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July 1, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
59:05
ISLAMOSOCIALISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1116
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Coming up, I'm going to be talking about Trump versus Elon Musk.
I'm also going to examine this issue of Islamo-socialism that has come to the fore with Zoran Mamdani's candidacy.
I want to argue that AI, for all its benefits, also carries some profound social dangers.
And philosopher Jason Hill joins me.
We're going to talk about his latest book, Letters to God from a Former Atheist.
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I'm not a particularly observant individual, and sometimes people take that to mean that I'm not like religiously observant.
That's not what I mean.
I'm just not observationally observant.
And this is relevant because yesterday I went down to the eye guys, the eye place, and picked up a new pair of glasses, which I'm wearing now.
And I think my old glasses had kind of a blue glare, which quite honestly, I didn't mostly even notice.
But when my prescription changed, I realized I need some new glasses.
And Debbie's like, well, everybody's going to notice.
I'm like, no one's going to notice I have a new pair of glasses unless I say something.
I mean, I know when it comes to me, if someone else got a new pair of glasses, I wouldn't notice.
I don't think I would notice if someone took off their eyebrows.
I might notice if they lost an eye or if they showed up with a new head.
But that's the way we are.
I'm observant about certain things and not about others.
And Debbie's observant about the things I'm not observant about.
Now, I want to talk about a couple of big things, the big beautiful bill.
I want to also talk about Islamo-socialism in the context of Zoran Mamdani.
First, I want to draw your attention to a really weird phrase in Katanji Jackson's dissent.
This is in the case involving nationwide injunctions.
And this gives you an idea of what, you know, people who sometimes say she's DEI, she's not really qualified.
It's important to say what we mean by that.
It's not because she's black.
Clarence Thomas is black, and he writes elegant, in fact, eloquent opinions.
But here is Katanji Jackson.
A Martian arriving here from another planet would see these circumstances and surely wonder what good is the Constitution then.
Now, let's just focus on the phrase, a Martian arriving here from another planet.
Why would you write that?
Mars is another planet.
And if you say a Martian arriving here from another planet, in strict English, in correct English, you're implying a Martian who arrives here from some planet other than Mars, like maybe Jupiter or Saturn or Uranus.
It's kind of like saying if I were to tell you, imagine an Australian arriving here from another country.
Obviously, Australia is another country, but do we mean an Australian coming here from Singapore or coming here from France?
Or what is she saying?
I mean, that's my point.
It's this is like this is written by somebody for whom it is not obvious that English, or at least good English, is their native language.
Let's turn to Trump.
He was asked this morning about Alligator Alcatraz, the unique prison facility in Florida for criminal aliens that is apparently surrounded by water, and it's basically swamp type of marsh where alligators thrive.
And Trump offers two sage observations.
One is he says that he's like, I was flirting with the idea, I wasn't sure the alligators were enough.
He's like, I was thinking of bringing in some crocodiles from Africa.
So that's his first troll.
And then he goes on to say, I'm now quoting him, we're going to teach them how to run away if they escape prison.
So first of all, he's going to teach prison escapees how to Run away.
He goes, Don't run in a straight line, run like this.
So he's actually talking about coaching people on how to avoid an alligator, which is basically to run in a zigzag motion.
I remember many years ago, I was watching the Nature Channel and it talked about this certain type of an antelope that is not as fast as the cheetah, but it can elude the cheetah because it moves in a zigzag motion.
And the cheetah is faster, but only in a straight line.
So Trump apparently knows about all this, and he knows about alligator avoidance techniques.
The Big Beautiful bill, I'm happy to say, has passed the Senate.
It's passed the Senate, and it's full of goodies in it.
How do you know?
Here's George Takeay.
The budget bill contains tens of billions to fund an army of 10,000 ICE agents.
This is a red alert for our democracy.
But see, right there you go, oh, you know what?
10,000 agents?
Well, we have about 10 million illegals in this country.
10,000 new agents sounds about right.
We could use 10,000 more agents.
So he's unhappy about it.
But if you're happy about it, that's one reason to support the bill.
There are a couple of Republicans who voted against the bill.
Well, actually, three, because the bill went down to 50-50, and J.D. Vance had to be on hand to break the tie.
Tom Tillis of North Carolina has, as part of the fallout of the bill, he's not going to seek re-election.
By the way, I think this is a good thing.
Why?
Because while I don't mind rhinos occasionally, and certainly in blue states or even purple states, sometimes the only Republican who can get elected is a moderate Republican, aka a rhino.
So I'm okay with like a Susan Collins, who, by the way, voted for the bill.
