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Nov. 6, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:39
WOLVES IN WOLVES CLOTHING Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1206
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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.
Is the MAGA faction on the right that wants to remake the right even on the right?
Are these guys even MAGA?
I don't think so, and I'll tell you why.
I want to consider a question that Gen Z interlocutors often put up to the Reagan generation.
You're supposed to be a conservative.
What is it that you've actually conserved?
I'll tell you what we conserved.
And Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia joins me.
We're going to talk more.
We talked a little bit about this yesterday.
How the U.S. can help embattle Christians in Nigeria.
If you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to the podcast.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
Are the people on the right who claim to be fixing the right or redirecting the right or representing the true spirit of America first?
Are they on the right at all?
This may seem like a strange question to ask because many of these people, and here I'm thinking about the so-called Groipers, I'm thinking about Nick Fuentes, his followers.
I'm thinking about people like Matt Gates or Steve Bannon.
I'm thinking about Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens Tucker.
They say they're on the right.
They seem to inhabit political space on the right.
And yet, are they on the right?
Are they conservative in any meaningful sense of the term?
Let me start by pointing out that at the Mamdani victory celebration, and there are a bunch of videos of that circulating on social media, you see an unusual sight.
You see Groipers in red, in their kind of MAGA uniform, celebrating with Mamdani.
You also see Nick Fuentes posting that he's really happy that Mamdani won, and he's really happy that the Republicans took some stinging defeats in the election.
Not only did he not lift a finger to help, but he is hoping that MAGA itself will go down.
This is Nick Fuentes.
This is the guy that our side or Tucker is platforming.
This is the guy that we're supposedly trying to mainstream in Kevin Roberts at Heritage Service.
He really wants to be able to get through to people like this.
So there they are celebrating with Mamdani.
Now, I began to become suspect about the so-called right-wing credentials of these groipers, of these self-proclaimed white supremacists or white identitarians, because many of them embrace the Nazi or the neo-Nazi label.
You can say that they do it for kicks or they do it to be outrageous or they do it to give you the middle finger.
But it's interesting that they choose that particular, they choose Nazism, which is to say national socialism.
It's not an accident that Nick Fuentes tweets out with a meme, Team Hitler.
Why Hitler?
Well, partly because Hitler was, and I've been hammering this home in at least two of my earlier films, Hitler was on the left.
Nazism is a compressed term that means national socialism.
In the film that I did called Death of a Nation, I interviewed the guy who was then the poster boy of white supremacy.
His name is Richard Spencer.
And this is a guy who was himself, he's the early version of Nick Fuentes.
He was doing events where he'd do the Siegheil.
Again, he claimed it was kind of ironic.
But in the interview, it became really clear that this guy is in no way conservative.
Not only that, he rejects the American founding.
He rejects the idea of rights coming from God.
He says rights obviously come from the state.
It becomes pretty clear in my conversation with him that he's a collectivist.
By the way, if you want to find this conversation, it's right there on my social media.
I've posted it on X and on all my other social media platforms.
It's about a three or four minute excerpt from my conversation with Richard Spencer.
He ends up saying that his favorite presidents are not people like Reagan, whom he doesn't really like, but people like Andrew Jackson, who happens to be the founder of the Democratic Party, or Polk, who is also a Democrat.
And so I said to myself after this conversation that this guy, one of the apparently the main figures associated with the so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, remember that?
I'm like, this guy is on the left.
Not only that, I expect him to emerge on the left.
He's going to move increasingly leftward.
And so he has.
Who do you think that Richard Spencer endorsed in 2020?
You guessed it, or you didn't guess it, Joe Biden.
Who do you think he endorsed in 2024?
Kamala Harris.
So this is not unique to this guy.
Let's turn to some of the other people that I've mentioned.
Candace Owens has put out a message: I am not going to get involved politically.
I'm not even going to vote myself.
She says, until we, meaning I guess her investigative team, discover who really killed Charlie Kirk.
And quite honestly, if you ask me, she will never be satisfied who killed Charlie Kirk as long as it continues to get her ratings.
So this will remain like the Kennedy assassination for years and years and years, where maybe the guy, Tyler Robinson, may even be indicted, convicted, sent to life in prison, gets the death penalty, and yet can't, well, I'm not really sure it was him.
