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Oct. 13, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:03:14
WHAT GOES AROUND Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1188
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It's a 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?
The Dragon's Prophecy.
Watch it now, or by the DVD at the Dragons Prophecyfilm.com.
Coming up, I'll tell you why I'm elated over the indictment of Letitia James.
I look forward to other potential indictments, maybe John Bolton, maybe others.
Very good news.
Uh also very good news on the hostages coming home.
I'm gonna discuss the um the um happy reunion of one family, the Miran family profiled uh in our film, and also talk about the wider implications.
An author Josh Hammer joins me.
He's gonna talk about how he got roped into a wild conspiracy theory from you guessed it, Candace Owens.
Hey, 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 America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh de Sousa Podcast.
I am happy to say that the Trump administration has brought a powerful indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James.
This is big indictment number two.
The first indictment, of course, James Comey for lying to Congress.
And in both cases, the indictments, if you read them, are very clear cut.
The government is not trying to prove something wide ranging or speculative.
It is like, "Comey said this to Congress?
Is it true?
No.
Did he know it to be false?
He must have.
He's the director of the FBI, so the answer is yes, he knew.
And therefore, did he lie to Congress?
Willfully, intentionally.
Yes.
Case closed.
I think the Trump administration realizes that they might be arguing these cases in front of mixed, if not even hostile juries.
You want to frame it in such a clear-cut way that there's kind of no way to get out of it.
Now it still might be that you have people who just absolutely refuse to convict.
We're gonna see how that all goes down.
But the good news is that Comey and Letitia James are going to be in a whole lot of trouble.
They're just going to have to get criminal defense attorneys.
They're going to be bombarded with requests for documents.
There will be hearings.
They will incur, I will say right now, hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in legal fees So to the degree that the process is the punishment, they're gonna get some punishment starting right about right about now.
And there have been some reports that more is to come.
I'm actually hopeful that more is to come, a lot more.
I think that when we consider the wide range of indictments against Trump and Trumpsters, think of all the charges against Trump alone, 90 plus charges, all of them trumped up, bogus, but launched out of multiple jurisdictions, and not only Trump, there There were indictments of um other people at Mar-a-Lago.
There were Georgia electors.
There were pro-lifers and January 6th defendants and on and on it goes.
And then Bannon, they went after Bannon and they went after Peter Navarro.
They went after Roger Stone.
So this is a very long list.
We have a long way to go before we even come close to getting even, getting even.
And so my hope is that indictments are forthcoming for Adam Schiff.
By the way, he appears also to have been involved in some sort of similar mortgage shenanigans.
And so Adam Schiff may be on mortgage fraud.
Liz Cheney and some of the members of the January 6th Committee.
They could be found guilty of obstructing justice.
I don't know if just putting out false information, if that qualifies in any way as a crime.
And what about Clapper?
What about Brennan?
The kind of other intelligence officials who are involved, either in outright lying or scheming to frame Trump.
And then what about Majorcus for lying to Congress?
And what about Merrick Garland for bringing bogus prosecutions?
Now, some of this may seem on the surface, like where is the crime, Dinesh?
I mean, you a bogus prosecution is not a good thing to do, but it doesn't mean there's a crime.
Well, let me tell you this.
Our federal book of statutes is so large and so voluminous and such an accordion like structure of do's and don'ts that pretty much anything you can think of, you can find a crime in those federal statutes.
And um, and uh so if the Justice Department wants to do it, they can pretty much bring a case.
I'm thinking here of a book written by Harvey Silvergate several years ago called Three Felonies a Day.
The point Harvey was making is that you can pretty much find any citizen, look into their bank accounts, look into their uh into their taxes, look into their daily activities, figure out what they do for a living, and you can bring three felony charges against pretty much any American just because our federal crime statutes are so broad.
You're a doctor, okay, we're gonna charge you with illegal pain medication.
You're a construction worker, we're gonna say that in one of the houses you built, you use sloppy standards and endangered people.
So there you go.
So what I'm getting at here is where there's a will, there's a way.
Now, there's a lot of talk at CNN and other places about Trump engaging in retribution, engaging in their favorite word is vengeance.
And whenever I hear this, I sort of laugh.
First of all, I'm completely in favor of retribution.
Retribution is essentially another word for getting even.
It's another word for justice.
It's another word of making bad people pay for what they did.
But even vengeance, now vengeance is generally considered a bad thing, but it's only a bad thing because it is extracted typically in the wrong forum.
If you think of the old um, you know, Charles Bronson movies where he takes vengeance.
Well, he's taking vengeance, and he's a private citizen, and he doesn't have the authority to take vengeance.
Vengeance really belongs, so to speak, to the government, uh to the state.
The state exacts just retribution.
Private citizens can't, quote, take the law into their own hands, but that's the reason why vengeance is bad, not because vengeance itself is bad, because it's being executed through the wrong authority.
But in this case, for the DOJ to take vengeance is not the wrong authority.
It's the right authority.
The DOJ is in fact the agency that is tasked with extracting justice in cases where people have done really bad stuff and at least until now gotten away with it.
So I've argued long on this podcast, so we need to do a little more to them of what they are doing to us, and I'm glad to see this is actually happening.
By the way, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should do exactly what they do.
So if they do vandalism, I'm not saying we should do vandalism.
If they they throw bricks, I'm not saying we should throw bricks.
But what I am saying is if they throw bricks, we should throw them in jail uh and hold them accountable for throwing bricks.
