WHO CREATED THE BIBLE?

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
As a Christian, I believe the Bible is the inspired
word of God. The Bible is the book in which
God communicates his formula for how we should live. And
yet the Bible is not really a single book. We
think of it that way, it seems that way when
we hold it in our hand, but in reality, the
Bible is a collection of books written by many different
writers over a long period of time. In a sense,

(00:36):
the Bible is not an inspired book, but an inspired
library and inspired collection of books written down over a
period of one thousand to fifteen hundred years. But how
do we know that the books in the Bible are
the ones that God inspired? How do we know they've
come down to us accurately through the ages? Who chose
those books? When? And on what basis? For centuries, these

(00:59):
questions were asked only by scholars, but not by ordinary
Christian believers. The Bible was taken, for the most part
on faith. God said it, I believe it. And that's that.
Our society was largely Christian and therefore the assumptions of
Christian orthodoxy were taken for granted. But today our culture
is largely secular, and this secularism is the foundation of

(01:20):
our education system and our mainstream media today. We're aware
that for centuries before the printing press, the Bible was
copied by hand by scribes, and scribes not only make errors,
but scribes of their own predilections and prejudices. And so
we wonder could some of these guys have changed the
Bible along the way? Is the Old Testament as we
have it today, the same one that Jesus read and taught. Moreover,

(01:43):
today we know about books from early Christianity that didn't
make it into the Bible. We're aware of the literature
of Gnosticism ever since Elaine Pegels wrote her book The
Gnostic Gospels. We're aware of the existence of alternative gospels,
such as the Gospel of and the Gospel of Peter.
There's also the Book of Enoch. I'm making a video

(02:04):
series of Noah's Ark studying the geology of the flood,
the world before the flood, and the archaeology of the arc.
Have been reading the Book of Enoch, which talks about
giants and fallen angels and the rise of the Nephelm.
Incredible stuff. The Book of Enoch is mentioned in the Bible,
but it didn't make it into the Bible. Now why
not Why do we have Ecclesiastes but not Enoch and

(02:27):
in the New Testament? Why do we have the Gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John but not the Gospels
of Peter and Thomas. Clearly there's a process of selection
that decided that these books were in and the rest
of them were out. But who decided when and how?
In some ways, these questions are not merely of religious
but also of historical and cultural significance. We speak of

(02:49):
a biblical canon. The term means rule or measure. The
Biblical canon reflects Orthodoxy, and that term simply means the
right or true path. Orthodox he is contrasted with heresia
terms which refers to a deviant or wrong path. Now,
the Bible doesn't itself specify which books ought to be

(03:10):
in the Bible. Canons are not born, They don't spring
out of the ground. They're made. So who made them?
Many Christians would answer, well, God, God did it. Yet,
if God made the canon, how did he let us
know that? Why didn't God emblaze in his true list
of books in the sky so we could all look
up and go, those are the ones that God wants
us to read. Canons are assembled by human beings. They're

(03:32):
are human production. Think of the canon of the Great
Books of Western civilization. When I was younger, we had
a course on that at Dartmouth. We read the so
called great books. Now we all know some of these
major authors Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. But the Western
canon also has a secondary list Euripides, Charlotte, Bronte, Joseph Conrad,

(03:53):
Robert Frost and who makes those lists well, faculty committees do.
The list is also somewhat flexible. While the major authors
always make the cut, sometimes the secondary list is modified
through edition and subtraction. This year will do Escalists instead
of Europeanes. We'll do sol Janiedsen instead of Conrad. So
the canon is flexible, not set in stone. But the

(04:15):
Bible is for the most part set in stone.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
True.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
There's some variation between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics count seventy
three books in their Bible, Protestants sixty six. Now, both
Catholics and Protestants have the same New Testament twenty seven
books in the Old Testament. However, Catholics include seven books
among them, books like Tobit, Judith, and wisdom. These books
make up the so called apocrypha. Catholics also called them

(04:40):
the duterocanonical books that were dutero, meaning second. And the
point is not just that these are lesser works, but
merely that they were added after the original Hebrew canon.
Ever since the higher criticism of the nineteenth century, which
signaled the rise of religious skepticism and atheism, critics have
raised three separate questions about the Bible. First, does the

(05:02):
Bible describe real people and true events? This is the
issue of historicity. Second, or the manuscripts copied accurately? And
do we have a reliable text that preserves the integrity
of the original? This is the issue of transmission. Third?
Who picked the winners and losers in the Biblical canon?
This is the issue of selection. Now I've just finished

(05:25):
a new book which addresses the first and to some degree,
the second issue. The book is called The Stones cry
Out subtitle Biblical Archaeology, Prophecy and the Last Days. It
will be published in the fall, but you can order now.
You can pre order a copy from Amazon. I'm very
excited about this book. I'm also doing a series of
videos based on it for Prager. You these videos will

(05:47):
reveal the greatest discoveries of Biblical archaeology and their implications
for the historicity of the Bible, the presence of the
Jews in their ancient homeland, and the core foundations of
Western civilization. I was tempted to address the second issue today,
the issue of the reliability of the transmission of the

(06:08):
Biblical text. When I drafted this monologue. I got into it,
but then I realized I'm running out of time without
even getting into the third issue. So I'm saving this
second issue for another day another monologue, and I'm going
to focus here on the third one, the issue of
selection and how some books but not others, made their
way into the Bible. Many people get their ideas about
how the Bible got put together from popular works like

(06:30):
The da Vinci Code, a best selling book that also
became a movie. The premise of the da Vinci Code
is that there were multiple books circulating in Christian communities
from the time of Christ until the fourth century. Then,
when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and declared Christianity
to be the religion of the Roman Empire, he created,
in effect a powerful church bureaucracy allied with the Imperial state.

