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Nov. 10, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:17
GAME OF CHICKEN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1208
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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, this government shutdown is a game of chicken.
I'll tell you how you win a game of chicken, and it looks like we might be winning this one.
I'll point to a single piece of evidence that shows that things are not looking too good for one James Comey and political strategist Matthew Farachi joins me.
He's going to highlight the plight of the Christians in Syria.
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This government shutdown is a game of chicken.
Now, we need to talk about games of chicken because there is kind of only one way to win a game of chicken.
Well, first of all, it's always best not to play.
If you don't have to play, then don't play because it's a bit of a reckless game, right?
You're driving toward the other guy.
He's driving toward you.
You're waiting to see who's going to swerve first, who's going to chicken out first.
But when you have a government shutdown, you've got two sides and neither is willing to give in.
So this is why it kind of resembles the game of chicken.
And this time, it looks like the Democrats chickened out.
They gave in.
They had defectors, a sufficient number of defectors, in the Senate.
Apparently, about eight or nine of the moderates decided, let's vote to move the process forward to reopen the government.
Now, the government isn't open yet, but it looks like it's going to be.
It looks like what's going to happen is that funding will be pushed out.
Now, this problem isn't going to be solved in a fundamental way.
This is a case of just moving the problem further out, but it does mean that the current crisis, if it is a crisis, and I'll come back to that, will pass.
Now, we need the Senate to vote.
We need the House to vote.
We need Trump to sign.
And all of that could occur pretty quickly, but it hasn't happened.
It hasn't happened yet.
What was this game of chicken about?
Fundamentally, it's about the Democrats saying, we won't go along unless you extend Obamacare, including, by the way, at least some of the Obamacare programs to illegals.
We won't give in.
Shows you the priorities of the Democrats, how deeply dug in they are on this illegals issue.
Illegals are the future of the Democratic Party, and they know it, or they act like they know it.
And this is what they were willing to kind of go to the edge about.
Now, when you do have this game of chicken, the key thing is to be so crazy that the other side, in a way, realizes that it's hopeless to play because you're not going to give in.
The problem with Democratic societies, and particularly with the right side of the aisle, the Republicans, the Tories in Great Britain, the Conservative parties, they tend to be wimps.
They tend to give in.
This is why shutdowns in the past have generally been really bad for the Republican Party.
We get all the blame.
The public thinks we're at fault.
And then we sheepishly relent.
In other words, we swerve out, and the Democrats can kind of claim victory.
So it's worth asking, what did we do differently this time?
How did we win this one?
Well, the answer is you win a game of chicken by being so dogmatic, so unwilling to move.
It's almost as if Trump were to say, he didn't say this, but this is the way you win the game, is you go, all right, well, the government is shut down.
This doesn't bother us.
There's some talk about airlines cutting back.
All right, well, we don't plan to open the government for the next three years.
Now, again, this would seem to be an outrageous thing to say, but precisely because it is outrageous, the Democrats realize we can't possibly endure this.
All the EBT people, all the people who are from our constituencies that rely on these benefits are going to come screaming to our offices.
And all the Republicans are going to say is, well, we're happy to open the government as long as you sign here.
But otherwise, we're not doing it.
And we honestly don't care.
We don't care about the midterms.
We've got three more years, three and a half more years.
And so, well, we have, you know, until January of 29.
And so you might be looking at the government shut down the whole time.
And then the Democrats go, well, that's unacceptable.
We kind of have to cave.
Now, as I say, this threat wasn't made in this way, but this is the kind of way you play the game.
I would extend the same logic, by the way, and this may not seem like a direct analogy, but it is connected.
If you're Israel or if you're any society and somebody takes your hostages, if you're America and the Iranians in 1979 take your hostages, again, how do you play that game of chicken?
The way you play that game of chicken is you dare them to do whatever they want to do and you tell them, as Trump has actually said in his own language, that the fury of hell will be unleashed on you once you do it.
So go ahead, do whatever you want.
But guess what?
None of you are going to be left standing when it's all over.
So the ball's in your court.
Either you swerve or you keep going.
And we're just going to be watching to see what you do.
And in the meantime, we're making preparations for your total and complete decimation.
And this is how you win the game of chicken in war as in peace, in war as in politics.
Now, the government has been closed.
Have you really noticed?
I haven't.
I mean, not particularly.
Now, true, I'm not exactly on the EBT role.
And I've been watching these videos of all these people.
You know, I don't know how I'm going to survive.
I may have to go and become a thief.