And so she's not going to vote basically till the cows come home.
And then we turn to Nick Fuentes, who is very clearly a guy.
Well, Nick will say anything, but the one thing he did say in his conversation with Tucker, he likes Stalin.
He goes, I'm a fan.
And think of it.
You have somebody who's not only a ruthless butcher.
He's a socialist.
This is a guy who has killed, what, 30 to 40 million people.
So for a guy like Nick, I don't even think the magnitude of that can get through his epicene head.
But the fact that he chooses this association again is pretty significant, isn't it?
And then let's outline some positions, which I've done before, but I do it again for clarity.
You have a guy, Tucker, who of late, this is not the old Tucker, the old Tucker was in fact on the right.
I don't deny it.
But I'm asking about Tucker now.
Most recently, Tucker basically did a post.
I'm talking about his newsletter, which I looked at this morning, basically defending Mamdani and actually defending Jews who voted for Mamdani.
Why?
Well, I guess because he says that these Jews are now being called anti-Semitic.
And so again, Tucker's like Israel obsession kicks in and he wants to defend these Jews.
He said they're not anti-Semitic.
They identify with Mamdani.
Tucker has defended Maduro, the socialist dictator of Venezuela.
Think about this.
Why would a normal conservative do that?
That's not consistent with conservative ideology.
In fact, even the Democrats won't defend Maduro, but Tucker evidently will.
And he defends him on the strangest ground.
Well, he's socially conservative, as if to say that Maduro is some kind of a evangelical Christian who is on our side of the ensemble of, now, there is some weird overlap between us and Maduro, in the same way there's some weird overlap between us and, let's say, the Islamic radicals.
They don't like homosexuals.
We disagree with homosexuality.
But on the other hand, they take those same gays and throw them out of windows.
We don't do that.
They make it punishable by death to leave Islam.
So the fact that we have some overlap, it would be wrong to call, would you really call Osama bin Laden a conservative?
Even Tucker wouldn't do that, but he's willing to do that for Maduro.
And then you have Tucker just going down, you know, down the line of his positions, one after the other, a repudiation of anything that we would today call modern American conservatism.
Hamas is not a terrorist group.
It's, you know, it's a political movement.
And we should have allied with Hitler in World War II.
Now, not all these positions, you know, I actually made a list of them.
Someone goes, well, that wasn't Tucker's position, Danesh.
That was the position of Tucker's guest.
Well, I think you know, Tucker only has one type of guest.
With rare exceptions, like when he's doing an ambush on Ted Cruz, his guests are basically Tuckerites.
They are people who agree with him, and he has them on for that reason.
He wants to take some disgraced academic, some the nun with the mustache sister, whatever her name is.
He wants to amplify their views.
These are people normally who would get no attention whatsoever.
These are people who can't get into their local newspaper, but they get on the Tucker Carlson show because they have some perverted, typically, or twisted point of view that Tucker wants to amplify.
And so what I'm getting at here is quite simply this.
And I think this is the heart of the matter.
It's not about cancel culture.
Nobody's canceling anybody.
It's about what do we as conservatives stand for?
What is MAGA?
What does it mean to be a Republican?
We have a party that is founded basically on the platform of all men are created equal.
The history of the Republican Party goes back to a guy who was a runaway slave in Missouri.
And he ran away where?
To Wisconsin.
And in Wisconsin, he was captured.
And there was an attempt to return him.
to his owner in Missouri.
And a whole bunch of residents of Wisconsin, apparently some 5,000 citizens, freed him.
They freed the guy.
Later, however, he was apparently recaptured, but these same 5,000 citizens then made their way to Ripon, Wisconsin, where they founded in 1854 a new party, the Republican Party.
That's the origin of our party.
That is the root from which our principles spring.
And we have a winning formula, and it's the Trump formula.
It's America first, but not America only.
It's America first that recognizes that there's been a lot of racial preferences and abuse against white people.
That has to stop.
But it's a party at the same time that is open to conservative Jews and conservative Hindus and conservative Indians and conservative blacks and conservative Latinos.
We can't win national elections without this coalition.
And to try to destroy this coalition, just try to say to the Indians, go home, to try to say to the blacks, we don't need you because America is a white man's country, to say to the Jews, go back to Israel.
