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Oct. 16, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
58:35
PROPHECY AND PEACE PLANS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1191
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Is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians?
The revival of an ancient conflict recorded in the Bible.
The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
What if there was gonna be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
The Dragon's Prophecy.
Watch it now, or buy the DVD at the Dragons Prophecyfilm.com.
Coming up, I'll talk about how Trump's peace plan fits into the narrative of Bible prophecy.
I'll review the Supreme Court hearing on race-based minority districts, and Seth Dylan, the CEO, the editor of the Babylon B joins me.
We're gonna talk about keeping a sense of humor in these strange and perilous times.
Uh hey, if you're watching on YouTube, XOR Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
Also, by the way, here we go.
This is the Dragon's Prophecy now in DVD, the number one DVD in the country on Amazon.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
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I want to talk about Trump's messianic vision for the Middle East.
I use this term messianic vision because of all I think it is quite likely, maybe even demonstrably the case that Trump is an instrument of divine will and divine providence.
He's being I'm you may say used by God.
Now this is not the same as saying that Trump is a godly man or Trump is a devout Christian.
Trump says funny things that suggest that he has at best a sort of whimsical understanding of Christianity.
Uh recently he made some quip about the fact I don't really know if I can make it to heaven.
It's that maybe too high for me to go.
Uh you know, I'm an Air Force One, that may be as high as I'm gonna get.
Uh but uh but maybe I will, you know, I've done a lot for people.
Now, right away you realize this is a bit of a Christian heresy.
Doing a lot for people doesn't in fact get you into heaven.
I'm not sure if Trump is even being serious in this kind of rhetoric.
It is he's chatting on the plane.
But I will say that Trump has outlined this sort of magnificent vision of peace in the Middle East as far as the eye can see.
A um a view of prosperity and security, and uh the Arabs and the Jews kind of coming together, almost like the biblical image of the lion and the lamb.
And the question is, how seriously can you take any of this?
At a certain level, it seems uh problematic, it seems naive.
I've been on a couple of uh podcasts with uh actually Israeli podcasters, and they are downright I mean borderline scornful about this type of rhetoric.
They they love Trump, they recognize the magnitude of what he's already done.
They credit him, uh not Ned and Yahoo or more than Ned and Yahoo for bringing the hostages home.
But at the same time, they're like, why is he going over the top like this?
And I think what Trump is doing here is not even so much diagnosing what is going to come.
He's giving a sort of a vision of what he sees as a possible future.
Trump is saying, in effect, look, these people have had war, I'm going to offer them peace.
Uh, they've had uncertainty, I'm going to give them the prospect of security.
They've all been unemployed, they seem to be doing nothing but standing on the street.
I'm going to offer them the idea of having productive jobs and a better path for their children and genuine genuine education and so on.
So I think Trump's view is this is the best we can do.
You can't force people to live a better life.
You can't force them to educate their kids, you can't force them to get jobs, but you can offer them an environment in which those things are possible, and they might still say no.
They might say, as some of them do say, we love death more than life.
We want to sacrifice our children and not raise them.
Uh, we prefer hardship uh to ease, and uh we um were motivated by the exciting prospect of martyrdom, uh not the exciting prospect of uh you know adding to our kitchen or living in a in a livable environment.
Now, in some ways, I think um when we look at biblical prophecy, it's a little difficult to try to uh fill it all out.
And I say that because unlike uh some Christians who are really into biblical prophecy and it will give you blow by blow accounts of what's going to happen, this first and this next, and then the three years of this and the seven years of that, I find that the book of Revelation is quite uh veiled, quite obscure, and maybe intentionally so.
So in the Dragon's Prophecy, we don't uh try to give you this kind of a detailed chronology, not at all, but what we do look is for like the big signposts.
And what the big signposts say is number one, uh, this issue uh of Israel, of the Middle East, is not going to be finally or ultimately settled till the end of time.
And by the way, this is not just a biblical diagnosis, you just have to look at the psychology of the people in the region.
Uh, look at the psychology of Hamas, look at its charter, uh, look at the psychology of the global jihadis.
I think that there's plenty of rational and empirical ground for seeing the Bible as utterly realistic in this matter.
And um and also we look for one of the big signs of the last age, and that is the rising temperature, both of anti-Judaism, anti-Israel, but also anti-Christianity.
And again, the Bible predicts it, and the question is: do we not see it?
Look around the world.
Does it look like there is a um there are more attacks on the Jews?
Does it look like anti-Semitism is showing up even in places like on the right where it's been unfamiliar for a long time and now we see it in a very vehement uh form.
A uh almost a generation ago, in fact, I'm thinking this is uh 2006.
I I wrote this book called The The Enemy at Home.
It was a very controversial book at the time.
Uh, it was written in the aftermath of 9-11, uh, when the uh Iraq war was underway.
And in the book, I argued that the theory that had been put forward by Samuel Huntington, the clash of civilizations, us, the West against them, the Islamic world, was too simple.
Why?
Because there wasn't any clear us, and there even wasn't a clear them.