I may have to start the stealing out of Walmart.
And I'm like, first of all, you don't exactly look like you're starving.
And second of all, if all these people have been missing their EBT benefits, how many people have starved in the meantime?
You would assume that if there are even some, they would be profiled in the West Virginia Gazette or they'd be seeing them on CBS News.
Presumably, we don't see them because it hasn't happened.
And what does that tell you?
You've got millions upon millions of people getting these benefits, and a lot of them don't need them.
A lot of them.
Now, I'm not saying there aren't people who, there are people who do need them, but we have no way of telling the difference.
Has there been any systematic audit of this program, the program that was created by and large to prevent hunger and starvation, to make sure that it's going to people who would otherwise be hungry and starve, as opposed to the fact that you're just giving people money because they're going to vote for you?
In other words, this is not really a program based upon need.
This is a trading of benefits for votes.
It looks like so many of our programs, I'm not singling out EBT, it just came to the forefront because of this shutdown.
Now, I see that Trump has just posted that he would like to see the air traffic controllers, whom we do need.
We need air traffic controllers.
We need the military.
And the fact that we've heard so much about the air traffic controllers and the military makes the point that these are things that the government does do and perhaps they need to do.
It's not entirely obvious, by the way, Debbie and I were talking this morning, I think it was.
Is there a reason that the air traffic controllers need to be, quote, federal employees?
What is that reason?
So many of these things developed as if it was just sort of obvious that you needed, you know, it's obvious that you need the post office to deliver the mail.
Who else will deliver the mail?
This was, by the way, before FedEx, before UPS.
It's obvious that you need, you know, government-run lighthouses because you can have private ships, but who's actually going to monitor the ships coming into port?
Well, there's no reason you can't have private lighthouses.
We even have private prisons, privately run prisons, which contract out, which get contracts from the government to run these, to run these prisons.
And so it's quite possible that you could have a privately run and maybe it would be better run air traffic control system.
I say maybe because by and large, I think it is the case that pretty much everything that the government does, it does badly.
And so there's an enormous amount of waste, fraud, inefficiency, bureaucracy, multiple people doing the same job, and so on.
Look, I'm glad we are reopening the government.
I'm glad the Democrats have caved.
It would be really bad if we caved, because if we caved, it would really show that not only that we're a party without backbone, but that we are going to normalize this ongoing looting of the treasury to give political dividends to the Democrats on a continuing basis.
And it would also show that even when we are in control or when we are ostensibly in control, they are still in charge.
I think by holding firm, Trump has proved that at least this time, and at least on this issue, we are in control and we're also in charge.
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James Comey is in, well, a little bit of trouble, or maybe a lot of trouble is a better way to put it.
Now, we know this because Comey's team filed a motion for dismissal.
Basically, Comey said, I've done nothing wrong.
I've been indicted for no reason.
This is a vindictive prosecution.
And in response to that, when you file a motion for dismissal, the prosecution gets to file a motion opposing your motion.
And in opposing it, they show some things that are evidence likely to come out in the trial.
Basically, to say, look, we got some stuff on this guy, and this is not vindictive.
And we have good reason to believe that he has committed the offenses with which he is charged.
So, the U.S. attorney is Lindsay Halligan, and she filed a public response which shows a note from Comey.
This note is dated September 26, 2016.
So, let's get our timetables out, our calendar is out.
We're talking about just a few months before the election.
This is when the Russia collusion scandal is being cooked up.
And the question is: what is Comey's role?
If anything, Comey has presented like he has no role, but this note says differently.
It's a handwritten note, but I'm looking at the handwritten version on the left and then a typeset transcription of what is on the note.
It clearly refers to President Obama, so it's a note subsequent to an Obama meeting, and it has a number of items.
But the key one, the single line that jumps out of this handwritten note: Hillary Clinton planning to hit Trump.
So, what does this tell you?
Comey knows that there is a scheme that has been cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
It is a fraudulent scheme because it is a dirty trick on the part of the campaign.
And its motives are to hit Trump, to go after Trump, quite clearly in this case, given the contents, to frame Trump.
And Comey goes on to talk about the ties to Russia.
He goes on to talk about the role of the press.
He says, quote, I mentioned the New York Times in this context.
And he talks about ways in which this scheme can be advanced.
So, what we're getting out of this is that Comey was not only aware of, but he saw himself as participating in a scheme involving Hillary Clinton, involving Obama, to fabricate a Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
And there it is.
I mean, this tidbit, if you want to call it, this single document alone, I think, is sufficient to show the judge that there's plenty of reason to push forward with this.
