MYSTERY AT BROWN

Summary

The Dinesh D'Souza Podcast – "MYSTERY AT BROWN"

Date: December 18, 2025
Host: Dinesh D'Souza
Guest: Prof. Mark Defant (University of South Florida)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Dinesh D'Souza tackles three major topics:

• The mysterious and allegedly mishandled mass shooting at Brown University.
• The rationale and fallout of high-profile Trump officials giving interviews to a critical Vanity Fair.
• A critical conversation with Professor Mark Defant on the rigor and ideological underpinnings of feminist scholarship in academia.

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1. The Brown University Shooting: Incompetence or Cover-Up?

[01:01 – 13:48]

Key Points

• Ongoing Mystery: D'Souza describes the mass shooting at Brown as shrouded in confusion; authorities have only recently moved from a "person of interest" to a "suspect."
• Police and Media Response: He expresses skepticism about indistinct security footage and questions why a wealthy university lacks better surveillance.
• Alleged “Insurrealism” of Authorities: Press conferences, particularly the sign language interpreter, struck D'Souza as bizarrely out of place for such a grave event.
• Potential Motives & Rumors: D'Souza references unconfirmed reports that the shooter may have shouted "Allahu Akbar", questioning officials' refusal to confirm or deny the information. He speculates if such reticence aims to curb "Islamophobia" or prevent public speculation.
• Link to Other Incidents: He ponders a possible connection to a contemporaneous murder of an MIT professor (later debunked as unrelated).
• Concerns Over Targeting: Acknowledges speculation that a student, who was vice president of College Republicans, was targeted. D’Souza finds this unlikely due to the indiscriminate nature of the attack.
• Public and Official Missteps: D’Souza criticizes how authorities handled an earlier wrongful arrest, voicing concern for the wrongly accused.

Notable Quotes

"...the whole thing has an element of mystery, if not an odor of incompetence. The press conference...was an exercise of insurrealism." – D’Souza [02:28]
"Why is it the case? How can someone come on a venue, into a classroom, shoot people and leave, and all you have is this kind of pathetic, grainy video?" – D’Souza [03:53]
"Are they trying to prevent Islamophobia? Are they trying to prevent public conjecture or speculation?" – D’Souza [05:29]

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2. Trump Officials, Vanity Fair, and the Pitfalls of Media Engagement

[13:48 – 19:24]

Key Points

• Vanity Fair Interviews: D’Souza analyzes why Susie Wiles (Trump White House Chief of Staff) and others granted interviews to the left-leaning magazine.
• Historical Parallel: He draws a comparison with David Stockman’s infamous "Education of David Stockman" interview in The Atlantic during Reagan’s tenure and the fallout it caused.
• Media Strategy in 2020s: D'Souza speculates that such interviews nowadays have less impact, given the fragmentation and lowered authority of mainstream media.
• Conservative Reaction: Notes that any attempt to secure favorable coverage from adversarial outlets is often futile and may lead to misrepresentation or embarrassment.
• Vanity Fair Response: Susie Wiles later clarified her remarks were "spun" out of context, though not denied.

Notable Quotes

"You cannot be surprised that you’re being trashed in Vanity Fair, because that is kind of what they exist to do." – D'Souza [18:24]
"...the media today has a lot less power than they used to...Frankly, no one really cares." – D’Souza [17:50]

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3. Interview: The Perils and Rhetoric of Feminist Scholarship

Guest: Prof. Mark Defant
[19:24 – 43:26]

Key Points

The State of Feminism in Academia

• Institutionalized Feminism: Defant and D’Souza discuss how feminism's tenets have become deeply embedded in university structures.
• Rebellion and Counter-Currents: D’Souza suggests a "ferocious counter feminism" is mounting among young people, but Defant counters that universities remain overwhelmingly feminist in culture and staffing.