We should not let them get away with it, because then they're more likely to do more of it.
The reason, for example, we're having a difficult time these days with ice uh is because these Portland Antifa people have been at that courthouse occupying it, taking it over, vandalizing it, terrorizing it, maintaining a kind of hegemony over it.
They've been doing this now for years.
Uh and the Portland police either let them or just um intervene very slightly now and then, but let them be pushed back and pushed around.
Finally, you have federal forces in there that are not putting up with this.
And you can actually see the shock and surprise on the face of these Antifa activists because they are used to, as I say, getting away with it, and now finally they can't.
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What could it actually buy now compared to what it could buy in 1980?
Answer less than 130 dollars.
Now, why is that?
Because the U.S. government, through the Fed is constantly printing money.
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Money buys less.
The Fed has been at it since 1913.
That's why a dollar today can only buy what a few cents could buy in 1913.
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When the cultural tide turns against truth, it becomes more important than ever to support the storytellers who are willing to stand for it.
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President Trump said this morning that he foresees that we are in an era of lasting peace in the Middle East.
I'm going to come back to that in a moment.
But one thing we have seen just hours ago is the hostages coming home.
And I've got to say it is a very moving thing to see.
And especially so for Debbie and me because our little film team was in Israel just weeks ago.
And we were at the Nahal Oz kibbutz, right on the Gaza border.
And we feature a young mom in the film.
Her name is Lisha Miran.
And she has two very little kids.
They're like what, honey?
They're like one and three, something like that.
And one is a baby, or one was a baby.
Yeah, two and four, Debbie says.
And so just describing the horrors of what happened to her family on October 7th.
And of course, we happen to have the footage of those events as she was describing it.
I mean, this is very unusual in a documentary film.
Normally, when someone is talking and describing something, you have to either just let them talk or you have to recreate the events so people can visualize them better.
But in this case, we have the actual footage in the film.
And so we are particularly touched by all of it, but especially by Omri, the dad, after now more than two years, back home, reunited with his wife, reunited with his two kids.
Our friend Marina Medvin sent us a photo of the family being united and literally, you know, Debbie and I were holding back tears just Just because we had we've met this woman.
So there's a personal element to it for us, and we're just obviously overjoyed to see their family, their little family.
And you know, this is um this is a family of very modest means.
Uh, we were almost shocked at the simplicity of these kibbutz homes.
They're like three rooms, mostly, by the way, empty.
Um, you know, hardly any sort of um decoration.
Uh it's the simplest of simple conditions.
I mean, this would be a modest home in rural India.
And yet uh these this is um, I'm sure for this family, that's all unimportant because having Omri back is is really everything.
And this is a this is a huge accomplishment for for Trump to have pulled this off.
Remember, the attacks didn't occur under Trump, they occurred under Biden, 2023, um, October 7th.
And who would have thought that Trump could figure this out?
Um, make it happen.
You're dealing with some of the most elusive and despicable and in some cases two-faced characters on planet Earth.
So to just bring about this exchange, and the exchange is in some ways distasteful because Israel is releasing terrorists, two thousand really bad guys in exchange for a handful of living hostages and perhaps some dead bodies.
Um, and yet uh Israel values life, and so they're willing to do it.
And um so, and Trump deserves enormous credit for for pulling it off.
You know, uh right before this, the Nobel uh Peace uh committee announced the Nobel Prize to Maria Corina Machado, by the way, friend of Debbie, and uh Debbie and I have helped her um in her activism, uh upholding principles of self-government, freedom of speech.
This is a woman harassed and tormented in her own country, and by the way, many Venezuelans in her position would have fled.
They would have gone to Spain, they would have gone to Miami, they would have chosen the easy life of the uh expat.
Uh, but this woman is like, no, I'm a Venezuelan, I'm going to fight for Venezuela.
So we're actually very happy that she got the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now, does Trump deserve it?
Yes, he does.
In fact, Maria Corina herself calls Trump and says, You deserve it.
I'm dedicating the prize uh to you.
But Trump, quite honestly, doesn't need it.
He's above it.
Uh, the Nobel Peace Prize, I mean, as you know, there have been some very dubious characters, including, I think Yasser Arafat got it one year, and uh Obama got it for achieving nothing, basically for being black, you know.
Well, we want to recognize your achievement of being black.
Um, so you know, this guy who actually has caused more trouble in the world and undermined peace, promoting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for example.
So the Nobel Peace Prize, I mean, it's a joke.
Um, but no nevertheless, Trump is such an interesting character.
He likes external recognition.
He's a little bit like Achilles in the um in the Iliad, where Achilles will never say, Well, listen, I'm the greatest warrior of the Greeks.
I know it.
Everybody knows it.
I don't need an award to prove it.
I don't need Briseus.
You can do whatever you want.
You know, King Agamemnon, go ahead and take Briseus from me.
Big deal.
Does that change the fact that I'm the greatest warrior of the Greeks?
No.
But Trump is like Achilles.
He's like, no, I want Briseus.
I want public acknowledgement.
Trump operates in a world of like ratings and scores and the number of awards on his wall.
So in some ways he's a very ancient character.
You'll never have Trump say something about like, well, listen, you know, regardless of who acknowledges it, I'm the guy who actually brought about the peace.
And I know that.
And deep down you know that.
So who cares about a prize?
No, Trump is like, I care about a prize.
Um, and uh that's just the way he is.
And I I find it downright amusing that a man who accomplishes so much uh needs this kind of external approbation, but he but he clearly does.