(06:55):
It is that bureaucracy that organized the Council of Nicea
in three twenty five ID, and it is there that
an official Bible was created. Now, this view, as well see,
is completely wrong headed. It locates the formation of the
Bible at Nicea. And hey, there was indeed a Council
of Nicia, but the topic of what books should be
in the Bible never even came up. Nicia was about

(07:18):
something else, entirely, the clarification of Jesus as both fully
divine and fully human, and also the articulation of the
doctrine of the Trinity. Now, a more sophisticated version of
the critique of the Bible comes from New Testament scholar
bart Erman. I know Ermin we've debated a few times
on the issue of God and suffering. Erman argues that

(07:39):
the institutional Church made the decision of which books to
allow into the Bible. Ermine says it did so in
the late fourth century through the actions of church councils
at Hippo and Carthage, as well as powerful bishops like
Athanasius of Alexandria, who enumerated the New Testament Canon of
twenty seven books in his famous Festal Letter of three

(08:00):
seven AD. Basically, the church included the books that affirmed
what it considered to be orthodoxy and excluded those that
the Church considered to be heresy. The Canon, according to Ermin,
was the product not so much of divine inspiration as
of institutional power. Now Erman's claims that goed by other skeptics,

(08:20):
raise an interesting issue the Catholics and Protestants debate to
this day. Did the Catholic Church choose the Bible and
in doing so, confer authority on the twenty seven books
of the New Testament, or rather, did the Catholic Church
merely recognize and bring together books that derive their authority
as a result of divine inspiration from the time they

(08:40):
were composed? In other words, did the Church create the
Bible or merely adopt, assemble, and promulgate it. Now the Jews,
of course, had already assembled the books of the Old Testament,
the Hebrew Scriptures by Jesus' time. The Hebrew Scriptures are
divided into three parts, the Torah, the first five books,
the prophets both and minor prophets, and the so called writings,

(09:02):
which include the Psalms and the Proverbs and so on. Essentially,
the Torah was written first and adopted as a divinely
inspired set of books. The Torah itself says the prophets
will come later bearing the word of God, and over
time the Jews adopted prophetic books such as Isaiah, Jeremiah,
and Daniel. Now the other books were adopted later, so
the Old Testament canon was largely in place in the

(09:25):
early centuries before Christ. The Book of Enoch was never
part of the Jewish canon, composed between the third and
first centuries BC. The book is pseudo epigraphical, which means
it was written by someone else, not Enoch. According to
the Book of Genesis, Enoch lived just a few generations
from Adam and only a few generations before Noah. Enoch

(09:48):
is a character in the Book of Enoch, but he
didn't write it. That's one reason Enoch didn't make the cut.
Another is that Enoch is an apocalyptical work that offers
a detailed commentary on Genus. It takes the reference to
giants and fallen angels and gives us an elaborate account
of fallen angels mating with human women to produce bloodthirsty

(10:09):
and sexually rapacious giants. Now Jews read Enoch, and fragments
of Enoch were found among the Dead Sea scrolls, but
Enoch was viewed not as scripture, but as a late
and interesting commentary on scripture. The books of the Apocryphur
were also not part of the Hebrew canon because Jewish
rabbis and scholars didn't consider them on the same level

(10:31):
as the Torah, the prophets, and the writings. But they
were not viewed as heterodox or heretical. They were read
and discussed, and they became a sort of adjunct to
the Old Testament canon. Interestingly, when scholars in Alexandria translated
the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, this is the
so called Septagint, they included the Apocryphur, and later in

(10:53):
the fourth century, so did the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformers,
starting with Luther, didn't like the apocrypher because of references
to prayers for the dead and how alms giving all
works of charity leads to salvation. They knew these books
were not part of the Hebrew canon, and so they
left them out of the Protestant Bible. Now let's talk
about the New Testament. The New Testament was written in

(11:15):
the second half of the first century AD, so between
fifty eight and ninety eighty. Remarkable all of it. The
Four Gospels, the Letters of Paul, Book of Acts, Book
of Revelation were all circulating among early Christians. By the
end of the first century. They were viewed as important,
as central and even inspired from the outset. In the

(11:35):
late second century, around one hundred and eighty eighty, Bishop
Irenaeus of Lyon quoted or alluded to twenty two of
the twenty seven books that now make up the New Testament.
He defended as authoritative the Four Gospels, most of Paul's Letters,
the Book of Acts, and the Book of Revelation. Other
second century Christian writings also revere these books. Writing a

(11:56):
bit later, in the middle of the third century, the
Christian writer Origin referred to quote it from and accepted
all twenty seven books that are now in the New Testament.
He did so without championing or defending them. Rather, he
seems to take it for granted that these are the
books that Christians are reading and sharing with each other.
It was in the fourth century that the New Testament

(12:17):
canon was more formally assembled. Between the second and the
fourth centuries, there was a proliferation of texts, some composed
long after Christ's death, that purported to be divinely inspired
and therefore scripture. The Church took on the task of
separating orthodoxy and heresy, the wheat from the chaff. One
heretical figure was Marcion, who believed that Yahweh, the God

(12:39):
of the Old Testament, was an angry, vengeful figure unworthy
of worship. Marcion didn't believe the Hebrew scriptures belonged in
the Bible. Marcion seems to have been well the first
groyper I wonder if he's a remote ancestor of Tucker Carlson.
Marcion put together his own canon, excluding most of the Gospels,
which he considered too Jewish, and heavily editing the Gospel

(13:02):
of Luke to create you guessed it the Gospel of Marcion. No,
I'm not kidding. Marcion was excommunicated in the second century
by the Church in Rome, and his works, which continue
to circulate, were routinely condemned in later centuries. Early in
the fourth century, Eusebius of Cesarea wrote his famous Ecclesiastical History,

(13:23):
which gives a close up account of discussions of the
biblical canon. Eusebius list books that fall into three categories.
Number one books of the Christians of the time fully accepted,
to books that they debated, and three books that they rejected.
In other words, the books fell into the camps of yes, no,
and maybe eventually, by the end of the fourth century,

(13:46):
a biblical canon solidified. So bart Ermin is wrong. The
canon was affirmed in the fourth century, but it was
not created then, and even in the fourth century, the
Church didn't formally adopt the canon. In fact, one is
hard pressed to find single event or council where this occurs.
And as the Church accepted, ratified, and promulgated the canon.