Feminist Scholarship vs. Scientific Rigor

• Evolutionary Psychology as Counterpoint: Defant critiques feminist theories that attribute gender roles and differences entirely to social constructionism, ignoring biological underpinnings.
• Gender Pay Gap Discourse: He challenges the claim that pay disparity is purely due to discrimination, emphasizing choices, risk preferences, and the influence of hormone-driven interests.
  • Example: Overrepresentation is only counted as problematic in male-dominated fields, not in those where women dominate.
  • Jobs attracting more women (e.g., teaching, nursing) pay less due to oversupply, not necessarily institutional sexism.

Power, Ideology, and Academic Inertia

• Power Play in Academia: D’Souza raises the question of whether feminist "scholarship" is more about institutional control than pursuit of truth.
• Lack of Rigor: Defant argues that feminist studies are often unscientific and ideological, stating his critique isn’t well received in the field.
• Critique on Social Constructionism: Argues there is little empirical support for the blank slate theory; biological influences are evident from fetal stage onward.

The Endgame: Truth vs. Ideology

• Both agree that ideology often trumps scholarly rigor and objectivity in academic feminism.

Memorable Moments & Quotes

“This feminist revolution has now become fully institutionalized...young people who are rebelling against it, what you're describing is what they're rebelling against because this is the stuff that they have been bombarded with probably since infancy.” – D’Souza [24:31]

“I see the lack of rigor in feminist studies...the gender pay gap...there's a gap, but there's a definite reason for that gap. Men tend to be risk averse, they tend to be aggressive, and women tend to be more interested in social issues and they resist the risk...” – Defant [33:38]

“All this toxic masculinity nonsense...masculinity has a lot of good points too, and I hate to see that happening in our universities...” – Defant [28:19]

“If not, let's move out of the university system because we're looking for something called truth, not politics, not ideology, and not the pushing of those ideals that you think are important.” – Defant [42:05]

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4. Extended Monologue: Consciousness, Free Will, and Human Nature

[44:31 – End]

Key Points

• Limits of Science: D’Souza asserts that aspects of human experience, like consciousness and free will, transcend scientific explanation.
• Philosophical Inquiry: Explores classic determinism (Laplace’s view) and challenges the idea that human choices are illusions.
• Societal and Moral Implications: Argues that the denial of free will would render history and morality nonsensical—no accountability or meaningful choice would exist.
• Critique of Free Will Deniers: Points out the contradiction of figures like Sam Harris urging people to buy books while denying free will.
• Philosophical Attempts to “Salvage” Free Will: Distinguishes between freedom from external constraint and true self-direction; argues the former is insufficient to explain authentic human choice.

Notable Quotes

"If there is no free will, the American founders didn't choose to adopt a Constitution in Philadelphia, nor did America elect Obama or Trump as president...the entire human experience altogether [becomes]...incomprehensible." – D’Souza [50:08]

"What is the point of persuasion if no one has free will at all?...the whole thing becomes senseless." – D’Souza [52:15]

"We can choose what we will, but we cannot will what we will...that is caused, that is predetermined...what we do have is a more limited kind of freedom." – D’Souza [56:36]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Brown Shooting Discussion: [01:01 – 13:48]
• Trump Officials & Vanity Fair: [13:48 – 19:24]
• Interview – Mark Defant on Feminism & Academia: [19:24 – 43:26]
• Consciousness & Free Will Monologue: [44:31 – End]

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Summary Takeaways

• Dinesh D’Souza paints the Brown University shooting investigation as muddled, possibly compromised by either incompetence or unwelcome truths officials are reluctant to address.
• He critiques the Trump team’s willingness to speak candidly to adversarial media, arguing that such interactions are rarely advantageous for conservatives.
• The conversation with Prof. Defant offers a robust critique of feminist ideology in academia, favoring evolutionary psychology and scientific rigor over social construction arguments.
• D’Souza closes with a philosophical meditation on free will, rejecting materialist determinism and championing the centrality of true choice for moral, historical, and societal coherence.

Transcript

[Dinesh D'Souza]

Coming up, I'll explore why the officials investigating the mass shooting at Brown seem, quite literally, clueless. I'll resolve the conundrum of why Trump officials would give extensive interviews to an obviously hostile source like Vanity Fair. And I've got a professor on who's going to talk about the perils of feminist scholarship. Let's just say that's a little bit of an oxymoron. If you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, Listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel. This is the Dinesh d' Souza Podcast.