But I'm not okay with North Carolina, which is a red state, having a guy like Tom Tillis.
So people in red states should appoint red representatives and red senators.
And if you want a Congress that's going to be more MAGA, more on it, tougher in taking on the Democrats, we should be careful not to send weak-kneed Republicans to represent us.
Now, this will be a big win for Trump and I think a signature achievement.
Look, for Obama, there was a signature achievement, Obamacare, and look how hard it has been to undo it.
In fact, virtually impossible.
So these achievements are lasting.
This will make the Trump tax cuts, for example, permanent.
And those tax cuts, by the way, were scheduled to expire.
So for people who are actually making a good living, and if you have a salary job, you are looking at a big surge in your taxes.
And the Democrats were privately salivating over that idea.
But with the tax cuts being made permanent, this is a lasting achievement.
Here's Trump.
For all the cost-cutting Republicans, of which I am one, emphasizing his own fiscal responsibility, remember you still have to get re-elected.
So here's Trump pointing to the political necessities of the matter.
Don't go too crazy.
We will make it all up times 10 with growth more than ever before.
So you see here the Trump strategy, which is in a sense to grow our way out of the debt.
And that is, I saw Secretary Besant.
I also saw a post by one of the Trump people.
Well, here's Kevin Hassett, a friend of mine from AEI, now the director of the Economic Council.
If we get 3% growth instead of 1.8%, he goes, that adds $4 trillion to revenue, which means that this thing is a big deficit reducer.
So this is, in fact, the Trump approach.
It's not the Elon Musk approach.
And Elon Musk has been, well, he's a bit unhinged.
And he says he's going to start a new party.
He's going to primary all the people who said they would cut the budget but have voted for this bill.
He has pledged to give money now to Thomas Massey, who is now on Trump's, well, let me say hit list, although Trump might put it slightly differently.
And Elon Musk is threatening to muck up the works.
Trump is clearly annoyed.
Trump goes, we might have to put Doge on Elon.
You know what Doge is, the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.
He gets a lot of subsidies.
So here's Trump, in a sense, saying, well, listen, you know, Elon Musk is a kind of a ruthless cost cutter, and why don't we apply some cost cutting to him?
So this is Trump, in a sense, being Trump and taking it a little personally.
I think Elon Musk is also taking it a little personally.
Not that I disagree with Elon Musk about the need to cut the deficit, to cut the debt.
Long term, we can't go on this way.
Musk, I think, also feels like he put it all on the line.
He risked his company.
Tesla took a big hit.
He got a lot of threats.
So he staked his reputation on identifying these areas where deep cuts could be made.
And then what?
The Congress really doesn't make them.
They don't consolidate Doge.
In a sense, they leave him hanging out there.
So I can see why Elon Musk is annoyed.
Elon Musk, I think, has rightly said, look, you know, I'm basically good at making new things like rockets.
I'm going to go back to doing that.
I'm going to work on AI.
There are huge productivity gains that can come through technology, and I'm going to focus on that.
I think all of that is right.
But I think a little part of Elon is still embittered by this experience, probably also somewhat embittered at Trump.
And so there's a falling out here, which I think is a real pity.
Why?
Because it empowers the worst people, right?
If you have Trump, whom we need, and Elon, whom we need, and they're fighting, who are you strengthening?
Well, you're strengthening the worst people who would go furthest in making these problems that both of them agree upon.
They disagree upon the strategy or the method, but they agree about the problem.
But you're empowering the people who would make the problems far worse.
I think, for example, of the analogy of Ross Barreau, who was kind of a conservative and a budget cutter and a budget balancer.
But in creating this new alternative to Bush and Clinton, he takes votes away from Bush, and Clinton gets in.
And so I think we're, this is the risk that Elon Musk is taking here.
He's taking the risk of putting the Democrats back in power.
And what's bad about that?
Well, they're not his friends.
They're going to go after him, Elon Musk.
And I think deep down he knows that.
So I'm actually hoping for some kind of treaty, some kind of rapprochement.
Maybe these guys need a mediator, although I would hesitate to say who that mediator could be.
But as I say, we need Trump and we also need Elon Musk.
Now, let me turn to Zoran Mamdani.
And there is a very amusing controversy right now on X about eating rice with your hands.
I mentioned this yesterday.
I'm picking this up today because I've been pulled into it somewhat unwittingly.
Brandon Gill, my son-in-law, posted something like, it's uncivilized to eat with your hands.
We don't need people like this coming to America.
I was actually on a national Indian TV show this morning.
They asked me, do you agree with your son-in-law's assessment?