(14:07):
This acceptance seems to have relied on four criteria. First,
the apostolic connection how close were the books to the
apostles themselves or those who were part of the original
group of Christ's disciples and followers. Second, which books were
widely read and revered by the early church? Third, did

(14:27):
the book show consistency of doctrine, which is to say,
did the books in question agree doctrinally with the books
that were already accepted as authoritative? And finally, did the
books contain moral teachings that were seen as reflecting the
work of the Holy Spirit and edifying Christian life and practice.
It's fun to read the non canonical writings today because

(14:49):
they're pretty far out, but when you read them, you
can also see why they didn't make it into the canon.
Consider the Gospel of Thomas. It was written late in
the second century BC, so one hundred and fifty years
after Christ's death and one hundred years after the other Gospels.
It was obviously pseudo epigraphical, which is to say it
was not written by the apostle Thomas. Someone else wrote

(15:10):
it and put Thomas's name on it to make it
seem more authoritative. The Book of Thomas also says that women,
in order to be saved, need to make themselves male.
This part, of course, I agree with wink wink, but
I can see how it's a bit salty to include
in the New Testament. This line, along with the rest
of the Gospel of Thomas, ended up on the cutting

(15:31):
room floor. The Gospel of Peter, another second century composition,
is mainly fascinating for the remarkable account that it gives
of Jesus walking out of the tomb Jesus evidently is
so tall that his head touches the clouds, and Jesus
is followed by the cross. The cross comes out of
the tomb. Well, who knew the cross was even in

(15:53):
the tomb? And the cross doesn't just come out and
follow Jesus. The cross also talks. Yep, this is a
bit too crazy. Even the early Christians, who were accustomed
to supernatural and miraculous accounts, didn't go for it. And
of course Peter didn't write it. We have here another
case of someone masquerading as Peter to give a newly
composed work in ancient pedigree and authority. The Church did

(16:17):
not fall for that. I find the story of how
we got the canon the books that made it into
the Bible both fascinating and inspiring. It replicates the process
with which the Bible was composed. God provided the inspiration
and humans wrote it down. So too, when it came
to putting the Bible together, God provided the inspired texts,

(16:38):
and humans, over the period of a couple of centuries,
recognized which ones they were. And that's the way I
see it. Here's the thing about crypto. It's here to stay.
That argument is over, But think about it if this
is a market that never sleeps, it's moving at midnight,

(16:58):
it's two am, three am, and while you're asleep, who's watching.
Because here's what nobody tells you. Most crypto platforms give
you a login, wish you luck and call it a day.
That's not investing. That's gambling with your retirement and hoping
for the best. That's why I've partnered with block trust Ira.
Block trust Ira is CRYPTOIRA built for Americans who refuse

(17:22):
to be on the losing side of that equation. Their
award winning AI engine navigates the notoriously volatile crypto markets
around the clock, automatically rebalancing your portfolio to protect your
gains and limit your exposure when markets swing. No panic,
no emotion, no missleep at three am, your savings sit

(17:43):
inside a two hundred million dollar institutional grade insurance shield,
managed intelligently and secured from day one. Their AI never sleeps.
It's rebalancing your portfolio around the clock, managing risk, responding
to volatility, protecting what you've built, automatically, intelligently, without panic.

(18:05):
Voted Bitcoin Magazine number one Technology platform, and that doesn't
surprise me one bit. Open your CRYPTOIRA today and block
trust IRA will give you up to a twenty five
hundred dollars inflation shield bonus straight into your account. Go
to Dineshcrypto dot com and sign up today. They can

(18:25):
print dollars, but they cannot plint crypto. That's deneshcrypto dot com. Hey,
I'm now on substack. It's kind of full circle for me.
I started out as a journalist, writing articles for National Review,
the American Spectator, the Washington Post, lots of places. After

(18:46):
my stint in the Reagan White House, I pivoted to
writing books, and that was way back in nineteen ninety one.
So I've been mainly known as an author and of
course later as a filmmaker. But my first job journalist,
and now I'm getting back to that. On substack you'll
get original articles on commentary, groundbreaking investigations, exclusive access to

(19:07):
film clips and show clips, and guess what, it's free.
So check it out. Go to Dinesh Desusa dot substack
dot com. Guys, I'm delighted to welcome my friend Dave Rubin.
He is an author, he is a podcaster. He is
also going to be appearing in a show at the

(19:30):
Fillmore in Miami Beach June eleventh, so shortly grab your tickets.
It's called Florida Man, It's Ronda Santis, It's Dave Rubin.
It also features Adam Carolla, Ben Shapiro, Jillianmichaels. The website
is Dave Rubin dot com slash events Dave. Welcome, Thank
you for thank you for joining me. You know, when

(19:51):
we talked about doing this, my mind flashed back to
when we first met. Now, I wish I could peg
the year, but I do remember. Sure, do you remember
what year it was?

Speaker 3 (20:03):
I know at that time I was in, believe it
or not, Roseanne Barr's studio. We didn't publicize that it
was Roseanne Barr's studio, but it was right before I
moved into my home studio. So we did that in gosh,
that's around twenty nineteen. It's probably fall or late summer.

(20:23):
It was probably late summer of twenty nineteen.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
And as I remember, we had talked about how you
had fairly recently made a kind of exit from Young Turks.
Some people don't know you used to be on Young Turks. Now,
obviously chin Goigor was part of Young Turks. Was Anna
Kasparian also part of Young Turks. You probably know these
characters extremely well.

Speaker 3 (20:47):
She was, she was a dear friend of mine. She
was invited to my wedding. I would say they were
very different at the time. I was very different at
the time. The culture wars were very different at the time.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
You know.