[Kevin McCullough]

America needs this voice. The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth. This is the Dinesh d' Souza podcast.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

What on earth is going on at Brown University? Or what's going on in Providence, Rhode island, which is the place where Brown is located? There was a mass shooting there. Several kids killed, some injured. Just a horrible incident. And as of now, we don't have someone who has been arrested yet. Now, I just saw not really very long ago, that the police are saying now that they have a suspect. Yesterday it was a person of interest. Now they have a suspect. They have been releasing, admittedly, some rather indistinct and fuzzy videos. I'm not even sure of the videos that have come out sequentially are all of the same person. Debbie's like, these guys don't even look alike. Are these different people? Are they the same people? And. And the whole thing has had an element of mystery, if not an odor of incompetence. The press conference that they had with the mayor and then the police chief was an exercise of insurrealism. First of all, I don't want to dwell on this. I don't know if you watched that press conference, the actions of the person doing the sign language, but it was so over the top that for a moment I thought, this is a comedy routine. This is not real. Either that or they're playing some kind of a joke on the public, which would be in very bad taste, given that this is a very serious situation. Not exactly the time for Saturday Night Live. And yet the sign language person was operating kind of in a Saturday Night Live type of mode with over the top reactions that bordered on the old cartoons where if somebody's looking to the left, you know, they would spin their head around and around and then look to the left, almost like in Bugs Bunny or one of those cartoons. Now, if a shooter goes into a classroom and guns down victims, why is it the case that we don't know as of this moment whether the shooter shouted Allahu Akbar or not. There were some reports from day one. That's what the shooter said. And the public officials are like, we're not going to say. We're not going to confirm, we're not going to deny. Now, maybe they know, but they're not saying. And that would be in itself very telling that they. What are they trying to prevent Islamophobia? Are they trying to prevent public conjecture or speculation? And second of all, you have a college, one of the most prestigious universities, with what endowment of 8 or 9 billion dollars? Why aren't there cameras everywhere? Why is it the case? How can someone come on a venue, into a classroom, shoot people and leave, and all you have is this kind of pathetic, grainy video where you can barely make out someone's features. What is the explanation for that? Now, there were some reports, and I. I was skeptical of them from the start, and I'm skeptical of them now. They claim that video cameras were turned off. I'm not going to believe that until there are some genuine corroborations. This is not like the Candace Owens podcast here. We're going with things that we know and we're admitting things that we don't know. But I do think that this whole thing seems to be odd from the beginning. Now, there's been some speculation that is this. Do they know who did it, and is it someone like that? The university has been trumpeting as, oh, this is like an exhibit for how wonderful we are and how diverse we are. Could it be that the university is in an awkward situation and for this reason they've been so reticent? You're reluctant to believe that a university would not be moving full speed ahead to resolve this kind of issue, particularly when its own students have been harmed and killed in this merciless way. Now, one of the students was the vice president of College Republicans, and there has been some fitting tributes to her on social media. How brave this kid was and how she, in a very hostile environment, was nevertheless kind of upholding the conservative mantle and the MAGA position. And that led some people to go, well, obviously this is someone who was. Who was targeted. That, to me, seems implausible, unlikely. Particularly because this was not a case where someone went to this young woman's apartment. Someone goes into a classroom and just blows people away. It seemed kind of indiscriminate. And so until we know more, I think it's hard to say that this person was an individual target. Was this Ideologically motivated, who knows? Is there a kind of Islamic element to this? That would certainly be suggested if someone shouts Allahu Akbar. And then there's a new question which has just come up, which is whether or not there is a connection between the Brown University shooting and the professor at MIT who was