact that they didn't even send him a letter afterwards saying we're extremely sorry.
None of that.
This is how these people are.
They're faceless.
They are...
Well, the term police state was a perfect description.
Deep state doesn't even do it justice.
Deep state is, the word deep is a very poor adjective for what we're describing.
And frankly, these people aren't that deep, nor are they hidden.
A lot of their activities are out in the open.
They kind of came out of the deep.
Well, yeah, they came out, right, or the swamp, or however you want to put it.
So let's just hope for the worst for this guy, Christopher Wray.
And I think Cash has a big task ahead of him because the good thing is I think Cash is an inside man, by which I mean he worked for Devin Nunes.
He was a key figure in the whole Russia collusion stuff.
I think he knows how these agencies interact with each other.
And that's important to know.
It's also important to know that the problems at the FBI aren't on, quote, the seventh floor where the senior management is.
Well, you did an excellent interview with him for Police State.
I mean, that's available.
People can watch that, you know.
So it was really eye-opening, what he said.
And at this point, it looks like...
That the Trump cabinet positions are looking pretty good, I think.
In fact, all of them.
I wouldn't say there's a single one that we would say right now is in real trouble.
There's been some reports.
Tulsi Gabbard's meetings haven't been going that well.
But every time I've seen one of the senators' comment, even if they're noncommittal, they're not against her.
And the left's rhetoric here is so preposterous that this military veteran, this person who is allergic to foreign wars, Partly because she's been there and she's seen the blood on the ground, that she's somehow, you know, a body of Assad or in the pocket of Putin.
I mean, this is so outrageous.
It's not going to fly.
It's going to go nowhere.
I mean, the intelligence agencies love to plant this kind of, everyone who's against them is, you know, is some kind of...
I'm surprised they haven't said that about you.
They probably think it, you know, and they probably think it, but my point is, I mean, I'm outside the government, so it doesn't know good to imply this, and who cares, really?
You know, so, I mean, one of the benefits that we have working, you know, for ourselves is that, you know, if they send us a letter, obviously, you know, a complaint, it comes to you and me, and we basically read it, and we tear it up, and we throw it out, and it's like, comment noted!
Sometimes I keep them just to read them.
Yeah, that's right.
And get freaked out.
But anyway.
All right, so...
Let's move on to talk about these two big cases in New York.
One, of course, being Daniel Penny.
And the other being Luigi, is it Mangione?
Mangione.
The alleged shooter of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.
Do you want to start with...
Which one do you want to start with?
Well...
Remember, we talked about Daniel Penny last week, and I said, you know, to me, he's a hero.
No doubt.
No doubt.
And the jury saw it.
They saw that he was a hero.
But I would not...
I mean, evidently, even the guy in the mask.
Yeah, yeah.
Someone posted, you know, this guy in the jury is double-masked.
He's like...
Definitely a vote for convicting Penny, but he wasn't in the end.
No.
And so they all voted to acquit.
You need every vote to be acquitted.
Yes.
I saw Penny say something that...
You didn't let me finish my thought.
Oh, no.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
So I just said, I would not do...
He's a hero, but I would not do it in a blue city where prosecutors think that the criminals are the victims.
Right.
I would never do it in a city like that.
And not just the prosecutors, but they get enough support from the community that it's a very scary jury pool.
I would never do it.
Never.
I would walk away.
So we should identify the progressive inversion, as I call it.
What is the progressive inversion?
If you look at this scenario with Penny, Penny is the hero.
And Neely, Jordan Neely, is the bad guy.
He's the criminal.
He's the one terrorizing these people in the subway.
He's the guy with the rap sheet.
So the progressive move here is to swap the two.
Daniel Penny becomes the alleged criminal.
Let's prosecute him.
And Neely becomes the hero.
And there was an effort, at least briefly, to try to elevate Neely to George Floyd's status.
It failed, which I think is telling of our moment today.
In other words, this is not, you know, 2020. You can't, this elevation isn't going to work.
No one's going to go, you know, genuflect before Jordan Neely.
