Dinesh D'Souza - TELLING IT LIKE IT IS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1190

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Oct. 15, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

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TELLING IT LIKE IT IS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1190

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	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've got a great guest uh for you today.
	It is Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.
	We're gonna talk about uh current politics, but also his book, which is amusingly titled How to Test Negative for Stupid.
	I'm also gonna offer some comments about what Hamas is doing to uh Palestinian citizens in Gaza right now, not good.
	I'll talk about the foreign sources of funding for Antifa and a big case that is being argued today in front of the Supreme Court.
	Hey, if you're watching on YouTube, XORumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel, hit the subscribe, the follow the notifications button.
	I'd appreciate it.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	Music.
	America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
	Guys, the um the film critic Roger Simon is one of the most respected critics in the country.
	This is a guy who's been in the film world a long time, and uh he has a review of the dragon's prophecy.
	D'Souza's new film, a spiritual winner.
	He goes on to say, uh, Cheryl and I, this must be his wife watched Dinesh Jesus' documentary, and he goes on to say Um the result is the pundit slash filmmaker's best movie.
	and one that I could not recommend more highly.
	He goes, what makes it so compelling is that unlike his other work, provocative as that often was and controversial as it almost always was, he takes on a topic here far more profound than his usual conservative political focus, the topic of good and evil.
	And he goes on to talk about the remarkable historical and spiritual accuracy of the Old and New Testament he does a deep dive into the archaeological section in the film.
	And he goes on to say that the film has actually inspired him to go make another trip to Israel to check out some of the sites that are talked about in the film and to explore not just their immediate significance, their archaeological significance, but their deeper sort of spiritual and biblical significance.
	So, the film, if you haven't seen it, you've got to check out this film.
	It's not a normal film.
	It is going to leave you profoundly moved.
	And by the way, you might think, well, you know what?
	There's a peace plan, Dinesh.
	You know, isn't your film about October 7th?
	Is it about the war?
	Uh, how is it relevant to this new era of peace?
	Well, let me answer that question directly.
	Number one, the film has in it uh It kind of moves between darkness and light back and forth and back and forth.
	Why?
	Because that's good and evil.
	Good is the dark.
	I mean, good is the light and evil is the darkness.
	And so, in a way, as our moment shifts from one to the other, there's there is something in the film for you.
	If you want darkness, there's plenty of darkness.
	If you take a dim view of this peace plan, if you believe that human nature is unchanged, the leopard doesn't change its spots, Hamas is not going to give up so easily.
	They're not going to just put their weapons down.
	Well, guess what?
	There's plenty in the film, and you'll go, yeah, that's right.
	This evil is much more intractable, much more unyielding.
	Ultimately, it comes from the dragon.
	The dragon doesn't really believe in surrender.
	He can be defeated and overthrown by God, but he's not going to succumb.
	He's not gonna, he's not gonna beg for mercy.
	He's not gonna concede he's wrong.
	Uh read the dragon's kind of fiery speeches in Milton's Paradise Lost.
	The basic idea is I will not submit, I will not yield, or in the in the Latin, non-servium, I will not serve.
	On the other hand, after Charlie Kirk's death, people are talking about spiritual revival.
	This theme was obviously very widespread in Israel when the hostages came home, and obviously we share in that relief and jubilation.
	And guess what?
	The film fits into that mood just as well.
	In fact, that is the mood that the film leaves you with.
	So this is a film not to be missed.
	Uh it is now on multiple platforms.
	It's on the uh it's on Rumble, it's on Salem Now, it's on the platform of that's allied with the Epoch Times called GJW.
	All those tabs, by the way, are on the movie website, the dragons, plural the dragons prophecyfilm.com.
	So one click and you can watch the film.
	You can also order DVDs.
	By the way, I'm happy to say the film is number one in DVDs of all DVDs in the country on Amazon right now.
	In fact, when I when I checked yesterday, it was number one in documentaries, and I'm like, guys, we're number one, we're the number one documentary in the country.
	And then the guys on my film team look it up and they go, no, no, no, we're not number one in documentaries merely.
	We're number one of all movies in the country uh on Amazon.
	So you want to buy it from Amazon, no problem.
	Again, go to the movie website.
	There's an Amazon tab, or you can obviously search it on Amazon directly, uh, or you can also buy it from from Salem now.
	Now, turning to news in the region, uh, you might be noticing that Hamas, as I mentioned a moment ago, is not easily giving up.
	In fact, what Hamas seems to be doing now, there's an orgy of recrimination.
	They're not content with all the Jews that they killed on October 7th, not content with holding the hostages for two years, they're now killing their fellow Arabs.
	They're killing other Palestinians.
	They're killing people who don't go along with the Hamas program or the Hamas ideology.
	So for those of you who agree with Tucker Carlson that Hamas is not some sort of terrorist organization, to quote Tucker, it is quote, a political movement.
	Name another political movement in the world that rounds up people who don't agree with that movement and shoots them in the head on the street.