killed right in about the same time period. So on the way to the podcast, I told Abi, I said, let's look up and see, was that professor Jewish? It'd just be interesting, the coincidence of the Allahu Akbar report. But it turns out this guy is South American or Latin American. He has a Portuguese name. According to Grok, there's no evidence that he's Jewish. So at this point, all you have is two. Two incidents in kind of gruesome proximity. I mean, MIT is right in the Boston area or near the Boston area. Not, not right in Boston. And. And Brown is in Providence, Rhode island, so. But within the close vicinity. So there's a possibility that there would be some connection, particularly if one could find some ideological connection or perhaps some shared motive in both incidents. So I hope that this suspect is a firm suspect because remember that in the Brown case, they grabbed a guy. His name and his images were all over social media. People were like, why would somebody in the armed forces do this? And it turns out that's the wrong guy. And so they let him go. And I'm not even sure with a decent apology, which certainly would have been due in that case. Let's hope that we're able to figure out the real motive and the real perpetrator. There's a powerful new film coming from Angel Studios on the Wonder Project. It's called Young Washington. It tells the untold story of how George Washington's character was forged long before independence, when he was just 20, facing failure, loss and near death. Directed by John Irwin, who made Jesus Revolution, American Underdog, starring Andy Serkis, Ben Kingsley and Kelsey Grammer, it's a sweeping, high quality production that reminds us what true leadership, virtue and providence look like. This isn't revisionist history. It's the real story, told with courage, truth and respect for the values that shaped America. Young Washington releases Independence Day 2026 on the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding. Become an early supporter by joining the Angel Guild today Premium members get two free opening day tickets and help bring this inspiring story to theaters across America. Go to angel.comdinesh Help make young Washington the number one movie. Help this Independence Day. Again, it's angel.comdinesh I want to talk to you about your travel plans for 2026. Imagine exploring Israel, where thousands of years of history are on display and embarking on a journey that changes the way you see the world. This is Dinesh d' Souza inviting you to join me and New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Cahn for the Dragon's Prophecy Israel Tour. Mark the date down 12-7-16, 2026. For 10 unforgettable days, you'll discover the best of Israel. You walk the stone streets of Jerusalem, pray at the Western Wall, sail the Sea of Galilee, stand in the Mount of Olives, and visit ancient sites that confirm the biblical prophecies and the Jewish people's deep history in this land. Jonathan Cahn and I will be doing some talks. We'll be opening the scriptures in the very places you've read about for years and connecting the archaeological record with biblical prophecy and what's happening in our world today. Come see for yourself what history, archaeology and prophecy reveal in Israel. Join us call 800-247-1899, that's 800-247-1899 or visit inspirationtravel.com dinesh inspirationtravel.com dinesh to get information about about the Dragon Prophecy Israel Tour. I'd like to comment on the interview or interviews that were done with Susie Wiles, the chief of staff at the White House and Vanity Fair. This was a kind of big scoop for Vanity Fair, which evidently came to the Trump administration and said, we want to, we want to describe the consequential presidency that is underway here. And we wonder if you would have open up access to us, including a series of very, it seems, candid conversations that Susie Wiles had. Candid to the point where she made some fairly blunt and I would say even negative remarks about J.D. vance, that he's some kind of a conspiracy theorist and has been for a decade. There were comments about other people as well. There was a comment about Trump that struck a lot of people and seemed very negative. It was the Trump has the personality of an alcoholic. And by this, Susie Wiles means that Trump thinks he can do anything and has this kind of invincible confidence that very often alcoholics have and also a sense that anything can be accomplished. And very interestingly, when Trump was asked about it, he in effect said, well, I do. I have that personality now. He goes, kind of, that's why I'm not an alcoholic, because I'm disposed that way. So Trump neatly flipped this seeming negative characterization and almost embraced the definition or embraced the analogy and said, so What? Now, this