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Oct. 27, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
58:07
WHAT IS ISLAMOPHOBIA? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1198
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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 going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
The dragon's prophecy.
Watch it now or buy the DVD at thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.
Coming up, how do you solve a problem like Mom Dani?
Debbie's giving me the looks like, Dinesh, is this really necessary?
You're going to scare people right off the podcast.
I'm going to talk about Mom Dani.
And by the way, his claim that the true lesson of 9-11 is the danger of Islamophobia.
Wow.
I'm also going to explore why the Trump administration wants to prevent Israel from ruling over Judea and Samaria.
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In a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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My focus in this opening segment is going to be the strange phenomenon of Zoran Mamdani.
And how do we get a guy like Mamdani?
And I'm reminded of the line in The Sound of Music, which basically is like, how do you explain a phenomenon like Maria, right?
She's this kind of curious character.
And it's like, where'd she come from?
Where do you get somebody like that?
And I wanted to raise that exact same question about Mom Dani.
Before I do, I want to address two other topics that are in the news.
The first one, which is a kind of interesting contrast with Momdani, it is the midterm electoral victory by Javier Millay in Argentina.
Now, how does this relate to Mamdani?
Well, it relates to Mamdani in this way.
Argentina is proving that good policies work, and that if you have good policies, even if they cause some short-term pain, by the way, people will see that they're working and they will vote for more of the same.
So that's understandable.
That makes a lot of sense.
The Mamdani phenomenon is stranger, which is to say that one of the things the Democrats are able to prove is that they can do bad policies in blue cities and still win.
It's almost like people look at the policies, they don't work, or at least they don't work by any conventional measure.
The city is poorer, the city is dirtier, there's more crime, there's more homeless.
Guess what?
Let's vote the guy back into office, or let's vote in another guy who promises to make things even worse.
That's Momdani.
But back to Malay.
His party wins so big, and this is just great news, that it surges its parliament deputies from 37 to 101, and the number of senators from 6 to 20.
Now, this is really important because I have been watching some media reports.
Oh, Malay's in trouble.
Malay's reforms haven't really delivered the goods.
Argentinians are very restless.
So they were predicting that Malay would not do well.
But Millais does well and he reacts in his trademark fashion, which is to say, Tebby and I were sharing a video and we were both laughing out loud because there's a long, there's a kind of a big crowd and Millay comes running out of it with unnatural enthusiasm and speed.
And he's clearly, Debbie goes, he thinks he's a rock star.
I go, the guy is a rock star and he's high-fiving people along the way.
And then he goes all the way down the crowd and then he sprints back with the same speed that he came out the gate.
It's just this guy is like a kid.
I mean, he has that youthful enthusiasm.
And I think he's made that contagious or infectious in his country.
And more power to this guy because this is MAGA gone global.
Make Argentina great again.
And Millay is on his way.
Now, I want to offer a comment also on Trump's statement, which is echoed also by J.D. Vance, that Israel will not be allowed to annex, that's the word annex, Judea and Samaria, which is also known as the West Bank.
It came to be called the West Bank because it is the West Bank of Jordan.
It was captured, by the way, by Israel in the 67 war.
And the underlying assumption appears to be that this is land that does not belong to Israel.
Because after all, when you say you can't annex that land, the assumption is it's not your land.
You can't really, quote, take it.
But how is it not Israel's land?
And I say this because you have a country, Israel, that was offered a piece of land by the UN in 1948.
Israel accepted the deal.
The Arabs attacked Israel and failed in 1948.
They were getting ready to attack Israel again in 1967 when Israel struck preemptively, defeated a big coalition of Arab countries, including, by the way, Egypt and Jordan and Syria, and Israel emerged victorious.
And that's how Israel got the Sinai, which, by the way, it gave back to Egypt.
And it also got East Jerusalem.
And it also got Gaza.
And it also got the so-called West Bank.
So when you're attacked or you are on the verge of a preemptive attack, and then you move quickly and you diffuse it, and you seize this land in a war that you win, how does it not become your land?
Now, maybe what the Trump administration means here is: well, we're not saying it isn't your land, but what we are saying is that you've just got a bunch of these Arabs, otherwise known as Palestinians, and they live there, and they have to be given some form of local autonomy.
And that has some practical wisdom behind it.
But Israel could easily answer, well, all right, but if we are reconstituting Gaza in such a way that it's going to be ruled by, let's say, an international authority with involvement from a lot of other Muslim countries, why don't we do the same with Judea and Samaria?
To which I think the Trump administration's answer is: well, you know, October 7th was not launched out of Judea and Samaria.