	Name such a movement.
	Um you won't be able to.
	Why?
	Because Hamas is in fact a terrorist network.
	It's a terrorist organization.
	And um, and this is what Trump is going to be dealing with in phase two of this plan.
	These are the people you're going to have to figure out.
	Listen, Trump wants them to either leave town or to demilitarize, put down their weapons and give up control of Gaza.
	As I say, the more likely to try to resurrect themselves under a different guise.
	You know, we're no longer Hamas, we're the Committee for the Restoration of Gaza.
	Same guy's uh basically maybe shaves his mustache, uh, you know, gets rid of his middle name in case it's already recorded by Israel, uh, and resurfaces now as a as a reformer, as somebody who's very willing to fix the problem.
	So, look, if I was an Israeli, I would still be asleeping with one eye open.
	As Debbie says, I'll be sleeping with like one foot on the ground.
	Uh, because these are the people who remain your neighbors one way or another.
	Peace plan or or no peace plan.
	All right.
	Let me now um bring this uh conversation home to the United States because there are important things happening in this country.
	I've been quite focused on this topic, and I think rightly so.
	This has been the topic front and center.
	And you know, this is something as a filmmaker, you kind of dream of, right?
	You make a film, you want the film to be timely.
	You hope that the film is as timely as when you made it.
	But our film is more timely than when we made it.
	In fact, today I should mention Prager University, Prager U has kind of taken over X, taken over Twitter, and they are featuring an excerpt of the film.
	Now, the excerpt, we've uh we've allowed Prager to use it as a kind of a mini documentary of their own.
	It's basically the first 15 or 17 minutes of the film with one or two short added clips.
	But the idea is to is to tap into this general interest.
	How do the events that are happening in the world tie in with the Bible?
	How do they tie in with the book of Revelation?
	How do they connect with biblical prophecy?
	So the Prague or you kind of mini doc is a way of appetizer.
	You get a taste, but a taste that goes far beyond a single clip.
	I've been releasing short clips, and we obviously have a trailer, which is about two and a half minutes long.
	This is like 20 minutes long.
	But what I'm hoping you'll do is watch it.
	You'll see how engrossing it is, and I hope that at the end of it you want more.
	Because the clip, the mini doc ends with these big questions being advanced, which are ultimately dealt with and answered in the film.
	So there's really no substitute for watching the film itself.
	Check out the Prague or You mini doc.
	I think it's called Rebel.
	It's the title of it is Revelation, and it uh the book of Revelation, and it ties into the issue of revival.
	But then check out the film itself.
	Now, coming home to what's going on in the country.
	There is a big case before the Supreme Court today, uh, probably going on as we speak.
	It's called Louisiana versus Calais, and it is about the issue of racial gerrymandering.
	The basic issue here is that since the voting rights act, Democrats have been pressing the courts quite successfully to get what they call minority uh districts.
	Districts that are tailor-made to enable a minority candidate to win.
	So these are almost, you could almost call it affirmative action in voting.
	It is creating districts where you want to get more black representation, so you draw the district a certain way, kind of to uh capture a sufficiently large number of the black population, the idea being that that's how we're gonna get a black congressman uh out of it.
	And the court has become increasingly skeptical of this kind of racial line drawing.
	They don't like it for university admissions, they don't like it for government contracting.
	We're kind of moving toward Martin Luther King's idea of the colorblind society.
	So why do we want affirmative action in drawing congressional districts?
	Answer, we really don't.
	Uh, and the practical effect of this is if the Supreme Court, now their decision won't come for a couple of months, you know how it is.
	In fact, it may come the middle of next year.
	The court moves a little slowly on all these things, but they do move perhaps in time for the midterms next November.
	And so the court decision will basically decide.
	If they strike down this idea of minority districts, guess what?
	Well, the simple consequence is gonna be like 20 more seats for the Republicans.
	So this is a not a small deal.
	In fact, it could even decide the fate of the midterms.
	If you put 20 more house districts in the Republican column, the Democrats are going to have an extremely difficult time taking the house.
	I don't think that they're gonna take the house anyway.
	Uh, I'm not one of these people who thinks that because, you know, because there's a division about Israel on the right, therefore we've lost the midterms, that's nonsense.
	Um, but the midterms are going to be hard fought.
	The Democrats are going to try really hard to take away from us the idea that we control right now all the branches of government, albeit narrowly.
	The House, yes, the Senate, yes, the Supreme Court, yes, the presidency, yes.
	So they hate that.
	Uh, that is in fact the way that a party gets things done in this country.
	You you do have to control all the branches, and if you lose Even one of them, then that branch becomes the way to obstruct the Trump agenda, which the Democrats will dutifully do, not to mention the idea of initiating impeachment proceedings, not to not to mention all kinds of other mischief that they can do.
	But the most important thing they can do is put a break, put a block, throw a spoke in the wheel of MAGA progress.
	And so for these reasons, we hope that this decision comes out right.