in itself is really interesting because I remember a whole generation ago when a leading figure in the Reagan administration, this was David Stockman, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, gave, under very similar circumstances, a series of in depth interviews to, not Vanity Fair, but the Atlantic Monthly. And the Atlantic published this long article called the Education of David Stockman. And David Stockman said, I have my doubts about Reaganomics. I'm not really sure it's going to work. So think about this was a guy who was sort of the top man in charge of implementing the Reagan agenda, and here he's saying he doesn't think it's going to work. So it was very embarrassing. And sure enough, Stockman resigned. And Reagan's policies, as it turns out, went on to work very well. Reagan was resoundingly reelected. Stockman kind of receded into the background and that was that. And I think there were people who, when they saw the Susie Wiles comments, thought sort of the same thing. In other words, they applied the Reagan template and they said, all right, well, this shows you that, number one, Suzy Wiles is about to leave the government. She's either going to be fired by Trump or she wants to leave anyway. And she maybe doesn't think things are going this well. And so she thought, all right, well, I'm just going to say my piece so I can distance myself from some of the things that are going on. I don't want to be held responsible. And. And I am essentially packing my bags. Well, as it turns out, this whole mode of understanding what's happening is wrong. And Susie Wiles isn't going anywhere. Trump isn't firing her. And this all raises the interesting question, well, why did the Trump administration agree to these interviews? Is it the case that they didn't know that Vanity Fair is trash? Vanity Fair is this left wing rag. Vanity Fair is not going to portray you favorably. Sure enough, Vanity Fair had you. They have this picture of the Caroline Leavitt, the press secretary. They try to make her look as scary and like Nurse Ratchet ish as much as they can. And they have. The whole article is unfavorable. And Susie Wilds actually put out a tweet where she said, in effect, hey, they've distorted what I said. They have given it the wrong context, they have spun it the wrong way. She didn't say that the statements she made aren't true because evidently they're on tape. So Vanity Fair can just play the tape and you'll see that these statements are accurate. It's not that she was saying the statements aren't accurate. What she was saying is that the context was unfavorable and unfair. Well, whoop Dee Doo. By Whoop Dee Doo here, I mean, what do you expect? You're dealing with the opposition. You're dealing with people who hate you. You're dealing with people who cannot be counted on. And it's very late in the game to have to say this to do a fair treatment. So if you cooperate with them, you are actually asking for unfavorable treatment. You are enabling it, you are cooperating with it. You're getting what you paid for. You're getting the result of what you did. And so some conservatives were like, this is a big error of judgment on the part of the Trump administration. But whenever I see these kinds of things, I ask myself, I say, well, surely they already knew that, and yet they went ahead with it. Is it because the media today has a lot less power than they used to? And they were like, all right, let's play along with Vanity Fair. We know it's interesting, it's amusing entertainment. They spell my name right, and frankly, no one really cares. So if you do this negative portrait, yeah, the left will salivate over it, but the right will go, that's very fair. We don't really believe a word they say anyway. And so as a result, it's not the same. When David Stockman did those interviews, there was a kind of chill wind that blew through Washington. Everybody was like, virtually, you know, stuttering or speechless. And there was a sense, how can you have this guy in an administration? He's become an albatross. He's a millstone around our neck. This is extremely ill advised. And so this guy just has to go. He has to be let go. And sure enough, Stockman, by the way, who was a congressman before that, very knowledgeable about the budget, has gone on to a become a leading economist and strategist and forecaster. Very smart guy. But in a way, he signed his own political death warrant by giving those interviews, and that was the end of him. It's a very different landscape now. And so, in my view, again, I'm still not sure what the purpose of doing this was, because you cannot be surprised that you're being trashed in Vanity Fair, because that is kind of what they exist to do. 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[Kevin McCullough]