The us, the West, is divided between the right and the left, the cultural, conservative right, the cultural left.
And I predicted that the cultural left is going to make common cause with the Islamic jihadis.
In other words, I predicted in 2006, this is really two decades before now, two decades before it's happened, I predicted what is now often called the red-green alliance.
Now, when I predicted it, it caused a big scandal.
The National Review, which I was on their publications board, wrote very critically of me.
What's Dinesh talking about?
Dinesh is really lost his mind.
And there were people at the Hoover Institution where I was a scholar who actually threatened to resign over this kind of scandalous as they saw it, an attempt to divide America.
Victor Davis Hansen of all people said, I'm very surprised that you know Dinesh is saying all this.
Is he even a patriot?
Does he even love America?
I mean, I had written a book called What's So Great About America.
So this is a very strange thing to say about me coming from the great Victor Davis Hansen.
I want to emphasize, I think Hansen has retreated from that position.
Everything is fine between me and Victor.
I think Victor actually would recognize today and be man enough to say I was that he that I was right and he was wrong.
But I give you some idea because I've been trying to create some context for some of the anti-Israel kind of anti-Jewish sentiment coming from the right.
And I want to put it in this broader context of the fact that when the Red-Green Alliance was first put forward by me in 2006, it met with scandalous reaction and in fact general rejection.
And this is long before Tucker Carlson was even significantly on the scene.
It's long before Marjorie Taylor Green or Candace Owens.
But they are now entering this debate.
And they're entering this debate in such a way, I think, as to strengthen the red-green alliance.
I saw this morning a second video of a jihadi basically praising what he called Sheikh Tucker.
Sheikh Tucker.
Tucker has now become an Islamic sheikh.
True, I haven't seen him really in one of those robes with uh, you know, the thing over his head, uh, like a Kuwaiti uh or Omani Sheikh, but Sheikh Tucker, and he used the phrase which I had heard before, Sheikah, Sheikh a Candace.
So here you have a jihadi basically giving a rhetorical embrace of Tucker Carlson and Candace.
And what he's really saying is, you're on our side.
You're on the jihadi side.
Everything you're doing is undermining America.
It's undermining conservatives, uh, it's undermining the Jews, it's undermining the closeness between the Jews and the Christians, and what it's doing is it's helping us.
Uh, it's helping the red green alliance.
So uh the assistance here is not just for the jihadis, that would be bad enough, but it's also helping the cultural left.
Why?
For the obvious reason that the cultural left and the jihadis are marching in the same column.
They're marching on the same side.
So to undermine one side, it's like a seesaw.
You undermine one side, and the other side is gonna go up.
You're gonna help the other side by by doing so.
And that is the sad reality of what is happening here.
Trump, I think is watching this.
He hasn't gotten in the middle of it yet.
It's very clear from what Trump has said that Trump sees it my way and not their way.
Uh Trump believes in a coalition of sort of good Muslims, let's call them traditional Muslims.
When Trump was signing the peace deal, you saw he was surrounded by Muslims, uh, leaders from Pakistan, leaders from Emirates, leaders from Bahrain, leaders from Oman, from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, uh, Egypt.
So Trump is not declaring here a war against Islam.
What Trump is doing is playing out the theme of the enemy at home, which is to say, if there is a red-green alliance of the bad guys, let's call it the dragon's platoons, there needs to be a reciprocal alliance between the Jews and the Christians, between Israel and the United States.
Let's call it the platoons of God or the platoons of good to take on and defeat the forces of evil.
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The Supreme Court yesterday heard an important case.
A case that involves the idea of racial redistricting.
Now we're not talking about redistricting or gerrymandering per se.
Legislatures in various states have the right and the ability to draw districts pretty much however they want.
And no surprise, in the red states, they tend to draw them to favor conservative or Republican candidates.
In the blue states, they draw them to favor Democrats.
This has been going on for a very long time.
But you notice that the red states do not draw their districts quite as blatantly as the blue states.
And it's not simply because Republicans are sort of less dedicated to this redistricting or gerrymandering than Democrats.
That's not the reason.
The reason is actually the Voting Rights Act.
And the reason is that ever since the civil rights laws of the 1960s, the voting rights act has been interpreted in such a way that minorities have to get adequate representation.
Now, a lot of these minorities, by the way, live in red states.
They live in states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma.
And so what's happened is that the courts have forced these red states to create majority black districts.
The term minority applies to Hispanics as well, but it's mainly applied to blacks.
And so you've had red states that are forced to create these black districts in order to get black representation.
It's a kind of affirmative action, as I said yesterday, as applied to voting.
And really what's before the Supreme Court is should this practice be stopped?
In other words, if we're moving toward a colorblind society, if we're getting rid of affirmative action in university admissions and federal contracting in government jobs and promotions, then why not get rid of race-based thinking in drawing congressional lines as Well, I think this is actually where the Supreme Court is going.
And this is what a majority of the court is going to decide.
Just listening to the arguments, it's pretty clear that there was a lot of skepticism toward this idea of race-based districts.