It was launched out of Gaza.
So Gaza has disqualified, if you will, Hamas from the right to rule.
But the Palestinian Authority has not had, has not forfeited its authority in a comparable way.
I think what's going on here is the Trump administration basically sees that there is the possibility of making some real progress in Gaza.
They just don't want to shake the tree in another part of Israel.
They don't want to create a new disruption.
And so they're usually when you don't want to create a new disruption, you just basically say, let's leave this other place the way it is.
Let's not change the status quo.
I think this is the diplomatic reasoning.
It's not that Trump or Vance are making an assessment about who the land really belongs to.
It's kind of like, well, listen, you know what?
I'm going to make radical changes sort of to the garage.
And while that's happening, I'm not going to be messing with my kitchen.
I'm going to need my kitchen to stay the way it is while the garage is being fixed.
And so I'm just going to prudently leave this other part of my house alone.
And I think something of the same reasoning is operating here.
All right.
That's my take on the rationale for what Trump and Vance have said.
Some Israelis are kind of upset about it because they feel like, well, come on, don't you understand this is land that was given to Israel from the biblical times.
Or if you want to use a secular analysis, this is land we won in a war.
Either way, it's ours.
But I don't think that that point is really being disputed here.
As I say, I think the Trump position is driven by pragmatic or prudential considerations.
All right, now, Mamdani, I see this morning on Polymarket that Mamdani is almost certain to win.
And Polymarket, by the way, is an extremely reliable predictor.
Zoran Mamdani soars to new record highs, 95% chance he's New York City's next mayor.
To give you an idea of what this kind of probability is, when Elon Musk, who was visiting Mar-a-Lago or was with Trump while the election results of 2024 were being counted, even before the counting was complete, when Polymarket showed that there was a 95% or 95% or thereabouts chance that Trump was going to win, Elon Musk basically got up to leave.
And everybody was like, where are you going?
The results aren't in.
And Elon Musk is like, she showed him his phone.
He's like, look at Polymarket.
He basically said it's done.
Trump has already won.
I'm out of here.
Very Elon Musk-like behavior.
But the point is that Mamdani here is very close to the finish line.
And I quote tweet by saying this: I feel like I am watching a blade fly into a very tall building.
This is not an analogy that needs a lot of explication.
I think you can figure it out.
What I'm really pointing to is the irony that a quarter century, 25 years after 9-11, we are, or New York is, on the verge of having not only a socialist, but an Islamist, a hybrid, a cross between a socialist and an Islamist as its mayor.
Wow.
If you had predicted this at 9-11, people would have given you a funny look as if to say, Are you off your meds?
Are you nuts?
Now, why is Mamdani ahead?
Why is he winning?
Well, part of it is the three-man race.
But the other reason he's winning is foreign-born New Yorkers overwhelmingly support him.
So if this was an election that was simply confined to American-born New Yorkers, Mamdani would lose.
So isn't this interesting?
What this is really telling you is not just that there's a chasm between the foreign-born and the American-born New Yorker, but it tells you the way in which immigration over time alters the demographic balance of a whole city.
I mean, who would have thought, if you were, someone were to ask you just in general, if you go to Amsterdam or you go to Mumbai or you go to Rio de Janeiro, you would expect that native-born Brazilians or native-born Dutch would be the majority in that city, particularly one of their own major cities.
And that the number of foreign-born Brazilians or foreign-born Dutch would not outnumber the natives.
The political impact of having the foreign-born New Yorkers outnumber the native-born New Yorkers is that the foreign-born New Yorkers control the election.
They now run New York.
And so this shows you that immigration is not simply about adding to the numbers of the whole country.
It can tip important cities, critical cities like New York, into the Mamdani direction.
Now, Mamdani has been going around saying that, and this gives you an idea of his politics in relation to 9-11, very revealing.
He says that my aunt was afraid to wear her hijab after 9-11 because of Islamophobia.
So this is how he sees it.
The real problem with 9-11 is not what happened.
It's the Islamophobia that came out of it.
Not only that, but the real victims of 9-11 are not the 3,000 people who died, not the firefighters who suffered lasting damage and lasting injuries and lasting illnesses.
The real victim of 9-11 was his aunt, who was afraid to wear her hijab on the subway.
Now, some people have dug into this and actually pointed out that his aunt at the time was not even in America.
So this whole story is made up.
But even if that's true, the point here is that Mamdani has this very dislocated perspective in which he does not see 9-11 through the eyes of the real victims.
He sees 9-11.
His aunt, according to him, is the it's kind of like this.
