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Sept. 26, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:50
THE ICEMAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1177
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Coming up, but Debbie and I normally do a Friday roundup, but it's gonna be roundup time just by me.
Debbie's a little under the weather, and I'll give you the scoop on all that.
I'm gonna talk about a bunch of things from the latest case of violent action against ice.
I'm gonna talk about Charlie Kirk and whether he was caught in the middle between his donors on the one side and his audience on the other.
I'm gonna talk about the movie The Dragon's Prophecy, get your tickets if you haven't already, uh, and a bunch of other things.
If you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Music by Ben Thede.
America needs this voice.
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Normally on Fridays, Debbie and I do our Friday roundup.
We actually did our joint conversation on Monday.
So today I'm going to attempt a solitary roundup.
I'm going to do a roundup of a bunch of different things that have happened during the week, and I'm going to cover them, but cover them myself.
Actually, Debbie is a little bit out for the count.
She's under the weather.
We we slightly overdid it.
We had our long trip to Israel, and it was, you know, a four-day trip, so we're going halfway across the world and coming back in four days.
The other thing about it is from where we're going in Texas, you can't go straight.
Uh you have to go through Newark.
So that makes the journey a little more arduous.
In fact, we were talking about well, comparing Israel to Australia.
In Australia, you jump on the plane in Texas, and guess what?
You get off at Sydney.
You're straight there.
Amazing.
And so even though Australia is further, this trip seemed well just as long because of course when you come back uh into the country, you land at Newark, you gotta like go through immigration, go through customs, get your bags, uh, check them back in, then make your connection.
So it's um it's um it's fairly wearying the whole thing, but normally we'd have a day or two just to recover, and uh but in this case we get back and Charlie Kirk's funeral was last Sunday, so right away we we both realized this is something we can't miss, we have to go, doesn't matter if we're tired.
I also have kind of a principle of life.
I've communicated this to Danielle more than once, and that is listen, don't w don't miss weddings and don't miss funerals.
It seems like there's always we're all busy, there's always something to do.
But when I think back to my earlier career, there are one or two cases where I was invited.
Uh there was a friend of mine from India, a very good guy.
He had actually been in my wedding, but I didn't go to his wedding.
And why?
I had something else to do.
I was very busy.
I can't remember if I had a speaking engagement or a proposal for a speaking engagement or an important meeting.
But I I wish I did go.
Um I'm I'm sure he's looked back many times at those wedding pictures, and he may have crossed even crossed his mind.
Hey, I went to Dinesh's wedding, I was in the wedding, and Dinesh never came to my wedding.
That's not good.
So I regret it.
I also had in Washington, D.C. an older guy who was kind of a mentor to me.
Remember that when I came to America at the age of 17, you know, I essentially relied on people here to be my surrogate family, to be my mentors, my own parents, of course, were just a long distance away.
And so this was a guy who took a real interest in my career.
He's in fact a Dartmouth graduate and uh very nice guy.
And then uh he took ill and was ill for several weeks uh and ultimately passed away.
And it's one of my regrets ever since that I wasn't able to see him right before he died.
I never went to his funeral.
And um, it taught me this very important lesson.
Do not do this again.
Um so, in any event, uh fast forward to the present.
Um, this was not even a subject of discussion.
We are like, let's we have to go, and so we did, but it probably was too much because the getting into a uh funeral service in a major stadium where you've got the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and down the line, all of them speaking, it is an ordeal, to put it mildly.
Um, and uh so by the end of the day, that means like I'm getting a sore throat.
So, anyway, she is uh a little bit uh out for the count.
She's getting better already, and I think she'll be she'll be fine by the weekend.
But um uh I am certainly on my own for today's roundup.
Now, I'll begin with a comment about Charlie Kirk, because there is a a lot of craziness that is surrounding uh Charlie Kirk.
Some of it, I don't even know if it's worth even discussing.
Uh, I know that uh Candace Owens is putting out a theory that uh that there's a visible pipe that can be seen in the in the photo and in the video and raising the possibility did somebody,
did some other shooter, did some Israeli guy, did some Mossad agent come out of the pipe and take the shot, and it wasn't really this guy, Tyler Robinson.
Um the reason it's difficult to address these kinds of things is because they are suggestively insinuated and not really argued for.
So Candace is not saying that someone did that.
She's not saying that someone was in the pipe or came out of the pipe or that there was another shooter.
She's just saying it needs to be looked at.
Well, it is being looked at, all of it is being looked at.
Uh, Cash Patel posted just a couple of days ago uh that they were looking at every single thing.
And in fact, he itemized all the things they're looking at.
You know, there were some people, for example, who said, hey, there were there were people who were touching their ears and their nose and seemingly giving hand signals.