Now, in a rather peculiar moment, Justice Katanji Jackson, who can kind of be counted on to say the most outlandish and sometimes the dumbest things that you're going to get from the court.
In previous eruptions, she has even been chastised by Elena Kagan, and she gets looks from Soto Mayor.
So she is, in a sense, in a in a league of her own.
But she makes this really amazing statement where she says that the reason that you need black majority districts is black people are like the disabled.
She says they don't have equal access to the voting system.
They're disabled.
So the idea here is that just as disabled people need a ramp, they need special treatment.
They need extra solicitousness because you can't just say, hey, I've got a bunch of stairs.
Okay, why don't you just roll your wheelchair up the stairs?
No, I can't.
I'm disabled.
So no one is arguing with the logic of that.
But what Katanji Jackson is saying is that blacks as a group are basically like the physically or mentally handicapped.
This is, I think, a very shocking thing for her to say.
In fact, this is the kind of thing that racists say.
And I think the rest of the court looked over at her as if to say, are you seriously contending that blacks are somehow prevented or disabled from just showing up to vote on the same basis as whites?
And so I think that this preposterous statement is not going to stand.
Um, nor is the court going to go in that direction.
Right now, the American South is insanely rigged because of the voting rights act against Republicans.
In normal redistricting, these Southern states, which are by and large red states, would have a lot more red seats.
And if the Supreme Court decides the way I think it will and really ought to, which is removing the consideration of race from the whole area of congressional redistricting, what you'll find is that these southern states draw their districts the way the blue states do, uh, the way northern states do, the way everybody else does, draw them in a way that tends to be beneficial to the ruling party in that state, because that's the legislature that controls that state.
So what we have now is the voting rights act is used as an instrument of undermining electoral democracy and thwarting political representation and giving an unfair advantage to the Democrats.
And I hope that as a result of this hearing, decision by the way, to come in several months, the Supreme Court puts an end to this nefarious practice.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast.
Our friend Seth Dylan.
He is the CEO of the Babylon B. He's an entrepreneur.
He's a venture investor, a speaker, a humorist.
And you can follow him on X at Seth Dillon, of course, the website, Babylon B dot com.
Hey, I see here that the Babylon B has overtaken the onion in traffic and engagement.
Excellent news.
Seth, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I remember when you guys were just a fledgling operation, just coming out the gate with this kind of wry, whimsical sense of humor.
And looks like you've just grown and grown and grown.
So what's it been like to preside over this, you know, just uh this enterprise that has now become a distinctive feature of our public life.
Well, it hasn't all been uh well, thank thank you for having me back, by the way.
Um it hasn't been all smooth sailing.
The the growth has has uh actually been driven quite a bit by the controversy because um there's been so many efforts over the years, you know, to censor the Babylon B to fact check our jokes, uh rate them false and then try to penalize us, accuse us of incitement to violence or hate speech, something like that.
So, you know, we've been dealing with those issues um both on the platforms but also with state laws uh that our jokes run afoul of uh for several years.
But every time that happens, you know, all these efforts to kind of silence and suppress the bee's voice, it's really it's the great backfiring, it's the streizant effect thing, you know.
We've seen growth as a result of that because we've pushed back on it.
We've had a lot of people support us, uh, most notably Elon Musk coming to our rescue to buy Twitter and set us free from Twitter jail.
Um, so you know, those those efforts to suppress our voice have in many ways amplified it.
And uh you see that over and over again.
You see, with with what happened with with Charlie Kirk, you know, Charlie's voice is bigger now than ever uh because they tried to silence him.
And he's reaching his message is reaching more people than ever.
So we've been beneficiaries of that um too.
Um, of course, you know, um incredibly tragic that his life was taken, but it is amazing how that often works, where the efforts to suppress you amplify you.
You know, a lot of people may not really know about the connection between the Babylon B and Elon buying Twitter.
Uh if I remember at one point, I don't know if it was you or somebody else at the B who tweeted at Elon, basically saying you might consider buying Twitter, and Elon, in his very kind of Elon mode, just essentially messaged back how much would it cost?
How much is it?
Yeah.
How much is it?
Well, it turns out it was 44 billion dollars.
Wow.
So uh yeah, when we uh that story, I mean, I'll give you just kind of a brief rundown of it.
You know, we got suspended because we had had done a joke that you're not allowed to tell.
You know, we we misgendered Admiral Rachel Levine by referring to um uh Rachel Vina's our pick for man of the year.
It Rachel Levine had been named Woman of the Year by USA Today.
And so our response was to name Rachel Vin Man of the Year.
Um that's what we do.
We're provocative that way.
But we knew that uh we knew that we would be violating the rules if we did that, and then it might come with a penalty, and of course it did.
And then we had, you know, the choice like do we delete this and take it down to get our account back?
And we refuse to do that.
And so it was this kind of like principled stand that we're taking.
We're like, this is this is expression where we should be allowed um to speak.
We should be allowed to tell these jokes, we should be allowed to push back on these bad ideas.