Now, the bigger question here is whether this massive advance, this great good news, this moment of jubilation, uh, which by the way is very much in keeping with the spirit of our film, The Dragon's Prophecy.
It's a film that takes you down some dark places, October 7th, also the devil's handbook, the devil is in fact the dragon, but it doesn't leave you there.
The film ends on a very uplifting, triumphant, spiritually invigorating note.
In fact, we've been getting just enormous amounts of comment about the film and not to mention reviews, and many of them take note of the very powerful ending of the film, uh, which actually involves Debbie and me getting baptized in the River Jordan, but also involves John Rich and his great song Earth to God.
I think our film fits in very well with the current mood.
A mood of restoration that, by the way, was highlighted by Charlie Kirk and Charlie Kirk's funeral service, but also a mood that is reinforced by what's happening now with the hostages jubilantly uh coming home.
So, just a word about the film.
It's gotten rave reviews in Red State, in hotair.com in PJ Media.
I just read this morning a review by the long the um veteran film critic Roger Simon, who says, Hey Dinesh, you know, he goes, This is Dinesh D'Souza's best film yet.
And he goes, the reason for it is its profundity of theme.
This is a film in the end that is not even about just Israel or Hamas or the war.
It's a film about the great clash between good and evil.
It's a film about God and the dragon, God and the devil.
It's about how the events in front of us are indications of a world behind the world.
Um and they reverberate with echoes from the Bible, going back 3,000 years, but they also point forward to biblical prophecy.
The film, by the way, is available in DVD.
You can buy the DVDs on Amazon, uh, or you can buy them right from Salem now.
Go to the website, the dragonsprophecyfilm.com.
We also have the ability for the film to be streamed by churches as a tab on the website.
So if you're in a group or a church and you want to have the film screened for your members, go to that tab.
We've hired a company that specializes in doing this so that it the instructions are really all right on the website.
And the film is streaming now on multiple platforms, primarily Salem Now, which is our partner in financing this film, but also Rumble, the platform called Rumble, and then also the our friends at the Epoch Times have a kind of adjunct or related platform.
In any event, all those platforms, those tabs are on the website.
So the one-stop shop is just the dragon's prophecy film.com.
But coming back to the Bible, the point I want to make is that the Bible seems to suggest, and I'm treading cautiously here because I I want to say seems that there will not be an ultimate solution to these issues in the Middle East really until the end of time, that they will remain at the root level unfixed.
And I think we can see that that is probably the case even here.
It's not to say, by the way, that you can't make measurable progress.
Hey, guess what?
The hostages are home.
That's progress.
If Hamas can be sort of dismantled, I don't think it can be fully dismantled because quite honestly, Hamas lives on in the hearts of a lot of civilian Palestinians.
A lot of people in the region.
They support Hamas.
If you look at what happened right after October 7th, who do you think was cheering in the streets?
And by the way, not just of Gaza, but also of the West Bank, places like Ramallah.
So that's the civilians.
Many of them support Hamas.
Even the civilians in the West Bank or in Judea and Samaria, the civilians living under the Palestinian Authority.
Many of them support Hamas, which is kind of why the Palestinian Authority, the so-called PA, doesn't like to have elections because they're afraid they might lose out to Hamas.
So it's not simply kind of a biblical intimation.
It is a careful observation of the facts on the ground that tell you that you can create a certain type of fix.
You can see progress.
You might be able to get a new type of government in Gaza.
But a lot of the underlying problems, a lot of the deep-rooted hatreds, the sentiment of from the river to the sea, which is basically to get rid of Israel.
Not only that, but the sentiment of global jihad.
Let's remember the jihadis in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Turkey and Yemen.
These are not people that are going to go away, nor does their agenda go away.
Their tactics might shift.
They might decide, all right, we're gonna get less out of Hamas than we used to.
Hezbollah has now been crippled.
Iran has lost its nuclear capacity for the foreseeable future.
All right, let's opt the anti and ill infiltrating Australia, Canada, Europe, the United States.
So the underlying problem, I think, remains.
And in this respect, uh, we can see that not only is the Bible correct, the pro the prophetic element of the Bible is borne out by our empirical observation of what's going on, but we can see that in some ways there remains a great deal of work to do in dealing with this problem of radical Islam in all its many manifestations.
Three weeks ago, my friend Charlie Kirk was supposed to be the one reading this to you, just two days before he was assassinated.
He decided to support an explosive new documentary.
His death and the violent attacks on churches and schools remind us that we are in a real spiritual battle, but there is hope.
Church attendance is rising, especially among young people, and for that hope to last, we need generational change.
That's why Charlie wanted you to see off school property in theaters on October 23rd.
This film tells the story of life-wise, a nonprofit bringing Bible classes to public school students during the school day.
Charlie was excited about this mission.
This nonprofit called LifeWise in Ohio said, okay, we'll raise the money, find the space, and the school has to allow one hour of religious instruction.
So I just learned about this a couple days ago.
This could be a revolution in government schools across the country.
Now it's up to us to carry it forward.
Take your family and friends to see off school property in theaters nationwide, October 23rd.
Find a theater near you at lifewise.org slash dinesh.
That's L I F E W I S E.org slash Dinesh.
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Guys, uh Josh Hammer does not need any introduction on my uh podcast.
Uh but just for the one or two of you who don't know Josh, he is a senior editor of Newsweek.
He hosts the Josh Hammer Show podcast, a syndicated radio show.