Now, I looked at that video, I'm like, yeah, maybe, but you know, also maybe not, because if you watch Charlie, Charlie was like scratching his ear, touching his nose.
I mean, Charlie's obviously not giving anybody hand signals.
So you've got to be a little careful in like jumping to conclusions about these things.
But hey, there it is in Cash's list.
We're looking at the potential of somebody giving a signal.
We're looking at the potential of co-conspirators, collaborators, people who may not have taken a part in it, but who nevertheless knew something about it.
So I have confidence that they are doing something pretty thorough.
And I'm actually eager to learn more.
I learned a lot from the original uh grand jury indictment, things we didn't know about the shooter or the suspected or the alleged shooter.
But I think there is a lot more.
There is a lot more to come.
As I've mentioned myself on the podcast, that whole exchange with the alleged shooter and the boyfriend, you know, hey, I'm the guy who did it, really.
Uh that looked very fake to me.
Uh, and I but I think faked again, not because of the deep state in this case, not by some foreign agent, uh, faked, possibly by the shooter himself to absolve everybody else who knew about this or was in on it of a potential responsibility.
Now I also want to talk a little bit about this issue regarding Charlie and his donors, because once again we are in the territory of anti-Israel kind of conspiracy mongering, as if there's some dark truth.
You know, what's the motive, for example, for Israel to go after Charlie?
I mean, things have reached such a crazy pitch that Israel officially, via Nedanyahu has to deny, like I had nothing to do with this.
And why would Israel even have to say that?
Well, the answer is the idea that somehow, quote, Jewish donors were upset with Charlie for platforming people like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, and that Charlie Kirk, as a result, had fallen afoul of the donors, that Charlie was somehow turning against Israel.
Now, look, um, I happen to know quite well one of these donors.
And I'm also very familiar with nonprofit institutions like Turning Point.
Why?
Because for most of my early career, I was in these institutions, right?
I was at the Heritage Foundation, then I was a fellow at AEI, which is a nonprofit, very similar to Turning Point, more of a think tank than an activist student group, but nevertheless structured the same way.
Uh, and then the Hoover Institution, pretty much the same deal.
Now, these nonprofit institutions are set up in such a way that there are two constituencies you are sort of addressing.
One is the people who receive your work, who read your work, who are part of the people you're trying to organize.
And in Charlie's case, that would be the students, the young people.
But on the other hand, the donors are not going to be 17-year-olds and 22-year-olds, it's going to be older people.
So here you have young people, many of whom, by the way, have been raised in an environment where they have learned very little about history.
They don't know a lot about the Bible.
Uh, we're not in exactly in a in a culturally literate environment where things like the Bible, you know, if you were to go to someone 50 or 80 years ago and say, tell me about the story of Jonah and the belly of the whale, they could do it.
You go today, people are like, Jonah, what are you talking about?
Uh, I have a friend named Jonah.
I don't know anything else about Jonah.
So you have biblical illiteracy.
You have historical illiteracy.
And so these young people are often very much very easy to sort of seduce, to draw into this sort of idea that there's all kinds of villainy going on.
Uh, and so Charlie knew about that.
He knew that young people were being drawn into an orbit of questions and discussions and suspicions.
Remember also, there is earned distrust towards so many of our public institutions.
So this is all coming out of an environment where other people tell you what to think, tell you what you can't say, and young people naturally, you know, they chafe under that, they rebel.
So I'm not objecting to the fact that they have these questions.
But on the other hand, Charlie has these older donors.
These are, by the way, representing the mainstream of the Republican Party.
They are Reaganites, they are pro-America, but they're also pro-Israel.
Uh, they're pro-NATO.
They um they have come in an age of the Cold War.
They know that Israel is on the front line fighting radical Islam.
Here we're coming to a theme that touches a little bit on the movie.
But think of it this way.
We do not, as Americans, we don't know how to fight radical Islam.
Proof.
Look at what we look at how we fought it so far.
Horrible job.
Uh Jimmy Carter pulls the rug out from the Shah, and we get Khomeini.
So we didn't by ourselves create or give radical Islam control of a major state, but we had a role.
Uh, number two, uh, we should have been able to get bin Laden long before 9-11, but we didn't do it.
And then 9-11 happens, and we go and blast the Taliban To smithereen's, chase them out of Kabul into the mountains, but you know what?
They're back.
Who's ruling Afghanistan now?
The Taliban.
And then off we go on another adventure into Iraq to try to sort things out, remake that society, change the configuration of power in the Middle East, total failure.
Iran beats us at that game.
Of course, Iran and Iraq is both are both Shia Muslims.
And basically, Iraq falls right back into the Iranian camp, and the United States is sort of chased away with its tail between its legs.
So this is actually a miserable record.
Massive amounts of resources allocated, and yet we don't know what we're doing.
By contrast, and people say, well, why are we giving money to Israel?