In fact, we need to push back on these bad ideas every way that we can because they're so harmful.
Um and so if you know, this is where we're gonna take our stand.
This is the hill we're gonna die on.
And we had no idea that it would catch Elon's attention and that he was seriously considering buying Twitter already, and that it was kind of like, you know, well, if comedy's not legal, something really needs to happen here.
So he's been a great friend to us and um a great friend to everyone who values liberty and wants to be able to uh engage in the marketplace of ideas and contend for what's good and true.
So um we handed him an IOU for 44 billion when we saw him next.
That's right.
Well, maybe if you get big enough and your stock gets large enough, uh you might be able to uh buy Twitter yourself.
One day, one day.
We'll see.
Um The B's got to get a little bit bigger than this.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, you may have to get funnier.
Yeah.
Tell me Toby's laughing.
Did you have to say that?
Uh listen, um, set let's talk about something.
You know, one of the consequences of having free speech is that, you know, we now have uh X being a really a torrent of all kinds of wild ideas.
Quite honestly, I think it's fantastic.
I don't have a problem with it.
I like to see people speaking their mind.
I even think that to have certain taboos set to the side, people say what they really think.
I'm thinking here of like the Nick Fuentes of the world.
Uh I would rather let them speak within the bounds of what's legal.
That's kind of the Elon Musk standard, uh, rather than try to somehow shut them down or suppress them.
Um, he's a good example too, because you've engaged him head on and we've had a discussion instead of calling for his silencing and and suppression and censorship, you had a conversation with him.
Right.
And I will tell you, just between us, um, well, not just between us because we're on my podcast, but even Charlie Kirk.
Turn it off real quick.
Cut your mic.
Yeah, that's right.
Uh, even Charlie Kirk was very unnerved that I was doing the debate with Fuentes, he sent me some like very manic text to the effect like, why are you like platforming this guy?
Uh almost as if in the wishful hope that not to platform him is somehow going to be to uh gonna cut him off from public recognition.
But you know, Nick was uh had uh kind of a gathering storm of followers, a lot of young people who were attracted to him precisely because he was Mr. I will say what you're thinking without any sense of being of restriction.
Um but let me ask you this.
You recently posted something I think very interesting, which is uh you are you were pushing back, I think, against some forces on the right that are uh taking the view, I I I I'll identify this loosely with Megan Kelly, but there may be others who have the same view.
It's a position that you describe as no enemies to the right.
Uh to summarize kind of what Megan said, she basically said, look, uh, I'm not gonna criticize Tucker uh Carlson uh because uh she said he's a really good friend of mine.
And so whether he's an anti-Semite or not, I don't really care.
Um, because he's a good guy as far as I'm concerned.
And and with Candace Owen, she said, well, she's a young mom, she's got a bunch of kids, she's facing a lot of issues, and so if she's a raging anti-Semite, I'm just not gonna go there.
Our enemies are on the left.
Now, um, you know, it's her prerogative to say that, but I'd like you to analyze that position for a moment.
It certainly hasn't been my position.
Uh but there are people who push back on me and go, well, Dinesh, why are you taking this kind of position?
Why are you calling out people on our own side?
How do you kind of adjudicate uh responsibility?
We are in a fight with the left.
Uh and there is a sort of reasonable position that says, hey, listen, if we are two teams, uh let our team should come together in taking on the bad guys.
Uh and if we divide our own forces, that will be to our own detriment.
Uh how do you make sense of all this?
Well, it's funny you say to take on the bad guys.
Uh I I think it's a mistake to think bad guys can only be on one side.
You know, when I when we when I summarize the Babylon B's mission, um, I often try to put it as succinctly as I can.
I say our mission is to ridicule bad ideas.
Um notice I didn't say ridicule the left.
I said ridicule bad idea, you know, bad ideas can live anywhere.
They can be on the left or the right.
And uh, and if you're not willing to confront them, if you're not willing to confront bad ideas and bad actors wherever they are, then you're not in a fight of good versus evil.
You're just in a fight of your side versus their side.
And it doesn't any longer become about what's good and what's true.
And so I I've heard the argument what you articulated, I think you accurately represented what Megan Kelly had said.
I think you know others have put it in different terms, they've framed it differently.
They're talking about the need for unity.
Um they use that word where they're, you know, what they mean is we need to win.
The goal is to win, um, politically, of course, culturally.
Uh, and in order to do that, we need to have unity, we need to be working together.
We don't want to be, you know, undermining each other and and in fighting will, you know, inhibit us, it will, it will handicap us, it will, it will put us at a disadvantage because the left is going to stick with their own.
They're gonna fight as a unified front.
Um the surface, I think that sounds good.
You know, it sounds reasonable, it makes a lot of sense.
You you certainly don't want to be a fractured and divided uh movement going into battle, of course, you know, battle's a good analogy for that, right?
If your own, if your own forces are divided against each other, you're not gonna fight the enemy very effectively.
But I like to try to frame what I mean by the enemy in terms of what's good and what's wrong, you know, what's right, what's wrong.