	We hope that the court strikes down this affirmative action nonsense.
	And we hope that ultimately we see a derracialization.
	And that these congressional districts, look, there's going to be politics in the way they're drawn.
	This is not about whether there should be gerrymandering.
	It's only about whether there should be gerrymandering on the basis of race.
	I'm not too happy about gerrymandering in general, but guess what?
	It's part of our system.
	There's nothing we can do about it now.
	But what we can do is get rid of these race-based districts.
	Guys, when I first came to America around 1980, I had a mere $500 in my pocket.
	Now, if I had been super frugal and not spent a penny of that money, what do you think it would be worth now?
	What could it actually buy today compared to what it could buy in 1980?
	Answer less than 130 dollars.
	Why is that?
	Because the US government, through the Fed, is constantly printing money.
	Now, when the government prints money, you got more money chasing the same amount of goods and services.
	So money goes down in value, goes down in purchasing power, it buys less.
	The Fed has been at this since 1913.
	That's why a dollar today can only buy what a few cents could buy in 1913.
	And the government continues to print oceans of money.
	It never stops.
	An ounce of gold reached a high of $850 in 1980, it's worth around $3,900 an ounce today.
	So historically, over time, gold has gone up and up in value, dollars have gone down and down in purchasing power.
	What about in the last 12 months?
	Well, gold is up over 40%.
	I believe now is the time for you to check it out.
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	I want to talk about uh two of the groups that are now part of the cultural left in this country.
	The first one is Antifa, and the other one is this trans network, the network of trans activists.
	Not even necessarily trans people in general, but trans activists.
	So let's begin with Antifa, because it is now coming out kind of piece by piece that a lot of Antifa is funded by billionaires, left-wing billionaires, but also left-wing billionaires from outside the country.
	Now, a couple weeks ago I had Peter Schweitzer on the podcast and he talked about how two Chinese billionaires, one of American, one an American citizen, but living in China, are bankrolling Antifa, a bank rolling the trans issue.
	And um, And Peter Schweitzer made the point that these are not people who bankroll those agendas in China.
	They apparently want Chinese culture to be cohesive.
	They want Chinese culture to stay the way it is, but they want to promote that this sort of change, radical reorganization of society, blurring of the distinction between boys and girls, men and women.
	They want that in the West.
	And Schweitzer suggested that this could be as part of a Chinese strategy to like undermine the West, weaken the West.
	Now, the liberal billionaires, however, don't all come from China.
	Some of them come from Europe.
	And there's an organization very benignly called the Children's Investment Fund.
	Now think of how this is very much how the left operates.
	They pick a title, the children's and we are investing in children.
	We're investing in the future of the country.
	We're investing in the next generation.
	Who would think that the children's investment fund would basically be Antifa?
	But it is.
	And what you have is you've got these billionaires like Hans-Jörg Wiss.
	This is a uh apparently a Swiss billionaire.
	There's also a guy named Christopher Horn, H-O-H-N, Christopher Hone, I guess it is.
	Uh, and he's evidently a British uh billionaire.
	And these are guys who have been putting giant amounts of money into these American NGOs.
	So NGO stands for non-governmental organization.
	Very often we're dealing with these so-called nonprofit organizations.
	Uh there's a report by a group called Americans for Public Trust, APT, and APT shows that the groups controlled by these foreign billionaires, people like um Christopher Hohn and Hans-Jorg Wiss, um, they funneled 553 million dollars to US organizations from 2014 to 2023.
	So we're not talking here about 100 grand or even a million dollars, 500.
	This is half a billion dollars really over a period of nine years.
	So that's a lot of money for these organizations to cause a lot, a lot of havoc.
	Now, the good news, I don't know if you consider this good news or not, but um, but evidently the exposure of these billionaires is having an effect.
	And recently, um, the British billionaire named Christopher Hone basically says, I'm I'm out.
	In other words, what he says is that uh there's a change of environment in America, and he says, therefore, his organization, which is apparently called CIFF, CIFF is just the uh the acronym of it.
	It stands for Children's Investment Fund Foundation.
	That's the CIFF.
	He goes, CIFF is no longer going to be giving money to US NGOs.
	It's now gonna focus its giving on foreign NGOs.
	So by the way, this is not that this guy has seen the light or that he's reformed.
	My guess is he doesn't actually want to be under scrutiny, he doesn't want to be under investigation.
	He probably doesn't want the FBI to be checking into his activities.
	And so he's decided, let me cause trouble abroad after having caused a great deal of trouble uh within the United States.
	But I'm glad to see that you know Antifa operates as such a shady organization, and people say, well, there's no such thing as Antifa.
	It's just an idea.
	Well, it's just an idea with 500 million dollars.
	You know, that doesn't make it an idea anymore.
	When a group has that kind of money, they can buy a lot of stuff.
	They can buy lawyers that will provide bail money for them, they can buy bricks to throw, they can buy various things that they can use to cause trouble, they can use it for propaganda, they can they can buy journalists, they can buy ads, um, they can buy social media posts.