Speaker 3 (21:00):
Subsequently, obviously we've gone in our separate directions. I'd like
to believe that I've joined the sainter side. I'm pretty
sure that I have.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
So let's dive into that.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
It takes much to be honest.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
Well, this interests me a lot because as thinking about
the process of conversion, how people move from one point
of view to another, and it seems to me that
generally this is quite rare. And I say it's quite
rare because most of us operate within sort of broad
philosophical and political frameworks, right, And this applies to whether

(21:35):
or not you're a conservative or liberal, but it also
applies to whether or not you're a Christian or whether
you're an atheist. You have a framework and all issues
and even contradictions are resolved by and large inside of
the framework. So, for example, if you're a Christian, you're
going to say something like, you know, I've done really
well in life, thanks me to God. But on the

(21:56):
other hand, if you start doing badly, you don't say
I'm going to blame God. Say, oh no, I want
to I'm going through a trial and tribulation and I
want to thank God again for giving me the discipline.
So in other words, God comes out ahead either way.
The framework is what dictates how you think about it.
So it's not common for someone to sort of abandon

(22:18):
a framework, so to speak, and move to a different framework.
And now what I want to ask you is, is
that what happened to you? Were you actually in a
very different place and you shifted. Talk about how you
used to think and how you think now, and what
was the fault from that moved you from one to
the other.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Sure, well, let me start by saying this.

Speaker 3 (22:37):
You know, when we met and we only spent probably
thirty seconds saying hello before we taped that episode at
Roseanne Studio. You know that was I at that point
was sort of leaving the left officially, so I didn't
really consider myself a progressive anymore. But what was interesting
about meeting you and then subsequently interviewing you, and now
we've done you know, dozens of shows together, in live

(22:59):
events together, and things of that nature. Is that it
was just a continuation of the road that I had
been on, meaning I was in it with the lefties,
and I will address some of the issues that I
believed in that I've changed on.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
But then when I started, you know.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
Waking up, let's say, all it took was that I
started having conversations with people that I disagreed with. So
I had conversations, you know, now, I'm going back about
ten years, let's say around twenty sixteen seventeen. I started
talking to Ben Shapiro. I started talking to Larry Elder,
Dennis Prager, Thomas Sole, Jordan Peterson, of course you several others,

(23:34):
Glenn Beck. There were a bunch of people that I
thought were my ideological opponents that I was debating issues with.
I debated death penalty, I debated gay marriage, a series
of taxation, a whole bunch of things. But every time
those conversations ended, I always felt that people who were
conservative or you know, in some cases, let's say, more libertarian.
Larry Elder, for example, usually considers himself a libertarian more

(23:57):
than conservative. But people that were right leaning, always, without exception,
we're kind, we're decent, we're willing to listen, we're willing
to agree to disagree, and always wanted to continue the conversation.
And that was in stark difference from what I was
getting on the left. I had some frustrations with the left.

(24:17):
You know, there were a couple things that woke me up.
But one of the very simple ones was that I
started realizing, it makes no sense. It can't possibly be
true that everyone's a racist and we're just so righteous
that the math didn't make sense. It made no sense
to me. These can't be complete arguments. How could it
possibly be that we're just so right, we're so evolved,
it's so obvious, and yes, everyone who opposes us as

(24:40):
a racist or a bigot. You know, that was sort
of a bumper sticker way of understanding what I was
starting to come across. Then there were a few things
that were very very specific that happened to me. I
famously interviewed Larry Elder and we started getting into it
about systemic racism, and he turned a lot of the
questions on me.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
I was not prepared to get give him answers back.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
And interestingly, that video it got clipped, you know, the
way things happen online, it starts getting clipped every which way,
and a lot of the titles were something to the
effect of, you know, black conservative destroys white lib tart
and when you're that white libtard, it's not so fun.
But what I realized within, you know, twenty four hours
of that video being seen millions and millions of time times,

(25:23):
is that people started saying, you know, it seemed like
Dave was listening, and it seemed like he might continue
these conversations. And not only did I continue those conversations,
but I ended up campaigning with Larry Elder when he
ran in the recall against Gavin Newsom, and we've become
you know, great, great friends over the last ten years,

(25:43):
and so many of these people Jordan Peterson, who I
toured with, Glenn Beckoy ended up working with for years.
You I mean, I had no idea what to make
of you other than this is Danesh Desuza. You know,
this is this guy on the right, Dnesh de Susan,
and I'm sitting down with him, and now we've become friends.
So you know, it was I think the magic in

(26:03):
some sense of my career is that it was just
that I did it on air, the conversion process that
you're talking about. People got to see me go through
it live. And then I think the thing that put
the stamp on it was when I did that video
for Praguer, you called Why I Left the Left, and
if you watch the video again, and I think it

(26:24):
might be their most most viewed video of all time.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
It's certainly in the top three or four.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
I never actually said in the video that I had
left the Left, And when I woke up the morning
that it was published. You've done some of those videos,
so you know, you record the little five minute piece,
but then they have to put it through post production
and it takes a few months to get the video out.
So I did it a few months prior and then
I forgot about it. And then one morning I woke up.
I'll never forget. I look at my phone on my
nightstand and it says I have a push notification from

(26:52):
YouTube and it says, Dave Rubin Praguer you why I
Left the Left. And I freaked out for a second
because I thought, no, I haven't left left. I'm critiquing
the left as a lefty sort of what Bill Maher
is doing Now let's say, and I really didn't want
to be purged from the left, but what I realized
was in some sense that was just that was just

(27:14):
rules that needn't be played by. Let's say, it doesn't
matter whether whether I have some lefty leanings, I don't
really anymore or not. What I've realized is that I'm
on the side of liberty. I want people to live
free lives. I want there to be limited and small government.
I want there to be individual rights. I want you

(27:34):
to pursue your happiness. And I want to create I
want to create the conditions for us all to flourish.
Those are all things that are part of the broad
right these days. And I'm very proud that. You know,
people call me the gateway drug. I'm the gateway drug
to getting you listened to Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro
or denesh And I love that.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
I love that. So that's what brings us together.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
So this idea of individual liberty very central to the
American founding. Of course, it is encapsulated in the Bill
of Rights. It's reflected in what we could call a
classical liberalism that was once I think the shared patrimony
of the Republicans and the Democrats. True Republicans and Democrats

(28:19):
disagreed about the application in some cases. But you know,
I remember when I first came to the United States
in the late seventies and kind of became politically active
in the early eighties, you would see the left championing liberty.
They were the ones who were talking about free speech.
The left was you could almost say that the right

(28:41):
was for economic liberty for the most part, and the
left was more for personal and civil liberty. But part
of I think what we've witnessed over the last few
decades is that the left has seems to have abandoned
liberty as a cause altogether. Do you agree with that
and when do you think that shift occurred?