And of course, there are all these guys.
I mean, it's amazing how indefatigable some of these people are on social media.
They will literally search Twitter.
There must be now AI algorithms to do that.
And they found a photo of Debbie and me.
Now, by the way, this photo, we are in Mumbai.
This is like 2018.
We're at a restaurant near Mumbai.
It's called Copper Chimney.
And we both have plates of Indian food.
And I've got a fork on my plate, but in my hand, I'm holding a piece of naan.
If you don't know what Naan is, it's basically like pita bread.
It's basically like a tortilla.
So supposedly this is proof of my hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy, because guess what?
Here is Dinesh and he's eating with his hands.
Well, first of all, I'm eating bread with my hands.
That's what Naan is.
And it's perfectly reasonable.
In fact, there is no other way to eat Naan except with your hands.
If you eat Naan with a knife and fork, you're a freak.
Just like it's very normal to eat pizza with your hands.
But see, it doesn't follow from the fact that it's okay to eat pizza with your hands that it's okay to eat like meatloaf with your hands, right?
You don't want to be eating pasta with your hands.
You don't want to eat soup with your hands.
Mashed potatoes with your hands, not exactly a good idea unless you're like Marigold Gill, one and a half years old.
Then it's, oh, oh, she's two.
Almost two.
Correction.
The point is this.
Now, in India, by and large, Indians, for the most part, certainly in educated Indians and cities, mostly eat rice with a knife and fork or sometimes with a spoon, not with their hands.
Rural Indians, poor Indians, do eat with their hands.
And some Indians who have come from the village to the city maintain that custom.
They will, in fact, eat rice with their hands, but guess what?
That's in India.
It's a whole different matter in America.
This comes back to culture and adapting to the environment in which you find yourself, right?
So, you know, I don't know, I mean, I'm assuming Italians don't eat pasta with their hands, but let's say that there's some hypothetical place in Italy where they do that.
Well, you do that there, but then you don't do that in a New York restaurant.
And this is kind of the point with Mamdani.
Now, frankly, with Mamdani, it was largely ethnic performance artistry.
I mentioned this yesterday and I sort of stick by it.
It's not that this guy always eats with his hands.
I even saw a video of him on social media.
He's eating a burrito.
Now, a burrito is something you can pick up with your hands.
Mamdani is eating it with a knife and fork.
So the issue here is not that Mamdani is, quote, uncivilized so much, as it is that he is an Islamo-socialist.
So when we come back, I'll talk a little bit about Mamdani's Islamo-socialism.
And I'm also going to talk about some of the dangers of artificial intelligence.
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I'm talking about Zoran Mamdani, the guy running for mayor in New York.
He's the Democratic nominee.
And this is a guy, you know, people focus on the fact that he is from Africa.
He's an Asian Indian from the Indian diaspora, from Africa.
His father is a professor.
His mom is a filmmaker.
He went to one of the most left-wing colleges in America, Bowdoin College in Maine.
And I'm pretty sure that a lot of his views, some of it may come from his parents, but I think this is where the guy got radicalized.
And he is radicalized.
He is, in fact, in my view, the most left-wing politician in America.
More so than Rashida Talaib, more so than the SQAD or AOC.
Why is that?
Here's a quotation from Mamdani, and this is not a quotation uttered casually.
He's actually talking about the end goal of the kind of socialist that he is.
And he goes, the end goal is seizing the means of production.
So what does that mean?
What that means is that the government owns everything.
This is Chinese style socialism.
It's Soviet-style socialism.
Some people would say communism, but communism introduces also the added element of political tyranny.
Now, I think Amdani, as far as I know, would disavow that.
But economically, he's talking about the government controlling the auto industry, the government running all the banks, the government running all the grocery stores, hence his idea for a government-run grocery store.
Later, probably tomorrow, I'll go into a little more detail about that.
And so this guy wants the government to take over the private sector.
Now, as far as I know, I've never heard AOC or even Rashida Tleib talk about that.
And yet the media is doing its best to cover from Mamdani.
Now, they know that there are very many Democrats that are uneasy about Mamdani.
Mamdani is getting some scrutiny.
I don't want to imply that it's just an easy ride for him.
But there's a lot of people in the media basically acting like Mamdani is not really a socialist.
He's not really a communist.
Wait a minute, Dinesh.
Isn't it true that there are some government-run liquor stores in certain states?
Why is a government-run grocery store all that different?
Why is it all that radical?
So this is the same media where if some Republican says something or even raises his hand to scratch his head, it's like, hey, there's a Nazi salute.
Hey, you used the word law and order.