I'm talking about Jews born in America who are American citizens, people like Laura Loomer and Mark Levin, go back to Israel.
This kind of rhetoric has no place in the Republican Party.
And those who massage it, who coddle it, who try to mainstream it, they themselves are revealing their own nefarious agenda.
And again, we're not canceling them, but what we are saying to them, and I'm actually very happy to say that a massive wall of resistance has arisen on the part of conservative institutions, on the part of prominent conservatives across the spectrum.
And this wall of resistance is basically saying to all these candidacites and fuenticites and tuckerites a very firm but implacable no.
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One of the problems with this fissure or divide on the right is that it is becoming not only an ideological divide, an ideological divide over not just Israel, not just even U.S. foreign policy, but even the way that the Republican Party understands itself, defines itself, conducts itself in elections.
In the end, it's a fight over who we are and what we believe and what our platform is going to be in 26, and even more importantly, in 28.
Now, this divide also happens to have a second dimension.
It's a bit of a generational divide.
And a lot of young people, young right-wingers, are getting the idea that the earlier generation, and I'm going to speak now for the Reagan generation.
Debbie and I both belong to the Reagan generation.
I was born in 61, so technically I'm a boomer, but I was born in 1961 in India.
So I'm claiming exemption from the boomer class.
I'm really a Reaganite.
My first job really was at the Heritage Foundation, 1985.
And then my second job was in the Reagan White House.
Debbie is very firmly in, what are you, honey?
Gen X.
Yeah, Debbie's in Gen X, and she's in the Reagan generation.
So anyway, our generation is being accused by some of these young people of having accomplished nothing.
And here is a fairly typical, this is a guy, by the way, connected with Turning Point.
His name is Gabe Gardini.
And he echoes in a typical kind of adolescent way the familiar chant, which is not unique to him.
He's a kind of a regurgitator.
Young conservatives just want their respective conservative thought leaders and elected officials to, quote, conserve something besides liberalism.
I'm sure he thinks this is like a very brave, bold, and original thing to say.
And the one thing that never seems to cross his mind is: is it even true?
Now, look, I know what he's responding to.
He's responding probably to the phenomenon of him and his friends having been raised perhaps in broken families, the product of divorce and messed up family structures.
He's talking about some decimated communities that we do see around us.
He's talking about LGBTQ extremism, which hasn't been stopped.
In fact, has obviously gotten a lot worse.
Although, very interestingly, it didn't get worse in the Reagan generation.
It got worse in his own generation for reasons that we can explore.
In other words, what I'm getting at is that the extreme acceptance and tolerance toward LGBTQ didn't come from our generation.
It actually came from the subsequent generations, including Gen Z, which basically took the attitude there's nothing wrong with this kind of stuff.
In other words, I'm not blaming Gabe, but I'm blaming other people of Gabe's own generation.
This is the generation that actually took the most permissive attitude toward these social issues.
Now, I do want to make at least a moderate defense of the older generation, because it is simply false.
In fact, it's an absolute slander to say that the Reagan generation achieved nothing.
For people who don't know any history, that's an easy thing to say.
You achieved nothing.
It's like saying to the generation that won World War II, you achieved nothing.
I wasn't born during World War II, so whatever you achieved is unimportant to me.
Well, that generation achieved a lot.
They overcame the Depression, they won a big war.
And I can say on behalf of the Reagan generation, as somebody who lived through it, participated in it, wrote about it, that the Reagan generation achieved a lot.
So I'm going to talk about a few of those things just to kind of wipe the arrogant smile off the face of people like this, Gabe Gardini, and others like him.
I'm obviously using him here as a kind of emblem to typify a smug attitude that we sometimes get from young people.
Now, let me go through my own tweet here responding to him.
We, the Reagan generation, won the Cold War.
Let's start with that.
The Cold War lasted for 40 years from the mid-40s.
The preceding generation, which was really the boomers, couldn't win it.
It was won by the Reagan generation, and no one saw it coming.
And no one thought it would even occur in our lifetime.
So this was a very big win, made all the more spectacular by the fact that it was won without loss of life, as Margaret Thatcher put it, without firing a shot.