Speaker 3 (29:01):
Yeah, well, you're completely right in your prescription there, because
if you think about it, so it's obvious for some
people to understand what economic liberty would be. You'd want
limited government and lower taxes, and you allow for competition
and capitalism. So that makes sense to people from a
Republican perspective. Okay, generally, that's what Republicans do. From a
social perspective, what you're talking about is that the left
was trying to offer more liberty, let's say, with things

(29:25):
like same sex marriage or abortion, and you would think, okay,
well they're each arguing for liberty in a certain sense.
So how did this get so confused?

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Now?

Speaker 3 (29:37):
Well, my first book, Don't Burn. This book was all
about classical liberalism, and classical liberalism which really is what
the founders fundamentally believed in and is what the Constitution
is based on. Is about individual rights. That rights are
to be for you as the individual, as I ran
called the smallest minority. There are no group rights. There's

(30:01):
no such thing as gay rights, and there's no such
thing as Black rights or Indian rights or Jewish rights.
There are individual rights and that is the basic fundamental
building block of a society, and then you can build
upwards from that. The left, sadly, I would say, abandoned it.
It's I mean, it's been a slow abandoning. And you know,
we can talk about the march through the institutions, how

(30:23):
they confused people about so many of these issues. And
I think there's a very strong argument to make that
there's a fundamental flaw in liberalism, which is that liberalism
puts tolerance at such the peak of the hierarchy of
importance that you can't be you know, it's Carl Popper's
paradox of intolerance. You can't be tolerant of intolerance. And

(30:43):
they basically were like, we're so tolerant any idea can
come in. And that's why now you have the Islamists
are married to the Queers for Palestine, even though we
know how that is going to end.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
So I think the basic.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
Answer to your question, if we just look at it
from the last ten years, is that the last march
for equality, if you want to talk about civil secular law,
was the march towards marriage equality.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Now, you, dnesh are.

Speaker 3 (31:11):
Entitled to whatever your religious opinion might be on marriage,
and by the way, I can fully respect someone's religious opinion,
I actually don't fully know your opinion, and I'm happy
to discuss it if you want. But sort of the
last bastion where there was an inequality based on individual
rights in the system was marriage equality.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Now, I would not force a church or a.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
Mosque or a temple or anything to perform a gay marriage,
but from a civil perspective, to adults, whether they're straight
or gay, have every right that anyone else has. Now,
the issue is that once gay marriage got passed, the
activist class didn't know what to do. They've been running
on something that I think was a just cause, and
then they had to move. So that's why when gay

(31:51):
marriage got passed the next day, it seemed like the
trans thing burst forth, and they just moved on.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
A whole series of things.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
That's that's ironically, I mean, the trans thing is radically
anti gay actually, because they're trying to trans a bunch
of you know, effeminate boys or girls that maybe are
what we used to call tomboys, you know, So I
think that that and then you add, you know, you
had the social media elements of that, you add the
toxicity of our general political state of being, and the

(32:23):
fact that the Democrats have just handed the keys. They're
letting the inmates run the asylum. There are no adults.
Who's the adult. Why isn't Bill Clinton the adult in
the room with these people or Barack Obama? I mean,
I would agree with you that Barack Obama has been
a main driver of this stuff, but they have nobody
to be the elder statesman anymore, and they've handed it
to their radicals, and that really is the problem. We

(32:45):
got to a place in America where there is nobody.
If you can figure out who it is, I'll gladly
correct myself on air. But nobody in America is discriminated
against based on an immutable characteristic. And once we got there,
we needed to sit with it for a little bit,
and we never sat with it because the activist class
kept growing, and that I think explained so much of

(33:06):
the last ten years of craziness.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
You know, one thing Dave I noticed. I think I
noticed this first in about the mid nineteen nineties, but
it's something that metastasized to the ludicrous point that we
see it now, and that is I noticed that, in general,
in modern liberalism, not classical liberalism, but modern liberalism, in leftism,
in progressivism, there appears to be no end point in

(33:33):
any area. And I say this because one good question
you could post, any liberal is all right in what society?
Would you be a conservative? In other words, to put
it differently, the tax rate. Let's say the top tax
rate is thirty eight percent. Okay, you think it should
go up to forty or forty two or forty five.
Let's say you think it should go up to fifty. Now,

(33:55):
would you at that point stop and go all right,
we now have a just rate. Everyone is paying their
fair share. We're not pushing for higher rates. They will
never tell you that, no, we're done, we're happy, we're content.
And the same applies to just about any other issue.
If you were to say to them, all right, well,
you know we now have individual equality for blacks, we

(34:15):
have equal pay for equal work for feminists and women,
we have gay marriage. Well, is this the time where
you've basically achieved your goal and you're now going to
put a stop to it? And they go, oh no,
this just clears the way for the next battle. And
so you where do you think this kind of restlessness

(34:37):
comes from? In progressivism, in which there seems to be
no endpoint at all?