He writes a weekly newsletter, the Josh Hammer Report.
He's also an author, his latest book, Israel and Civilization, the fate of the Jewish nation and the destiny of the West.
Uh welcome, Josh.
Thank you for coming on.
I um saw you just posted that you are going to be coming on board at Salem.
So say a word about uh say a word about that.
Yeah, Dinesh, always great to join you, my friend.
So my show, the Josh Hammer Show, has been a product of Newsweek for the past three and a half years, give or take.
And it's it's still a product of Newsweek, but we're signing a new partnership distribution agreement with with Salem.
So it'll be joining the Salem Podcast Network, and you know, more generally, just gonna be more of a more of a frequent presence uh within the Salem family, I imagine.
I'm a longtime huge fan of the Salem brand, and you know, Dinesh, and so it's not gonna make me, I think, really motivated harder than ever to double down to do what I can to try to continue the legacy of our departed colleague, my friend Charlie Kirk, who, of course, was a Salem personality in his in his own right.
And I feel like my brand fits very well with Salem's brand, Dinesh.
You know, I'm a hard-hitting truth-telling, biblically based Jewish conservative, and I just can't wait to get started here.
Not to mention, Josh, that our friend uh Dennis Prager, uh, as a result of a terrible accident, has been pretty much out for the count.
Uh, and so there's um greater need than ever for your voice and other voices like that to be to be heard today.
Uh let's begin Josh on this momentous day talking about the return of the hostages.
Is this something that you thought you would see happen?
Or does this come as a kind of exuberant surprise?
Uh, it's really more the latter.
I'll be honest with you.
I I was probably among those who wrote this final batch of hostages off as likely being a simple casualty of war.
We saw one massive hostage exchange, about a month and a half, two months after October 7th in late 2023, over a ho over a hundred hostages released at that time.
And since then, there was a there's a small trench once, maybe a second small trench, but this this final trench really seemed like it was it was not gonna happen.
And I I'm I'm pleasantly surprised.
I I'm pleasantly actually very surprised.
But I'll tell you who did not forget about the hostages, two groups of people.
One are the Israeli people.
So I was last over there, Dinesh in in June.
I was there actually when the whole war with Iran started, which is a whole another story.
We evacuated neither here nor there.
But I was struck when I was there in June by the sheer ubiquity of the hostage posters all throughout the country, on overpasses, on the highways, on the street lampposts, uh just on the streets, on the storefronts in the windows.
This is a country that was really, really, really thirsting and yearning for its hostages to be released.
It's a very emotionally acute issue for for the Israelis, I think, in a way that doesn't even necessarily directly resonate for Americans like me and you or for many others there.
Obviously, we all want the hosts to be returned there, but for the Israelis, it was kind of next level emotionally intense.
These are literally their sons and daughters and so forth there.
So I count me as very pleasantly surprised.
Uh, of course, the other group of people, Dinesh, who did not forget about the hostages, in addition to the Israeli people, are the Trump administration.
Our President Trump, probably first and foremost himself, who vowed on the campaign trail repeatedly.
I saw him do this for what it's worth.
I was actually at Trump Dural in South Florida on October 7, 2024 for for an event on the one-year anniversary of October 7th, and I saw Donald Trump vow about a month before the election that he was not going to forget the hostages, that he that he would get them out, and he did it.
I mean, yet again, as his president is want to do, promises made, promises kept.
I mean, how many times have we seen this play out over the years?
He i it's becoming something of a of a trademark, you might say.
So he didn't forget about the hostages.
The Israeli people didn't forget about the hostages, even though folks like me who are perhaps a little more cynical, I'm not gonna say we obviously were willing to write them off, but I I didn't see it happening, honestly.
And uh to President Trump's tremendous credit, Jared Kushner, the whole team, they did see it happening and they executed it, and here they are.
You know who I else think deserves credit, and my wife Debbie was making this point on my way to the podcast this morning, is she goes, Netanyahu, and she goes, and here's why.
Because the the battle against Iran was initiated and really largely executed by Netanyahu and his government.
The United States did come in at the end with the B-2 bombers and the ultimate strike on the nuclear facilities, but prior to that there was the attack taking out these Iranian nuclear scientists and attacks on top members of the regime, and all of that was done by Israel under Netanyahu.
And I think the point that Debbie's getting at, and I agree completely, is it changed the balance of power in the region decisively?
Because think about it if Iran was still calling the shots, Iran would be in a much more powerful position to dictate terms uh to reject the idea of dismantling the Hamas power structure altogether in Gaza.
Do you agree that the much maligned Netanyahu is also a critical figure here?
Oh, without question.
Uh well, I mean, your analysis, your wife's analysis is is completely correct.
You know, I I I analogize Dinesh that June strikes.
I'm a big sports fan, so I think a lot about sports analogies.
So I I analgize it to the basketball fans to something of an alley oop.
I think to I think 25 years ago to Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal.
I mean, I mean, Kobe Bryant is lobbying up the past.
That's actually probably the more difficult part than Shaquille O'Neal comes in at the end for the big massive slam dunk and he gets credit.
But it's really kind of the beautiful past that's actually doing more of the legwork there.
That's really actually what the IDF did in really above all in the first few hours of the war in Iran in June.
Again, I was literally there, Dinesh.
I woke up at 3 a.m. in the morning Israeli time to the sirens there.
I I I I experienced that very much firsthand.