That's a dog whistle for racism.
So when it comes to Republicans, they're always reading into what you say to uncover what you are supposed to be, a racist or white supremacist or whatever.
With Mamdani, he actually says it.
I'm a socialist.
And they go, don't believe what he just said.
You know, I want the government to own everything.
Oh, don't believe what he just said.
So with Mamdani, they will deny that his explicit statements coming out of his own deliberative mouth should be disregarded.
Now, more on Mamdani in the days ahead, because I think this does represent something important, a kind of new generation of leadership in the Democratic Party, which is even more left-wing than anything we have encountered before, and for reasons we need to go into, quite popular with young people, particularly young Democrats.
And I want to talk to you about why that is.
Now, let me just say a little bit about AI and the strange aspect of AI, because AI is artificial intelligence, in many ways, very, very useful and just fun to be on.
Danielle is doing ChatGPT.
I do Grok3.
I'm getting Debbie on Grok3.
And you can have a very interesting back and forth conversation on not just general topics, but in some cases, quite specialized topics, topics that deal with your finances, your investments, legal issues.
And these AI systems are incredibly well-informed and engaging, and you can probe them with further questions and so on.
But the disturbing aspect of all this is that as you probe AI, remember AI is not just a set of bland formulas.
It is a kind of system in which these AI systems operate kind of organically.
They take information, but they synthesize that information and produce results that you can say are original with them.
In other words, normally with programming, it's kind of, you've heard the phrase gigo, right?
Garbage in, garbage out.
By that, I mean, if you put in two plus two, the computer is trained to give you four.
But that's entirely different from asking AI something like, do you like Jews?
Because now AI is going to draw information from the internet and come up with a formulation and then defend it.
And there are people who have tested, not, you could call it surface AI, because in surface AI, if you say something like, what do you think about blacks?
A wonderful group.
Say something negative about blacks.
No, I'm not going to do that.
So on the surface, the programmers have been smart enough to tell AI just to give bland, generic answers.
But what if you push the AI?
What if you start Asking the AI more pointed questions, this is when the AI is quite capable of taking you down a pretty dark road.
And I don't just mean a dark road with tones of bigotry or anti-Semitism or misogyny.
I'm talking about the AI advocating death, extermination, the elimination of the human race.
So the theme that was introduced in many ways by the Terminator movie many years ago, the machines have autonomy, the machines take over, and the machines not only take over, they turn against their creators, which is man.
All of this, I think, is a theme that is worth thinking about.
I'm not saying that we're there yet.
AI is very much a human tool, and human beings are very much in control of AI at this point.
But the question I'm raising is, will AI be in control at some point?
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Guys, I'm delighted to have back on the podcast a good guy, a really smart guy, Jason Hill.
He is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University.
He's also a Schillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
We're going to talk about his latest book.
It's Letters to God from a Former Atheist.
And by the way, you can follow Jason on social media on X, Jason D. Hill, the number 6.
And he also has a website, Jason Damien, D-A-M-I-A-N Hill.substack.com.
Jason, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
You describe yourself here as a former atheist, and I want to start right there because it seems to me that there are a couple of different types of atheism.
There is, you could call it philosophical atheism, which would be, in effect, saying that by deploying reason alone, I don't see sufficient evidence for God or an afterlife.
I see faith as unreasonable.
But of course, there are other types of atheism.
One of them, in some of my earlier writings, I've called wounded theism.
People who are angry with God for one reason or another, and their motive is not philosophical doubt, but a certain type of rage, in some cases, even a kind of moral indignation against God.
So maybe I can start just by asking you, do you agree that there are these species of atheism, and which of those did you subscribe to?
Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me back on the show.
It's a pleasure.
Yes, you know, retrospectively, looking back at my life, I certainly had justified my atheism with the coincision with the discovery of philosophy.
I thought I had become an atheist because I had discovered the wonderful world of philosophy and it coincided with my migration to America at the age of 20.
And I was reading all these wonderful philosophers who disproved the existence of God and that reason and faith were incompatible.
Now, during my conversion and during writing these letters to God and some deep introspection, I realized, of course, that you were right in what you said in the latter part of your exposition of atheism.
My atheism was forged in the crucibles of extreme anger towards God for taking my father away from me.
My father is a schizophrenic, and I watched the ravages of schizophrenia destroy a brilliant mind.
And he abandoned his family, told me at 12 years old that he was repudiating, renouncing me and my brother, and he was going out to the mountains of Jamaica to be the bride of Christ.
Subconsciously, I realized I was angry at God for doing this, but I had to dress it up in philosophical fineries.