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[Dinesh D'Souza]

Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast a new guest. It's Mark Dafont. He is professor of geology and geochemistry at the University of South Florida. He specializes in the physical sciences, also in evolutionary psychology. He's been doing a lot of work on the issue. Well, the issues around feminism, the patriarchy, so called social constructionism, the whether there's a pay gap between men and women and basically the the ideological underpinning of feminist scholarship. By the way, you can follow Mark. He's got website is Mark M A R C Dafont is D E F A N T so Mark Defant. Mark, welcome. Thank you for joining me. It's a real pleasure. My wife mentioned to me that you you told her that many, many moons ago you attended one of my debates with the illustrious literary critic Stanley Fish.

[Mark Defant]

Yeah, I thanks for having me by the way. And yeah, it was quite an ordeal. I had just finished reading your book which I think was out about that time on political correctness, illiberal education. As I Remember? And it was such a good book that when I saw that you were booked to come on campus, I made my way down there and got to see you debating Stanley Fish, which one might not call much of a debate, but I think you look great.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

Well, he was. The irony about Fish, thinking back to those days. And by the way, there's a kind of weird little update, which is after being out of touch with Stanley Fish for many, many years, I heard from him about two months ago, and he's now teaching, apparently, in Sarasota at a university. Yeah. And he's like. He's like, dinesh, you need to come down here, and we need to have a public conversation on stage. And. And so we're actually working that out. But. But these debates that you're referring to were in the mid-1990s, right?

[Mark Defant]

Right.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

Yeah. So it's a long time ago. And. And so, anyway, good to see you again. And let's talk about. Let's talk about feminism. I mean, this is a powerful current of the last 50 years, if not more. But you get the feeling, particularly now among young people, that not only has it somewhat run its course, but there's a pretty ferocious counter feminism that's developed. And by counterfeminism, Mark, I don't mean in the past, we've seen some counterfeminism where you've had, like, women's rights and then a bunch of guys come out and go, well, we are for men's rights. And to me, that's not counterfeminism. That's actually buying into feminism and playing within the feminist playground, so to speak. Do you agree with that, and do you also sense that we're seeing a real shift in the attitude of young people toward feminism?

[Mark Defant]

I'm not sure. I mean, I see right now so much happening on the university campuses that would seem to argue against that. I mean, more faculty now are women more. Of course, more women are in college than men. More people graduating from law school are women. More people getting their PhDs or women. So we've had a lot of recent papers coming out saying that the university has been feminized. So I'm not. I'm not sure I'm seeing this in the university. I'm seeing a lot of things to the contrary. And that's what kind of pushed me to write this paper.

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[Dinesh D'Souza]

Think actually the things we're talking about are quite consistent because I think what you're reflecting is the fact that this feminist revolution has now become fully institutionalized.

[Mark Defant]

Yes.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

And so the young people who are rebelling against it, what you're describing is what they're rebelling against because this is the stuff that they have been bombarded with probably since infancy. Particularly if you are young and white and male, you have been the object of a battering ram that begins basically from the time you come out of the womb and really never stops. Still on that's right. Now your tool of looking at this is you sort of use the techniques of science and maybe social science to examine feminist scholarship. If you had to give a kind of overview of your latest paper, can you tell us what it's about?

[Mark Defant]

Yes, I have. I'm a volcanologist, geochemist, as you mentioned. But I for years have been extremely interested in evolutionary psychology and I taught it in my honors science course for years. I've read everything I can get my hands on on it, and I feel pretty grounded in the area. And I was seeing the discrepancies between what evolutionary psychology was saying and what feminism is saying. In fact, I've seen feminism completely deny evolutionary psychology. And there seems to be, as you mentioned, this idea of social construction where we're all culturally formed and biology doesn't have anything to do it. In fact, we're all born as blank slates and culture makes us the way we are. So for masculine culture did it if we're feminine culture did it if we're trans cultured in it. And you can see this, I think, in the fact that feminists aren't standing up against trans, at least not any feminists that I know are standing up against women participating, males participating in women's sports. So I think it goes back to this concept of, you know, you are what you declare you are, and it's only culture that makes you the way you are. And of course, I'm seeing just the opposite with evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology first posits that there's a difference in hunter gatherer society between men and women. And we see that in that men can have children without much support or input, and women who have babies in hunter gatherer society, not as much today, were in kind of a crucial situation. If you had a baby without male support, this could be a serious problem. And. And so women have become very reluctant to have indiscriminate sex, if you put it that way. And I think any man that's ever been in the dating scene knows this. And we see this kind of coming out in the way men behave. Men want to impress women and they compete against each other to win women over. Now, men select women too, but on totally different basis. And, and so anything that happens in our society that's kind of labeled patriarchy is not what we're led to believe by feminists, that men are all hanging around trying to subjugate women. We're not trying to do that. I think we developed a patriarchy, what I call an evolutionary patriarchy, from this process of women selecting men. What did women select? They selected men that are masculine. They go out, they earn the bacon, they are great hunters, they're great defenders of the family, and they protect. So all this toxic masculinity nonsense. I mean, yes, men can be more violent or are more violent on average than women, but this is not also something that we should be calling toxic. Masculinity has a lot of good points too, and I hate to see. I hate to see that happening in our universities, but it. It just seems like it's become universal that, you know, men and masculinity are toxic. And we see then this drift away from this in the university systems. Am I talking too long here? Because kind of guide me as to.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