	So the point here is that there is big money funding the bad stuff on the other side, and we need to be aware of that.
	The other thing I want to highlight, and this is I think generally good news, Is fewer people are becoming trans.
	What?
	How is this possible?
	We keep hearing that evidently through a mistake of God's creation, or you can say through a fault in nature itself.
	There are many, many people born in the wrong body.
	And as of a few years ago, there was some kind of alarming data that in a number of our campuses, you would find that something like five or six percent of people, five or six percent of students would claim to be trans.
	So again, this looks like God would make a lot of mistakes, right?
	This is five or six percent is like one in twenty.
	Is it really possible that one in 20 people are like created or born in the wrong body?
	Well, as it turns out, that was never the case.
	The whole thing is completely bogus.
	And the reason we know that is that the number of trans people is dropping dramatically.
	So they recently did a poll, for example, at Brown University, where in 22 and 23, 5.6 uh 5% of students identified as non-binary or trans, and now that number has dropped in half.
	It's like 2.5%.
	Probably if if the um trans issue remains controversial the way it is now, that number's gonna drop even further.
	And this, by the way, I'm just I just gave you the single example of Brown University.
	Uh, we can look at the data more generally, uh, and we see that there's been sort of similar drops.
	Um, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the number of self-identifying trans people was something somewhere between 5.2 and 6.8% in the last few years.
	Now it's dropped to 3.6%.
	So these are actually significant drops.
	We're talking about drops of 30 to 50%.
	And what does it tell you?
	What it really tells you is that fashions are changing.
	What it really tells you is, well, one thing it tells you is that mental illness had evidently gone up dramatically in this country.
	It's now leveling off a little bit.
	In other words, fewer people are mentally ill, and no surprise, fewer people are declaring themselves to be trans.
	Not only that, but there is a strong kind of anti-woke vibe shift in the country, and that is being felt even in the kind of woke precincts of elite universities.
	Uh, the anti-woke movement is stronger now in all sectors of society.
	And so what we're finding is that the woke progressives, who at one time thought it was just really neat and really cool to identify as trans, they don't identify as trans so easily anymore.
	Let's remember that the trans group generally comes out of the left.
	You don't find very many kind of conservatives who identify as trans or Christians or religious people.
	Now there are some, and sometimes what you have is uh this phenomenon by itself is not new, rebellious kids raised in conservative Christian families, and they want to believe and do the exact opposite of what their parents taught them to do, and so they go in the opposite direction.
	Their parents say, don't have sex before marriage, they go out and have sex before marriage.
	I hope you're not gay.
	They're like, yes, I'm gay.
	Uh and so one can see in some way the trans phenomenon as a mode of rebellion against one's parents, against one's pastor, against one's small town upbringing.
	Some of that has gone on for a while now.
	But again, the point I'm trying to make is that it is slowing down.
	Would I like to say it's kind of gone away, that we're not like dealing with this issue anymore, this craziness is like behind us.
	Yes, I would love to tell you that we're we're not there yet.
	Uh we still are living in a confused society.
	We still have mental illness in the middle of our and what's particularly sad is these are not just mentally ill people who have been broken by the long march of life.
	You know, there are some people who like lose their marbles when they turn 40 or they turn 80.
	Uh, but in this case, we're talking about people who are losing their marbles when they turn like 14 or 15.
	And of course, their parents have already lost their marbles, because any parent who says, hey, my kid is a little confused, I'm going to basically surgically make sure his genitals are removed.
	That's a parent that has some mental problems as well.
	So we're dealing with all this as a society.
	This is all part of MAGA restoration, uh, which is to say that MAGA restoration cannot simply be a matter of adjusting tax Rates and making sure we get plenty of revenue from tariffs and crackdown on political targeting.
	We have to do all that.
	But I think in the end, even MAGA is going to be judged by what kind of improvement can we produce in families, in spirituality, in uh strengthening boys and being boys and becoming strong men in strengthening women and being women and making them in a way good moms and good uh productive members of society and good citizens.
	So MAGA has a lot of work to do, and I'm really glad that we have such a movement that is now in power at a critical time in this country.
	Can it fix everything?
	Probably not, but at least we're getting started, and that by itself is something.
	A few 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's 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 LifeWise, a nonprofit bringing Bible classes to public school students during the school day.
	Charlie was excited about this mission.
	So 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.
	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.
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	It's D-I-N-E-S-H-Dinesh.
	Guys, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome to the podcast someone whom I consider to be a national treasure because not only is he a model of clear reasoning, but his style of interrogation.
	He's one of the few guys in the country that makes you laugh out loud, and he does this regularly.
	And so it's a real joy to welcome Senator John Kennedy, Senator from Louisiana.
	He has a new book that we're going to talk about.
	It's called great title, by the way, How to Test Negative for Stupid.
	Beautiful title, hilarious.
	Senator Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 2016.
	He won re-election in 22.