This is not a case where this poor man who has nothing to do with this has been hauled into court and charged.
He's being charged because he was involved.
Now, basically, what Comey is getting at, why would he mention the New York Times?
Why would he mention the media?
The reason is this.
Essentially, the Hillary campaign creates the false information.
They create the dossier.
Obama, Comey, and the other guys in the administration at the highest level are aware of it.
They're aware that this is a fraudulent document.
But what they want to do is they want to convert this false information into something that, let's say, a judge, particularly a friendly judge like Boesberg, will take seriously.
They've got to give him something that he can lean on.
So, what they do is they kind of launder the information.
What I mean is that they pass it off to the New York Times, they pass it off to the media.
The media does an article on this, and then Comey will clip the article and put it into the application for a FISA warrant asking Judge Bose, hey, Judge Boseberg, there's clearly something going on here.
Look at this bombshell report in the New York Times.
Of course, Comey is the guy behind that bombshell report.
So he is putting the info out there.
Then it sort of comes back to him through the New York Times.
He then passes that over to Judge Boseberg.
It's a wink-wink operation all around.
It's important to realize Comey knows what's going on.
The New York Times knows what's going on.
Judge Boseberg knows what's going on.
All of them are in on it.
All of them are, in a way, participants in a highly corrupt scheme.
And the scheme is now happily being busted.
And there is finally, belatedly, some accountability that may, I emphasize, may be coming here.
Now, it's a really good question: how these documents, including this particular document from Comey, how did the FBI, how did Kash Patel get it?
Because it was found.
It was found in a kind of secret stash.
And Cash has been actually kind of gloating, and perhaps appropriately so, hey, look what I found.
Hey, look at this stash.
And it got me thinking, like, wow, how is the stash even preserved?
So here are some possibilities.
I mean, one possibility is that some kind of whistleblower, now I don't mean an explicit whistleblower, I mean someone in the FBI who said, you know what?
I have access to these documents.
They're going to be valuable at some future date.
Let me kind of hang on to them.
Let me preserve them.
I don't want to destroy them.
They're too important.
And I want someone at the right time to find them.
That's possibility number one.
I don't know how likely that is, but that's one way that these documents could have been preserved.
Here's a second way, just sort of bureaucratic ineptitude.
Let's say, for example, that Comey wanted these documents destroyed.
And he maybe even ordered their destruction.
But since he was in charge, there wasn't any urgency about it.
And somehow it wasn't really done.
A third possibility is they were sort of hiding the documents.
They didn't want to go as far as to destroy them.
Destroying evidence is always prima facie evidence of guilt, not to mention it's a crime in itself.
And so they're like, let's not do that.
That may be going too far.
Why don't we just sort of stick it over here where no one's really going to find it?
Obviously, our goal is to keep our team in charge, our team in the White House.
And so this way the documents are not going to be found.
And yet we haven't really disposed or destroyed them.
And they didn't expect that you would have a regime change and that these documents would eventually be found as indeed they were.
So these situations, I think, are indicative of the sense of immunity that all these people had.
Hillary did it knowing that she could, that this wasn't just something her campaign was going to deal with.
Hillary put it together knowing that I can hand off to Obama.
And Obama knew I can hand off to my trusted concigliaries, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et cetera.
They know what to do with this.
The New York Times was like, we know what to do.
Hand over the stuff, hand over the quote leak.
We will uncritically transmit it.
We don't mind that you're trying to frame Trump.
We are happy to be part of that.
We want to get rid of Trump with the same urgency that you do.
And then there's Boesberg.
He feels the same way.
So what you have here is, is it a conspiracy?
Of course it is.
This is not a conspiracy theory.
This is an actual conspiracy because these people are knowingly working together.
And if anything, I would like to see a much broader case made here.
Pam Bondi is, I would call her, at least at this point, a kind of judicial minimalist.
She's doing as little as possible to try to keep Trump happy.
And, you know, you notice that Democrats aren't blasting Tambondi.
Why?
Because I think they realize that she's, from their point of view, not so bad.
No massive RICO case in which you have 30 or 40 defendants accused of conspiring with each other at various levels of the FBI and also in the other intelligence agencies, also to include Obama, also to include, I mean, look at the aggression with which the Democrats went after Trump and the Trump stirs around them.
But we don't play it that way.
We go at them with a kind of circumspection or caution.
And as a result, you have Comey facing this indictment.
Even the indictment itself is quite narrow.
You misled Congress.