We give an infinitesimal amount to Israel compared to what we've spent ourselves on something that is very important for us to do, and we don't know how to do it.
And the Israelis know how to do it.
And guess what?
They are effectively clobbering radical Islam and they are on the front lines of doing that, and that helps them, but it helps us just as much, if not more.
We remember are the great Satan.
They are the little Satan.
This is a point that Netanyahu himself makes in my in my conversation with him.
And that's a conversation, by the way, that by itself is worth the price of the movie.
Hey, if you haven't gotten your tickets, go for it.
The dragons prophecyfilm.com, that's the website.
And uh sign up for the theater if you can.
I've said before, I, you know, I make these films for the theater.
The theatrical experience cannot be easily replicated.
And there are some documentaries where if you watch in the theater, watch at home no difference, but that's not true of my films.
And over time I've gotten better at making these films.
So this is a highly cinematic film with um with uh just music that will sweep you along, an intellectual narrative that will constantly surprise you, uh, and it is both timely and timeless at the same time.
So I'm very proud of this work, and and you're gonna see you're gonna you're gonna be very happy that you saw it.
Try to see it in the theater if you can, October 6th, October 8th.
Two days.
So October 6th is a Monday, and October 8th is a Wednesday.
Uh make plans, round up your family and friends, go get your tickets at the website.
That's the only place you can get them.
The dragonsprophecyfilm.com.
And uh, but if you want to see it at home, no problem, the next day, which will be Thursday, October 9th, that's when the streaming starts.
That's when the DVDs land in your mailbox.
So you can pre-order streaming now, you can pre-order DVDs, go to the dragonsprophecyfilm.com.
All right, back we are to Charlie Kirk.
And the point I want to make is this it is not abnormal.
In fact, it's completely commonplace for institutions to be caught between donors who have one set of priorities and a constituency that has a different set of priorities, and there's a kind of a natural tug on both sides.
And the guy in the middle, Charlie is gonna feel a little bit caught.
I'll give you the example of when I was at the American Enterprise Institute.
We were free market institution.
We wanted by and large to have no subsidies, just free markets.
But on the other hand, we had some donors who were CEOs of business groups, and they wanted government subsidies for their company, for their industry.
So they're pushing the AEI.
You and I, you guys need to do a paper on the importance of corn subsidies.
Uh, and so we were caught between the donors and between our free market philosophy.
Uh, and so this is not unusual.
This is not, by the way, a reason to think, oh, well, this there you go, Dinesh.
That that's why Israel had him killed.
This is absolute rubbish.
Uh, and we're not, by the way, talking about exclusively Jewish donors.
We're talking by and large, if you look at how this Israel thing plays out, the older generation, which is the mainstream of the Republican Party, remains solidly pro-Israel.
That's the larger base for the donor community.
And then younger people have become at least off late.
I'm hoping to correct some of this, by the way.
I'm hoping ultimately to show young people that a lot of this, uh a lot of these rabbit trails, a lot of these kind of Israel is at the root of it, uh, are nonsensical and uh in fact, not only nonsensical, they're playing into the hands of the enemy.
And by the enemy here, I mean the political enemy, which is the left, but I also mean the enemy.
I'm referring here to the devil and the devil's schemes.
One of the themes of this film, which I think you'll get and it will hit you very powerfully, is this.
Uh, we often hear it said that underneath our political debate, uh, political fight, there is a cultural fight, and under that a moral fight, and under that a spiritual fight, a spiritual warfare.
But we don't often think to ask a spiritual warfare between who?
Who is actually fighting?
And what are they fighting about?
What are they fighting over?
This film will, in fact, answer that question by showing that the fight is really between God and the devil.
And we need to be alert, not simply to what God is communicating to us through the scriptures and through prayer, but also what the devil is up to.
That's the part of it that people don't often pay attention to.
Like, what's the devil's strategy?
How is the devil hoping to outdo God?
What is the devil's mechanism for deal?
The devil cannot openly defeat God.
So he needs to be very cunning, very low.
He needs to come up with clever strategies ultimately to thwart the aims of God and the creation of God and the people of God and the laws of God.
The devil knows all this, and he is at work and he's at work with a level of genius and industry that requires us to pay attention.
Let's just put it that way.
And so the film illuminates all this and illuminates all this by showing the example of how it is happening right now on the ground.
So, what's going on in Israel isn't just about Israel, it's about us, it's about our future, it's about the unfolding of biblical prophecy, and in the end, it's also about your soul.
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Alright, it's time to go to a lighter note.
I'm looking at a picture of the presidential walk of fame.
This is in the corridor of the White House, a very recognizable corridor, I have to say.
And here's the funny part.
We uh are going through the ranks, and of course we see uh it's a long corridor, but I'm picking it up here with um with Nixon.