It's kind of like after World War II, a bunch of Germans are going around and they go, you know, everywhere we go in the world, we get dirty looks from Jews.
We are the real victims.
Why?
Because there's just a rising tide of Germanophobia, especially on the part of these Jews.
Well, wait a minute.
What did you do to the Jews that makes them give you dirty looks?
And you did it.
The Germans did it.
So this isn't Germanophobia.
This is actually a very well-grounded suspicion of Germans given what the Germans have just done.
And the same can be expected right after 9-11.
People see who did this.
Muslims did it.
Why did they do it?
They did it in the name of Allah.
That was their own account of why they did it.
So naturally, a certain suspicion of Muslims who do things in the name of Allah, which is to say pretty much all Muslims, is going to be a natural outgrowth of 9-11.
Mamdani doesn't see it that way.
And it's very telling that it's his version that is likely now to be approved by the voters of New York.
A final point about Mamdani, which I get from a New York Post article out today from Asra Nomani.
And this is an article which I recommend to you inside the Mamdani machine.
Very good article because it shows that a lot of times someone like Mamdani pops on the scene.
We go, oh, wow, what a spontaneous eruption of this young suave candidate.
No, it turns out Mamdani was a young activist with the Democratic Socialists.
He was involved with the jihadist Linda Sarsour.
Going back now a decade or more, he has been cultivated.
He has been groomed by a network.
Asra Nomani uses the word engineer.
They engineered his rise and his campaign.
Who is involved?
No surprise, George Soros.
Here's a statement from the Soros group called the Open Society Foundation.
We fund a range of civil society organizations that work to deepen civic engagement through peaceful democratic participation, counter discrimination, including against Muslims, and advance human rights.
So this is the boilerplate blah, blah, blah.
But the point is, the Soros group has put millions of dollars into this.
And it's not just Soros, it's also a bunch of other massive foundations.
It's also a massive network of activist groups, CARE Action, the Islamic Circle of North America, Muslim Action Coalition, Yemeni American Merchants Association, Bangladeshi American Advocacy Group, and all these groups come together and they create media campaigns, canvassing, door-to-door voters, buzz.
And they have a lot of money.
They have been raising revenues.
Apparently, collectively, these organizations have revenues of $24 million a year.
So they're very well funded and they get money from radical, they get money from socialists, they get money from radical imams, they are involved with political organizers, non-profit organizations, major philanthropic groups, the Foundation to Promote the Open Society, Soros, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation.
So these established foundations that were set up, by the way, by conservative philanthropists decades and decades ago, have gone, the Tides Foundation have gone completely to the left and are funding socialists.
Think of it.
They made their fortune through capitalism, and now they are bankrolling what they would like to see as the overthrow of capitalism in the very center of capitalism, namely New York.
Mamdani's ascent, I'm now quoting from the article, is the product of deliberate design, a sophisticated collaboration between socialist activism and Islamist organizing, lubricated by millions in foundation grants and political donations.
So this is what has created Mamdani.
And we have to understand this network.
Why?
Because this is the same network that created Dearborn, Michigan.
Where do you think that the mayor of Dearborn came from?
The same guy who told a Christian recently, you don't belong here.
That was Mamdani before Mamdani.
So it's not as if this is a new playbook.
It is a playbook that has been tried successfully, at least in some places, and now it has come to perhaps the most important city in the country, namely New York.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
It's Chris Ekstrom, and he is a board member of U.S. Term Limits.
He was a candidate for Congress in the 13th congressional district in Texas and the Texas state chairman for U.S. term limits.
He's also a contributor to The Blaze.
Chris, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I want to talk to you about two topics that seem a little distant from each other, but I think they're related in a strange way.
The first one is Zoran Mamdani, and the second is the sad state of politics in Texas.
Now, it seems to me that here's the nexus or the link between these two.
And I'd like you to maybe comment on this.
It seems like that Mamdani is a reflection of the fact that in the Democratic Party, the party is sort of captive to the far left.
And so somebody who is a Democratic socialist can knock out his opposition and win in a kind of classical blue city like New York.
In Texas, by contrast, it looks like the captivity is in a different direction, that you have a red state, a conservative state with conservative voters, and yet the state appears captive to these kind of weak-need, moderate, some people call them rhinos, but a faction of the Republican Party that is not representative of Republicans as a whole or even Texas as a whole.
Am I right in essentially saying that in the two parties, in both parties, you have a problem, but it's a different problem.
Yeah, I think, Dinesh, you nailed something there.
You have a feckless, crazy person in New York who's basically leading around these establishment Democrats, such as they are, by the nose.
And in Texas, we have conservatives getting hoodwinked.