Number two, we conserved America's number one position in the world.
America was number one when our generation came in, but it wasn't decisively number one.
We actually made it number one.
In the Cold War, America and the Soviet Union were running side by side.
Certainly in terms of military force, many people thought they were number one and we were number two.
But we got an America post-Reagan that was number one, and it still is.
And the Reagan generation did that.
We preserve free markets.
We're seeing a lot of socialist upsurges now.
We actually made it so that socialism was completely discredited in our generation and during our era.
It is only rearing its head now, again, for reasons that we can explore.
But we did not allow this to happen in the 80s or the 90s.
Even Obama was very much carried by a tide that he couldn't fully resist.
And when he tried to resist it, there were sweeping victories against him by Republicans in the midterm elections that kept him completely in check.
Who, if not the Reagan generation, toppled Roe versus Wade?
Roe versus Wade had lasted from 1973 for almost 40 years.
It was the Reagan generation, its personnel, its appointees, its transformation of the courts.
We got rid of that one.
Abortion, a really big one.
Think about the loss of life under Roe versus Wade.
And look, I'm not saying that the abortion problem as a cultural phenomenon has been solved, but this case that established a right to abortion in every state pretty much for all nine months of pregnancy-that's a way that we conserved life by defeating that.
Affirmative action.
Now, I know something about this myself.
I was very actively involved in this fight.
And I will tell you that when I got involved in this, and by the way, I've written several books about this: my first book, Illiberal Education, my second book, The End of Racism.
I've probably spoken on three times as many campuses as Charlie Kirk over the years.
So, I took this battle to the culture.
I popularized phrases like political correctness.
I did prominent debates with leading figures on the subject of affirmative action: Mary Frances Berry, head of the Civil Rights Commission, Walter Mondale, former Democratic presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson at Stanford University, many others.
So, I know a lot about this fight from the inside.
And I will tell you that the affirmative action industry had massive support.
It was entrenched in every university.
It had hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars behind it.
It was supported by many people in the Republican Party as some kind of way to kind of keep the blacks happy.
It was challenged by a number of people that total, by my count, somewhere between five and ten.
There was a time when it seemed that the only people fighting affirmative action were Thomas Sowell, Glenn Lowry, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, one or two others, and me.
That's it.
So, it's five against a massive arsenal on the other side.
And who won that fight?
Well, we did.
Affirmative action has been dethroned.
It has been overthrown by the Supreme Court.
It is being pushed out of the universities.
And so, we conserve that.
What do we conserve?
We conserve the principle of equal rights under the law.
So, we are talking here about, and I could go on listing the things we conserve, but I just wanted to list a few to highlight the fact that it's extremely arrogant and stupid for people who know nothing, actually weren't around, but don't read, don't seem to have a good understanding of what these fights even felt like, and to kind of proclaim, well, what have you conservatives even conserved?
Well, my question is: what have you conserved?
Look at the debris around yourself and your own lives.
I mean, I realize that you're just starting out, but you are speaking with the sort of authority of a veteran, someone who really knows his way around and can chastise the earlier generation for its deficiencies and failures.
Look, conservatism started out basically in a broom closet in the 1970s.
Bill Buckley would have told you that.
It gained some traction under Reagan, and we conserved an awful lot.
Now, did we control academia?
No.
Did we control the media?
No.
Did we control Hollywood?
No.
There were very powerful forces arrayed against us.
And so we lost some big fights.
And some fights, by and large, I mentioned earlier the gay issue.
I do want to say one thing.
A lot of conservatives surrendered some territory on the gay issue because they wanted to focus on the pro-life issue.
In other words, they didn't want the gay issue to detract from the pro-life issue.
And so they made a tactical decision to let some of that go and focus on Roe versus Wade.
Was it a wrong decision?
Perhaps.
I, by the way, was not on board with that decision.
But nevertheless, that was how some conservatives decided to play this tactically on the social or the cultural arena, where I repeat, we were greatly outnumbered and in many ways outgunned.
So, when you want to measure what we conserved, you have to measure it against the resources available to us at the time, our relative strength in the culture, and look at what we were fighting for.
Yes, I'm not saying you shouldn't chalk up our losses, but you should also chalk up our gains.