What, you know, you're doing. You're doing just fine. Let me frame a question this way, because whenever I see these kind of, you know, somewhat perverse social movements, I asked myself, what was. What were the conditions in society that facilitated the rise of this? In other words, we can obviously point to, you know, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and a kind of ensemble of feminist pied pipers who are preaching this message in the 60s and 70s, but there was obviously some reception to it on the part of young women who must have heard, like, oh, wow, what they're saying is making a lot of sense. Do you think that just to offer a theory, do you think it's possible that because of the enormous proliferation of technology in the middle of the 20th century, I'm basically thinking about, you know, the vacuum cleaner and the later, the microwave oven and so on, where the kind of project of managing the home goes from being a full time occupation to being a kind of part time occupation. I say this because the big theme, of course, of Betty Friedan's feminine mystique was I'm bored, I'm a woman and I have nothing to do, my mind is wasting away. And so I have to jump into the workforce and be like a man, because that's where all the action is. And when you look at the whole feminist project, it was essentially to enter the man's world and compete with men on your own terms. But I'm trying to get to what was the soil out of which this grew initially, what was its appeal?

[Mark Defant]

Well, I think you're onto something. I can only give you my opinion on it. But it seems like we kind of reached the peak in the 60s where we had the development of the pill in the 50s. And then with that, it gave women a lot of freedom. They didn't have to be so careful about who they had sex with. And as a result of that, we see women sort of getting rid of those old cultural kinds of things where I think women were not treated equally. And I think it, this movement has helped women in some respects, they're getting equality, they're getting equity or equality. And then also during that time you mentioned it, you had all this technology coming to the home where, you know, we had washers and dryers and garbage disposals and refrigerators. And this really freed up the woman for a lot of activities that were formally taking, you know, taking hours to complete during the day. So, yeah, I think the combination of those things gave women a lot of time and a lot of women took advantage of it. They went to school, to college and all those things. So, yes, I would agree with you.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

Mark, in your, in your review of feminist scholarship, what is the sort of tool that the feminists use to distort the result? In other words, I read recently that, you know, when they do these measurements about whether or not men or women are overrepresented or underrepresented, they use a bogus metric. By and large, in fields where the women are fewer they go, well, we're underrepresented. But in the fields where women are 60% or 70%, they don't say, oh, women are over represented. We now need to reduce their numbers. They say, we've achieved parity. So they basically act like over representation on their side is actually a good thing and should not be counted as such. But in any field where they fall under 50, major work needs to be done to, you know, bring them up or bring them to parody. Now, this is obviously a rhetorical sleight of hand. Have you found that feminist scholarship is constantly sort of mucking about with the rules and not applying fair standards and are even distortions of data? What is your assessment of this body of work academically?

[Mark Defant]