Speaker 3 (34:42):
Right, So I think there's probably a theological reason for that,
But first, from a political perspective, I mean, the simplest
way to put what you just said is there's no
there there. They are on the goal of progressing, So
you never progress if the word is progressed. Well, okay, progress,
we're going to keep going. We're going to keep going
and going. It doesn't matter if you're going and there's
a chasm and you're about to fall in it, you're

(35:03):
just going to keep going.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
So that's what you just illustrated.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
There, there's no number when they say this is what
minimum You know, Bernie will say we should have eight
ten dollar minimum wage, and then Rashida Tale a week later,
we'll say we should have twenty five. And it's like, well,
in that he made up a number, not based on economics,
she can make up a bigger number, and then somehow
she feels more moral and lofty, and then why not
thirty five or fifty? Your point on the taxation is

(35:27):
the exact same thing. They always say the top one
percent doesn't pay their fair share. We know the top
one percent it pays between forty and forty seven percent. Okay,
so would it be fifty two percent or ninety percent?
There is no there.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
If you said to.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
Mom, DAMMI, okay, how much money do you actually need
to usher in all of these things that you want
to do, there is no number. It is a constant
quest for progression, But what it really is is a
constant quest for revolution. You know, this is my friend
James Lindsay, who I'm sure you've chatted with, always talks
about the issue is never the issue. The issue is

(36:00):
always the revolution, and I think that that really is
right with these people.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
Now. Your question, really, though, was so where does that
come from?

Speaker 3 (36:06):
Where does that sort of where does that impulse to
keep going no matter what come from?

Speaker 2 (36:12):
And that I would say largely.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
And this is something where I think maybe I've turned
into more of a conservative as I'm about to roll
into my fiftieth year this month. I think there's probably
religious reasons for that.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
That if you don't believe in.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
God, that or something, you have to believe in something outside.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Of politics as the answer. Right.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
So I don't even want to do an entire religion
thing here, but if you don't believe in something that
most people would say God, that created some sort of
order at the beginning, then you will.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
In essence try to be God.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
And that is what their quest is, to constantly perfect
a world that is imperfect. They want to build perfect systems,
and humans are imperfect, and that's why communists kill an
awful lot of people on their way to creating that
perfect utopia, which of course always becomes a dystopia.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
I mean, I think one could I even understand it
in a non theological way by looking at the way
that the Greeks looked at it. So the Greek view
was the Greeks of course had their gods, it was
a polytheistic society, but they also kind of anchored their
view in nature, and of course nature includes human nature,
and so the Greeks would have said that human nature

(37:26):
has this sort of aspiration to being better, but it's
also kind of held down by you could say, basic
or primitive or natural impulses greed, lust, hatred, envy, revenge,
and those things can't really be removed from human nature.

(37:46):
And so the job of politics is to create an
environment in which essentially we allow human sort of productivity
to flourish, but there's some checks and balances on the
kind of baser elements of human nature. And I think
what you're saying is that the left's view is that

(38:07):
because human nature is seen perhaps as more of a
blank slate, that that institutions can continue to make human
nature better. And I think even on the individual level.
Isn't it true that you, like, I've been looking at
some of the some of the kind of celebrations of pride,
and Kamala Harris had one. She just put one out

(38:29):
basically saying something like it gives everybody a chance to
be their authentic self. So the whole idea here appears
to be that yourself is a sort of creation. You're
the author of your own self and the way that
you I might write an article or a book. There's
nothing kind of given about the self that we have

(38:50):
to sort of accept or deal with or let alone
God forbid, like exercise some control or restrained over.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
So yes, and again I think that that's connected to
a sort of theological or deep philosophical confusion. But what
it does, putting aside the genesis of it, what it
does is it creates. You have to believe in something.
Humans have to believe in something. So I'll give you

(39:19):
a good example. I just did this surrounded show where
you sit in a circle, and for me it was
like Maga Guy verse twenty far leftists. And one of
the things beyond just like the unbelievable amount of hate
and vitriol and anger they had towards me, which there
was plenty of, was that they all believe that if
you just say something it that it's real. So they all,

(39:43):
almost all of them, they kept saying, medicare for all.
Now it's the I kept saying, well, it's the easiest
thing to say medically yes, for medicare. Do I want
everyone to get health care? Yes, it's the easiest possible
thing to say. Does it mean if we give medicare
at all, that the system will work, that people will
get healthier, that will have enough doctors, that it will
be functional in any way, that it will economically make sense,

(40:04):
or anything else. No, But they don't want to think
about it much further than that. So they want to
do what they think is morally sort of good by
their own moral standards. So it's Medicare for all or
another one that I thought was quite interesting. They were
all very enthusiastic about the Obama Iran agreement. They love
that Obama had this Iran agreement and it was signed

(40:24):
and there were inspectors.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
And I kept saying them, well, I accept that.

Speaker 3 (40:28):
There was an agreement, but do you believe that the
Iranians were keeping their word? Do you believe that the
United Nations or the proper authorities were going in and
vetting it? And they don't want to think about any
of those things. They liked the idea that an agreement
was signed, Medicare for all. They like these sort of
bumper sticker things that just kind of make you feel

(40:49):
good and then you don't really have to think about it.
So what I think I've learned over the years of
doing this is that I consider myself a realist first.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
So I know it's easy to say certain things.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
Right, would I like everyone in the United States of
America to have access to great healthcare? Well, of course
the answer is yes. But just saying the government should
give it is the dimmest argument that you could possibly make.
And of course the irony on that is that what
are the Democrats really railing against right now? It's AI, AI,

(41:23):
which is going to create all sorts of new ways
that we will through nanobots and all incredible technology where
we're going to quite literally have doctors that will be
able to operate you. I mean we already have some
of this. Doctors can operate you, operate on you from
other countries right now because of robots and all of
the things that we are going to learn.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
Well, why are you guys against AI?

Speaker 3 (41:46):
They're against AI because they think AI is anti human
now and everything else. But everything they do is very thin,
and then all you have to do is peel beneath it,
and you usually see a very very authoritarian impulse.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about some
characters that you and I, over the years have gotten
to know pretty well. And this is continuing my exploration
of the theme of conversion, because I'm trying to make
sense of You've got these disparate characters. You've got Tucker Carlson,
You've got you've got Megan Kelly, you've got Candice Owens.