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Guys, yesterday I introduced the topic of Christian persecution in Nigeria by talking to a missionary who is on the ground over there.
Very illuminating conversation.
And I want to continue in that same theme or that same vein today.
I'm delighted to welcome Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia.
It's the second district of the U.S. House of Representatives.
He also sits on the House Appropriations Committee.
He tells me he's good buddies with one Brandon Gill, who is connected with the D'Souza family.
Representative Moore is a native of Morgantown.
His wife, Minna, and their three children live in Harper's Ferry.
By the way, you can follow him on X at Rep Riley, R-I-L-E-Y, Moore, M-O-O-R-E.
Riley, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
This is a topic, alas, that has been neglected by a lot of people for a long time.
I'm really happy that happy, maybe the wrong word, because it is, of course, a very difficult topic, but I'm glad it's getting attention.
Let's put it that way.
And can you talk a little bit about how you became interested in this topic, about what is happening to the Christians in Nigeria?
And then perhaps we can explore what the United States might be able to do here.
Much for having me on, and thank you for illuminating this for people.
It's something that's gone unspoken for a very long time, unfortunately, by the mainstream media.
But this is something that I have been. tracking and has certainly been weighing on my heart for a number of years.
And that's just generally the persecution of Christians around the world.
And there's no country more dangerous for Christians in the world than Nigeria.
I mean, it is rated as the most dangerous place for Christians to live.
And really, it started right when I got sworn in.
The first floor speech I ever gave in the U.S. House of Representatives was about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria and other countries in the Middle East and Africa.
But I spoke specifically about Nigeria and introduced a resolution condemning the persecution of Christians in Muslim-majority countries.
And this started me down this path of pushing and pushing for the redesignation of Nigeria as a country of particular concern, which President Trump had rightfully put that designation in place in his first term.
But then the Biden administration took that designation off because they viewed the conflict, and I'm not joking, as being precipitated by climate change.
And there was no discriminant violence against Christians.
This was just random acts of violence and Muslim terrorists doing what they do.
And climate change and land disputes is what caused this, which is just obviously completely bogus and unfortunately laughable in this situation.
So I had pushed and pushed, sent a letter to Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, last month, asking for this redesignation as a country of particular concern.
And I'll talk about why that's important here in just a moment, but and did a started off podcast like this and just continued to do the media work of it all and raising it.
And then in the middle of all this, you get folks like Bill Maher and some others that, oh, hey, this is an issue.
Can't say I've ever agreed with Bill Maher really on anything, but thank you, Bill Maher, for at least bringing this one up.
And it gained a lot of steam.
And I've been pushing the White House and working with the staff and reaching out to the State Department.
Please, can we get this redesignation?
And then we just saw it last week, President Trump making the absolute right call, which I knew as soon as he saw this.
I know how close this is to his heart and the kind of man that he is and had the good fortune of being able to interact with him on a number of occasions now that he would re-designate, which is exactly what he did.
And then left a very strong message for the Nigerians to contemplate of what's going to happen if there is inaction here in Nigeria, which he was very clear that something needs to change or we're going to start changing some things to protect these Christians over in Nigeria.
Riley, I want to explore this issue of a country of concern, but you're aware as I am that there is a certain kind of faction, if you will, on social media, very loud, that will erupt anytime you talk about a subject like this and say something like, what do we care?
Nigeria is none of our concern.
We have big problems here in America.
Why are you even concerned about what's happening over there?
Let's look after the problems inside of our own country.
Would you, I mean, I understand having served in the Reagan administration and over many decades that we have a State Department and the country has a foreign policy and we have dealings with people all over the world.
But how would you answer, if you were speaking on a campus and some kid asked you that question, why are you wasting your time on Nigeria?
What would you say?
Well, what I'd say is first, I'm absolutely America first, and I have been somebody who's supported President Trump since he came down the golden escalator.
I mean, this has shaped my entire political career and ascendancy up to this point and will continue for the rest of my life.
And why this is important is our brothers and sisters in Christ are literally being murdered for the profession of their faith and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
How many times have we talked about also the same people online of the destruction and corrosion of the West and Western civilization and Christian values and the importance of those things?
If we don't address this, if we don't do something about this and some terror state takes hold in Nigeria, I promise you, unfortunately, we're going to have to address it one way or the other.