Even the left was like, the most they would be, it's like, Jordan Neely was hungry.
Well, as you know, they called him a passenger.
Yes.
Yeah, Subway Rider.
Yeah, Subway Rider.
Subway Rider was choked.
But this is the game they were playing.
They were trying to flip the normal moral analysis on its head, and the jury didn't buy it.
Now, interestingly, what do you think about the fact that Penny, I mean, maybe he's very naive, but he goes on, he comes on afterward, and he goes, hey, I'd do it again.
And he says, because if any of those people had been hurt, And if I had been in a position to stop it, I would not have been able to forgive myself.
So in other words, despite all he's been through, I mean, think about the expense, the danger to his security.
The fact that the whole prosecutorial establishment of New York was out to get him.
I mean, they tried.
They had this two-part maneuver, didn't they?
It's like, if you don't get him on the first one, let's dismiss the charge and try to get him on the lesser charge, hoping the jury will.
So, I mean, I sort of agree with you, which is to say that if you are a good guy in a blue city, you're probably better off looking the other way.
Walk away.
Walk away.
I mean, and the reason to walk away is that the establishment is going to make you the villain.
That's right.
So...
Isn't it sad?
It's sad.
I mean, it is...
What does it speak of?
I mean, sad doesn't even describe it.
It is so screwed up.
It is.
It's upside down.
But isn't that a definition of progressive America?
We sometimes say, instead of a law and order society, they want a society where the criminals run amok.
Instead of a society with lawful borders, they want to swamp the borders.
Instead of a society with some at least aspiration to decency and moderation, the Moulin Rouge society.
So this is happening across the board.
So yeah, I'm glad Penny is a free man.
I think your advice to him is get out of New York if you can.
Yeah, get out.
I think so.
Because even after the case, you were telling me, I think, that the BLM activists were threatening him.
They were.
They were saying that they were going to be watching him and that he was not welcome in New York and that it didn't matter what the police, you know, the police were not the ones in charge.
They were in charge.
Like, really?
Okay, not going to New York, you know?
Well, in a sense, they're announcing that...
I think what they're saying is that the police...
Not that they're in charge over the police, but rather that the police and them are on the same side.
Yeah, but I don't...
And so they can get away with doing whatever they want.
I don't know that that's necessarily true, because I do know a lot of police officers in New York are not okay with it.
Yeah, that's true.
But I do think that they are in cahoots with the prosecution...
The Alvin Braggs of the world.
What is it?
The Daphna Yorans of the world.
In fact, the Alvin Braggs of the world want to defund the police, right?
So the police is right here.
They're caught in the middle.
Or Letitia James or that whole democratic establishment.
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Let's turn to the other criminal case in New York.
What do you make of this weird, weirdo, Luigi Mangione?
You've been following this case right closer than I have.
You're usually intrigued by, well, this guy doesn't fit the mold, right?
That's right.
Generally, I mean, we watch a lot of crime dramas and a lot of real-life crime.
And in real-life crime, criminals are themselves...
They're pathetic in a certain way because generally they have had horrible lives.
They've been brutalized themselves in some way or the other.
They're often victims of neglect.
None of this, of course, is to excuse.
Usually poor.
Usually poor.
Usually dumb.
Well, I can.
And so you look at them and you go, wow, this is just, your life isn't a tailspin and this burglary, this robbery is the culmination of a life in free fall.
Now, you couldn't say that about this guy.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
You were telling me not only an affluent family, but like your typical close-knit Italian family, very well-liked by the community.
Yeah, beloved by the community.
Quite involved in philanthropic activities, and they had reported them as missing.
I didn't know that.
I was wondering how they, you know, reacted to seeing the mugshot.
Yeah, but see, here's the thing, and I mentioned this to you.
I said that the mother reported him missing.
around there before Thanksgiving.
And after he did the deed, right, his mugshot, well, not mugshot, but, you know, his photograph.
Right.
From the surveillance.
From the surveillance.