I see Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and the line continues uh Obama, Trump, and then a surprise.
I'm looking for Biden, but there's no Biden.
The gallery shows a picture of the auto pen.
The autopen is in charge.
Uh, the autopen is making the decisions.
Now, it takes a Trump to like okay something like this.
This is downright hilarious.
Quite honestly, I cannot think of another president who would have gone for this and approved it.
In general, this is the kind of idea that comes up, and then sort of older heads go, well, that's a good one, Dana Sh, you know, young White House staffer, but you know, we're not gonna be actually doing that.
Uh and how delightful it must be to be a young staffer in the Trump administration, where you go, sir, how about putting the autopen?
And Trump goes, Great idea.
And that's exactly what they did, and I think it's fantastic.
All right, um, let me say a word about this Tylenol debate.
Number one, I think it's just downright crazy that you've got pregnant women on the left, and they're like, I'm gonna take 10 Tylenols right now just to show that Trump is wrong about this.
Uh this is the lengths to which Trump drives these um these confused TDS um adult people uh who, if Trump says up, they say down.
And uh in some ways Trump can actually very easily achieve his own agenda by just starting to say the exact opposite of what he believes.
Trump could actually say, you know, free Palestine from the river to the sea, and these people will be like, we're pro-Israel now.
This is kind of how they seem to seem to think.
And there's so much out on social media, you know, I took Tylenol when I was uh pregnant and my kids are okay, or I never took Tylenol, and guess what?
I've got an autistic kid.
All of this is kind of missing the correlation demonstrated in studies between taking something and having a result.
Now, that does it doesn't mean that if you to use an analogy that I think I used a couple of days ago, but I think it's very illuminating, so I'll I'll um with your permission do it again.
Smoking and cancer.
Now, I know people who have smoked all their life.
My dad was in fact a smoker, and when he died, he didn't have cancer.
He actually had uh kidney problems, he was a dialysis patient, um, and ultimately uh a combination of that and one or two other things is what did him in, but it had nothing to do with cancer.
So he's a smoker, he didn't get cancer.
There are other people who don't smoke at all, and they got cancer.
So no one is saying that there is a direct causal effect.
What the studies are showing is a kind of correlation, and all that a correlation can establish is a is a likelihood, a greater predisposition, a greater probability.
So keeping that in mind, um, I I'd urge you to sort of look at these studies yourself and see if what the Trump administration is saying is valid or not.
I agree that there are doctors who say, well, there are other studies that show.
And I believe uh Dr. Martin McCarry and others in the administration were basically saying, look, there is there are studies on both sides, but the weight of the Studies is on the side that we're taking.
In other words, when people say follow the science, you've got to accept that science doesn't always march in a straight line.
Science marches ultimately by taking in some evidence and doing some studies, and you have a connection, but it's not definitive.
And that's the that's we have to in sometimes operate in a world that has some ambiguity about these about these things.
Now, uh Jimmy Kimmel, I see, is back on the air.
But he's not back on the air in the way that he was before.
True, he I listened to his uh smarmy uh self-congratulatory.
He was trying to pose as if he's the true Christian, you know, he's siding with Erica Kirk, and he's like, she invoked Jesus, I believe in Jesus, we need forgiveness.
Uh believe me, I I you know, this is not a guy who believes in forgiveness across the board.
I did he say after January 6th, guess what?
Some people got too excited, they went inside the Capitol, Jesus believed in forgiveness, I believe in forgiveness, not at all.
This is when he was absolutely beating the war drums, absolutely cheering on for the prosecution.
Uh, it's only when it's someone on his side, it's only when it's someone from the left, it's only when you have this sort of trans allied shooter with a trans boyfriend.
That's the guy who did it.
Oh, now suddenly we need to invoke charity.
Aren't you a Christian?
We gotta let it go, stop worrying about it.
Um, let's adopt the spirit of Jesus, let's turn the other cheek, um, ask him to do it again.
Uh he shot one guy, maybe he can shoot some others.
I mean, this is this is the the kind of selective morality of Jimmy Kimmel in this situation.
So I don't really believe a word of it.
Also, what I don't like is this implication on the part of Jimmy Kimmel that he's the real victim.
So he's the real victim of the Charlie Kirk assassinations.
Not Charlie Kirk, it's Jimmy Kimmel.
Um, and uh, and not only that, but his removal.
By the way, here's a guy who's unfunny, uh, full of himself, uh, one of the most annoying people because it's one thing to be stupid, but it's another thing to be stupid with a really high opinion of yourself.
Then you become like that guy uh in Mary Tyler Moore, who is you know ultimately a kind of egotist, egotist, and we, you know, he'd meet, he'd see Mary, and you know, he'd be like, Oh, Mary, it's your birthday, I've got you a present, and it's a frame picture of me.