Not that you committed treason, not that you are part of some vast criminal scheme, but rather you didn't tell the truth when you appeared before Congress.
And that's it.
That's all we're going to go after you for.
So I suppose we should be grateful for small steps that are being taken by the DOJ, but I'm not.
I'd like to see a lot more.
I'd like to see this Comey prosecution be just the start.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast my friend Matthew Farachi.
He is the founder of Gideon 300, which is a public affairs company.
He's a political strategist.
He's also a media and film guy.
He was co-founder and executive producer of The Chosen.
He's also one of the primary architects behind the Angel Studios' massive box office hit called Sound of Freedom.
And Matthew is here in Washington and he is mobilizing political support for, well, we're going to find out about what?
It has to do with Syria.
It has to do with the persecution of Christians and others.
You can follow Matthew on X at Matthew Farachi, F-A-R-A-C-I, the website Gideon300.com.
Matthew, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
You have come a long way from Israel to Washington, D.C.
And you are bringing a really important message that has been signed, by the way, by some of the biggest leaders in the Christian community.
I just looked down the list.
I see some giant names of mega church pastors, people like Steve Strang of Charisma Media.
You have Jack Hibbs.
You have the actor Kevin Sorbo.
There are a number of others.
What is the important message that you are bringing to the Trump administration right now?
Well, first of all, Dinesh, you mentioned Kevin Sorbo.
I'm actually his stunt double.
So I just wanted to clarify that for your audience.
But when I'm not his stunt double, I'm honored to be here representing the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, where I'm a senior advisor.
And the letter, the purpose of the letter, and I kind of need to back up and put it this way, Dinesh, is, of course, you saw the amazing job that President Trump did recently talking about Christian persecution in Nigeria and how it's sort of his Monroe doctrine.
He said, we're not going to stand for that.
And the president said, we're not going to stand for Christian persecution in Nigeria or any other country.
This is a U.S. policy.
You know, like, unfortunately, in the Biden administration, it was the opposite.
It was, you know, we're going to stand for transgender rights in other countries.
Well, thank God we have a righteous person in office and he's standing up for persecuted Christians in whatever the country may be.
Well, you know, I mean, he went so far as to say that if you guys, meaning the Nigerian government, doesn't straighten this out, he goes, we're going to come in there guns ablazing.
I think that's the phrase that jumped out at me, which really shows that Trump is no isolationist.
He's not going to drag the United States into protracted wars, but he doesn't hesitate to go abroad when necessary and administer a well-needed clobbering.
Yeah, well, the president has never liked Dinesh.
If you notice, if you remember actually the missiles he sent into Syria in his first administration, he doesn't like humans being harmed, like the innocent being harmed.
And that's the righteous instinct that he has.
And exactly to your point, he said, hey, Nigeria, you don't knock it off.
We're going to knock it off for you.
So now we have today at the White House the new president of Syria, of course, a former al-Qaeda terrorist, Ahmed El-Sharra.
And, you know, we saw President Trump go to the Middle East and meet with MBS and meet with Al-Shara.
And the president sat down and he said, Look, kid, I know you've got a troubled past.
I know you've been in Juvia a couple times.
You've been in and out of jail, literally in and out of jail, U.S. terrorist detention centers, but we're going to give you the keys to the car.
And that's fine.
We're going to give you the keys to the car, but you have to act appropriately.
And now, of course, he's not acting appropriately.
A little background.
In July, his forces went down to southern Syria to a place called Sweda, and they started slaughtering people, Dinesh, October 7th style, like from your documentary, but raping little girls, throwing grandparents and their grandchildren off buildings, burning old people alive in their wheelchairs, ripping a guy's heart out and eating it in front of him.
I mean, the most gruesome stuff.
They have hundreds of women and children currently that are hostages.
Okay.
This is happening.
So they realized this was not a strategy to take over the region because they'd have to slaughter everybody.
So now there's a siege of Sweda happening, where this is a city of 750,000 people.
They are below the United Nations level, just as an example.
Daily water intake is below the United Nations level for starvation.
Okay.
So this is a very, very serious situation.
And they're slowly killing a bunch of these people.
And then we're heading into winter.
So a humanitarian disaster.
I don't know how you get worse than disaster, Dinesh, but a humanitarian disaster is turning into a mega disaster.
And so these faith leaders are saying to the president, hey, you stand up for religious freedom.
You've been our champion around the world.
And basically, you own this guy because he really wouldn't be in charge in Syria unless you gave him your endorsement.