And unfortunately, like Brush Limbaugh, you say, low info voters don't vote in primaries sometimes, or they just accept, oh, he's got a magic card next to his name.
He must be great.
Unfortunately, they're not.
They've got a governor there, Abbott, who totally, I'm talking about lead from behind.
This guy has never done anything without taking a poll.
I literally don't think he goes to lunch unless he has taken a poll about where he's going to go.
And so he doesn't lead.
I mean, you see more leadership out of somebody like DeSantis going in conservative directions, and you'll see that Abbott will follow him.
Like Abbott recently took up the LBGT crosswalks after DeSantis had done it in Florida before.
He would never have considered something like that.
It would have been far too out there.
It's just, and Texas is where our cornerstone is of our electoral strategy.
So yeah, I think you nailed that.
You know what?
Since we're talking about Texas, let's stay on Texas for a little bit and then we'll turn to Momdani a little bit later.
What do you think is the deal with Abbott?
Because it doesn't look like Abbott is forced to be the way he is by political necessity, right?
There are certain places, for example, you take a Susan Collins in Maine.
Well, it's a very liberal state.
As a result, she's forced to kind of accommodate her voters in order to be elected.
But Abbott is in a red state, in a fairly reliably red state.
So what do you think is his, is it just his own instinct?
I want to stay close to the center.
Is it that he's made some political calculus that this is the right place for him to be?
Why do you think that he doesn't operate more like DeSantis when he can?
Well, my considered opinion about Abbott is that, A, he is hesitant and cautious by nature.
And it is a red state.
Unlike Florida, which has become a red state, was more of a purple state.
It has been an ongoing red state with a lot of very weak leadership in Texas.
There's been an unwillingness to take the full measure of conservatives, conservative movement people and people in the MA movement and put them together and to really transform it into like, in a sense, California is for their Democrats, which is utterly reliable and sort of a thought leader and a leader for what should happen, right, in places under our control.
Abbott is just unwilling to do that.
I saw him in an interview once say to somebody that somebody said, if you close the border and didn't just put some flotation devices out there, but you really use the DPS and close the border on your own, people would talk about you around campfires.
And he's for the rest of hundreds of years.
And he seemed to look at and think about it.
And then he sort of like came back to his senses of Abbott's normal way and like, oh, you know, yeah, that would be interesting.
He doesn't want to do anything.
He's a fearful man who apparently wanted to be president.
He had ambitions.
I think he had ambitions to be on the vice presidential ticket.
He's an enormous fundraiser.
He's done very well by uniparty politics.
If you look at his corporate fundraising, he's got a huge war chest, but he is totally unwilling to go out on a limb.
And you can't lead that way politically.
Let me, as somebody who is trying to grasp Texas politics, Debbie, my wife, has lived here pretty much all her life.
I'm somewhat of a newcomer, but I've been here now seven or eight years.
Let me put my finger on a couple of problems in Texas and have you comment on them.
One of them is it seems that a lot of times when you have primaries in Texas, you have a conservative candidate who is strong on issues and has a pretty good grassroots base, but doesn't have any money.
And then along comes the rhino, who's some corporate guy who doesn't really have a conservative agenda per se, or if he has an agenda, it's something as simple as, I want to lower taxes, I want a business-friendly environment.
But guess what?
I'm going to put a million dollars of my own money or $2 million of my own money in the race.
And then that guy is all over the airwaves.
That guy buys all the ads.
That guy sends out all the mailers.
And that guy ends up winning in a pretty red district.
And so you end up with red districts that are represented by people who are less red than the voters.
Do you see this as a recurrent problem in the state?
Absolutely.
I lived in a district like that with a guy named Pete Sessions, who'd been there forever, and eventually just burned down the electorate to some degree.
They just lost interest in conservative politics because that wasn't important, clearly, to him.
Now, there's many others like you described that are self-funders.
And to be honest, I was a self-funder too.
I was supported by Club for Growth, and I did raise some money.
But these people often have an agenda, a business agenda, let's say, in the House.
People aren't as interested in statewide politics in terms of the state houses if they're not living in Texas.
But it does matter in Texas because Texas, as I say, is our electoral cornerstone of our presidential policy.
We had a Speaker of the House in Texas elected by Democrats, Dustin Burroughs.
And the kind of people that elected him was a guy in particular from Waco.
It doesn't get more red than that.
And Dustin Burroughs himself is from Lubbock, which is super red.
And this guy, Pat Curry, came in and, you know, would like to style himself as some sort of conservative.
And then he probably votes like a Democrat.
You know, I mean, this is how these people are.