You know, that's this is the Jimmy Kimmel type of character, absolutely pathetic.
And uh, all right, he's back on the air, but you know what?
A lot of the local stations that ABC relies on, remember ABC operates through affiliates.
They don't own all these stations.
These are local stations, and in some cases there are local networks.
The Sinclair network owns a big part of these local networks, and there are others.
And these local networks are basically saying, you know what, we're not satisfied that this is all fixed.
Uh, we're not satisfied that um that um there is an uh any genuine contrition on the part of Jimmy Kimmel.
Jimmy Kimmel hasn't really made any kind of apology.
Um this is a guy who is spreading false information.
Let's remember Jimmy Kimmel was implying that um that the MAGA movement was wrong because it was a MAGA guy who did it.
That's the falsehood that he was trying to slyly peddle.
He didn't exactly say it directly, but he implied it.
He's he implied that basically Charlie Kirk got himself killed.
Why?
Because after all, he fueled the kind of hate of this MAGA movement, the MAGA movement turned on him, uh, and it was a MAGA guy who did it.
No, it wasn't.
That is just flat out false.
It was a left-winger, uh, basically somebody who is listening to people like Jimmy Kimmel, basically somebody who believed that Charlie Kirk was a fascist and it was an anti-fascist action to take him out.
He believed that you need to do these things by any means necessary, which is another big slogan on the left.
So this is this is the truth that Jimmy Kimmel was trying to suppress.
And there has been uh a second um shooting attack, this time against ICE.
Uh and this is a shooting attack where not all the information is known, but it looks to be another case of a left-winger who hates ice doing this and once again inscribing his ideology on the bullets themselves.
Now, this is when it when I saw this in the case of Kirk, where they talked about the catch this fascist slogan written on the gun, written on the ammunition.
At first I thought this is a little unbelievable, because who does that?
I mean, what kind of a murderer inscribes the slogans of their ideology on the ammunition itself?
But it appears to be some sort of a thing.
Maybe it's it's um part of a sort of uh a kind of trophy that uh I want to um I want to mark why I'm doing this, and I want to put the ideology that I subscribe to right on the bullet itself that in a sense carries out my mission.
It's very sick, it's very twisted, it's very demented, but it was not only done in the Charlie Kirk case, it's done also in this ICE case, where I believe there's one dead, there are others wounded.
Um and I'm really glad to see that Trump has designated Antifa.
Let's remember Antifa is the organizational structure, the organizational orbit that has put out this idea that if you're looking for a fascist, don't look for people who call themselves fascists.
Don't actually even look for fascist ideology, don't look for national socialism, don't look for the ideas expressed in in the Nazi 25-point program.
Don't look for what Mussolini actually believed, which is much closer to what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren believe than it is to anything Trump believes.
Don't look any of those places.
Just look at the Republican Party.
Look at uh the MAGA movement.
That's where you're gonna find the fascists.
This is the Antifa mantra.
Now, so many people on the left are saying Antifa is not an organization.
But I see here a post by Mike Benz, and he goes, if Antifa's not an organization, why does the Portland wing of Antifa have a website about organizing?
I'm looking at the website right now, it's called RoseCity Antifa.org.
What is fascism?
What is anti-fascism?
What is the goal of your organizing?
In other words, what do organizations do?
They organize.
What was Barack Obama?
He was a community organizer.
And it talks about why people stay anonymous, why do you do doxing, how can you work with courts, and finally, how can I get involved?
In other words, how can I join this organization?
I admit that these organizations of Antifa are amorphous.
They are cells, they are decentralized.
We talked for a moment ago about the Portland Antifa.
But think about it.
All terrorist groups are organized like this.
Uh, they are decentralized.
Uh, they may have some sort of a command structure, but very often it's not clear what it is.
And not only that, if for some reason someone at the top is removed, somebody else kind of takes their place.
This is the way that uh Al-Qaeda is organized, this is the way ISIS is organized, Al-Shabbat is organized, this is the way the mafia is organized.
You might remember in The Godfather, the famous scene where um um Michael Corleone is testifying before Congress, and he goes, uh, there's no such thing as Cosa Nostra.
There's no such thing as the mafia.
There's no this organization doesn't even exist.
Well, maybe it doesn't exist as a single organization with a corporate structure and a website, but there do happen to be five mafia families in New York, and they do happen to have adjuncts in other cities, and so there is a mafia structure, it's just a decentralized structure that operates collaboratively, even without a central uh kind of command structure at the at the very top.
You have mob bosses, a lot of things are carried out at the retail level, and there are wholesale organizers, even if they don't fully disclose how they operate.
So the Antifa is cleverly created this cellular structure where each cell operates on its own, and therefore you can take down one cell, but you haven't brought down the the whole organization.