But I I would actually go even further than that, because not only did the Israelis lay the groundwork for Operation Midnight Hammer, the B 2 bombers coming from Missouri, Iran 37 hours, an incredible demonstration of American peace through strength and resolve, and the president it certainly deserves tremendous credit for that.
But I would actually go even further than that.
Because what was Iran's insurance policy against Israel doing exactly what it did inside Iran for the past 30, 35 years?
Their insurance policy was Hezbollah.
It was well understood that Iran's number one most beloved proxy militia in the Middle East, the Shiite supremacist led by Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, just north of Israel.
They had at one time upwards of 150,000 precision guided missiles pointed directly at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
It was well understood that Israel's freedom of action to operate directly against Iran was was essentially non-existent because if they did so, if they lifted a finger, Hezbollah would just start raining drones and missiles and so forth on the Israeli population centers.
So what happened in June, from the American perspective, it was it was only made possible by the Israelis at the start in those first few hours, but it was really only made possible by what Israel did a year ago in 2024 when they systematically crippled Hezbollah there in Lebanon, ultimately culminating in the target assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, cowardly hiding in his bunker in Beirut last September.
But they took out essentially the entirety of the Hezbollah hierarchy and organizational leadership, including top jihadis like Fuad Shakur and Ibrahim Akiel, both of whom had multi-million dollar US State Department bounties on their heads for for orchestrating the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings and the 1983 US embassy bombings.
You know, Dinesh, I I get asked, as I know you do as well.
I get asked, Josh, you know, how does the US benefit from US Israel relations?
And one way to answer that question is well, you get a dead Fuachor and a dead Ibrahim Akiel.
These are literally Hezbollah jihadis who had US State Parliament bounties of five and seven million dollar bounties on their head for over four decades.
Nothing happened until Israel took them out.
But frankly, Israel taking out jihadis just like Shakur and Akiel is what laid the groundwork for the successful Iran operation in June 2025 as well.
The other interesting thing to me, Josh, Is that not just on the left where we kind of expect it, but even in certain quarters of the right, there appears to be a little bit of a sullen silence over the jubilation of today and over the evident success not only of the Trump operation in Iran, but also the Trump kind of pulling a rabbit out of the hat and just getting this peace plan to wear to where it is.
The very people who kept warning we're going to be drawn into World War III, we're going to see an escalation of genocide, we're going to see a quagmire in the region.
Now that the war is stopped, now that the hostages are home, you would think that they would be like, you know what?
We kind of have to admit that our warnings were wrong.
We were at the best premature.
Uh Trump has pulled this off.
This is a reason for all us, all of us to celebrate and be relieved.
We maybe misjudge some of these people like Josh and Dinesh and call them names.
Uh well whereas we whereas they turned out to be right, we don't get any of this, right?
And so let's try to understand why these guys are digging in and unwilling to sort of concede even the obvious.
Well, you're totally right.
Uh, you know, if someone like Tucker Carlson has celebrated this, then I have I've missed it.
Um which may which puts me in very similar standing to a Rashida Taleb or an AOC or someone like that, which, you know, perhaps is a feature, not a bug of our current political landscape.
But I I I think the reasoning short that you're not having folks, whether it's on the AOC left or the Tucker Carlson quote unquote rights who are who are celebrating this and giving the president his his very well deserved credit, is because they're coming at this, Dinesh, and this is th this really is the key point, I feel.
They're coming at it not from a place of empiricism.
They're coming at it not from a place where they actually care about facts, care about the data.
They're coming at this from a place of ideology.
They're coming at it from a place of dogma and doctrine.
When I debated Dave Smith at the Turning Point USA student after summit debate back in July in what turned out to be Charlie Kirk's last ever turning point USA event that he was on stage for, I made this point repeatedly, which is that my foreign policy approach, which is the is the exact same as President Trump's, is a foreign policy that looks through the singular prism of what is in the best national interest of the United States.
That is an empirical, fact-specific case-by-case assessment.
I don't look at the world through an ideological lens, whether it's on the John McCain ideology of America universalizing force throughout the world, or the Ron Paul isolationist ideology, which that America has no role.
Those are both forms of ideology.
They are not subject to empirical, sober case-by-case real facts on the ground assessment there.
There's no input output in kind of the computer algorithm within their head because they're just looking at it through a singular ideological prism.
So that's why, Dinesh, when a massive fact happens and this huge hostage ceasefire deal is a major fact, it is a shocking, a pleasantly shocking empirical development here in the year 2025.
That that is why the internal algorithms, the internal computers of everyone from the Talaibes and the AOCs on the left to the Tuckers on the right, they're unable to process that because again, they're just not operating from a place of empiricism and actually taking in facts.
They don't really care about the facts.
They have their talking points, they have their ideology, and you know, let the facts be darned, I guess.
And and what you're saying to push that logic even further, Josh, is you're saying that if the next phase of this plan goes through, let's call it the complete uh demilitarization and dismantling of the Hamas structure and the creation of a an independent authority with a lot of other Muslim countries involved to now create, at least offer a different option to the people of Gaza.
You're saying that these guys won't be appeased with that either.
They're gonna be just as grumpy, just as sullen, because that's another success on top of the release of the hostages, and that's further disproof of their ideologically based sort of uh speculations, and so at the best we can expect them to say nothing,
if not warn about further dire consequences to come, because as you say, they're too dug in and there's not a fact in the world that can violate their pre-existing prejudices.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
I mean, their ideology, uh again, from folks on the left to certain folks on the quote unquote right seems to countenance no role to have no place in mind for the existence of the state of Israel, for the existence of a of a Jewish state in the holy land.