So take him out to the wood shed and tell him, knock it off with the killing of Christians and Druze and Alawites and other minorities, and we won't have a problem.
And that's what these faith leaders are asking.
Let's review some of the background here, Matthew, so that people understand how Syria fits into this picture.
For a long time, Syria was run by this Alawite dictator, Bashar Assad.
And then Assad was ultimately toppled, right?
And he ejected.
And has it been the case since then that you essentially have an Islamic terrorist regime that has been in charge at Syria?
There's been a kind of a Syrian civil war between different groups.
Is this the guy who's emerged on top of all that?
And is he now carrying out recriminations against the Alawites and against the Kurds and the Druze?
What's the way, what's the framework for understanding what are his objectives in Syria?
Yeah, so he was, Dinesh, you got it perfectly right.
He's literally the king of the hill.
He's the guy that managed to overthrow Assad and remain on top.
And obviously, he has a terrorist background.
In fact, they had to remove his terrorist designation to allow him into the country to meet President Trump.
And the Treasury Department had to lift certain sanctions against him to allow him into the country.
So now that he's come into power, he's saying that he wants to be pro-West and receive the support of the United States.
And there's a sense, Dinesh, of it's the rough, it's, you know, we're talking about the Middle East is the roughest neighborhood in the world.
So you're not going to get, most likely, a righteous leader to come take over a country.
You're going to get a thug.
And so obviously Trump has this very pragmatic foreign policy in which he says, okay, you're a thug, but are you going to be a pro-Chinese thug?
Are you going to be a pro-Iran thug?
Are you going to be a pro-Russia thug?
Or are you going to be a pro-American thug?
And if you're a pro-American thug, let's try to be pragmatic and let's see if we can deal with you.
That's the theory.
And that's why the president said he would give him a chance because he's saying, we're going to see if you play ball.
And so the issue is that he is being given a chance.
And to your point, Dinesh, some reports say that up to 18% of the new Syrian army is actually former ISIS fighters.
So he's got some really crazy elements to contend with in his administration.
But it's been particularly bad, you know, that the Archbishop of Damascus said last week, and I'm paraphrasing, that it's really rough to be a Christian in Syria.
Now, let's remember, Dinesh, make Syria Christian again should be the goal.
Syria is essentially the birthplace of Christianity.
You know that more than anybody.
Damascus and the whole history there, it used to be a majority Christian country.
And so for Christians and other people that are non-Muslims and non-jihadists to be struggling in their own country is a bit of a weird juxtaposition.
And the president has an opportunity here to turn this guy into a success, I think, by putting the right pressure on him and saying, hey, when you do what America likes, great.
When you do what America doesn't like, not great.
And that's America first.
Speaking of America first, as you know, there has been, and Tucker is part of this, but he's not the only one making the charge that the persecution of Christians is somehow being a neglected issue in the world with all this focus on other things.
Why are we focusing on Jews and on Israel?
Look at the persecution of Christians.
And yet, I had on this very podcast just a few days ago an American missionary in Nigeria who was talking about the systematic murder of Christians there.
And that guy just posted a video kind of calling out Tucker by name and saying, Tucker, why are you trying to deny and minimize and kind of poo-poo, if you will, the persecution of Christians in Nigeria?
As far as I know, Tucker and his allies, the Tuckerites or whatever you want to call them, have been pretty silent, have they not, on this issue as well?
Well, Dinesh, there's a little secret there, and it's called No Jews, No News.
So there's a wonderful comedian.
I think you've met him, Dinesh Ami Kozak, and he has a terrific little bit where he's got Tucker preparing for a show.
And they start going through Christian persecution around the world.
And Tucker settles on a fender bender somewhere in Israel where a Christian gets rear-ended and gets his car dented.
It's very funny, but he's making an incredibly serious point, which is Christian persecution is a vital issue around the world.
Religious freedom, to me, Dinesh, is the most important of all free.
If you don't have religious freedom, you don't have anything.
If you don't have religious freedom, you don't have free speech.
You don't have a free market economy.
So purely without sarcasm, Dinesh, I would love to see Tucker start telling the stories of Christian persecution around the world, because that's an actual problem, focusing on a country like Israel, where Christians are not only allowed, but celebrated and welcomed.
We have obviously Christians come to Israel all the time, people such as yourself, Dinesh.
It's not exactly a hostile place for Christians.
And I think to be the thing I used to love about Tucker back in the day is that he was intellectually honest.
That's what I respected most.
And so a return to intellectual honesty would be to start telling the stories of these persecuted Christians all around the world.