And what I'd like to do is to address this in a cooperative manner.
I'm hopeful they'll be with the Nigerians.
But we do have to stand up for our brothers and sisters in Christ.
We can't just sit there and just let this happen and at the same time saying, oh, Western civilization and culture is completely corroded.
It's rootless and just floating down a river, a tree without roots, and there's nothing that we can do at all about it.
And it just kind of happens and we can just complain about it online.
No, I'm not willing to accept that at all.
And I do think that there is a potential very quickly to be able to partner, and I'm hoping they're going to partner with the U.S. government to address this because we have been providing them billions of dollars worth of security assistance.
They did pay for that.
But then also there was granted security assistance from the United States, training and equipping and equipment for them to address this issue.
And it has gone unresolved, billions of dollars worth of this, and they're not prioritizing the protection of the Christians.
So I do think the pieces are in place to address this.
It's just been flying under the radar and it's nobody's cared about this for a very long time.
But if we're not going to stand up for our values that we have as Christians, and I'm not talking about nation building and democracy and all this, we're not talking about those neocon talking points of going in and changing it.
That's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about standing up for other Christians and just protecting them from murder, which I think is something as a Christian, we should all be able to agree with.
It's very important to me as a Catholic.
And I think it's important to all denominations of Christians that I've spoken with too around my district and also in the country.
Riley, you mentioned a couple of minutes ago the phrase, the plight of Christians in Muslim majority countries.
Christians sometimes face persecution in other places.
I'm sure it's not easy to be a Christian, for example, in China.
I know that in some parts of India, there are these anti-proselytization laws that make it difficult at least to try to evangelize for the faith.
But it seems like you're highlighting these majority Muslim countries for a reason.
And is it because you have powerful jihadi movements within these countries that directly target and assault Christians, you know, chopping people's heads off, making people dig their own graves?
I mean, in other words, is the magnitude of the persecution greater in the Muslim-majority countries?
Yes, Dinesh.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head there.
And look, this is China is absolutely persecuting Christians.
That happens.
They are locking pastors up, preachers up, priests up.
That is absolutely happening.
But in these Muslim-majority countries, that's where we're seeing the extermination of Christian communities in those countries.
That's why it's such a different specter that's happening in those countries, the death and wanton destruction, and what I view in Nigeria as a genocide that's happening against these populations.
And that's why we do have to stand up and say something and try to do something.
And I do want to circle back to that country of particular concern designation.
It's not just words saying, okay, now you're a country of particular concern.
It unlocks 15 different levers within the International Religious Freedom Act that the president can now use, which would be individual sanctions.
It could be freezing foreign aid.
It could be freezing monetary transactions with international financial institutions.
It could be stopping arms sales and transfers of training and equipment.
And there's a lot of different things that that designation actually unlocks.
And it does start to ratchet up the pressure on the Nigerian government and gives the president, President Trump, different levers that he can continue to push on.
Because I think this is going to be a carrot and stick approach, hopefully.
Hopefully it's not all sticks.
But the Nigerian government, and I'm sure I know they're tracking everything that I'm saying right now.
So I will tell you that they have a great opportunity to actually strengthen and deepen their relationship with the United States government right now, if they're willing to do the right thing and partner with us.
The guy I had on the podcast yesterday, who's a documentary film guy, but he's also a missionary, he said that the government sort of plays this, I won't say double game, that's maybe putting it too strongly, but that they seem to be kind of in with a lot of the bad guys.
And so they don't do the extermination themselves.
But what they will sometimes do is, for example, they will come into a village, disarm everybody.
And then somewhat conveniently, three weeks later, there's an attack on that village, and you have all these people dead and all these cattle that have been massacred.
And the village is basically leveled to the ground.
It seems like you're staying on top of all this and that you think that there is now an opportunity by Trump and by the Trump administration to take concrete action and that this designation, this change of designation, actually signals a change of resources and tools available to the government to make a difference on this issue.
Are you optimistic that we will see that change?
I am optimistic.
And I've been meeting with the State Department and been meeting with the White House in contact with the NSC and others.
As President Trump asked in his true social post for me to lead the investigation over here in Congress and report back to him.