I mean I mean that is that is essentially my read of the situation.
Now, for someone who actually cared about the facts, because you know, Dinesh, once upon a time, there actually was a robust debate as to whether or not Israel and our in our relationship actually served the American national interest.
This was a big, you know, decades long talking point for Pap Buchanan.
It was a decades-long talking point for John Meersheimer, the very anti-Israel professor at the University of Chicago.
Professor Wald, many others, yes.
Remember all this.
And what they used to argue was that the US being so close to Israel harmed American interests because it hurt our relations with the Arab world, it hurt our relations when it comes to oil.
That's the infamous 1970s oil embargo and so forth there.
But whatever that debate may or may not have been 30, 40 years ago, what I've been saying for the past five years, Dinesh is that the Abraham Accords of 2020 singularly put this whole argument to rest.
It is a definitive victory for the pro-Israel camp.
Because what Donald Trump did in his first term is he went all in, more all in than any president had ever done for USS relations.
He moved the embassy, he recognized the goal on heights, he recognized that Jews living in Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank are not per se illegal, and on and on and on.
He went above and beyond.
What was the result of sideline the power the Palestinian Arab question?
The result was not the revolt in the proverbial Arab street.
No.
The result was that you actually had the non-Islist Arab countries make historical, unprecedented peace for Arab countries making peace with Israel, the first peace deals in 30 years since Jordan, and very warm peace deals in terms of the UAE and Bahrain and that.
How do I know that they're warm?
Because they stuck after October 7th.
These are solid, durable peace deals.
So again, whatever argument whatever merits the old Mirsheimer Buchanan argument had 30 years ago, it's dead as a doorknob today.
And again, that's just not the world that folks at Tucker are living in.
Josh, I posted a video yesterday that got a lot of circulation.
It was a British jihadi, Muslim guy, and he was talking about the fact that a faction on the right has essentially saved radical Islam from having to lose Iran.
He says that the Trump administration after the nuclear strike was about to sort of authorize the decimation of the mullahs.
Uh and Iran itself would have collapsed as a uh prize in the hands of radical Islam.
And he goes, but at the last minute, and then he goes on to name people.
He goes, Tucker Carlson and uh Candace Owens, and he mentions several others, and he says they weighed in heavily on the right side of the aisle.
He mentions Marjorie Taylor Green.
He goes, I used to think of her as a racist.
She's from such a racist part of Georgia that you know, black people don't even dare to go over there.
And this woman, Marjorie Taylor Green, has come to our rescue, and essentially they intervened, they've made their voices very loud.
So Trump backed off at the very end and basically said, All right, we've knocked out the nuclear facilities, but we're not going to take it all the way to capsize the mullahs themselves.
I mean, I found this to be uh just sort of a remarkable video because what you're getting is radical Islam itself now declaring that it is relying on figures of the right to advance its global jihadi agenda and save it from total catastrophe when the occasion arises.
It's a really sad save affairs, isn't it?
But uh I I watched this video clip as well.
It is a remarkably revealing and telling clip.
You know, when you look, Dinesh, when someone like Tucker, when when he says some of the stuff he says, you know, when he had on that that nun, the nun who had a mustache and it was a little bizarre, and the nun was talking about how Israel is committing genocide or famine or whatever she was invariably accusing Israel of doing.
And I I went on social media, I went to the post on X, and if you look at a lot of the accounts that are retweeting, quote tweeting it there, it's like Al Kuds, you know, you know, like various kind of Qatari-funded Palestinian Arab sources there, a lot of Russian sources, a lot of a lot of Chinese accounts, things like that there.
It's literally giving aid and ammunition to the enemy.
It's just it's just a remarkable thing.
Now, look, I I think that all these uh all these individuals are are different.
I don't claim to know exactly what is going on in the heads of every individual.
I I do think that for for some folks, certainly for Cam this Owens, who's been coming after me in in insane deranged ways.
For some folks, I think it really is just as simple as as as medieval style anti-Semitism.
I I I think for some folks, as also Dinesh, this notion that they they have so soured on American elites, on American institutions, that they conflate their criticisms of the American ruling class with their criticisms of America itself.
And they find themselves in this really bizarre paradoxical world where they talk themselves into making the purported alleged America first case for actually trying to make America go away and just slink back into the hole whence it came because America has become a force for bad.
Again, how how this ends up being America first is that's not really my business.
That's not that's not my responsibility to try to justify that.
But that's basically how I see it for some folks there.
They are 1,000% giving aid and ammunition to America's geopolitical enemies.
I would say that's personally America last.
I guess some people say that's America first there, but that that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me.
Josh, let's close out.
Uh I don't want to give this too much importance at all, but you were front and center in the news because of an absolutely outlandish, absurd allegation by Candace Owens that you might somehow be implicated in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Without dignifying this uh really at all.
I just want you to talk a little bit about what does it feel like to be sort of sucked into this kind of maelstrom uh from a woman who is I mean, you know, both of us knew Candace in the old days, but I I feel like that there's a sociopathic element to what's going on here.
Do you how do you even read the situation as someone who was kind of caught in caught in it, really probably unawares.
Well, the first thing to note, Dinesh, is that this all happened while I was offline.
I I was offline for the Jewish holiday of of Sukkot.
I did have someone approach me at synagogue and say, hey, Candace is kind of going off on you.
So I I I I had steeled myself for turning my phone back on.