Uh, I don't think the bad guys are explicitly or exclusively on the left.
Um, I think a lot of the worst ideas are on the left, but not exclusively.
So uh, you know, when I say that I reject the no enemies to the right principle, I I explain my reasoning for it.
I I think the reason that that's a bad principle is because um it's what it's designed to do, uh, from my perspective, this is what I truly believe.
It's it's not designed to make sure that we're actually unified so that we can win.
Um, I think it's designed to allow for extremists, for radicals, for the bad actors on the fringes of the right to rise to more power and prominence that they would otherwise have because they're doing it unchallenged.
Um it's a principle that they constantly want you to abide by.
Now they're happy to attack you, uh, especially if you um criticize them.
Um they just want to be untouched so that they can be mainstreamed.
And I don't think that that's very wise.
And I don't think that's a strategy for winning either, because as I, as I explained in one of my posts, you know, it's like if you find out if you're diagnosed with cancer, um, and I think we have cancer on the right.
That's why I'm using this analogy.
But if you're diagnosed with cancer and you decide I'm not gonna treat it, um, then what's gonna happen?
Well, the cancer is gonna spread and it's gonna kill you.
That's not a strategy for winning, it's not a strategy for thriving and and uh and and finding success.
You gotta deal with the cancer, you've got to cut it out, or you're not gonna be healthy and you're not gonna be able to fight anyone or anything.
And so um I think it's it's just two different perspectives.
One perspective is we gotta unite if we're gonna win.
The other perspective is we need to kill the cancer if we're gonna survive and be healthy enough to fight.
And so that's my perspective.
That's where I land on it.
And I don't think I'll just one more thought here and I'll let you respond, but I don't think that winning is even possible.
If you've united with the wrong people, overlooked uh the terrible ideas that they're advancing, and you're joining in a in a movement that is now post-constitutional, revisionist, engages in all kinds of identitarian collectivist scapegoating and all of these things, these grievanced-based narratives that mirror the woke left.
If you're abandoning your principles, if you're trampling on the constitution and saying that we're we're not gonna fight by the, you know, uh by the standards that we used to, conservatism didn't conserve anything.
We have to throw it out the window and we got to go really hard with this authoritarian, you know, woke right mindset.
Uh, then how is that winning?
I don't see how that's winning.
You're not you're not actually defeating the enemy.
You're becoming more and more like the enemy, or you're becoming more and more like the caricature they've always made of you.
Yeah, this is a really good point.
I think that, you know, the Trump is in many ways a departure from Reagan.
Uh there's a different tone with MAGA than there was in the Reagan years.
But there are also some important continuities, right?
Uh Trump, for example, is just as pro-Israel as Reagan.
Um the division is coming really from this faction on the MAGA right that is trying to take a longtime position of conservatism and of the Republican Party, and basically say, no, let's drive a wedge between America and Israel.
Um, and And this comes, by the way, pre-packaged with not just a political critique, but I think as you and I recognize more than most, uh, a rather alarming theological proposition, which is sort of let's cut Christianity away from Judaism.
In other words, let's cut the new testament out from the old.
And this poses uh theological problems quite apart from the politics of the whole situation.
And I think what you're saying is that for us simply to kind of go along with this in the name of unity, is not only intellectually dishonest, uh, is not only breaking the conservative stream as it goes back to Reagan and and earlier, but even more than that, it is a um uh it is a politically losing strategy.
I mean, we can't really can you imagine us campaigning in 2028 on themes like Sharia law is not so bad.
Right, right, you know, or it was Hitler.
Neither was Hitler, and then you have a young guys, uh some young guys, admittedly in in a in a fit of of peak, but nevertheless, black people are like monkeys.
I mean, if you go around, you think you can win on this kind of a platform?
It's one thing to say, all right, these young people are really frustrated, and so they're just saying things because they're angry at the world and they're angry because they don't have the American dream.
It's one thing to sort of explain uh why they're they're flying off the handle, so to speak.
It's another thing to take their flying off the handle statements and make them the platform of the Republican Party.
It's insane.
Yeah, you can't run on a, you know, oh, I think Hitler was right about the Jews, and he handled that problem pretty well.
And uh, you know, America it was founded by white people, four people, and everyone else can get the hell out.
Uh yeah, you're not gonna get elected on that platform.
So I don't see that as a winning, I don't see as you're compromising both your own ethics and your own principles to partner with people who will drag you down and drown you, not help you win.
So none of it makes sense to me.
None of it makes sense to me.
I I I think I think part of the rationale and justification for, or not with the rationale, but part of the um maybe the internal justification, the way that people are justifying it to themselves, this idea that we need to do this, is they don't want to be the ones to confront these bad actors.
They don't want to, these there's now been enough mainstreaming of these ideas.
There's now enough traction, and they and some of them are powerful and prominent enough, they will attack you.
They've tried to make me an example.
You know, I've been attacked so ruthlessly, I'm now getting death threats on a regular basis, not from the left, but from the right, because I've stood up to this stuff and challenged it.