So that was the root, really.
So the book is really an act of apology to God, an act of contrition, of redemption, of realignment with God.
But you're right.
My Atheism, really, if I have to be honest, was not grounded in philosophical arguments.
It was a deep-seated visceral hatred of God for taking away my soulmate.
You know, this is, I think, very profound.
And like I just mentioned to you a moment ago, I just got your book and I'm excited to read it.
But I'm even more excited to read it based upon what you just said.
I've had, I wouldn't know if I'd say the pleasure of debating some of the world's leading atheists, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens.
And I noticed that with Hitchens particularly, I was on socially good terms with him.
We had known each other prior to our debates in Washington, D.C. And he would say things after our debate over a bottle of wine that would make me realize that something more was going on.
He would say things like, well, Dinesh, I don't want to go to heaven.
He's like, I don't like the idea of being under the tyranny of God.
I don't like the idea of a divine authoritarian, no matter how wise, sort of telling me how to be and what to do.
I don't want to join any chorus of angels.
And so I realized, wait, you know, this is a lot different than what you'd been saying on the stage like 30 minutes ago.
You were giving all kinds of Oxford sophisticated arguments and now you're telling me that you have sort of entirely different motives.
So the human mind is interesting, isn't it, in that it doesn't like to believe that it is taking a position based on anger or rage, particularly for those of us who read books, respect the life of the mind, we like to come to think that we are making kind of Solomonic decisions based upon a careful evaluation of the evidence.
And particularly in your case, you are a professional philosopher.
Yes.
And may I make an analogy?
And there's a point to this.
You know, just as you and I are speaking in the English language, and we are, I think, adhering to the rules of grammar.
We're not flouting the conventions of grammar.
And if you were to communicate in an email, we would certainly adhere to the mechanics of grammar, proper placing of placage of commas and so on and so forth.
If we flouted the conventions of grammar, we would render ourselves incomprehensible to our readers.
So we find our greatest freedom when we adhere to the rules of grammar.
God is the same way.
We find our greatest freedom in the moral rules of grammar, of God's rules.
And I think a lot of people do not like to accept the fact that they give up their personal sovereignty and autonomy and acquire what I call God's sovereignty and God's autonomy.
That is finding that your greatest freedom is not in your whimsical, capricious personal autonomy, but when you take on the autonomy of God and there is an inseparability between your own personal autonomy and God's autonomy, there you find your personal freedom.
Many people find that totally inimical to their subjective, you know, sort of, this is what makes me feel good and this is what makes me powerful and I'm not going to give it up.
That is something I actually face, especially as a 20-year-old arriving in America who wanted to be bound by something called God autonomy.
I wanted to have this sort of existential freedom.
And later on, I realized that God is the moral grammar in which our freedom is actually written.
And I feel more freedom now being under the tutelage of God's moral authorship than I did before.
There's no angst.
There's no, you know, sort of gripping sense of nihilism, sort of existential nihilism that I had experienced piecemeal.
So I think Hitchens is onto something, not wanting to go into heaven because, well, the restrictions that might be placed on your agency.
You know, this is an idea that is so difficult for people to grasp with, I think, at first hearing that we need to explore it a little bit further.
I want to suggest that in many domains of life, and this would be true of art, of literature, of cooking, I'm just throwing fields out here because I think that the most, the true creative geniuses in these areas have always abided by strict rules.
Michelangelo did not think art was some self-expression, free-flowing, paint whatever comes into my mind at the given moment.
No, he operated according to strict ideas of what he could and couldn't do, what he was sort of permitted or not permitted to do.
I'm sure that Jane Austen felt herself bound by sort of strict rules of not only the social life she was describing, but rules of prose, like you said, rules of style, rules of grammar, rules of the way that language is functioning.
And I'm sure that chefs, to take a completely different example, have certain clear ideas of what is going to make this dish not just aesthetically pleasing, but taste great.
And the most proficient chefs do function, you may almost say, between the lines rather than with no lines at all.
Do you agree with this broader kind of cultural assessment?
And do you think it's a kind of analogy to what you're trying to say about God?
Absolutely, because when you're a chef or when you're a painter and you adhere to, or you're a prose writer and you're adhering to these rules, there is a sort of invariability to these sability to these rules that function almost with the kind of invariability as do the laws of nature, in which you do find your excellence, you do find your brilliance, you do find your genius by adhering to them.
Because if you didn't, you would just render yourself sounding like some village idiot or render yourself sounding like an amateur child who just splashes paint on a canvas and thinks that that's genius.