So I think that both with these trans networks, and there apparently are violent trans networks where these trans people learn fighting, they go to camps, they are trained, they learn how to use violence, and uh and this is all very dangerous for our society.
Uh you have Antifa networks, you have the trans networks.
And fortunately, we are in a position, if we were under the Democrats, there's not a whole lot we could do because the Democrats would be well, I mean, for all we know, they could be funding these networks.
And they may and maybe in some ways there are funding structures we need to look at now.
But because we have the DOJ, um, we can launch federal investigations into the trans network, federal investigations into Antifa.
It's really important, I think, to pull out, to draw out the violent underpinning of these groups.
This is not a free speech problem.
They're welcome to have meetings and seminars and and chat about their ideology.
What we're concerned about is the translation of their theory into practice, which is to say the translation of their ideas into physical action and specifically violent action.
That's where we get them.
That's where we stop them.
And uh the time to do that is the time to do that is right now.
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It's the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The revival of an ancient conflict.
Recorded in the Bible.
The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
What if there was gonna be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
Dinesh de Suza went into a war zone to make his new film.
It offers a new way to understand October 7th.
Israel, radical Islam, anti-Semitism and Biblical prophecy.
To the fate of the world of humanity itself be tied to this place.
We came back to a land that was largely barren and empty, and we brought it back to life, and we're good to keep it.
The dragon's prophecy isn't just about the Middle East.
It's about you.
Because without that Jewish foundation, there is no Christianity.
Based on Jonathan Kahn's international bestseller in theaters October 6th and 8th.
Streaming and DVDs available October 9th.
Get the film at the Dragons Prophecyfilm.com.
This film contains graphic violence of October 7th.
I'm now continuing in the introduction to my book, Life After Death, The Evidence.
This is by the way, what the book looks like.
I love this cover, very a kind of um blue but blue infused with a kind of celestial light.
And this is the paperback and a quote from Rick Warren at the top Explosive in its impact.
The truths in this book are foundations On which you can build a meaningful life of purpose.
This is from the author of the Burpes Driven Life.
So I hope I can live up to that high standard.
But here in the introduction, I'm just telling you a little bit about myself and a little bit about what I'm trying to accomplish in this in this book.
I mentioned last time that in adult life I found my own faith deepening.
I found that I was being, in a sense, pulled or called to engage a little bit more in public in the debates around God and atheism.
This, of course, was the period of the so-called new atheists.
And so in this phase of my life, between 2008 and 2012, I wrote three books on Christian apologetics.
So the first one, What's So Great About Christianity, and the Life After Death.
This book that we're talking about is number two in the trilogy, and the third is called God Forsaken.
Interestingly, it was released in paperback as What's So Great About God.
But either way, it's the same book.
And if that book is about God and suffering.
I might do that on the podcast some other time.
And then I began doing these debates with leading atheists, people like Christopher Hitchens, Skeptic Editor Michael Schirmer, the Bible scholar Bart Ehrman.
We did two or three debates, bioethicist Peter Singer, philosopher Daniel Dennett.
I really enjoyed this, these debates.
Some of them were held on campuses, some of them were at conferences.
I remember going to Mexico, Puebla, Mexico, to do some of these debates.
And I enjoyed taking on the atheists using their own language, by which I mean secular language, the language of reason and argumentation.
And I liked also taking them on in their own arena.
So at one point, Rabbi Wolpe, whom I've had on the podcast, by the way, Rabbi Wolpe and I took on Christopher Hitchens and I forget the name of his debate partner now, but this was in New York City in front of a very left-wing, very secular audience.
And then they we we had a vote at the end, and we lost, but we lost so narrowly that it was kind of a miracle.
In other words, you're this is almost like being in the lion's den.
It's like me taking on a guy at Berkeley in front of a left-wing audience and then having a vote at the end and you know, me losing 51 to 49 or 52 to 48.
It's almost unheard of in that setting.
Uh now uh for a Christian, taking on these debates is sort of like debating as Rush Limbaugh, I like to say, with one hand tied behind your back, because you're not going to appeal to revelation.
You're not going to appeal to the scriptures, you're not going to appeal to anything that goes beyond human reason.
Uh, and in a way, I'm going to continue that same mode of discussion in this book.
This is truly a book of apologetics.
And um, it's not a book of half-hearted apologetics.
And by that I mean sometimes in the church, you get what you could call half-hearted apologetics.
You have someone who is sort of applying the language of reason, but then they sort of suddenly you find that they're appealing to uh a uh uh an episode out of the Bible or lesson about Jonah or a lesson about from the book of Ezekiel, and you suddenly realize wait a minute, I I thought we were arguing outside the Bible, and now suddenly you're inside the Bible uh and you are appealing to something that is handed down on the basis of revelation.