And uh wow, I I mean I clearly did not steal myself enough because I I mean, what is there to say about someone who is uh uh uh accusing me uh of complicity in my friend's own assassination?
I mean, uh what words can come could come to mind?
I mean, it is deranged, it is evil, uh demonic, satanic.
I mean, it's a kind of it's kind of a behavior, Dinesh, that frankly, once upon a time, prior to this nation's liberalization of involuntary commitment back in the 1960s, probably might have landed someone in the crazy ward.
And you know, you and I have talked about the law in the past.
I'm a lawyer by background, I clerk for a federal appeals judge in North Texas, I know a thing or two about the law.
I think there's a very strong case here that she has defamed me on under US law, and I'm talking with lawyers, and we'll see whether I pursue with that.
But on a personal level, you know, the main thing that I think about is uh you know, is my family, of course.
And I I've been talking with law enforcement there because Candace, uh whatever she may or may not have been, you know, three, four or five years ago, has clearly gone beyond off the deep end.
But sadly, she has a big following, and there are a lot of people out there who who listened to her, who watch her there, and she's very much putting me and my family in a in a perilous situation.
So that is that is probably the number one thing that I've been dealing with in the aftermath of this.
We'll see when it comes to legal action there.
But I guess Dinesh, I will just say this.
You know, uh Jew hatred is the world's oldest form of bigotry because it is the chameleon of all bigotries.
Because if uh uh uh you know, if the threat is communism, the Jews are capitalists, if the threat is capitalism, uh then the Jews are communists.
It shapes and it shifts with the times.
But the thing about Jew hatred, as you as you know, Dinesh, is that is it is really never actually about the Jews.
It is here, there, and everywhere, a symptom of a broader societal national or civilizational rot.
And I think the onus is on our colleagues in the broader right of center space, not you because you've been incredible, you've been amazing.
But more people have to speak up when people like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson are just going this far off the rails.
In particular, this particular situation of accusing me, one of Charlie's friends, of being placed in the murder is so utterly preposterous that it i if anyone ever again, Dinesh, if anyone ever again has the husband, the temerity to defend Candace Owens, perhaps even as quote unquote brilliant as Megan Kelly just did two or three weeks ago there.
I I'm gonna have to write that person off for the rest of their lives, because honestly, what in the world did they think?
Couldn't agree more.
Guys, I've been talking to the one and only Josh Hammer, senior editor of Newsweek, follow one X at Josh underscore Hammer.
Check out the book, Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
Josh, uh, what an ordeal.
Uh, but at least a happy day with the hostages.
Thank you very much for joining me.
I appreciate it.
God bless you, Janet.
How would one uh go about looking for evidence of life after death?
This in some ways is a difficult question to answer because whenever you're looking for something, you need to know how to look, and you need to know where to look.
Now, many decades ago, going back, I think to the 19 late 1950s, early 1960s, a group of Soviet cosmonauts returned from a space mission, and they announced to the communist Politburo of the Soviet Union, we have searched for God, we have not found him.
And the Politburo was like, wow, this is a vindication of the Marxist idea that God does not exist.
You've been up in the heavens, you've looked, you haven't found God.
And by the same logic, the cosmonaut said, there is no heaven, because again, heaven is supposed to be up there.
We've kind of had a look, and we haven't found it, found it.
Years later, I had a discussion with Christopher Hitchens, the noted atheist on this topic, uh, and he kind of chuckled.
He knew that this was sort of silly.
He knew that the looking up there, well, first of all, even if heaven were physically up there, the idea that you can go up in a spaceship and check out the entire uh realm of the heavens is absurd.
You're up there for a brief amount of time, you've sort of had a look, and uh that's it.
You're back down.
So think of the tiny amount of space you will have covered to try to find something, even if it were there in the physical realm.
But the real problem, of course, isn't that, it's that in Christianity, heaven is not someplace sort of up there as a separate planet or an orbiting galaxy.
Heaven is a different realm altogether, a different universe, if I can use that term.
And while in previous centuries, the notion of a different universe that operates by different laws might have seemed really outrageous and absurd.
This universe is all there is.
In fact, that's a line from Carl Sagan in his um famous series called Cosmos.
So in previous centuries, this idea of alternative universes would seem impossible, certainly for us to get our heads around.
But now, as we'll see later on in this book, this is a completely coherent concept.
And scientists today, without reference to God at all, talk about the concept of other, indeed, multiple universes.
We'll come back to that later.
But if it is true that heaven is in a different realm, then searching for heaven in this universe in this world, would be similar to Hamlet searching for Shakespeare.
I mean, think about it.
Hamlet is inside the story.
Shakespeare is the author of the story, but Shakespeare doesn't live in the world of Hamlet.
The world of Hamlet is Shakespeare's creation.
It is an imaginative realm which has characters and they operate according to human motives.
But Hamlet can't find Shakespeare in Denmark, at least in the Denmark that he lived in.
Shakespeare lives, you may say, elsewhere.
And therefore, Hamlet can say, I've looked and looked, and uh, you know, I don't find Shakespeare, therefore Shakespeare doesn't exist.
No, Shakespeare does exist.
In fact, that's kind of why you exist, and not only you, but that's why Hamlet's entire world is a creation of Shakespeare, but Shakespeare is not going to be found in that creation.
Now, a number of prominent uh scientific types have said that we need to do, quote, controlled scientific experiments to try to verify life after death.