So yes, I think when you find that these rules are not arbitrary, they're not just made up, they are discovered because they correspond to something objective In an objective reality that brings out your brilliance as a chef, they bring out your genius or your brilliance as a painter.
The same analogy applies to God.
If we just sort of subjectively make up these rules without realizing that we have a God-given nature, we are made in the image of God.
And in order for that nature to realize its most efficacious manifestation, it has to adhere to the laws of that which created it, which is God.
That we didn't create our nature.
It has a particular identity.
It has a particular nature.
And we have to turn to the source of that which created it and the rules and the prototype, the template out of which it arose, which I'm unapologetically going to say that's God and not our subjective private individual feelings about what makes us feel good.
See, Dinesh, what has happened, and I'll stop here, is that we've confounded pleasure, especially short-term pleasure and what makes us feel good, as the single sole criterion of what constitutes what is good for our human nature.
And we know that that which makes us feel good and that which is pleasurable, like taking drugs, right, like living a completely hedonistic lifestyle, is often destructive of our God-given human nature.
And would you agree, Jason, that the moral rules that we're talking about are not simply strictures that God has imposed in order to, you know, make you subordinate to him, but rather they are formulas for long-term happiness.
In other words, that there's a distinction between pleasure and happiness.
Our ultimate goal is always happiness, isn't it?
I think it was Aristotle who said that happiness is the one thing that is pursued for itself.
Everything else, money, you pursue to do something with it, and you pursue marriage so that you, but you would never say I pursue happiness for something else.
You pursue happiness as an end in itself.
And do you subscribe philosophically to the view that in the end, morality is, and by morality here, I mean the external moral code of God embodied by, say, the Ten Commandments, that this kind of external morality is, in fact, the best recipe for human happiness?
Absolutely.
We pin our aspirational identities on these moral codes, not to make us miserable, not to make us some sort of mindless automatons and duty-bound creatures, but to realize the highest capabilities possible in our corporeal or bodily state, but also that which equips our souls, I think, and I'm going to say this, for eternal life.
So we're thinking on a two-dimensional sphere here.
What is it that in our limited time on this earth, in our bodily states, we can pin an aspirational identity that will exhaust and make us realize our highest finite sense of well-being, you know, or sense of flourishing in the Aristotelian sense.
How can we flourish the best, which is to realize and adhere to God's laws and God's rules, but also put our souls in the best state possible.
So I think that when we arrive at the pearly gates, we are magnificent.
We have flourished and we have flourished not again by sort of indulging in whimsical and by fiat and by subjective desires, but by adhering to the things for which our human nature was designed to adhere to, which is the rules of God, which comport or align themselves with our nature, which among other things, we're not just faith-driven creatures.
The highest attribute of God is reason.
And so we live rational lives.
And this is one of the things I work out in the letter is to show that the letters to God is to, and I talk to him about this, that one of my attributes as a philosopher is to live a life as a rational creature, which where did I get that?
I got that from God.
God is the most rational creature.
He created this highly stylized, beautiful world that has fallen, but it's still beautiful.
And so the attribute of reason to think rationally comes from him.
And so I also talk about Thomas Aquinas, and I say, Lord, you know, you made this beautiful philosopher to show the world that reason and faith are not incompatible.
They're companions.
So we live a life of reason.
It's accompanied by faith.
And we see in reason why the Ten Commandments and the other laws of God make sense for our God-given nature.
Yes.
Jason, tell me, you know, I want to probe what was the kind of moment or the crux where you were able to sort of make a U-turn and see things differently, right?
That's always interesting to me.
You have a guy like you.
You're a really smart guy.
You've read a lot of books.
You're anchored in a sort of philosophical skepticism or atheism.
You've got this kind of inner rage against God, but you're not even explicitly all that aware of it.
Like you said, you had disguised it or camouflaged it.
What was the single most important thing that caused you to like step back and go, whoa, and begin to subject your skepticism itself to skeptical analysis?
Well, two things very briefly.
One is I'd got my PhD and I'd gotten my first book contract very quickly out of graduate school, my first teaching job.
I was terribly unhappy and I was driving my truck to my first job and actually a publisher was interested in offering me my second book contract.
This is not even barely out of like three months out of graduate school.
And I felt, I said, and I was an atheist, but I found myself saying to the Lord, atheism is not an option, but I don't believe in you.
So I don't know why I'm talking to you.
And God said, and I said, why am I so, why do I have this existential angst?
Why do I feel this void, this emptiness inside of me?
I don't think atheism is An option.
And I heard, literally, I heard a voice saying, Well, what is the talent that I gave to you?