And even the one where he took the mask off for that girl, you know, I mean, if I was his mother, I would have been, oh, my gosh, that's my son.
How did that not happen?
Is it in fact that your mind plays tricks on you?
And because you know that that couldn't possibly be your son, you're not going to go there.
I mean, is that what could have happened?
I think so.
I mean, it has to be, right?
Because I think that, well, there are two possibilities.
I mean, one obviously is that someone in the family looks at that and goes, oh my gosh, they do recognize him.
And they decide they're having a family.
I don't think this family would do that.
Just based on what I've been reading about them.
You're saying they would, in fact, blow the whistle.
Because, of course...
And we actually talked about this, the fact that this is, of course, a dilemma.
This is not a left-wing family, either.
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah.
They're conservative.
In fact, his cousin is a...
I don't know what you call it.
I think assemblyman.
Assemblyman.
A Republican assemblyman in Maryland.
In Maryland, yeah.
Yeah, very interesting.
So you think that they were just...
That it was so inconceivable for them that their son could possibly have done something like this that even if they look at it, it didn't register that's him.
That can't be him.
How could that be him?
No, that's not him.
It must be someone who looks kind of like him.
Yeah, someone else who's Italian, so what.
And the pictures weren't absolutely distinct.
No, no.
Now, what do you think?
I mean, we haven't...
To this moment, even though there are a lot of different angles about this, I've read the two-page manifesto, which clearly...
I mean, the two-page manifesto is the kind of thing that you would get at any liberal college.
He even mentions Michael Moore.
Well, that and also he talks about something like, well, you know, he's basically talking about healthcare costs and the United States rankings like something like 42nd in the world, even though we spend all this money on healthcare.
But, you know, to my point, and I think I mentioned this to you before, is how is that going to solve that problem?
Like killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, how is that going to bring costs down?
How is that going to do anything?
Right.
I think the way he thinks about it, at least if that is a key motive, which I think it is, is he thinks of it like this.
He thinks that these greedy, rich CEOs have bought their way into power.
They are leeching off sick people in America and And they have gamed the system so effectively that you're not going to change it.
So the only revolutionary act in that situation, similar to like if you live under the czars, right?
You're not going to change the czarist system.
You have to...
And in fact, prior to the Bolsheviks, there were these Dostoyevskian characters who are like anarchists and they would shoot a policeman over here.
They would like kidnap a tax collector over there.
I think this guy's motives are like that.
Well, they must be like that because, number one, you know that the issue was not costs for him because his family's very wealthy.
Right.
So you know he had the money.
Right.
So it didn't affect him personally.
Right.
So it's just a little nutty, but this is what happens.
In my opinion, happens when you have a kid that is probably, and you know, he was valedictorian of his high school class, so he was probably very well read and probably a good kid with a good foundation.
But I think what happens is a lot of times, unfortunately, they go to these liberal arts, they go to these schools where the ideology of the professor's Change them somehow.
And then all of a sudden, he has this white guilt or this rich guilt, like, oh my goodness, I came from money, but I really shouldn't have come from money.
This really shouldn't be me.
Either that or I think there's another spinoff of the same phenomenon, and that is the wealthy kid who believes it is their responsibility to act.
Right.
I mean, you've seen Les Miserables, right?
Who were the young men, the angry young men in that play?
They were all rich, all from rich families, right?
And they all saw themselves, it's our job to take on the cause and be revolutionaries, and if we're killed, you know, nevertheless, in other words, we have the resources to be able to rise above our circumstances, right?
And all the poor people, remember the rich people in that play, in that musical, they're like, the poor will join us.
And the poor never show up.
Yeah, no.
Because the poor people are like, no, that's very dangerous.
They're a little smarter than the rich people.
Right.
They're like, you know what?
We don't really want to get shot.
And we kind of know what the cops and the authorities can do to us.
So this guy lives in a world where he's rarely been told no.
He's been able to get away with it and do whatever he wants.
Well, I don't think he's going to get away with this one.
No, it's not looking good.