Here's Victor Stenger in his book called The God, well, it's called God, the failed hypothesis.
He says, No claimed connection with the hereafter has ever been verified in controlled scientific experiments.
The famous biologist Francis Crick, who is the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, uh Crick and Watson discovered it jointly.
Here's Crick.
He goes, if religious believers, quote, really believe in life after death, why do they not conduct sound experiments to establish it?
Now, first of all, religious believers don't believe in life after death on the basis of experiment.
They believe in life after death on the basis of faith.
But let's take up this challenge and ask this question.
What kind of scientific experiment do you propose to do that would settle the matter one way or the other?
The advantage of doing an experiment is that it allows you to confirm or refute a particular theory.
If I say, for example, the gun is buried under the tree, okay, we go look under the tree, we see if the gun is there.
If I say that hydrogen, two atoms and oxygen, one atom is going to produce water, well, let's mix the two together and see if we get water.
So, in that mode, what experiment can we do that will either or undermine the hypothesis that there's life after death.
It's very hard to think of that kind of an experiment.
Now, in the 19th century, a guy named William Clifford, in a famous essay called The Ethics of Belief, made the point that we should not hold any beliefs that are unsupported by evidence.
Basically, what Clifford is saying is that we have to collect all the evidence, and the only propositions we should believe are ones that have sufficient evidence or proof.
And then propositions that don't have sufficient evidence or proof, we should reject.
So we can sum up this position by this fellow Clifford with this slogan that has been used by a number of atheists.
The absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
If you don't have evidence for something, don't believe it.
Why?
Because the fact that you don't have evidence for it suggests that that thing is doesn't exist or is not likely to exist, because there's not a single shred of evidence that points to it.
Now, the problem with this idea, it's so intuitively appealing that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, that it takes a little bit of careful thought to see why this idea is in fact false.
In fact, it is implausible, it makes no sense, it doesn't even apply to the world that we live in.
Now, the way to see that is to imagine yourself being a young fellow in ancient Greece in the fifth century BC.
This is the heyday of Athens.
And you are going to take all the evidence at your disposal, you're going to look up in the sky, and you're going to do whatever experiments you can.
You're going to look at the refraction of the light that comes in from the sun, you're going to count the stars in the sky.
Well, you're basically going to conclude based upon this evidence that there are no other continents.
You have never encountered one.
You don't have a way to go to any other continent.
You also conclude that there are no other planets.
Why?
Because you can't see any.
And that the sky contains about, well, two dozen stars.
Why?
Because those are the only stars you can experience.
Any other stars are unseen.
You don't have any equipment that can detect them.
And applying your principle, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
You conclude that you are living on the only planet that there exists.
You can kind of see the moon, but you don't know what it is.
You can see the North Star, you know that's there.
You can see a few other stars, but you conclude that the entire universe is made up of like 27 stars and a moon and where you are, and that's about it, and nothing else exists.
So think about it.
Would you be right in coming to that conclusion?
Of course not.
Why not?
Why not?
Well, the answer is that you have to realize what limited information you have at your disposal.
You know, I don't have a microscope, so I can't actually count the number of bacteria that there are in a glass of water.
I can't see them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
So unless I have some idea of what is the equipment that I'm bringing to bear, uh, and not only that, unless I have some idea of where I am looking, I have to be looking for the right place.
If I say, you know, I never found the gun, maybe it's because I was looking in the wrong spot.
Maybe there is a gun, but I need to know where to look.
So the point I'm trying to make here is that not found is completely different from found not to exist.
I'll just give one more example that I think continues to sort of drive the point home.
Uh, and that is the example of um the example of aliens.
Let's say I were to pose to you right now the question, is there life in the universe outside of us, outside of the life that we are familiar with, the life of trees and uh animals and humans.
Is there any other life in the universe?
Um, we could say, well, let's apply our principle.
The absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Based on that, we have to answer no.
But this would be a very premature answer because the truth of it is we don't know where to look, and we don't know how to look, and we don't know what the qualities of that life might be if they if it exists.
In fact, we could say absolutely nothing about what life on other planets or other galaxies might even be like.
No statement, however preposterous, can be dismissed out of hand.
So, for example, can we say, for example, we know for sure that if there's life somewhere else in the universe, it does not have ten eyes.
No, we don't know that.
Why?
Because our only experience, very limited, is of our kind of life on our planet, and no generalizations beyond that are even possible or reasonable.
Can we say that life on another planet if it exists is going to be, it can't be smaller than a speck of dust, or it can't be bigger than a skyscraper.
No, we can't say that either, because we're familiar with with life in this realm on our planet, and um and we know what its dimensions are, but we know nothing about any other kind of life.
Is life possible for creatures that don't have a heart, or that communicate by telepathy, or sustain themselves by consuming metal?
Answer, we don't know.
So again, the absence of evidence is not, uh emphasize not evidence of absence.
And this is really important because what it's really saying is that if the atheist were to take the same principle that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and apply it to any other realm, you would say, this is ridiculous.
This is prejudice, this is short-sighted.
Just because you don't know about something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Uh, just because you can't find the knife in the crime doesn't mean that the guy didn't use a knife.
You can see the stab wound, he clearly used a knife, and the fact that you can't find the knife doesn't mean that the knife does not exist.
So, bottom line of it is the absence of evidence very often simply means you haven't Searched far enough, you don't know where to look.
And this is part of what we need to sort out as we undertake this voyage.
We need to figure out how are we going to be looking, where, and with what kind of equipment.
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