(42:23):
I don't think it's fair to see them all quite
in the same light. They all seem to have quite
different styles, quite different goals, and yet in some ways
they've all moved onto the same side of the track,
and the common element quite obviously appears to be the
Jews and Israel. In other words, if I were to

(42:44):
identify a pivot point that is causing the wider pivot,
I mean Tucker now will talk about a lot of
different issues. He's become sort of uncommonly and unnaturally friendly
toward it, not just Islam, but radical Islam. But the
start of it, he didn't start there. He started sort
of with net and Yahoo, and then he went to Israel,
and then it was the Jews and from that starting point,

(43:09):
it looks like everything else moved. Do you agree with
that sort of trajectory on the part of Tucker and
you and I have, you know, casually and sometimes off camera,
tried to make sense of what's going on, in part
because we know these dudes and fairly well, and we
are there's a little part of us that is still
scratching our heads.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:29):
I mean, look, the reason I excelled the way I
did when you brought it up is because, in some sense,
it's almost futile in a way to try to analyze
what they are doing the simplest version for everybody, for
all the three that you just mentioned right there. And
I say this particularly when it comes to Megan and
Tucker Candice. I feel like maybe there's a genuine personality

(43:52):
disorder there at this point.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
And you know, honestly, Tucker may have one as well, But.

Speaker 3 (43:58):
It seems to me they're doing anything they can for
clicks more than anything else. They want clicks, They want attention,
and they want fame. You know, I always quote Carl
saying an extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So I don't
think it's an extraordinary claim to say that some of them,
particularly Tucker and or Canadas are likely getting foreign money.
Candace probably from Russians. She's in Russia right now meeting

(44:21):
with Alexander Dugan and others. And Tucker has definitely taken it.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
You know.

Speaker 3 (44:25):
He flies to Saudi Arabia on a private plane, shows
up a Qatar, says he's buying a house like He's
not doing that on his dime. So I don't think
it's an extraordinary claim. But I don't think it's just, oh,
they're just doing it for money. I think in the
case of Tucker and Megan, you know, they come from
cable news.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
Cable news is a different beast there.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
I keep calling them trans podcasters because they're not really podcasters.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
They're in our world, but.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
They got booted from the other world, and they were
making crazy money there. I think Tucker was making about
twenty MILLI a year over there, and then he came
into this world. And to make that kind of money,
I mean, I don't make that kind of money. I
would certainly love to make that kind of money. I
do the best I can, but I think he's doing
anything he can to remain the center of attention, to
get as many clicks and drive as many followers and

(45:13):
either subscribers or however else. He's making his money selling
his nicotine, which is made in India. And you know
he's America first, but he makes his nicotine in India.
That's not a knock on India. I get why he
does it. So it's hard to say. Now the piece
that seems okay, So then you want to connect that
to the sort of Israel Jew stuff. I mean, look,

(45:36):
if you attack the group of people who don't fit
into the intersectional leftist calculator, because Jews are a ridiculous minority,
they're sort of the minority of all time who have,
somehow through family and ingenuity and education and through well

(45:58):
I would say also for religon just reasons, have grown
into a very mighty group of it's a small group
of people who've grown into a mighty people. Well, you're
going to resent them. It's the same sort of resentment
that the lefties have. So that's what the horseshoe theory
of politics brings. Right, So you can see it's like Tucker,
who does Tucker hate the most? Well, yeah, he hates

(46:20):
the Jews and Israel, sure, but he really hates the
Christians who don't bout out him. So that's why he
really hates my Kuckaby and Ted Cruz. Then he'll bring
on a lefty and he'll glaze them the entire time.
Where Candice Owans had anaksparianon from the Young Turks you
mentioned earlier, and they had a love fest for an hour.
They purportedly disagree on literally everything from abortion to everything else,

(46:41):
but what they both hate right now is the Jews
in Israel, and that is their driver. So I think
there's economic reasons.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
I also think there's just.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
You know, there's audience capture, there's pressures of the internet.
But it's been, as we and I have talked about
off camera, it's been really disappointing because you know, you
like to hold some of these people in a certain
high regard. You think people are a certain way, and
then you find out they're another way. You know, Tucker
blurbed my first book. Megan did too. Meghan's had dinner
at my house many times, and my kids' favorite hats

(47:12):
or the Yankees hats that she got them, Like, you
don't want this to be, and then it is.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
And then it's our job to call balls and strikes.
It's as simple as that.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
I mean, if it is the case that there are
a lot of clicks to be had by kind of
peddling in this kind of stuff, it seems to me
that it's it has to be a result of the
peculiar atmosphere of the last few years. I mean, I
think that when you and I met, let's go back,
you know, twenty eighteen or nineteen, I think if you

(47:43):
had run this stick, it wouldn't work. But what happened
is that in the Biden years and under COVID, there
were so many conspiracy theories that proved to be true,
and so many institutions that turned out to lie to us,
and things we didn't expect. I mean, we might have
expected lies to come out of Biden's mouth, but we

(48:05):
didn't expect lies to come out of let's say, the
NIH you know, or the CDC, or even the FBI,
which I think until fairly recently, well until my own case,
I sort of had a you know, I thought of
the FBI like the Untouchables, the way they're portrayed in
that movie, you know, a very romanticized positive view. And

(48:25):
so I think that in the conspiratorial post COVID atmosphere
to now say, guess what, guys, there is a master conspirator,
a puppeteer of all the other puppeteers who are moving
all the puppets that we call our society, and that's
the Jews. I mean, you can pull this off now,
but it would have made no sense that you tried

(48:47):
to do it earlier.

Speaker 3 (48:49):
No, I think that's completely right, and I think it's
an important point. I don't think and we may never
realize the actual damage that COVID did. And I'm not
talking about the cough and I'm not diminished anyone that
lost a relative or anything else.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
The damage that it did, by.