So you won't find me doing this here.
It's not that I'm not going to engage the Bible, but the Bible comes in at the end as if to say, look, the Bible is correct, but I've demonstrated uh that the Bible is correct, not using the Bible itself.
So I'm going to be engaging atheism and reductive materialism on their own terms.
There's a book that the philosopher Emmanuel Kant wrote many years ago.
It was called Religion on the Basis of Reason Alone.
Um I'm a huge admirer of Kant, but not so much of that particular book.
But what I do like is the title.
The title itself is interesting, religion within the limits of reason alone.
Who would have guessed, or who could have guessed that you could actually talk about religion within the limits of reason alone?
But this is my approach.
It's gonna, I'm gonna demonstrate life after death exclusively on the basis of reason.
No appeal to divine intervention, in a way, no appeal to miracles.
This is a secular argument aimed at a secular culture.
Now, what am I sort of trying to show here with life after death?
Because life after death, people may go, I don't even know what that's gonna be like.
I don't even know what that's gonna feel like.
I don't even know what kind of consciousness I could expect in another realm.
And I'm saying you don't really have to know.
Here's what I mean.
Imagine if you were to ask a caterpillar, do you know that you will one day become a butterfly?
And the can the caterpillar would say, What are you talking about?
That's impossible.
That's ridiculous.
How can a caterpillar become a butterfly?
But look, you don't need divine intervention, you don't need miracles to show how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.
You can demonstrate this through the working of nature, through the working of scientific laws, indeed, by straight out observation.
So I'm going to try to demonstrate life after death in the same way.
Now, later in the book, when I discuss heaven and hell, I'll I'll bring in God's role in this kind of transcendental realm.
Now, this kind of secular approach, this kind of just the facts approach, may seem a little bit unusual, but it's part of what I call Christian bilingualism.
We speak one language in church, the language of the Bible.
Uh, and we speak uh a different language when we're making the case in secular culture.
And I think that this second approach, the secular approach, is particularly effective when you're trying to appeal to, you know, seekers or fence sitters.
So who are these people?
Well, the seekers are the people who they want to know the truth.
They haven't found it, but they are seeking.
It's a good thing that they're seeking.
We want to encourage them.
But some of them, you know, are alienated from traditional religion.
If you come at them waving the Bible, they immediately start retreating.
They start backing up.
So you come at them speaking the language that they already accept, that they already understand, and you have a little better chance to get through.
Let's remember that these groups, the seekers, the fence-sitters, this group has become quite large in our uh culture.
And uh when I debated Hitchens, I remember years ago, this was at the University of California at Boulder, very left-wing college, a place where if I was doing a political debate, I would really be rolling the stone up the hill.
But I noticed in debating Hitchens that I was doing really well, and the audience was thunderously applauding the things I had to say.
And I suddenly realized that the primary composition of the audience was not outright atheists.
Atheists are not the majority in our society, they're not even the majority in academia.
The seekers are the majority.
So the atheists are probably uh a relatively small minority.
Maybe you add in the agnostics, you get a little bit of a bit of a bigger minority.
The Christians too are a minority, but the seekers and the offensive, these are the majority.
But these are people who are very skeptical of what they call the God of the gaps argument, which is like if you can't understand something, well, then God must have done it.
Well, that doesn't really follow, right?
Because after all, you the fact that you didn't understand it, you could later figure it out.
Um, and then what happens to this quote, God of the gaps?
So and yet at the same time, these very seekers, these very fan fan sitters are people who sort of they wonder, like, hey, is you know, it seems like this life can't be all there is.
You get this intuition that there is something more.
But what is that?
So this is where we come in.
This is where we come in to try to specify what that might be.
Now, one of the things that gives me confidence in debating the atheist on this topic, the topic of life after death, is that even though they start out from a position of tremendous confidence, like, come on, Dinesh, you know as well as I do, there's no life after death.
You realize that the moment you start probing them, they are conf confidently stating things about which they cannot be sure.
Think about it.
How is a Michael Schirmer or a Hitchens, the late Christopher Hitchens, Um, who, by the way, probably knows for sure right now that there is life after death.
But when we're arguing about things in this world, how can they be sure about something that there isn't?
Uh they are caterpillars and they don't know if they're gonna become butterflies or not.
Maybe not, but maybe so.
So, on what basis can they confidently and emphatically emphatically say, no, it is not so.
I know for a fact that what you're saying comes on around the corner is not around the corner.
They don't know.
And so as a result, this uncertainty allows you to probe them, get them to admit things that they don't really know, and maybe open their mind to other possibilities and to persuasion by rational argument.
Now, what am I trying to argue here in this book?
The argument is gonna move like a gathering storm.
It's gonna move from the significance of the issue, which I'm gonna talk about first, like why does this matter?
Why is it important?