	He serves on the Appropriations Committee, the Banking Committee, also the Judiciary Committee.
	You can follow him on X at John Kennedy LA, Louisiana.
	Once again, the book How to Test Negative for Stupid.
	Senator Kennedy, welcome to the podcast.
	I really appreciate it.
	I've got to start by asking you about your, well, your very famous name, John Kennedy.
	Is this a name that has haunted you through the years, or it's something that you just shrug and it's like, wow, yeah, I got the name of a famous president.
	I don't have the same middle name, and so it's no big deal.
	Or is it Something you got teased about, and it's something you've had to explain along the way.
	Well, um I guess the best way of saying it, Denish, and thank you for having me is uh it would probably, at least initially, it would probably help me in Massachusetts, and uh depending upon the part of my state hurt me in Louisiana.
	I I'll tell you though, the the uh President Kennedy, of course, was assassinated in 63, but his son, John Jr., got a lot of publicity.
	And when I first ran for office, um, I polled the race to see my name idea, and the polster came back and said, I've got good news and bad news.
	He said, the good news is 40 percent of the people of Louisiana know your name.
	And I said, What's the bad news?
	He said 80% of those 40% think you're the dead president's son.
	And so I said, Well, I'll take it anyway.
	I can get it.
	That's the start.
	Well, not to mention, Senator Kennedy, that if I remember, John Kennedy at one point when he had started his magazine called George, had apparently posed nude on the cover.
	I assume that this is not something that has ever occurred to you to attempt.
	Uh, not unless I wanted to trigger people's gag reflect.
	Wonderful.
	All right.
	Well, let me have you, as we as we talk about your book, I want to um to start by having you just reflect on the quite kind of extraordinary times in in which we live.
	Um I'm old enough to have lived through the Reagan era, uh, of course, the 90s, and then the Obama period.
	It just seems like we're in a somewhat surreal moment in American politics.
	The craziest things seem to rear their head, usually on the left, but even occasionally on the right.
	It strikes me that you are something of you're something that goes a little beyond politics.
	You're a bit of a student of human nature, and you seem to have an eye for the for the ridiculous.
	Um, I want to talk, ask you to comment, if you will.
	Do you think we're living through a normal phase of American politics?
	Or do you think that we'll look back on this, let's say 20 years from now and go, wow, that was really just downright strange living through that particular era.
	I I think great question.
	I think uh the country, the last time I I saw the country this divided, I'll put it this way, was during the Vietnam War.
	It's difficult to tell uh whether it's worse or not as bad, but it clearly the country is divided.
	Um I I don't hate anyone.
	I don't.
	I look for grace wherever I can find it.
	And uh in Washington, that's hard because I'm a conservative.
	About 98% of this town is not.
	Um, but when I say my prayers, I ask God, I said, please don't let me hate, because uh number one, it's immoral, and number two, it uh it affects your judgment.
	Uh and that's the way I approach the Senate.
	I try to be, I try to be objective, but I'm candid.
	God, that's the way I've always been.
	Sometimes it's gotten me in trouble, but but uh God gave me the right to remain silent, but not the ability.
	But I try not to do it.
	I try not to be candid in a mean way.
	Uh some people sometimes think I go over the line, but I really I really try not to.
	Let me ask you it this way.
	Um you said you're not sure if it's better or worse than it used to be in the Vietnam era, but it looks like in the Vietnam era that the division was over like one thing.
	The division was over the war.
	Now, there were some related divisions over civil rights, there were divisions over feminism, there were some divisions over the sexual revolution, but the war was certainly the focal point.
	Do you agree that our division appears to be in some ways more far-reaching in the sense that the left and the right appear to want to take the country not merely in different directions, but in opposite directions.
	Uh, and you can see this.
	Go ahead.
	I'd like you to just comment on that.
	No, I I thought you think you made, as usual, an excellent point.
	I think the division now is uh is much broader.
	Um I think it's why President Trump was elected.
	Um I I think it's why it's why uh uh it's why we're in a lockdown, a shutdown here in Washington.
	Uh This I predict at the moment, I hope I'm wrong, will be the longest shutdown of government uh in on record now in the history of ever.
	Now, somebody think that's a good thing.
	Um, but it right now it's a multiple vehicle pileup.
	And I think for better or worse, Congress really is a reflection, a snapshot uh of the country.
	And uh, you know, that's that's the where we find ourselves.
	But if my message to folks on both sides of the aisle, I'm biased, of course, uh, I'm a Republican.
	Uh I think um I I think Republicans aren't perfect, but the other side's crazy.
	I really believe that, at least the moon wing of the Democratic Party is in control, but I don't hate anyone.
	I know all of my colleagues in the Senate.
	Uh I don't hate a single one.
	Do you see your strategy?
	I'm trying to think about your strategy of asking questions.
	And I'm thinking now specifically of the young man that you had uh who wanted to spend a giant amount of federal money, but he was unable to tell how this would affect the climate change one way or the other.