And I believe Mark Walker, who's President Trump's nominee to be ambassador for international religious freedom at the State Department, has said publicly that there's 28, hope I got the number right, 28 countries that where there's an urgent, urgent problem with Christian persecution.
Those are the stories that Tucker should be focused on.
I mean, it's interesting in the dragon's prophecy, one of the things that Jonathan Khan says, and I was a little kind of like taken aback when he said it, is he was talking about the Bible's forecast that in the sort of last days or the last era, you will see simultaneously two types of violence, persecution, harassment, and so on.
The first is toward the Jews.
The idea here is that the devil hates the Jews.
The Jews are God's chosen people.
Let's run them out of their ancestral homeland.
Let's increase the temperature of violence, of anti-Semitism.
So that's one thing.
But then he says it's not going to be confined to the Jews because you've got what Khan calls the spiritual Israelites, and those are the Christians.
And Khan goes, the Bible predicts that they're going to be getting it too.
Persecution, hatred, violence, hostility.
And this is going to be happening in lots of different places, not just in one place.
And I think it's interesting because what you're saying is that, guess what?
If we can just, you know, empirically look around the world, we can verify that these biblical forecasts appear to be substantiated by the things that we actually see in many different places around the world.
And in fact, not only that, but they're coming from a common enemy.
In other words, if it's the Islamic radicals who are going after the Jews, it's the same Islamic radicals that are going after the Christians.
And your example of Syria is a kind of remarkable confirmation of that point, don't you think?
You know, Dinesh, the world is divided into people that are for God and the people are against God.
And you see people that are for God in so many different faith traditions, and you see the people that are against God.
And I find it, well, insidious that radical Islam is against God in the name of God.
They use the name of God to go against God.
And who are their targets?
Christians and Jews.
So why does God love to see Christians and Jews uniting?
Because we both believe in the Bible.
We both believe in the Torah.
We both believe in the prophets.
We have the same spiritual foundations, right?
And so then you look at the other side, and they don't believe in any of that.
In fact, they find that that holds them back.
And I think that this whole discussion that we're having, Dinesh, about Tucker and other, you know, Nick Fuentes and Candace and whoever else, it's an insidious sort of spiritual subterfuge to distract Christians and Jews who are supposed to be united,
a united front, to distract them from the real enemy, which is the fact that now we have an Islamist as the mayor of New York, that our country is literally being taken over, and it's part of a strategy that's, we've already seen it be successful in Europe.
It's happened.
Europe is done.
And now we can prevent it in America.
And what's the conversation on X about?
Is it about the onslaught of the Islamic conquering of America?
No.
Conversations about, you know, some ridiculous Charlie Kirk assassination theory or some other thing.
And it's all one big distraction to take people's eye off the ball from what the real war is about.
Don't you agree with that?
I do.
And in some ways, I almost think it's, you know, it's something that forces us to be a little humble because we begin to see that the plague is also on our own side, right?
In other words, it's easy for us to normally say, well, we're on the right and therefore we are right.
And the other side is on the left and they are wrong.
And those are in fact the battle lines.
But then we notice coming from our own right flank, you've got all this stuff that is, I think, no less poisonous than some of the stuff that we see on the left.
So it's kind of like we, you know, we're an army that is facing not only dissension, but all this stuff in our own ranks.
And that has to be sorted out as much as the battle carried over to the other side.
So the good people, if you will, have a lot to work on.
Yes, yes.
And I feel like, Dinesh, and you've been instrumental in this.
You know, in the Jewish community, we always have this emphasis on learning the Torah.
The reason is because we need to know what we stand for.
What do we stand for and why do we stand for it?
And what are our values?
And you've been a leader in the Christian community likewise to lead that conversation and say, hey, what do we actually stand for?
And I think part of the problem with the young people is they were raised in environments where it wasn't communicated to them in the Christian community what they stand for.
And now there's this kind of existential crisis of, well, is this what we stand for?
Or just because my parents believe this, this was never explained to me.
And so we, you know, people of the good book need to know what's in the good book and what it teaches and what its core values are.
And that way, when people come along and try to redefine what that is, as we were alluding to earlier, it doesn't have any impact.
Also, what do the bad guys stand for?
Right?
If you look at that culture, it's a culture where our view of a virtue is their view of a vice.
Literally, if you look at like radical Islam, to rape a Christian girl is a good thing.
That's a way to go, right?
And in our God's value system, we say that's a desecration.
How could you do something like that?