Um so they're they're mentioning my name all the time and and and sending their armies after me.
And so, you know, I'm I'm an example of what will happen to you if you stand up to this.
Now, who wants to go through that?
Who wants to deal with that?
Easier to just say, oh, let's all get along.
Then you're not alienating a large portion of your potential audience, the audience capture that you're looking for for your podcast or whatever is you're trying to grow and make more money, um, and you're not bringing all those arrows in your direction.
So there are um there are short-term survival uh benefits, uh, profit benefits to not confronting these problems.
I don't think that's the reason to call for unity.
Uh I will also just point out one more thing.
You know, the the way that this is a losing story, or the way that we can tell that this is a losing strategy.
I mean, look no further than the example of the left.
You know, the left um the left let the radicals take the reins.
Uh they pushed these insane ideas into the culture.
They started putting drag shows in front of kids and you know, critical race theory in the in the classrooms and um men and women's sports and all of these things.
And it got to the point where reasonable, normal people said enough.
They started showing up at school board meetings, objecting to the content of the books and the and the and the lectures and the classrooms, and um, and they started pushing back very aggressively.
We're now notching win after win in both the courts and the culture because the left overreached so much, it's backfired on them, and now we have Trump back in office, and we're getting all gaining all of these victories.
And so I think I think the left suffered greatly by handing everything over to the radicals and allowing them to take the lead.
Um, if they had done more to check their own side, they would have been more reasonable, you know.
Bill Maher, who I almost agree with on nothing, you know, there's very few things I agree with him on except for you know free speech, but also how the left has gone too insane.
Um, you know, someone like him would have said, no, we can't lead with our most insane ideas.
This is stupid, this is foolish, this is self-defeating.
Um, And he would be right.
And uh, and so I think, you know, just looking at that example, it's like, well, why would we model ourselves after that and do the same thing on our side?
What's going to be the result?
You end up leading with, you know, your radicals, and you end up uh you end up losing and getting pushed back because the pendulum's gonna swing back against you.
And you get then you're just giving more power to the left.
So that's just that's just foolish and self-defeating.
Uh I gotta ask you, Seth, as as a as a humorist and as a comedian about the CIA.
And of course, by the CIA, I'm referring to the Candace Intelligence Agency.
Oh, is that what it's called now?
Yes, it has Detective Candace at the helm.
She's deputized her own viewers and followers.
They are now FBI agents or CIA agents under her authorization.
And jointly they're going to solve Charlie Kirk's assassination.
Uh, not to mention a lot of other uh who-dunits, including the you know, the true gender identity of uh Brigitte Macron.
Um what do you make?
I mean, to me, you know, there are people horrified by all this, but to me, there's a like a pink manther element to all this.
It's a little it's comedic because it is sort of a, you know, it's like, let's take a look at this pipe.
I wonder if a Mossad agent crawled out of it and shot Charlie Kirk while the other guy on the roof was just getting loaded.
I mean, I know this is black humor, a macabre humor, let's put it differently.
I don't mean black, of course, in a racial context here.
Um the uh what do you what do you make of this sort of weird spectacle?
Well, I you know, I appreciate you looking at it from that perspective because on the one hand, you know, some of what's being alleged is so serious and so personal to me that it's difficult to find any humor in it.
Um, but but I do I I I your point's well taken.
Um this the idea that you know we can't I get the distrust of the government, the FBI, the actual CIA, uh, you know, we've we've been like they've earned it.
They earned our distrust.
Earned distrust, yes, of course they have.
And and it's gonna take a while to earn trust back.
Um we have some good people in in the administration now and at the heads of some of these departments.
Um and uh and you know, they're committed to trying to find the truth about this.
Um there, you know, we have the actual authorities on the case investigating this, and they have access to a lot more information than we have access to.
I do think it is somewhat comical to, you know, sit there in your your basement or your studio or whatever and try to solve this case by just you know guessing at whatever could potentially possibly be an explanation and then saying, well, it must be that.
Um the more wild it gets, uh some of the some of these things are are pretty outlandish and pretty crazy and and pretty comical, but but on the on the other side of it, it is it is um it is very frustrating and also uh uh damaging and aggravating um and even frightening because you know, like I said, I've got I've got death threats coming my way now.
You know, I was I was accused of being part of an intervention, staging an intervention with Charlie to get him back on board with Israel.
And if he didn't listen to us, and if he didn't take our money, um, you know, uh he's gonna wind up dead, and of course he didn't take our money and then he wound up dead.
Um that story was told as if it was true.
That story was told as if it had any any truth to it at all, and it didn't.
You know, this is not this is not um an accurate depiction of what actually went down in you know that the now infamous Hamptons meeting that we had in in August that Charlie invited me to personally.
Um so you know, on a personal level, it's not very funny to me uh what's going on over there, but uh I can see how it would be funny if it doesn't affect you as personally as it's affected me.
Yeah, and what you're saying is that you know, these accusations are made in in an environment where you know, we have a lot of kooks and mentally unhinged people in this country, and uh you don't know what ears these claims are falling on, and you don't know what people will say when they go, all right.