I mean, they found ballistics.
The casings match the casings that he had, or the ballistics.
You mean he picked up the casings?
Well, they have the casings, right?
They had the writing on them and everything.
Oh, that's right.
They match the gun, I guess.
Oh, right.
Or whatever.
Which they found on...
I don't know.
Technical.
But anyway, so they match...
His fingerprints also match.
And I think they're waiting for the DNA. But I don't think it's looking good for Mr. Mangione.
Which means his defense is going to have to be something...
First of all, he can't claim insanity.
He's not insane.
And he's going to have to do...
This is what made me do it.
And I don't think there's any good reason or any good excuse that's going to work.
Let's turn to a different topic.
And that is here in Texas.
We have somewhat of a scandal, I think, brewing.
And that is the Texas GOP, which is the majority and a pretty decisive majority in the Texas House, gets together and by a fairly decisive vote chooses a guy named Cook to be the leader of the GOP, which would gets together and by a fairly decisive vote chooses a guy named Cook to be the leader of the GOP, which would normally Conservative, reflective of the majority of the Republicans.
However, a guy named Dustin Burroughs, liberal Republican, comes up with a ruse that he didn't invent.
It was, in fact, invented by Dade Phelan before him and others before that.
And that is, it doesn't matter if I am the loser of the Republican caucus, because since I am on the liberal side, a liberal Republican, what if I can get all the Democrats to vote for me?
Then all the Democrats plus, let's say, 25% of the Republicans becomes a de facto majority.
No.
This is horrific, right?
Because think about it.
It is.
It means that the Democrats will have effective control of the Texas House because they put- Well, they always have.
This is the problem.
This is what we've been saying all along, is in Texas, that even though we are red in Texas, the state house is run by Democrats.
And it has been for years, decades, because of this problem.
So, if this is the case, I think...
And there's, by the way, for the first time, I believe, a fairly serious blowback against this.
Donald Trump Jr. has weighed in.
Obviously, I've weighed in.
Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, has weighed in.
And finally, Greg Abbott.
Greg Abbott, I think, as we know, is more cautious.
And I think Greg Abbott's point is, I have to work with the legislature no matter who it is.
But...
It's worth noting.
Someone pointed this out.
In fact, I think it might have been our friend Michael Berry, the radio host in Texas.
He made the point.
He goes, Ron DeSantis would never tolerate a liberal Republican making a deal with the Democrats to effectively control the Florida legislature.
I mean, DeSantis would weigh in so heavily, punish the Republicans who voted with the Democrats...
But this is what the Attorney General did.
This is, you know, what he did.
Didn't he campaign?
Well, so, yeah.
So it's almost like Paxton knocked out a bunch of the so-called rhinos, but there still are a bunch of rhinos left.
And enough where if you add them to the Democrats, you get a de facto majority.
So I think it's imperative that essentially all the conservative forces, some of them national, but certainly throughout Texas, weigh in the grassroots, the money people, basically saying that any Republican who votes for these Democrats is going to be ruthlessly targeted, primaried, basically saying that any Republican who votes for these Democrats is going Because it simply is unacceptable to have a red state, not even a purple state, with a democratically controlled house that does not reflect the electoral will of the state.
Yeah, it's really crazy.
But they also need to change that system as well.
Because if you are...
I mean, think about it.
In Congress, in the U.S. Congress, we get the Speaker of the House.
Who does he represent?
He represents the majority, which is Republican, even though by five, he's still...
It should be the same in Texas.
It should be, if we have a majority, the Democrats don't get a say.
Sorry.
They can serve on committees.
They just from get to head the committees.
Yeah, exactly.
We thought we'd close on a, I won't say a lighter note, but maybe a little more personal note and reflect a little bit on the two-part conversation that I had earlier this week, well, yesterday and the day before, with Dr. James Tour, a world-renowned chemist, but also a computer scientist.
And what did you think of that conversation?
I was a little bit...
Because I had listened to a lecture he had given, and it was quite technical.
Because he had charts on the board.