They function as a uniparty and they're happy to do that because they're very clubby down in Austin.
Their very exaggerated courtesy is the rule of the day.
And, you know, you've recently had Brian Harrison come into it and kind of kick up some dust and give them a tough time.
And boy, they don't like it.
But Brian Harrison isn't advocating anything more than things you and I have been advocating for most of our lives.
I know you're a longtime movement conservative, and I'm, I hate to say, I'm nearing 60.
We've been talking about this stuff for years and years and years.
It's not a mystery.
And these people just want to get along with the Democrats and keep them alive so they don't have to go too far off the deep end with us.
And it's ridiculous, literally ridiculous.
Do you think to raise maybe a bit of a sensitive point?
I mean, the Bushes were very popular in Texas.
I'm assuming they still have a lot of connections and ties in Texas.
In a way, Bush conservatism was this kind of big business conservatism in which you stay pretty close to the center.
You make sure you have the corporate interests lined up behind you.
You remain relatively open on the immigration issue, in part to appease these exact same corporate interests.
You give lip service to cultural conservatism.
You know, you make a speech on the pro-life issue, but not with any particular intention of doing anything about it.
Are we living with a kind of Bush legacy in Texas that has not been fully rooted out?
I would argue we're living with the Bush legacy and the Bush faction legacy throughout America.
In Texas, it's particularly bad because they really were highly effective.
I mean, as much as I don't like any of them and hope that none of them are ever elected again, I will give them this.
They hoodwinked a lot of the business corporate people into thinking they were really more conservative than they were.
And it was only until recently where things got really out of control, say on the homosexual front with all the insane sort of trans stuff and making kids, young kids get trans surgeries, which went on in Texas too, that some of these people began to reevaluate their alliance with the Bushes and those people.
Because look, on their watch, we have homosexual marriage.
We have all sorts of things that would never have been imagined.
And we've been the driving force, conservatives, since Reagan.
So what's going on around here?
I mean, why is this happening?
We have to hold these people to a much higher standard and we have to start to confront them and be very tough.
And I have been criticized for being very tough and confrontational.
And I can tell you, I plan on being that way until I'm no longer in politics because it's outrageous.
Your son-in-law, Brandon Gill, is a fine young conservative who's out there being candid.
Candor is very important from our politicians and talking about these sort of things in a direct way and in a highly disciplined and well-spoken way and getting to the heart of this, which is, look, we have an agenda.
We want to impose our will, our conservative policy, and we want to get rid of people who simply won't do it, like President Trump has been doing in Washington, firing bureaucrats, going into the military and saying, I thought it was great he pulled those generals together,
Heg Seth did, and President Trump, let them all look at each other, and they could all look around and see the people who were responsible for putting men in dresses in charge of important national security type things and act and pretending as if women and men were interchangeable and all this nonsense about having women in Marine combat and all that.
Listen, we were headed off a cliff there.
So this is dead serious stuff.
Trickling back to the local politics of Texas, it's similar.
I mean, we had all the bad things in Texas that they have in New York City.
Mondami would have fit right in in Dallas or Houston or some of these other places because they were doing the same things.
I mean, up until very recently.
I'll come to Mom Dani in just a minute.
I have one further thought.
I'd like you to reflect on as somebody who's run for Congress, raises money, you are familiar with the landscape of Texas.
To me, the Texas billionaires, of which I probably know a half a dozen, are extremely namby-pamby, certainly compared to the liberal billionaires.
The liberal billionaires are activists.
I mean, they get behind even a guy like Mom Dani.
They're not scared by the socialism label.
They're not even scared by the Islamic label.
They're like, we're going to be venture capitalists.
We're going to bet on this young suave guy.
We're going to bring him up and we're going to bet on him really early.
And so they cultivate their activist leadership.
And it is leadership that is firmly on the left.
By contrast, it's my experience that the Texas billionaires, even though some of them are quite conservative and they're conservative in their ordinary life, somehow are more reluctant to shake the tree.
They consider, oh, this guy's a little extreme or this guy's a little far right.
And so they hew to a much safer course.
And as a result, they encourage the Dustin Burroughs of the world because it's actually, frankly, easier for a Dustin Burroughs to raise money from these guys than, say, a Dan Patrick.
Isn't that true?
Or say a Ken Paxton will not get behind Ken Paxton.
They're clutching their pearls and whining about his imperfections.
Look, our president isn't perfect.
I'm not perfect.
Very few people.
I don't know if we're going to find any perfect people, but these billionaires suddenly become what I call billionaire cowards.
I know a few of them myself.