So we are all in coordination and conversation on the best ways to address this from all different branches of government here that are involved.
And I do think this is an opportunity to stop this killing.
I think we do have a chance to do this if they will work with us.
But the guest that you interviewed there is exactly correct.
I'll give you a great example.
Just a couple of weeks ago, a pastor sent out a warning signal to the Nigerian government saying, We're in imminent threat of attack in the next 24 hours.
Please send security forces here to protect us.
They panned it as fake news, hyperbole.
You're overblowing this.
It, you know, kind of just shuttered it away.
Well, within 24 hours, that pastor and 20 of his congregants were murdered.
And it's this blind eye that they've been turning to this, this almost kind of complicit silence on it, I think, that has caused so many deaths.
Over 7,000 Christians murdered and martyred this year just in Nigeria.
And a lot of that is happening in this middle band of the country where the Fulani tribe is their herdsman.
And that's where we get a lot of these flashpoints of conflict.
And the southern part of the country is Christian.
The northern part of the country is majority Muslim.
And then that middle band obviously is in the middle.
And that's where a lot of these conflicts flare up.
But you also do see it in the Northeast where Boko Haram and IS West Africa, ISIS, is so active there in trying to establish a caliphate within Nigeria right now.
And clearly, they see the Christian population as a problem in achieving that political goal.
And that's why you have this wanton death and murder against Christians.
Wow.
Very, very illuminating stuff.
And I want to congratulate you, Riley, for the work that you're doing to bring attention to this, but also to bring about some administrative action on the part of the Trump administration.
Guys, I've been talking to Congressman Riley Moore, who represents the 2nd District of West Virginia.
Follow him on X at RepRileyMoore.
Riley, thank you very much for joining me.
Dinaj, thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
I'm starting a new chapter in my book, Life After Death, The Evidence.
That's this book.
Very cool.
You really like it.
I recommend it.
Available on barnesandnoble.com, Amazon, wherever you want to get books.
And you can follow along as we're talking about this very interesting subject that think about it.
It affects you, affects me, affects all of us.
And this is a chapter that's going to deal with a very remarkable subject, which is near-death experiences.
When I first told people I was writing on the subject, they thought that that idea, this topic of near-death experiences, would be what the whole book was about.
And as it turns out, it's not.
The near-death experiences are important, and yet I will argue that they are not as important as some people make them out to be for reasons that we'll go into.
They are interesting and they are.
Well, let's look at the title of this chapter, View from the Edge.
What I mean by that is that near-death experiences take you to the very edge of life, kind of like you go to the edge of a cliff.
Now, you don't actually know what's down there, but you're at the edge.
You have the best view from anybody kind of on the land up there.
But it's a big mistake to think that you somehow now are the expert or have a kind of full understanding of what happens on the other side of the cliff.
You actually haven't been to the other side of the cliff completely.
At best, what you have done is teetered over the edge.
It's kind of like you're about to slip over the edge and go down, and then somehow you come back.
So that's a very remarkable vantage point, I grant.
And we're about to see some amazing things that happen to people who have these near-death experiences.
And yet we're going to have to think carefully about what those experiences mean.
Now, one thing that I find interesting, and I quote in the chapter itself, is the near-death experience as it happens not only to an atheist, but one of the most prominent atheists of the 20th century.
This is the logical positivist philosopher named A.J. Eyre, a British philosopher.
And he wrote an essay called What I Saw When I Was Dead.
And I'm opening the chapter with a quote from him, which I'll get into a little bit later in a little more detail.
Here's what he says: I was confronted by a red light.
He's talking about when he was dead.
He's dead.
And he says, I was confronted by a red light, exceedingly bright.
Dot, dot, dot.
And then he says this.
I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe.
Wow.
Pretty interesting.
A prominent atheist has a near-death experience himself and says that not only did he see this bright flash of light at a point when he should not have been able to experience anything, but he says that he understood, he was aware that this light,
whatever he was experiencing, was in some way, quote, responsible for the government of the universe, the entire universe, all its planets and all its satellites and all its suns and all its laws.
This light was, quote, responsible for all that.
Hmm.
All right, let's get into the chapter.
I say it would be really nice if you could confirm life after death by having a conversation with dead people, right?
Because they would tell you.