And Dinesh, when you're up against a value system like that, wake up.
That's what they actually believe.
And for some reason, you know, Mamdani comes along with a smile and a wink and everybody thinks, oh, this guy's great.
And they don't realize they've just taken that territory in New York and they're not giving it back.
You said something a little earlier, Matthew, that I thought was very interesting.
You said these are people who use the name of God to go against God, speaking about the radical Muslims.
And it kind of told me the cultural left, in a way, must recognize this.
Because when we think about the Red-Green Alliance, the red people have got to see, if the red people thought that the Muslims were really serious about being on God's side, they would run away from that side.
But I think what they recognize is that these radical Muslims are in a way part of the devil's brigades.
They're on the other side.
They're the ones against the Jews and the Christians.
And so the people in the cultural left go, well, they're our obvious allies because they hate the same people we do.
And so we need, right?
So, what I'm getting at is that we begin to see how the two camps, the red camp and the green camp, can very easily recognize the common project that the two of them are undertaking.
Yes, Dinesh, that's why I call them Islaminists, because it's the convergence of totalitarian communism and Islam.
And there's a rabbi called Elie Michel, and he wrote a book called The War Against the Bible, which answers that question: Why is it that purpled-haired transgender activists and people from the radical Islam community, why are they buddying up?
It doesn't make any sense because the purple hairs would be thrown off a building the minute they go to Gaza.
And the answer is that obviously they both hate the Bible because the Bible restricts them.
I didn't say God, right?
That's an interesting difference.
They both hate the Bible because the Bible says this is how you have to behave.
And they both don't want to be limited by the honor code and the Ten Commandments in the Bible.
So they're united in their hatred of the Bible.
And therefore, they're united in their hatred of the people that believe in the Bible.
So that's the inconvenient truth of our times.
If you believe in the Bible, these people on the far left and far right are your enemies.
Wow, fascinating stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to the one and only Matthew Farachi, founder of Gideon 300.
Follow him on X at Matthew Farachi, the website Gideon300.com.
Matthew, great stuff.
And thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
I'm in a chapter of Life After Death, The Evidence, where we are discussing near-death experiences.
And when researchers began to study this phenomenon, they realized that there are some references in Western literature going all the way back to the 5th century BC, where very odd things are described that seem to resemble these near-death experiences.
Here's Plato in the Republic.
He talks about a soldier who was mortally wounded in battle and says, Plato, as the man's body was tossed on a funeral pyre, waiting to be incinerated and then buried, the man somehow revived and felt his soul leaving his body.
The soul goes through a passage where it joins other spirits.
These souls are met and judged by divine beings that bring before them everything that is done in their earthly life.
And the soldier is told, but not you.
You're not going to be judged.
You're going to be returned to the physical world.
And the soldier awakes and finds himself right back on the funeral pyre.
So what an odd account, probably mysterious for readers through the centuries, and yet now recognizably similar to what people describe in near-death experiences.
One wonders if Plato actually got this based on someone who told him something like this.
And that's how the story ended up in the Republic.
The 8th century monk called the Venerable Bede reports a similar case in his History of the English People.
And in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, dying people are instructed to get ready to give a full account of your life as you go through the darkness out into the radiant light of pure reality or pure truth.
The writer Ernest Hemingway was wounded by shrapnel in World War I, and he was lying in a hospital bed in Italy.
And he wrote to a friend that on a fateful night in 1918, this is during World War I, a huge bomb exploded in the darkness.
I'm now quoting him.
I died then.
I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.
Very vivid analogy, mark of a good writer.
It flew around and then came back and went in again, and I wasn't dead anymore.
This is Hemingway.
Hemingway said he was very affected by this experience, and he used it as the basis for a scene in his novel called A Farewell to Arms.
The psychologist Carl Jung also had a near-death experience and describes it very much as a dislocation in time.
And then he says, I was drawn into an indescribable hole.
And then he said, when it was over, quote, three weeks were still to pass before I could truly make up my mind to live again.
It's almost like the experience was so transformative that he couldn't really return to normal life for quite a duration of time.
And finally, the atheist A.J. Ayer.
Now, A.J. Ayer is a British empiricist, and the empiricists are known for paying attention to empirical experience.
They don't like the idea that there is a spiritual realm.
They don't like abstractions.
They're basically the show-me people.
I want to experience it with my five senses, and then I'm going to believe it, but really not otherwise.
And the remarkable thing is, this is exactly what happens to A.J. Ayer.
His heart stopped.