I went to school with a few billionaires.
One I want to say notably Goodwin is a guy who owns the Kansas City Chiefs.
I think he's done actually some good things.
He's a hunt.
But Texas billionaires are not, and the very rich like these Oli Stone characters, you know, that are sort of meeting together and they're going to like throw everybody out and take over and quite the opposite.
They are, as you say, in contrast to the very rich liberals, very reluctant to be seen as what McCain used to call as wacko birds or something.
And even with all the changes and seeing what President Trump is doing and how he's sorting out these really entrenched bureaucratic forces in DC and the swamp, they are very hesitant to get behind Ken Paxton, and it's idiotic.
I mean, in fact, you have a situation where Ted Cruz has not endorsed Ken Paxton.
He's not endorsing against John Cornyn because they're colleagues or something.
Those two hated each other in politics for all the time I knew Ted Cruz and I was involved in a pact where I started Courageous Conservatives Pact to support Ted Cruz in 2016's elections.
So I'm not, I don't tolerate that from these politicians.
Ted Cruz should be out there supporting Ken Paxton.
He's the clear statewide choice.
He's won statewide elections.
He beat George P. Bush when George P. Bush came in and tried to throw Ken Paxton out.
Even with a good conservative Louis Gomart, who I believe made a terrible mistake in getting into that state attorney general's race at the behest of a sort of Bush faction guy named Mays Middleton, who's now running to be attorney general.
He'd be a disaster.
We have a good guy in Ken and Aaron Reitz, who I think would be terrific.
I like Chip Roy.
I wish Chip Roy had stayed in the Congress.
I really do.
He was a force to be reckoned with and a troublemaker, but he's decided that he wants to go statewide.
It's not easy.
And I'll just make a prediction for your people because I know they care about politics.
Let me tell you something.
When a local congressman like Wesley Hunt gets into a statewide Texas race, even with all the money in the world, and even if he's Plan B and Cornyn plans on dropping out, they never cut it.
Ken Paxton's going to wipe the floor with him in that election.
So maybe they're trying to get into a runoff because we have runoffs in Texas, but I'll tell you something.
The people who didn't get behind Ken Paxton, these kind of billionaire Namby Pamby types and the goody-goody politicians trying to play it safe and, you know, all that, they're going to regret it.
Very interesting, because I was thinking that, you know, when you think about the motivations here, the thing about Cornyn is the guy has managed to keep getting himself re-elected, right?
And one of the things that I think some people are afraid of in Texas, and I've heard them communicate this, is, hey, listen, you know, we want to have a candidate like Paxton who is a firebrand and actually has a record and shows that he knows how to fight, but we're a little anxious about whether he would be as strong in the general election and be able to carry it.
That's useful.
Yeah, yeah.
And you're confident that he will.
Let's pivot as we close out here to Mamdani for a minute.
Let me have you comment on this.
There are some House Republicans, I don't know how many who have been talking about, well, you know, maybe we can denaturalize Mamdani.
Maybe we can prove that he's not really a legitimate citizen.
This reminds me a little bit of what they tried to do with Obama with the birth certificate.
Do you think that this is just a foolish effort to try to pull the rug out from Mamdani and that it's never going to work?
Or do you think that this is a legitimate question of whether or not Mamdani is even eligible to run in the first place?
I think it's a desperate attempt to head off what will probably be a tragic outcome.
I mean, I do question whether anything could be worse than voting for a second term of Bill de Blasio.
That was bad enough.
We're going to find out, it looks like.
I happened to run into Mayor Giuliani in Palm Beach not too long ago, and we spoke about it.
And I said, are you supporting Cuomo?
And he said, no.
And I was sort of surprised.
And I said, wow, I know they must have brought a lot of pressure to bear on you to support him.
And he said, no, I'm not.
I'm supporting Curtis Silva.
And I understand that.
Cuomo is an evil man.
He's a horrible, terrible, evil man.
How could I possibly get excited about him?
I might have donated to Eric Adams.
And Eric Adams is sort of crooked and incompetent and a whiny, no-good politician as well.
But, you know, Cuomo's evil.
So they've gotten themselves in a bad situation up there.
Maybe they can get rid of him in some backdoor, typical Democrat New York way.
I mean, certainly Cuomo's an old hand at that.
Many people thought Cuomo was trying to throw out Biden eventually, if he could have to take over.
It's a desperate situation, and I'm sad to see it.
I lived and worked in New York for many years.
I'm highly critical, obviously, of New York politics, but I mean, that's an important city for us in the United States and America.
I'm horrified by what's going on there.
I mean, I think you're right.