But this can't happen.
It happens, it does happen in fiction.
If you have read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Brutus receives a warning from an apparition of dead Caesar.
In Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is taught a lesson by the ghosts of Christmas's past.
You have films more recent, Ghost, Sixth Sense, and you kind of get this little window into the afterlife.
By the way, in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century, it was not uncommon for people to consult mediums.
And these mediums were channels to the dead.
And people would, in some cases, they would hook themselves up to machines, the mediums I'm talking about, and then the mediums would close their eyes and kind of be receptive to signals from the other world.
And sometimes they would transmit messages to the other world.
I followed some of this.
And most of it, at least the stuff that I've been able to hear in audio, because some of this actually was recorded, and you can look it up.
Most of it, unfortunately, is not clear.
It's pretty, well, I would say it's pretty gibberish-y, because you have these very cryptic, well, your ancestors want to send you a message, and they have some cryptic message that you cannot make head or tail of.
And so this effort to kind of figure out life after death by communicating with ancestors, look, I'm not saying it's not possible.
But what I'm saying is, as a systematic science, it has not made any real progress.
Now, fortunately, there is, in fact, empirically another way, and that is the way of near-death experiences.
And these near-death experiences are very fascinating because they are very similar.
This body of scholarship on near-death experiences was really begun in the 1970s by a guy named Raymond Moody, whose book was called Life After Life.
And Moody reported on 150 different people from a wide range of backgrounds who had been declared dead or they were very close to death, and they had these remarkable experiences.
Now, what made these reports incredible is that these experiences were similar, in many cases, kind of identical.
And so, Moody produces what is a sort of composite account.
What are the common elements?
What is the typical near-death experience like?
So, I'm going to now give it to you.
Number one: a guy reaches a stage in which he is clinically dead.
He has all the signs of death, or he's pronounced dead by his doctor.
And so, you would expect him at this point to lose all awareness.
Not so.
Far from losing awareness, this person hears a loud noise and finds himself moving swiftly through a dark tunnel.
All of these elements I'm now describing are not one-off.
They are repeated again and again and again by people with near-death experiences.
So, the first element is the loud noise, the second element is the tunnel.
He is now outside his physical body and can see it from a distance.
Wow, this is a detachment.
In a sense, your consciousness begins to come out of your body, and yet, disembodied by itself, it has an awareness of your body.
It's kind of like if you were to step outside of yourself and look at yourself and go, There I am eating lunch, or there I am taking a nap.
This is an out-of-body experience.
Now, the disembodied soul isn't really just a spirit, but seems to itself have some sort of a body.
Now, the person having this experience will encounter the spirits of relatives and friends who have died before him.
In some cases, he might even report seeing Jesus or other celestial beings.
He is also dazzled by a bright light that envelops him with warmth and love.
The subject now finds his whole life before him.
This is sometimes called the life review.
And it's actually quite rare because most of us live through life and we might reflect back on this or that.
I remember this experience, that was very traumatic.
I remember this one even when I was three.
But very rarely do we have an experience where all the events of your life in a kind of rapid train, like a series of snapshots, or even as a single snapshot, comes right in front of you.
But this does happen.
So you can panoramically review your whole life or evaluate it.
Oddly enough, time itself feels compressed, as if you're living out your past and your future in a single unending present.
At this point, the person that we're talking about experiences a or approaches a wall, a barrier, signaling a point of no return.
So he wants to cross over, but somehow there is a force that is holding him back.
Somehow, he realizes my time is not yet.
I need to go back to earth.
Somehow, this person is then reunited with their body.
The consciousness and the body become reintegrated.
He tells other people about the experience, but they don't know what he's talking about.
He cannot even express it fully.
He also finds that there are people who like laugh and scoff at him.
Even so, this person is profoundly affected, completely changed by this experience.
They become, in a sense, a different person.
And they lose their fear of death, interestingly.
And they become, in some ways, more reflective, more gentle, more sober.
So, Raymond Moody, in surveying, as I say, 150 people, found that this, what I've just described, is the commonality of experience of life after death.
And when we pick up on this topic, and we're going to do it not tomorrow, Debbie and I have our roundup as usual, but Monday, I'll talk about specific instances of near-death experiences and what we can learn from them.
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