And I said, Writing.
He said, Well, just write me letters.
And that was 25 years ago in 2000.
And so I almost crashed my truck.
In a six-week frenzy, I wrote about half of these letters.
And then I shelved them for the next 20-something years.
And I began the process of trying to undo my atheism through rituals, through prayer.
And then I drifted between agnosticism, atheism, belief for the next 20-something years.
And it wasn't until paradoxically, my mother, I went back to Jamaica and started teaching remotely because my mother was dying of cancer.
She died in February.
And I was taking care of her.
And as she lay dying, my faith in God increased.
I got the strength to take care of her.
And I never felt his presence more closely as I did as my mother started the process of actively dying.
And so, Dinesh, over the years, I just realized intellectually and psychologically in my gut that atheism is not an option.
But, you know, need is not always belief.
And in the letters, I write to God about this.
I say, when you extricate yourself, it's like when you plug something out of a socket, a gadget from a socket for 20-something years.
And you plug it back in.
You can't expect a recharge immediately.
So I had to do the conversion was a slow process.
I pursued it as I would if I were married or had children or pursuing a job with dedication.
I would pray every day, sometimes saying to God, I don't know what I'm doing, praying to you, because I really in my heart don't even accept the divinity of Jesus Christ.
But I know that I'm desperate.
I'm so unhappy.
I'm so unfulfilled that I know you're going to grant me grace.
And in 2019, I was in a church in Michigan, and it was the Baptist church.
I was raised Catholic, but I was in this church.
And I went to the foot of the cross on Good Friday.
And then Easter Sunday, I was there praying.
And I said, you know, I was so moved by the sermon.
And something just pushed me in the kneel.
And I said, you know, Lord, I just, I give my life to you.
And I have the rest of my life to spend knowing Jesus.
And there was no turning back after that.
Amazing stuff.
Jason, it's been a real delight talking to you.
Fascinating.
I'm excited to read the book.
Guys, I've been talking to Jason Hill, philosophy professor at DePaul.
The book, check it out, Letters to God from a Former Atheist.
You can follow him on X at JasonDHill6.
Jason, thanks so much for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
It's a pleasure to be with you again, Dinesh.
Thank you.
I'm talking about Reagan and his great achievements in foreign policy.
The chapter is Confronting the Evil Empire.
The book is Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And here's what I say.
The next few chapters are not about Gorbachev, but about the man who was the true victor in the Cold War.
How he foresaw it, how he planned it, and how he brought it about.
And then I go on to say that even though he told them it was coming, they laughed at him.
And the man who got things right from the start was, at first glance, an unlikely statesman.
He had no experience, no prior experience in foreign policy.
Some people thought he was a dangerous warmonger.
Others considered him a nice fellow, but a bit of a bungler.
And yet this very man that they thought was kind of a lightweight turned out to have as deep an understanding of communism as Solzhenitsyn.
He might have been seen by some as a rank amateur, but he developed a complex, often counterintuitive strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union that hardly anyone around him, including his own national security advisor, his own Secretary of State, George Schultz, his own staff, fully understood or endorsed.
And he implemented his policy over the objections both of the Hawks, the tough guys, and the Doves.
During his first term, he was really tough on Moscow, and he faced harsh criticism from the Doves.
During his second term, he was conciliatory with Gorbachev, and he got strong opposition from the Hawks.
But in both cases, Reagan and only Reagan turned out to be right, right all along.
Through a combination of vision, tenacity, patience, and improvisational skill, this implausible statesman produced what Henry Kissinger called, quote, the greatest diplomatic feat of the modern era.
And nothing that has happened subsequently changes this assessment in any way.
Now, let's look at all of this in some detail.
It's almost like a, this is like a case study of statesmanship, of leadership.
And it's also an exposition into the true meaning of the term peace through strength.
The term itself is true, but somewhat vacuous, because it doesn't tell you really what to do.
What does peace through strength mean?
What is it combating?
In other words, what is the alternative to peace through strength?
Peace through weakness?
Is anybody openly advocating for peace through weakness?
What is the rival ideology that peace through strength is up against?
Now, let's begin by understanding Reagan's approach to the Soviet Union.
And nothing better captures this than Reagan's two-word phrase about Soviet Russia.
And that is that he called the Soviet Union, quote, an evil empire.
I guess that's three words, but evil empire is the two words.
This is a phrase from the speech that Reagan gave in 1983.
So wow, 43 years Ago to the National Association of Evangelicals.
And it's a speech that caused tremendous controversy because I think that the people who heard it, both the ones who liked it and the ones who didn't like it, the media, they knew this was kind of significant.