	Is this going to cool down the you asked him like listen, uh if we were to spend this amount of money, like what what amount of global cooling would we purchase by spending this money?
	And of course he was completely unable to say, and yet he was no less fanatically determined that this money ought to be spent.
	And I think what you were doing is just quite simply, you could almost say bringing out the craziness and doing it not in uh in a mean spirited way at all, but just surgically probing.
	Like, what is it that you are spending this money for?
	And you find that he was kind of dumbfounded.
	Um so clearly what seems to be going on politically is you've got people who are indoctrinated into a position.
	They're not able to empirically check that position against facts.
	Um, but that doesn't diminish their enthusiasm at all.
	And my question to you is how do you make headway with a guy like that?
	Do you think you could even persuade him?
	Or is your goal not to persuade him, but just to kind of expose him as a buffoon so that other people are like, I don't want to be an idiot like this guy.
	Well, many many senators don't ask questions.
	They just talk.
	They talk and they make a speech, and sometimes they read right off of a staff memo.
	That's their business.
	I just don't do it that way.
	Uh the person you're talking about was, I remember it well, he was the deputy secretary, the number two person at the Department of Energy under President Biden.
	And uh no disrespect, but this guy was a chucklehead.
	He he came before of us, us, there were three other witnesses, and he said uh, he basically testified that that we need Congress to spend over the the next decades or two, 50 trillion dollars, not 50 billion dollars, 50 trillion dollars in order for for the United States to be carbon neutral by 2050.
	And I let him go for a while, and then I said, okay, you want us to spend 50 trillion dollars?
	You say it's an emergency.
	If we spend 50 trillion dollars, how much will that either lower world temperatures or at least reduce what you see as the increase in world temperatures?
	And he was dumbfounded.
	He was dumbfounded.
	He he did not have an answer.
	And I was dumbfounded, Denish.
	I I mean, this is the number two at the Department of Energy saying fit spend 50 trillion dollars, not billion, not million, trillion dollars of taxpayer money.
	And he he says he can't measure the result.
	I mean, his commitment to stupid was impressive.
	And and he was embarrassed, and he should have been embarrassed, embarrassed.
	And my questioning uh got picked up on social media, and uh he deserved.
	He deserved to uh to be called the carpet.
	So when I listen to this, it occurs to me that somebody like that is committed to the climate change agenda for some other reason.
	In other words, let's say, for example, that you've got all these massive liberal projects that are all taking government money and maybe also undermining the political power of the fossil fuel industry, and the commitment of the Democrats and of the Biden administration is based on that.
	In other words, they want to increase the size of government.
	They see climate change as a pretty convenient and clever mechanism to get the government to do more.
	They see this also politically as benefiting their team because the people who give them money are all invested Al Gore style in various climate projects.
	And so, but they can't say that.
	So they have to come and argue, well, we've got to bring the temperatures down.
	Yes, the humanity is in an existential moment.
	So I interpret this not as that the guy is purely stupid, but he cannot say what his real motives are.
	Just like the Democrats can't say, well, listen, we have to open the borders because this is why we're hoping to get a lot of new people in to change the demographics of the country and long-term vote for.
	They can't say that.
	So they've got to give a different rationale.
	And it seems to me what you're doing is you're puncturing that rationale so that their true rationale kind of becomes more nakedly observable by the general public.
	Well, President Biden's administration spent billions.
	We don't know how many, but hundreds of billions of dollars on climate change.
	It was about two things primarily.
	Number one, it was about the money.
	In the last uh 70 days of the Biden administration, the Department of Energy shoved out the door 78 billion dollars in about two months.
	78 billion dollars to their friends.
	Uh one of the biggest recipients was Ms. Stacey Abram, the uh political activist from Georgia, former uh gubernatorial candidate.
	78 billion dollars to their friends.
	So part of it was the money.
	Uh, number two, it was about control.
	Uh the attitude of most of the people in the Biden administration was look, we're smarter than you, the American people.
	We're more virtuous than uh than you, the American people.
	You need to send to us all of your money and all of your freedom, and we will spin your money for you because we can spend it better than you because we're smarter and more virtuous.
	And you need to just shut up and uh and and let and let us uh tell you how to live your life.
	Well, you you can see, you can imagine the reaction of the American people.
	And I think that's primarily the reason that President Trump uh uh won.
	Uh it was a question of hope voting for for President Trump was a qu was hope, but voting for for vice president Harris was certain more hurt.
	So it was hope versus more hurt.
	Um and I was shocked at the number of people in the Biden administration that uh had this attitude.
	Now I'm not saying I don't know whether President Biden did or didn't, because I think he was clearly suffering from from neurodegenerative disease.
	But I can tell you that the people that had control of the teleprompter believed all this.
	Senator Kennedy, I gotta say that by and large, typically when a politician writes a book, uh I am uh unenthusiastic because as you well know, most politicians' books uh read like campaign documents.
	They have a lot of boilerplate, they're just not not fun to read.