To the possibility of it.
Because before you try to prove that something is likely or something exists, you want to show it's possible.
There are certain things that are simply not possible.
They are, they can be, in a sense, written off.
They can't happen.
Uh, and if life after death is impossible for some reason, let's say, for example, we are entirely made of material stuff, and this material stuff we know for a fact, dissolves, disintegrates, gets destroyed, gets deposited right back into the ground, and that's it.
If that's all we are, then life after death would seem to be impossible.
So I have to show first that it's not so.
It is possible.
Second of all, I'm gonna show it's not only possible, it's probable, meaning it's likely.
There's a high degree of confidence, a high degree of certainty that this is in fact the case.
And then I'm saying that once we consider the high probability and combine it with all the benefits.
I don't just mean philosophical benefits, I also mean practical benefits of believing in life after death.
I say, listen, that's enough.
That's enough to go for it.
Now, I cover a bunch of fields in this uh book.
I'll cover a little bit of brain science, physics, biology, psychology, history, philosophy.
It's an interdisciplinary kind of voyage.
But um, I have to do this because I'm proceeding sort of like a district attorney in a case where there are no eyewitnesses.
Obviously, I'm not gonna say that we can experience life after death the way you experience like your 30th birthday.
Uh life after death, we need a circumstantial case.
And the DA, for example, in in the example I'm giving, the DA is not an authority on ballistics, handwriting analysis, DNA.
You pull in kind of expert testimony when you need to, but what's your job as the DA to put the pieces of the puzzle together to make a coherent case to the jury.
So in this book, you are the jury.
I'm gonna assume that you're a pretty smart guy, but you don't know anything about these topics.
So it's my job to explain them, to make it clear, to help you to fully understand.
Now, recognize that at times you're gonna be sort of on a little bit of an untrodden path.
You're like, where are we going?
Don't worry about it.
It's my job to show you where we're going and to take you to take you there.
Uh I'm sometimes gonna talk in a pretty colloquial, even lighthearted way, because I think that uh my strength in this area is to be able to take these complex ideas and present them in a way that makes total sense, bring it down in a sense to the level of common sense.
So the topic is is serious, it has a lot of weight, it has a lot of gravitas.
At times I'll seem to be speaking in a much kind of chattier way about it.
It's not because I'm missing the gravitas of it, it's because I want to bring it, you may say, down to earth.
Now, one thing I'm gonna tell you, you're not gonna hear from me and find in this book.
You're not gonna get what I call the spooky stuff.
Uh there are no ghosts in this book, there are no levitations, there's no exorcisms, there's no mediums, there's no conversations with the dead.
Uh yes, I talk about life, I do talk about near-death experiences, but as you'll see, that's a small part of my argument.
I don't believe that these near-death experiences really show us The full picture of life after death.
At best, they show you what can be experienced at the very last edge of life, sort of the edge of the precipice itself, but it doesn't really show you a full vista of what is on the other side.
Now, this is not to say like I don't believe in any of this.
I'm rejecting the paranormal out of hand, but I'm uncertain about it.
I'm dubious about it.
I'm excluding it altogether from my argument.
My argument is based really on just reasoned discussion, reasoned debate, mainstream scholarship.
So the core of this book consists of three independent arguments for life after death.
One is going to come from neuroscience, or the study of the mind, the brain.
The second is going to come from philosophy.
The third is going to come from morality.
Any one of these three arguments is decisive.
So if I succeed with any one of the three, I have made my case.
But together, I will argue they make a really strong case, uh, a persuasive legal brief for the afterlife.
Now I admit that it is the nature of the topic here that we cannot be a hundred percent positive.
You can say, well, of course I'm 100% positive.
I believe a hundred percent in life after death.
And my point is I get it.
I do too, but we believe on the basis of faith.
I'm talking here about what reason can prove or what reason can demonstrate.
And in a way, I would put it this way if we think of the we think of this discussion as a courtroom trial, I'm not going to be able to meet the criminal standard, by which which is I mean I'm not going to be able to prove this case, quote, beyond a reasonable doubt.
No one can.
However, uh, what I can do is I can meet the civil standard.
What's the standard in a civil case?
It's winning the case by a preponderance of the evidence.
So I'm going to show that by a preponderance of the evidence, the majority of the evidence, the likelihood and weight of the evidence is on one side more than it is on the other side.
So that even in the absence of complete certainty, it makes sense to believe, it is good to believe, it will give you practical benefits to believe.
And finally, in the last chapter, you'll see a bit of a surprise.
I provide a kind of case study, and really this is the only one in history that shows that life after death in a weird sense isn't just like a future prospect.
It has already happened in a way for a single individual.
And this event opens up a kind of stunning new possibility, which is not just life after death, but something I'm going to call eternal life or eternity right now.
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