He was describing chemical transactions.
He was using a fair amount of technical vocabulary.
And I thought to myself, I don't know how this is going to translate on the podcast.
It's going to be my job to try to keep the conversation...
to keep it understandable all the way through and at a level that the ordinary person can grasp.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, you have to be uber brilliant to take one of his courses because, I mean, I can't imagine taking organic chemistry because, I mean, it's a very difficult...
In fact, a very small percentage of people can make that class work for them.
Yeah.
I mean, I noticed even at Dartmouth, there were people who would take organic chemistry and give up a week or two and then just go, it's too hard for me.
It is, yeah.
I was going to go to med school.
I'm just not going to go to med school.
I guess I'm going to be a lawyer.
And...
But what I like about him is he's very animated.
He also looks at practical application, which really think about it.
If you go into a class, you go to the lab, you do dissections, you do chemical transactions.
But at some level, you may ask yourself, well, how does this play in the real world?
And this guy is very involved in the real world.
Yes.
Well, you know, really my favorite part of the two part was every time he would talk about Jesus, he would get so emotional and he would just light up.
And I was like, you know what?
You can have all these accolades and be super smart and everything else, but that is the only thing that's important.
That is the most important thing.
And he knows it and he feels it.
And the other thing is, even as a professor and a scientist, and let's remember, this guy is not at Liberty University.
He's not at Hillsdale.
He's at a mainstream, generally left-leaning institution.
So it's not common to have an academic of his stature say it.
Mm-hmm.
And be so upfront and so candid.
No, it was really very, very touching.
And all of this came about in kind of a funny way.
And Trace is back to you.
You were just doing a little bit of a...
I was, you know, sometimes before we go to bed, I sometimes will scroll through Instagram and, you know, sometimes TikTok.
I know, sorry.
And I happened upon a video, like a reel, of this person, this doctor, who was born a Jew, Jewish, and he became a Christ follower when he was 18 years old.
And it said he's a scientist, right?
He was a scientist and he talked about his conversion and how he got to, you know, was just transformed by Jesus.
And he talked a little bit about it and everything.
And I was like, oh, honey, you have to get this guy on the podcast.
We have to, right?
So think of the odds, first of all.
That we could get him on the podcast and find him, right?
I mean, we knew his name and we knew that he was from Rice University.
But when I saw that he was from Rice University, I was like, wow, that's Houston, right?
And so we're in the area.
And so I was like, okay, well, I think we can get him.
And so Luke, you know, who does our scheduling, found him.
Yeah.
You know, the other hurdle was going to be, well, will he want to come on the podcast?
Because sometimes these professors just don't want to do that.
Played cautious, so they don't, yeah.
So then he comes on the podcast, and he's not political at all.
No.
So the story was not about, we weren't going to talk about politics, but so I guess what I'm getting at is that We've since become friends.
And it's just so funny how that one little Instagram reel, you know, did this.
Interestingly, we had dinner with Professor Tour and his wife, and his wife is from Pakistan.
And apparently a very good cook of Indian food, I hear.
So we had a lovely dinner.
And that's when we got the idea of having him come in studio.
And, you know, he's a very serious guy.
When I approached him about it, my initial thought was, okay, we'll do, you know, four segments of 10 minutes or so.
And he was like, no, how about if we do like a couple of hours?
Uh-huh.
And so that's how we got the idea of doing two shows and going more in depth than we normally have the chance to do in this kind of format.
And I think it worked really well.
The other thing I loved was when he said he read the Bible every day.
And you asked him, well, what do you do?
What do you mean you read the Bible every day?
Do you read a book?
a passage?
Do you read a page?
What do you read?
And he said, sometimes I just kind of marinate on a passage and I think about it for several days and internalize it.
And I think, you know, when we started trying to read the Bible, we were trying to go too much, you know, too many pages.
We would set a chapter a day and I think we would...
And we made our way through like four books and I figured we got derailed a little bit.
And I think it's because we were a little too mechanical about it.
Yeah.
His approach is better because it...