He was in an intensive care unit, and he had a near-death experience, which he admits completely confounded his previous assumptions.
Here's A.J. Ayer.
He says he found himself in a realm where, quote, the laws of nature had ceased to function as they should.
In other words, space and time don't function in the way that we normally experience them.
You're in another realm.
He says, quote, it was, he felt, up to me to put things right.
Almost a sense of I need to account for, I need to rectify the things I've done in my life that are wrong.
He says, quote, he was confronted by a red light, exceedingly bright, that was, quote, somehow responsible for the government of the universe.
Now, I used this quotation in the opening of the chapter.
I commented on it briefly.
I want to italicize that he's saying this isn't just a red light, kind of like, you know, I'm driving on the highway, a car turns up its beams, I have a flashing red light.
No, A.J. Ayer is saying that this red light is a kind of governing force for the entire universe.
It's somehow responsible for the government.
Government here means administration of the universe.
And then he returned to consciousness.
And Ayer did not become a theist.
One might think, okay, well, maybe he says, I'm not an atheist anymore.
No, he's still an atheist.
But he says experiences like this provide, quote, rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness.
So here we hit upon something that is quite remarkable.
And that is what Ayer is saying is it could be that we have life after death, but we don't have God.
You and I might consider that to be strange.
I, by the way, do not believe it's true, but it is frankly not unique to A.J. Ayer.
There are people, Hindus, for example, who believe in reincarnation.
One life leads to the next.
And this is all part of a natural process.
And as I mentioned earlier, the other lives don't occur in some other realm.
They occur right here on the earth.
Now, AJ Ayer is not advancing the Hindu view, but what he's saying is that as an atheist, he says, I have this experience.
It tells me, based upon what I went through, that it looks to me like death is not the end, at least not the end of my consciousness.
It may be the end of my physical body, but it's not the end of my consciousness.
And I just have to accept that.
It may be that that is the case, whether or not there is a God.
Now, this whole business of near-death experiences, as we are going to discuss, has stirred up quite a controversy.
And if it were just one guy, Raymond Moody, collecting all this evidence, you would have to be a little suspicious of it.
But as it turns out, over the last several decades, a number of other prominent researchers have gone into the field.
Psychologist Kenneth Ring conducted the first systematic study of near-death experiences.
There's a pediatrician named Melvin Morris.
He's focused on near-death experiences in children.
Cardiologist Michael Sabam says that, quote, at the beginning, I thought Raymond Moody was pulling a fast one.
But then he began to study in his own field.
He's a cardiac surgeon.
He says, I'm just going to look at cardiac patients who report these NDEs or near-death experiences.
And I'm going to measure those against a control group of patients who did not.
So this is how science works.
Let's look at the people who are in the distinct group that we are trying to study.
And let's compare their experiences to people who are not in that group.
And let's see what we can learn from that.
There's now an international association for near-death studies.
There's a journal that collects data.
And so we now have information coming in from all over the world.
And we find the similar phenomena that I've mentioned before.
And you have subgroups that study just one or other aspect of these phenomena.
So for example, you have people who study the out-of-body phenomenon.
Is it possible really for your consciousness to, quote, leave your body and observe your body as if from the outside?
Is it, that's one thing.
The second one is the tunnel of darkness.
The third one is the bright light.
The fourth one is the sensation of love and warmth.
The fifth one is the life review or the kind of moral audit of your life.
And then the sixth one and the final one is the subsequent life transformation.
So we can now very clearly delineate the features of these near-death experiences.
And these experiences border into the kind of wonderful.
And by wonderful here, I mean an experience that stimulates wonder, the kind of wonder a child has when you experience the world for the first time.
I'll give one example of this and then go into others when we pick this up tomorrow.
There's an 11-year-old boy who has cardiac arrest.
He has no heartbeat.
And yet, he describes an out-of-body experience in which he could see the doctors and the nurses working on his body.
He's outside his body.
He's observing this.
After his recovery, he accurately summarized the resuscitation procedures used on him, the colors and whereabouts of the instruments in the room, and even what the medical staff said to each other.
And of course, in the book, I provide the footnote.
You can go to the original source and you can get the full description of this incident.
Again, it's not the only incident.
We'll cover a few others when we pick it up next time.
But what we're seeing here, and the point I think that this particular episode shows, is that you have an 11-year-old who observes and knows things that it would seem they would have no way to know.
It's kind of like you were out for the count.
You had cardiac arrest.
You should not be able to observe these things and describe them afterward.
And yet you do, and yet you can.
So, what is going on here?
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