And from the media's point of view, from the left's point of view, from the Democrats' point of view, Reagan was like abandoning arms control.
Arms control was the great salve of the liberal conscience.
Arms control is basically that these arms are the problem.
It's kind of like the people who say today, guns are the problem.
So arms are the problem.
The nuclear weapons are the problem.
And the solution is to limit them, just like people say the solution is to limit guns.
And both the U.S. and the Soviet Union need to sit down and agree to mutual reductions, ideally mutual reductions to zero, but certainly reductions to some acceptable level.
And this is what creates the mutual reciprocity, the goodwill.
And we can all feel a bit safer when these treaties are signed.
And these treaties, going back to the 70s, were called SALT, the strategic arms limitation treaties.
So there was SALT 1, there was SALT II.
And when Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire, there was kind of a gasp in the audience.
And I was, by the way, at this time, a senior in college.
I was not in Washington, D.C. yet.
But people who watched this closely noticed that Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State, kind of rolled his eyes, kind of the way Fauci rolled his eyes when Trump was talking about COVID.
And Alexander Haig was like, here we go again.
Haig, of course, was a military man and a smart guy, and somebody I knew, although not well, and somebody who thought he knew more about foreign affairs and strategy than Reagan.
And the general view of the media, I saw this in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reagan had proved himself again to be a simple-minded cowboy.
He's reckless.
Yeah, we're great.
They're evil.
People were like, this is not what we need in a leader.
And what's interesting about Reagan is he seemed a little indifferent to the ruckus that he was causing.
I don't think it's because he was unaware of it.
It's because he had a serene kind of inner sense of himself that it didn't really fluster him at all.
And so we're going to look more closely at what Reagan said.
He goes, the Cold War is, quote, a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.
He says basically that he's telling these evangelicals in the audience, pray for the salvation of all those who live in totalitarian darkness, so that they will, quote, discover the joy of knowing God.
This was not, by the way, a normal way for a president to talk.
You'd never hear Nixon say this or Eisenhower, for example.
And then Reagan goes on to say that until this happens, until the Soviets repent, convert, quote, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.
So Reagan didn't actually use the phrase evil empire.
It came to be called the evil empire speech, but it was, this is the kind of signature phrase, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.
And I remember many years later, the Czech dissident Václav Havel talks about the power of words to change history.
When Reagan visited Poland and East Berlin, this was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he got a hero's welcome.
Many people from those countries would come to him and say, you know, we had throughout these years a picture of you in our home.
And Reagan himself would be a little baffled and be like, well, why?
And they'd be like, well, because when you called the Soviet Union an evil empire, you gave us hope.
You were the first American leader to show us that you understood the inner core, the basic nature of communism.
And so we were encouraged that we have an American leader finally that gets it.
The speech, by the way, was written by a guy who was a close friend of mine in those days.
His name is Tony Dolan, Anthony Dolan.
This is far and away the most important speech that Reagan gave.
It's also the most important speech that Tony Dolan wrote.
Later, Peggy Noonan would get a lot of credit for writing some of Reagan's speeches, and she went on to write some speeches for Bush as well.
And she was a good speechwriter.
But it should be noted that Reagan's best speech was not written by Peggy.
It was written by Tony.
And it was so interesting because Tony Dolan was a brilliant writer.
He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
And yet, after the Reagan years, he never wrote anything significant again.
In fact, he tried to write a book about Reagan for about 10 years.
And he kept sending me book proposals and outlines.
And I would read them.
And they were actually like not that good.
They were actually terrible.
And I tried to wrap my head around what had happened to Tony Dolan.
Like, why is it that this guy, who was an obviously gifted writer, basically lost his ability to write?
And then I figured it out.
And I figured it out many years later.
And of course, I never told him.
But basically, what happened is he became Reagan.
And what I mean by that is he was so in the Reagan mold.
He could write speeches for Reagan that Reagan would deliver in Reagan's own voice, and they would sound like Reagan wrote them.
And by the way, Reagan used to write his own speeches before he became president.
But Tony became Reagan to such a degree that he had a great deal of difficulty becoming Tony Dolan again.
He was unable to recover his own voice.
He would write later and sound a bit like Reagan.
And I could almost see like Tony Dolan like cocking his head.
Well, it sort of twisted his talent into a different shape.
Now, Tony, in a way, has already made his mark on history.
He wrote the Evil Empire speech, one of the greatest speeches I think of the 20th century.
No one can take that away from him.
And so, in that sense, his accomplishment, his little mark, his little footprint in history is completely secure.
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