Speaker 3 (49:05):
No, it's it's ironic because in some sense it freed
us in a way, right, So you could argue, all right, well,
then suddenly we saw all the lies of CNN, and
we saw the New York Times lies, and we saw
that the President could literally lie about the vaccine you
will not get nor transmit COVID. We saw that, So
that's kind of good. But then the damage it did
by by people having to be confronted with these these

(49:29):
crazy lies and then take those lies and then try
to apply it to a gajillion other things.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
The idea that that the that Israel or the Jews.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
Are running the United States is so it's so thin
and first off, first off, before Israel ever existed, people
used to say these things about the Jews. Now they
just say it about Israel because Israel is Jews with weapons,
and they really don't want their oppressed minorities to be
able to defend themselves. That's why there's this very specific
vitriolic hatred. There also part of it, you have to
remembering Danesh is a numbers game.

Speaker 2 (49:59):
There's billions of Muslims, there's fifteen sixteen million Jews.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
If you were just looking at numbers of where you
want to get an audience, you would be pretty It
wouldn't take a genius to go in that direction just
simply by numbers.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
If it was, if you want to just look at
it in that sense.

Speaker 3 (50:15):
But once they once so many of our sense making,
once our sense making apparatus collapse the way that it did,
you know, we went from even you know, a version
that I like to talk about is if you think
about the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson versus all of
the late night shows, now how hyper partisan they became.
Everything became partisan. Stephen Colbert dancing with the vaccine versus

(50:39):
Johnny Carson just quietly and calmly and with humor, putting
us to bed at night. You know, everything became so
freaking toxic that I think that that toxicity then just
jumped everywhere and it just it now has metastasized into
something that I would say is very, very dangerous. James Lindsay,

(51:04):
he just put up a tweet that I thought was
quite good. You know, it was these riots that are
happening in Paris. As we're taping this, I know it'll
be up in a few days, and you know, there's
Islamists running around. There's this video of this guy in
Arabic talking about hah, we're this, you know, the Sengalese
and the Libyans, and we're here, and we just took
down Paris in three hours. That's longer than it took

(51:26):
the Nazis. And it's like, you fools in the West,
you're pointing at the Jews while there are people literally
trying to upend Western civilization and you're trying to import
them into your societies. So all of that to say,
there's a lot of reasons for all of this.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
Guys, I've been talking to Dave Rubin. I want to
mention he is going to be in a show Florida
Man with Ron De Santis. It's at the Fillmore, Miami Beach,
June eleventh, Adam Carolla, Ben Shapiro, Jillian Michael. So it's
a real star cast. Go to Dave Reuben dot com
slash events to get tickets. Dave, great stuff. Thank you

(52:06):
very much for joining me. If you're sixty four or older,
here's an inflation report you don't hear about but should.
This year, your Medicare premiums went up nearly ten percent.
Your cost of living rais under three. Think about that.
You can't control premiums, but you can control your plan.

(52:29):
Millions of seniors are on the wrong one, overpaying without
even knowing it. They are real savings to be had,
but most people never look Chapter does. They're independent. The
only Medicare advisors that compare every plan nationwide. They look
at your doctors, your prescriptions, what matters to you, and
find the plan that protects you and your wallet. They've

(52:51):
helped thousands in my audience, myself included, navigate the Medicare maze.
Just last year those who found new plans with Chapter
saved and have of eleven hundred dollars on healthcare. Some
of you told me you saved as much as four
thousand or five thousand dollars all from one twenty minute call.
Call Chapter Today, they're a free resource for my audience.

(53:14):
Seven oh six two six two four seven seven four. Again,
that's seven oh six two six two four seven seven four.
Stop paying more than you should. Big news coming out
on silver right now. The US just added silver to
the Critical Minerals List. What does this mean? This is

(53:35):
an important list of minerals that are considered crucial for
US security and economic viability. So when you buy silver
to help protect your savings, you're also buying a critical
mineral that's needed for the US and its economy to survive.
That's why I want you to reach out to my
partners over at gold Co. They're the number one gold
and silver company in the country. They have over eight

(53:57):
thousand five star reviews, and they have the best gold
and silver offer in the business. So don't put this off,
don't ignore the facts. Get your free twenty twenty six
gold and silver kit from gold Co while you still can,
and get up to ten percent in bonus gold or
silver while supplies last. Go to dneshgold dot com. That's

(54:18):
dinesh goold dot com. Listen. When you need prescription medication,
you don't want to wait weeks for a doctor's appointment.
You want it fast. But the current healthcare system makes
people jump through hoops just to get medications they already used.
That's why I want to tell you about a pharmacy

(54:38):
that built a better way to do this. I'm talking
about All Family Pharmacy. When you don't want to wait
in line and want your medications delivered directly to your door,
you need All Family Pharmacy. When you want a simple,
safe and secure way to get medications online, you need
All Family Pharmacy. When you want to stay prepared before
you actually need the medications, you need All Family Pharmacy.

(55:01):
They've got everything antibiotics, antivirals, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquin, blood pressure medications,
thyroid support, and more. The process is simple. You order online,
the doctors will review your request, and once approved, your
medication shipped directly to your door. If you're tired of
the broken healthcare system, you need to choose the right Pharmacy.

(55:22):
Check them out All Familypharmacy dot Com slash Denesh Again,
it's All Familypharmacy dot Com slash dnesh and use code
Dinesh ten to save ten percent off your next order. Guys,
I want to announce I have a new book coming
out in the fall. I'm very excited about. It's called

(55:44):
The Stones cry Out subtitle Biblical Archaeology, Prophecy and the
Last Days. The book outlines the greatest discoveries in Biblical
archaeology that affirm the Bible, confirm the presence of the
Jews and the Holy Land, and also support the twin
foundations of Western civilization, which are Athens and Jerusalem. The

(56:06):
Stones cry Out has rave reviews from archaeologists, from leading pastors,
and from prominent commentators of The book, published by Charisma Books,
is available now for pre orders on Amazon. So I'm
calling a new early birds to order your copies now.
You'll be the first to get it when it's out.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Crime Junkie

NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}WHO CREATED THE BIBLE?

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Crime Junkie

NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal

All Episodes

WHO CREATED THE BIBLE?

Stuff You Should Know