	But I think your book, even the title is telegraphing that it's not a typical politician's book.
	First of all, you have a certain genius for for phraseology and how to test negative for stupid, one of the best book titles I've heard about.
	So let's let's give the audience uh of my viewers and listeners an idea.
	What can they expect to find in this book?
	Are they going to find your trademark wit and humor?
	Are they going to find a surgical dissection of Washington, D.C.?
	Do you name names?
	Tell us what's in this book that we can look forward to.
	Well, I do name names.
	It's not a policy book per se.
	It's a story book.
	I use stories to try to make my points about policy.
	Many of the stories are funny, some are bizarre.
	All of them are true.
	Every single one of them.
	I use stories, for example, to explain what the Senate is really like from the inside to explain to the American people why normal in Washington, D.C. is just a setting on a cloth on the clothes dryer.
	And to explain why it doesn't have to be that way.
	We just have a return to common sense.
	I talk about what it's really like, the agony and the ecstasy, more ecstasy than agony.
	What it's really like to work with President Trump behind the scenes.
	I talk about that.
	I tell stories about Cruz, Ted Cruz, and Chuck Grassley and Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and John Fetterman, and uh they're all true.
	Now I try not to be mean-spirited, but but but they're accurate.
	And if you read this book, you'll understand why we're we're in a shutdown.
	Um I think this book, I hope this book will make you think.
	Um it may make you laugh, it may make you daydrink, but it is the unvarnished truth.
	It sounds like wow.
	It sounds like great stuff, I gotta say.
	And uh, guys, I've been talking to Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.
	Follow him on X at John Kennedy LA for Louisiana, and the book.
	It is available, it is out, check it out.
	How to test negative for stupid.
	Senator Kennedy, thank you very much for joining me.
	I really appreciate it.
	You're a total banger, man.
	Thank you.
	Thanks.
	You're a rock star, Denish.
	Hey, I appreciate it.
	Thank you so much.
	One of the um benefits of this study on life after death is that we find ourselves learning a bunch of things along the way that relate to life after death, but have a much broader or kind of wider application.
	And that's going to be the case today.
	We're going to look at one of the problems with the verification principle of the philosopher David Hume.
	Now, to refresh your memory from last time, the verification principle kind of goes like this.
	There are two ways to decide if something is true or false.
	And only two ways.
	One is it's true by definition.
	And therefore, if I say, for example, that um two plus two is four, that's true by definition.
	I don't even need two oranges and two more oranges to figure out it's four.
	I know that it's for uh because I can abstractly figure that out in my head.
	Uh it's true, as some people say, by tautology.
	But um, that's one way of knowing if something is true.
	It's true by definition.
	Um, the other way for things to be true, and this is the more important way, is it's true by verification.
	It's true by experience.
	It's true because if I were to say there's a tiger in the next room, well, there's only one way for us to know.
	Let's go take a look and see if we see a tiger in the next room.
	And if we do, then we have corroborated, we verified that, yeah, there's a tiger in the next room, and therefore we know something to be true on that basis.
	Now, according to the skeptics, according to people who don't believe in God, don't believe in life after death, life after death can't be true because it is not true by definition, and it cannot be empirically verified.
	And I was saying last time that the one of the problems with this mode of reasoning, Hume's verification principle, is you can't even apply it to itself.
	If you apply it to the verification Principle.
	Is the verification principle true by definition?
	No.
	Is there a way to empirically verify or check to see if it's true?
	No.
	So the verification principle cannot survive its own standard.
	But today I want to move on beyond that to make a point that I think is far more powerful and far more profound.
	And that point actually concerns the validity of science itself.
	Let's remember that many of the champions of Hume's verification principle are, well, I call them logical positivists, but that's just a technical name.
	They're basically people who think that scientific knowledge is solid and secure, but metaphysical knowledge, knowledge about God or knowledge about good and evil, knowledge about life after death, those things are subjective.
	That comes down to what you believe.
	That comes down to a matter of faith.
	That comes to a matter of arbitrarily, do you choose to believe it or not?
	But scientific truths are objective.
	They have a certain, let's call it logical force.
	They are logically true, or to go even further, they are logically necessary.
	And they have to be logically necessary, it seems, because if not, science wouldn't work.
	Planes wouldn't fly.
	Medical treatments wouldn't work.
	You couldn't take two particles of hydrogen and one particle of oxygen and be sure that you're going to get water.
	But we do seem to be sure that we can get water.
	And therefore, it looks like these scientific principles are the most secure type of knowledge that we can have, and that we do not need to doubt them in any case at all.
	Now what I want to do is to logically challenge this idea and submit that it is in fact not the case.
	To put it somewhat differently, properly applied, Hume's verification principle wipes out the whole of science.
	There is no scientific law at all that can meet this Humean test.
	And at first glance, what I seem to be saying is so shocking that you think that can't possibly be true.
	Surely I can come up with a scientific law of the most basic kind, and then I will show that it meets Hume's test.