Normally in politics, you like to say we're going to choose the lesser evil.
But when you're dealing with Cuomo and Mamdani, I mean, it kind of reminds me a little bit.
The writer Samuel Johnson was once asked whether what, how he would compare Voltaire with Rousseau.
And he said, well, that's like asking me to choose between a louse and a flea.
In other words, his point is, it's a really, these are two really bad choices you're giving me right here.
And I think that's what you're saying about New York.
Guys, I've been talking to Chris Ekstrom, board member of U.S. Term Limits, also former congressional candidate from the 13th congressional district in Texas.
Very interesting discussion.
And Chris, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me, Dinesh.
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We are in the opening sections of my book, Life After Death: The Evidence, and we are going to, in the next few days, learn quite a bit about what do different cultures and peoples and religions believe about life after death.
It is, I would call it the Aristotelian mode of investigation, by which I mean this.
One of the key differences between the philosopher Plato and the philosopher Aristotle is that if you ask Plato a question like, what is truth or what is justice, Plato would examine this the Socratic way, which is he would say, all right, well, let's look at some circumstances, let me ask you some hypothetical questions, let's think in abstract ways about what justice is and where it comes from.
So the Platonic mode, you could say, is deductive.
It starts from a kind of premise and then it deduces conclusions out of that premise.
The premise is something that ultimately determines whether these deductions are sound, because obviously, if you have an unsound premise, you're going to come out with unsound conclusions, even if all your deductions are completely logical.
Now, Aristotle didn't go about the world this way at all.
Aristotle's approach was: if you asked him what is justice, Aristotle's view is, let's hit the road.
In other words, Aristotle's view is, let me go over here to Crete, and let me go over there to Athens, and then let me go over to Sparta, and let me ask the people over there, well, what's justice according to you?
And what's justice according to you?
And Aristotle's idea is that when you look at the way different people, in fact, approach this issue, you do a sort of inventory of different people.
You can get an idea of how justice is perceived, and then you can maybe compare and contrast and come up with some intelligent generalizations.
Well, if the Greeks see it this way, and if the Cretans see it that way, maybe this is what justice really is.
You draw it out empirically from the actual practice of different people.
So we're going to take the Aristotelian approach here by just looking to see what people think about life after death before we dive into the subject further.
The first thing to notice is that the belief in life after death is quite universal.
This is something established in a magisterial study by a guy named Alan Siegel.
His book is called Life After Death.
And what he shows is every culture from the beginning of mankind has espoused some concept of continued existence beyond death.
Early civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, the Americas before the white man came, all held the belief there's like some sort of life beyond the grave.
Now, interestingly, Siegel makes the point that in some of these cultures, they didn't believe that everybody has life after death, only the important people.
So it's like life after death for the rich and famous, life after death for the great ones, life after death for the pharaohs, but everybody else doesn't really get it.
So it's almost like life after death is like one of those privileges that continues after your life, but not for everybody.
Notice, by the way, that when the countless Egyptians were recruited and sometimes under forced labor to build the pyramids in Giza, in the pyramids, they preserved the bodies of the pharaohs.
Did they preserve the bodies of the people who built the pyramids?
No, because their lives were not important.
I don't even know if the belief in life after death was rejected, but the point was no provision needs to be made for it.
But with the pharaohs, let's wrap them in bandages.
Let's bury them in multiple coffins, sometimes one inside the other to protect their bodies from contamination.
Let's put masks on their face to preserve the identity of the person.
And we know from other cultures like the cultures of Samaria and Mesopotamia that the ruling class was often buried with jewelry, with crowns, with games, with weapons, even with eating utensils.
Why?
Because obviously there was a belief that they're going to need these things in the afterlife.
And sometimes servants, when they died, were buried with their masters.
And the idea being that the servants could be a servant in the afterlife.
Hey, listen, this guy's going to need a servant just like he did right here.
So you'll be around, but your job in the afterlife is to be pretty much what you are now, namely a servant.
Now, this universality of belief in life after death is actually quite astonishing in itself.
Why is that?
Because when you look at different cultures, you notice that they do some things in common, but they do many things quite differently.
So the things that they do in common are generally considered to be essential for human survival.
You find in all cultures, for example, there is some human facility for language.
No surprise.
How else can humans communicate?
How else are humans going to survive and prosper without communicating with each other?
Now, the actual languages will differ.
They speak Arabic over here and they speak Hindustani over there.
But language itself is a universal.
You also recognize, for example, that people in all cultures believe in mountains and rainstorms and animals.
Why?
Because they can look out the window.
There's a mountain.
There's the rain.