Well, clearly Seth Dylan is you know a uh representative of the establishment and he needs to be dealt with.
So this is this is the soil out of which these these threats are coming from, right?
Yes, yeah, it is.
It is.
And and there's uh uh an environment for it where people are receptive to this, you know, they're looking for these types of wild theories and and they're angry and they want to lash out.
You know, there's things are emotionally charging, especially in the aftermath of Charlie's death.
You know, Charlie meant a lot to a lot of people, including myself, by the way, and I'm sure you.
And so, you know, if you can point at someone who's to blame for what happened to Charlie, of course, there's going to be a lot of anger and rage directed at that person.
Um, if you do that deliberately with lies, that's pretty messed up.
That's that's pretty wicked.
Um, I don't appreciate that at all.
I do think the the funny ass when I the way that I was looking at it, you know, it kind of seems to me like some of this stuff that's been going on, it's it's not just any particular podcast, but there's a lot of conspiracy stuff going on all over the place on the right.
And it feels like there's just this weird invert, we're doing we're trying to do the opposite of Occam's razor.
Instead of trying to uh uh treat the simplest explanation as the one that is the one that we should you know favor and look to first.
It's like we go, we gravitate towards the most complicated, convoluted, far-fetched explanation that does the most damage very conveniently to all the people I don't like.
Um that's the one I'm going to prefer.
It just seems like the at the uh the inverse of uh maybe we'll call it Occam's inverse.
Are you saying you don't believe the idea that the Egyptian plane that was seen in the vicinity of Utah is in fact the key to cracking the Charlie Kirk.
It might have been if UTC meant Utah time, but uh but I don't think that's what that acronym stands for.
Right, right.
Uh yeah, good stuff, Seth.
Guys, I've been talking to Seth Dylan, the very well-balanced CEO of the Babylon B. Follow him on X at Seth Dylan, the website, Babylon B.com.
Uh Seth, thank you very much for coming on.
Thank you, Dinesh.
It's great to talk to you.
I'm in the chapter, one of the early chapters of Life After Death, where I'm I'm cleaning out the debris.
And by that I mean I'm taking on some of the common atheist objections to life after death in order to put the believer and the skeptic, the Christian and the atheist on a level playing field.
Part of this chapter is not aimed at establishing positive knowledge, it's aimed at showing that claims to knowledge on the part of the atheist and the skeptic don't really make any sense.
Now, today we're going to look at a very famous claim made made famous by the um psychologist Sigmund Freud, which tries to explain away belief in God and the afterlife by proclaiming it to be in Freud's well-known phrase, wish fulfillment.
So a number of atheists, very much in the Freudian tradition, say we don't even have to discuss this topic of life after death because it's quite obvious where the belief in life after death comes from.
It is wish fulfillment.
Here's philosopher Richard Rorty, the late uh Richard Rorty, who says that the belief in life after death is based upon, quote, the infantile need for security, the childish hope of escaping from time and chance.
Here's Richard Dawkins.
The idea of immortality survives and spreads because it caters to wishful thinking.
Now, interestingly, a lot of young people today, when they encounter Dawkins, they encounter Rorty, they think that these guys are being uh original.
Wow, Rorty says it's wishful thinking.
They don't realize that Rorty himself is just lifting the idea from a century prior from Sigmund Freud.
And the idea was advanced by Freud in his book called The Future of an Illusion.
What's the illusion?
Uh belief in God, belief in immortality, belief in life after death.
Now, Freud says an illusion is not the same as an error.
Why?
Because an error is something that is false.
But an illusion isn't necessarily false.
It just reflects wishful thinking.
So let's say, for example, you have a Peasant girl who says, I'm going to marry a prince.
Well, she's not a liar.
What she's saying is not false, because in theory it could happen.
It could happen that a prince would spot her and go, yeah, that's the girl I want to marry.
But you would say that her belief is based on an illusion.
Why?
Because it's a product more of hope than of reality.
Freud argues that since belief in life after death is obviously an illusion, he says we can disregard its relationship to reality.
It's illusory.
Now, why do these illusions arise?
According to Freud, they arise because we have a childlike feeling of helplessness in the face of nature's harshness, and in the uh face of the difficulties posed by life, and in the face of the inevitability of death.
And so, since we don't like any of those things, we don't like the fact that nature is harsh, we don't like the fact that life is up and down, we don't like the fact that death is going to come.
So we make up, we uh invent a sort of protective father figure, we call him God, and we uh invest him with these supernatural powers to give us what nature can't give us, namely with a continuing secure, happy existence after death.
So this is Freud's reasoning.
He says the hope of an afterlife shows, quote, the obsessive neurosis of humanity, and he says only science can like diagnose this and and cure it.
Now, what can we make of Freud's famous analysis?
First of all, as I hinted at a moment ago, just because I have a wish for something doesn't say anything about whether it's true or false.
Does this make having good friends an illusion?
No.
The prisoner wants to escape the surveillance of the guards.
Does this mean that it's impossible for him to do so just because he wishes it to be so?