	So I invite you to try to do this in your head.
	Try to pick a scientific law.
	I'm not even going to pick something really complex.
	I'm not going to pick like the inverse square law.
	I'm not going to pick like E equals MC square.
	Let's take something that seems to be true almost like straight out by observation itself.
	And that is, let's take the speed of light.
	Now, light travels at a known speed.
	It is, well, it's something like 250,000 kilometers, 186,000 miles per second.
	But that doesn't matter.
	Let's just call it speed C, which is the common scientific parlance for the speed of light.
	Now, let me ask you this question.
	How do we know that light always and everywhere travels at that speed?
	I want to submit we don't know.
	We can't know.
	The only way to know would be to measure light always and everywhere and record its speed, and we can't possibly do that.
	Not only can we not possibly do that because we don't have the instruments to do it, we would also be dealing with the fact that light is believed to have traveled at that speed in the past.
	Let's just say 10,000 years ago.
	But there was no one 10,000 years ago to measure the speed of light.
	And so how do we know that light then traveled at that speed?
	You can say, well, light travels at that speed now, and we assume that it traveled at that speed then, but notice that you've put this rather dubious word, assume.
	In other words, you have now assumed the thing that I'm asking you to prove.
	You are taking for granted, you are conjecturing that just because you saw light travel at one speed now, it must have always traveled at that speed.
	In fact, you are making further assumptions that if you go far out into the universe, let's say many light years away, where we have no light meters, we have no easy way to measure the speed of light.
	Let's even say that the speed of light traveling outside the radius of all human knowledge, more than 14 and a half million light years away, billion light years away, the question then becomes how do we know that light there outside the radius of all our available knowledge travels at speed C?
	We don't know.
	We can assume it does, we can guess it does.
	Um we can sort of act on the practical assumption that it does, but all of this is just like I say, this is conjecture, this is guesswork.
	The truth of it is we do not know.
	And the philosopher Karl Popper, who thought a lot about this subject, basically concluded that all scientific laws are like this.
	And let's put the point in its more general and perhaps most startling way.
	From no amount of empirical observations, uh, however large, can you derive a general proposition or a general law that is true as a matter of logic?
	Now, let me give a common example from human history to show why this is true.
	For hundreds of years, in fact, for thousands of years, there was in Western civilization the general statement that all swans are white.
	Now, from where did people arrive at this general statement?
	Well, they arrived at it from observing swans.
	And not one swan, not a thousand swans, millions upon millions upon millions of swans, and every single swan you see is white.
	So this is kind of similar to saying every time we see a light beam, we pull out our light stick and we measure it, we always get the same answer, and therefore, based upon repeated observations, we conclude that light must be traveling always and everywhere at that speed.
	But here's the point.
	When it comes to swans, it turns out that the only swans we see, even though there are many millions of them, are the swans within a certain geographical orbit.
	And when the white man first arrived in the shores of Australia, the white man saw, to his complete astonishment, black swans.
	Now, how many black swans does it take to refute the general law?
	It was never a law, but people thought it was a law, and they thought it was a law so much that in Western poetry people will talk about white as a swan.
	This became actually a kind of phrase, almost a saying in the West, but now we know that it's based upon something that's empirically been refuted.
	In other words, our circumference of knowledge was just not big enough.
	We kept saying that all swans are white simply because all the swans we had ever seen were white, and then it just took one black swan, and there goes the law that all swans are white.
	And so the point here being that when you make observations, it's true, each observation piles up on top of the other, but no amount of observations, even if you keep adding them up, ever leads to a logical view that you can't see something tomorrow.
	Even let's take something as obvious as the sun rises every morning.
	Yeah, the sun rises every morning, it's risen every morning since you were born, it's risen every morning since I was born.
	I expect the sun to rise tomorrow, but guess what?
	Is there some logical necessity that makes the sun rise tomorrow?
	Let's say, for example, that there is a change in orbits.
	Let's say, for example, there's some sort of seismic or cosmic event.
	Let's say, for example, that the Earth's position in the solar system is somehow dislocated because of a meteor or some gravitational force that we don't even know, and then we wake up one morning and the sun doesn't rise.
	Will that be somehow a logical contradiction?
	No.
	It'll just be something unexpected.
	We didn't think this was going to happen.
	We thought it's unlikely based on past experience, but there was never any kind of quote law that made the sun rise tomorrow just because you and I have seen it do it again and again and again.
	So this point, which is actually hard to digest, I've thought about it on and off for many, many years, is nevertheless logically irrefutable to repeat from no amount of empirical observations, however big, uh, however sizable, however large, can you derive a general law that is true as a matter of logic, true as a matter of necessity.
	It must always be the case.
	And so I'll I'll leave it here for now.
	But what I want to show is that this Humean principle of verification is inadequate.
	It's not, It is not a principle that we can fully go on board with.
	Why?
	Because not only does it seem to wipe out metaphysical truth, it wipes out all the scientific laws in existence altogether.
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