There are the animals.
So these are objects that are undeniably present to our senses.
Here's the point I'm getting at.
It would be really odd.
It would not be odd if you saw one culture that believed in, say, unicorns, or even two.
But when you find if every culture believes in unicorns, you'd be like, well, how would that belief even begin?
Unicorns aren't real.
And so where would all these cultures, which are not in communication with each other, particularly in the ancient times, where would they all get the idea that there are horses with horns that can fly?
It's crazy.
You would need some explanation for how that belief even came to be, unless, of course, unicorns were real.
So the point I'm trying to get at here is that you have a striking convergence of views among people in all these different cultures going back to very ancient times.
And it's not easy to account for it.
Now, atheists and skeptics try really hard to account for it.
And they try to account for it by saying that these cultures believe in kind of a primitive type of science.
They don't understand the world.
And so as a result, they come up with kind of supernatural explanations that are their best way to explain things like, well, why does the sun rise?
Or why does it rain?
And so the idea here is that religion is an unsophisticated form of science.
But in no way, when you look at anthropologists and other scholars, study these ancient cultures, and never once do they find anyone in these cultures ever saying, hey, listen, I've come up with an explanation for why it rains, or I've come up with an explanation for why the sun rises.
It seems like they just took those things for granted.
They never thought that those things even require any explanation.
Now, we in our modern age, with our scientific outlook, we raise certain types of questions.
And we assume that the ancient peoples in ancient times had the same questions.
And therefore, if they came up with religion, this must have been like bad answers to scientific questions.
But what if they didn't even have those questions?
What if it never occurred to them to ask, like, why does a river flow?
Rivers flow.
Every river you've seen flows.
You don't need to inquire why a river flows.
That's not exactly a problem that you need to solve in order to succeed in life.
What you need to solve is things like how to catch fish, how to prevent my house from drifting with the river and running away with me away from me.
So it could be that these ancient peoples never thought, quote, scientifically in this way at all.
Now, you might think that I'm suggesting that these ancient people were dumb or they didn't try to explain like natural phenomena, but they did.
They did try to explain natural phenomena, but they were looking for explanations at a different level than the ones that satisfy us today.
Now, let me give an example of this.
Consider the belief of an African tribal chieftain that if a famine or an illness ravages the community, the gods must be angry.
And so, these ancient communities will often have like witch doctors or shamans of one sort or another, and they do these rites of appeasement and propitiation to keep the gods from getting too annoyed with the village or with the tribe.
So, the atheist goes, oh, there you go, Dinesh.
Look at that.
That's basically like bad science.
This community thinks that somehow, you know, that the gods are causing the famine, the gods are causing the illness.
But what if the illness is being caused by like some venomous type of insect?
The insect is the real cause.
Isn't it true that these primitive people are falsely attributing it to, quote, a god?
Now, I want to suggest that the African chief would not be impressed with this kind of explanation.
Why?
Not because he is a very poor scientist, but because he doesn't think that the explanation explains anything at all.
His answer goes something like this: Well, yeah, maybe the insects are doing it, but I have a different question.
Why are the insects doing it now to my people?
In other words, the insects have been around.
They could inflict the illness on the next tribe or some other tribe in some other place, but they're doing it now and they're doing it to us.
So, simply to say it's the insects is kind of dumb because it doesn't go to the deeper question of why this is happening to our people at this particular time.
Are you saying that the insects popped into existence, inflicted this on us, and then promptly disappeared?
Clearly not.
But even if that were the case, who popped them into existence?
How did the insects even get here?
How did they then disappear?
So, what the ancient people are saying here is not that they're denying a natural explanation.
What they're saying is this natural explanation explains very little.
It tells you kind of what happened.
By the way, we can identify with what these ancient people are saying by just thinking about questions that we have today.
Let's say, for example, you are a teenager or you're a mom and your son gets a horrible disease and drops dead.
Now, the doctor comes and says, Well, you know, this is a very rare form of cancer, or yes, this is a very rare form of something else.
Your question is not, no, I refuse to believe that.
I reject science.
Your question is, well, yeah, but why did he get it?
In other words, of all the people in the world, this is a very rare and improbable ailment.
Why was my son picked out to get it?
Is it just the cosmic roll of the dice?
What makes my son so, quote, unlucky?
Is there even such a thing as luck?
Is my son fated to have this?
Normally, parents die before their kids.
So, for a child to die before its parents is unusual.
So, what did I do to deserve this?
So, here we're getting at kind of how the ancient people are thinking.
It's not that they reject these natural explanations.
They think that there has to be a deeper explanation at work as well.
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