No, he can probably find ways to do that.
A farmer wishes for rain.
He may not or may not get his wish, but either way, there's nothing illusory or irrational about such a desire.
So Freud appears to have delivered this big medical diagnosis, it's an illusion, without first establishing that there is in fact an illness to be cured.
Uh, and far from proving that there's no life after death, Freud just simply seems to kind of assume it.
Let's let's start with the premise there's no life after death, therefore, people believe in it, belief in it must be illusory.
Now, the second idea, uh, the second problem with Freud's diagnosis is a lot more serious.
And that is, it is based on the idea that religion, belief in life after death, promises you a better life than the one you have now.
But as anthropologist Pascal Boyer notes, he studied, by the way, tribes, ancient tribes, and is able to draw some generalizations about human culture based upon a wide inventory of tribes.
He goes, Look, a religious world is often just as uncertain, just as scary, just as uncomfortable, just as terrifying as a world that is purely secular.
So he says, for example, the Fang people of Cameroon, he says, in their afterlife, basically, witches and evil spirits eat people.
And so this is hardly the kind of afterlife you'd be like, I wish to have that kind of afterlife.
So it's wishful thinking is not going to go in that direction.
This is the point.
The classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz, in a book that I'll recommend to you, it's very well written and very insightful, especially if you're interested in this kind of thing.
It's called Greek gods, human lives.
And she's talking about the deities of pagan antiquity, the gods of the Greeks.
And she says they don't promise you any kind of heavenly bliss.
In fact, their world is, quote, a world full of evil forces, unpredictable change, difficult conditions, and inevitable destruction and death.
So she says the belief in Greek religion cannot be put Down to wish fulfillment.
Now let's consider Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
Now, in all the three Abrahamic religions, there is, of course, the idea of heaven.
And the idea of heaven does support the possibility of wish fulfillment.
Why?
Because after all, gee, we all want to live in adult Disneyland.
We all want to live in a place where there is no suffering and no hardship and no illness and no death.
It is better than anything that life has to offer.
So people might be wishful about wanting to go to heaven.
But that's not the whole picture, is it?
Because in the Abrahamic tradition, in Judaism, but really even more so in Christianity and Islam, you have the idea of hell.
So hell is worse than death.
Hell is worse than sickness.
Hell is worse than diabetes.
Hell has not just the uncertainty of life, which is up and down, but the certainty of pain and suffering, which is always down.
Roberts.
Hell is eternal damnation.
Hell is irrevocable separation from God.
So who would wish for that?
Hell is a heck of a problem.
Hell is, you can say a hell of a problem for the wishful thinking analysis.
And finally, there's a third problem with this kind of wishful thinking.
Freud's idea that we believe in things because we just wish for them and they satisfy certain emotional desires on our part.
And that is that kind of wishful thinking doesn't fit in with evolution.
Why?
Because evolution is based upon the idea that you have survival of the fittest.
And the only way to survive in a competitive environment is to have an accurate picture of what's going on in the world.
So by this logic, if a creature develops routinely false beliefs and acts on them, well, they're not likely to make it.
They're not likely to, they're not likely to perpetuate their genes into the next generation.
Imagine a deer who wishes, wishful thinking, that wolves are friendly.
Well, this deer is going to find itself basically one less deer in the forest.
So the point here is that wishful thinking is not something that is likely to develop in any species that is trying to survive in the face of danger.
You know, this is a point made by Stephen Pinkard, the psychologist.
He goes, listen, a freezing person doesn't get any comfort by uh believing falsely or wishing that he's warm.
No, you're still gonna freeze.
You're actually better off to take action to prevent yourself from freezing than just sitting around when wishful thinking, oh, I wish I was warm.
A person face to face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that he is a rabbit.
I'm facing a line.
I wish I was a rabbit, because I could run much faster than the Rhine, I could the line I could go into a small hole and the lion can catch me.
But guess what?
You're not a rabbit.
So this wishful thinking is going to result in the line eating you.
And so it makes no evolutionary sense.
This is my point.
So a lot of atheists who believe in evolution uh are going to have to square why is it that evolutionary creatures like humans are going to develop this wishful thinking, which would seem to undermine their evolutionary chances for success.
So this is how I wrap up this chapter.
I go, listen, the atheists have been telling us, and we've seen a number of cases of this here, that they have no reason to believe that there is an afterlife.
And what I'm showing is that they don't have any good reasons not to believe at all.
Uh they are in the same position as the believer.
If the believer's position, there is life after death is based on faith, the atheist position is also based on faith.
So my goal here is to make it even, to level the playing field.
We're gonna start, in a sense, on this level playing field.
And so what we need to do at the outset is just sort of accept that a lot of things that we hear about this subject are actually bogus.
They don't stand up to scrutiny.
We should recognize that our knowledge in this area does have certain limits.
Uh we should not pretend to knowledge that we don't actually have, and we should be open to learning something new.
And with that, we will propel ourselves next time into the next chapter, which is called a universal longing.
Two types of immortality.
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