You don't feel...
Sometimes you may just cover a single statement.
And he also says he lets the Holy Spirit kind of drive him.
Yeah.
And so that's so...
I mean, it's such a cool thing to witness and to have in somebody like him because, you know, when you're a scientist, a very, you know...
An extremely good scientist and very credible in that department.
It's so refreshing to know that his heart belongs to Jesus, that he is a believer, and that that drives him most of all.
And I just love hearing that.
Well, he's also taken the brave step of taking on a critically important field, which is the origin of life.
It's a case where in order to make the argument that science, at least in theory, is capable of explaining everything and we don't need a transcendental or supernatural explanation, What the scientists generally do is when they don't know something,
they pretend to know it or they pretend that it's coming or they act like we've made significant progress or they congratulate themselves and say things like, at least we're candid about our own ignorance and we have the open-mindedness that you don't find.
So there are all these different rhetorical moves.
And what this guy does is, without going beyond the facts, he just punctures their delusions.
And so I've seen some exchanges with him and very prominent, world-famous scientists, but he always gets them because they imply something.
And he goes, all right.
If it happened that way, show it to me.
Like show me the chemical basis of going from here to here.
And then you suddenly realize that they immediately back off and come up with another generality or they switch the argument altogether.
So this kind of surgical strikes that he does...
It's not a direct apologetics, but it does work in that direction.
It's a deflator of pretension.
Very valuable for that.
And remember, this is above and beyond his academic work, which he continues to do.
He's unbelievably productive.
Inventing things left and right.
Has all these companies and I don't even know how he does it.
And then he reads two of your books that are very, very dense.
Well, particularly...
What's so great about Christianity is a very good gateway into my apologetics work.
But then Life After Death, I have to admit, is a demanding book.
And I had to work hard to...
In areas like astronomy and cosmology, in physics, in modern biology, in neuroscience, all of that is in the book, so it's a dense book.
But, of course, it's going to be material that he's familiar with.
He's a scientist himself.
So I suspect those are the two he's sort of mastered, if you will.
And I was a little bit...
Because, I mean, this is a guy certainly in the area of chemistry, but is a true pioneer in his field.
And so I was a little tentative.
Well, you know, I say this about evolution.
I say this is what we don't know.
And I didn't know what he would say.
I thought it was interesting when we had that little discussion about consciousness where he was saying that the features of consciousness might even be found in a computer.
We were talking about this this morning, and I've been turning that over in my head, and I thought to myself, well, here's what I would say if I could make a further point to him if he was sitting right here, and that is, look, if a cat walks into a room The cat looks around and the cat takes in the situation.
If the cat sees a dog, the cat may back off, right?
The cat has an awareness of the room, of what's going on, and of itself.
I'm not saying the cat in a certain obvious sense knows that it's a cat.
It doesn't use language in that way, but it's aware of itself.
It has that inner sense of being in a world.
Now, a computer doesn't.
That is, a computer may be running, a computer is, you put in inputs and all kinds of churnings may go on and then you have outputs, but the computer doesn't quote know anything.
I don't know if he would agree with that because we have computers that can make chess moves.
You ask them questions, they answer you.
They can store a lot of information that you cannot store.
Right, but think about it.
All that information has been inputted into the computer.
The computer came up with none of it, right?
Just think of it.
A computer does a massively complex calculation, a quantum computer.
It's still doing a computation with data that has been inputted.
If I just create a computer and I don't put anything in it, nothing will come out.
Yeah.
So, in that sense, a computer is, well, I mean, if you think about it, an abacus, which does simple calculations, is doing the same thing.
The abacus doesn't know anything.
No, but you have to do the groundwork for the abacus.
Exactly.
At a simple level, you do inputs, the abacus does the calculation, and then you get an output.
But nothing that goes in, if you don't put anything in, the abacus has no, quote, consciousness.
Or a calculator, right?
Or a calculator.
Same thing.
Pretty much the same thing.
Well, he is a human calculator, I have to say.
And so are you.
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