Oh my gosh, don't get me started. My background in geochemistry gives me, I think, an irrational approach and a scientific approach to what's going on. And I see, and that's the point of my paper, I see the lack of rigor in feminist studies. But I have a perfect example of what you've been talking about and that is the gender pay gap. You know, feminists, they get out the graph that shows that men make this amount of money and women make this amount of money and they say there's a gap. Well, there's a gap, but there's a definite reason for that gap. And if you look at economics and the studies by feminists or. Well, I wouldn't call them feminists, but they're female economists. The research they're doing shows that the gender pay gap in is due to differences in behavior between men and women. Men tend to be risk adverse, they tend to be aggressive, and women tend to be more interested in social issues and they resist the risk that one takes in job opportunities. So time and time again we see that not only do women avoid high risk jobs where there's a lot of competition and, you know, 60, 70 hour work weeks, they tend to go towards things that give them a lot of ability and freedom to have children, for example. So women tend to leave the workforce during this and they tend then to get lower pay because of that when they come back into the workforce. They've lost a lot of years after raising children and I don't want to hold that against them, but I think that you can explain the pay gap by a lot of that at least. Not me, but a lot of communists are explaining it that way. And. Well, I just feel like it's unfair to say that the gender pay gap is due to discrimination. I think, sure, there's some discrimination going on there. But I think that this is a choice that women are making constantly. And we see this, we see this so much in the jobs. Like take, for example, teachers. Women tend to focus on jobs that are socially oriented. Social workers, nurses, teachers. And these are jobs that of course, have the mother instinct involved. There things with women have high hormones, oxytocin and estrogen, which really can be associated with those kind of mothering instincts. And they get into fields like education, which are just overwhelmed by women. So when you get into a field that's overwhelmed by people wanting to work in that field, people can pay less. And that's what we see happening too, with the pair, with the, with the pay gap. Women are being paid less because there's so many women in fields like nursing and education. And now they're trying to get men to go into those fields, but men aren't having anything to do with it because they don't pay very much because they're so competitive. And men then tend to, you know, drift away from that. Yes, some women, or some men become nurses, some men become teachers, but in general, men tend to move towards more competitive jobs. Is that being, you know, a misogynist? I don't think so. I'm just looking at the data and, and what it tells me, or really what feminine economists tell me, or, or women economists. Does that make any sense?

[Dinesh D'Souza]

Absolutely. Now, do you. Do you take a pessimistic view of all this in the sense that you've got this, you know, concentration of women in academia, as you say, and they. Are they likely to rehabilitate or reform or improve the standards of their scholarship? Or do you think, hey, these people, for them, it was always a power play. They were looking to take over these institutions kind of the way, you know, the Marxists do, for example. And I don't think the typical Marxist worries about whether his scholarship is all that secure. His idea is how do we take over the political science department and hire other people who think like us. So ultimately for them, it's a calculus of power, not necessarily of rationality. Do you think that the feminists are in the same racket, so to speak, or do you think that this kind of critique that you're making is going to get through to at least some of them?

[Mark Defant]

Well, so far I haven't found it getting through to anyone in the feminist circles. In fact, I'm being criticized pretty heavily. But I think that what you're saying about women is very interesting. I think that things like, let's take Social construction, for example. Social construction is not supported as far as I can tell by any research. I mean yes, they go out and they ask some kids, you know, now and then about, you know, why they are this way or that way or they see the way they behave. But all of it can be taken back to fetal development. Melissa Hines has done some wonderful research on this where she finds that children at very young ages, right after even in the womb, they're coming out and, and they have, if they're boys, they have masculine characteristics in general and if they're girls, they have feminine characteristics. And we can see this by the fetus is, is bathed in test, is bathed in testosterone about I guess six weeks in. And that, that bathing is due if you're a male, but if you're a female, you're not getting that testosterone. So, so this impacts the way babies behave right from the get go and then it's just the rest of life, it's, you know, trying to decide how much more you're going to get until you reach puberty, where then you get hit by more testosterone if you're a male or no testosterone or if you're female. You know, Testosterone is about 10 times higher in males than females. That's a lot. So no wonder we behave differently.

[Kevin McCullough]

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[Dinesh D'Souza]

You know, this is not so much an observation about men and women per se, but it is an observation about this idea of the blank slate of social constructionism as you put it. I think people often make the fallacy of thinking that hey, look, the reason that, for example, you know, we sent little Sarah to learn music is because the reason she became a musician is because, you know, we gave her music lessons. And the question that is not often asked is, well, why did you end up giving her music lessons of your five kids? Right. And the answer might be that from a really young age this young kid showed a lot of interest in music. And that was observed by the surprised.

[Mark Defant]

Right?

[Dinesh D'Souza]

I mean, yes, no, exactly. In other words, what I think what you're saying here is that that even a lot of things that are dubbed culture are themselves cued by nature. And so culture becomes a response to nature rather than the manual, the original manufacturer of the product. Is. Is that a good way to put it?

[Mark Defant]

Oh, it is. And there are some people out there, scientists that believe that culture has evolved too, so it becomes part of nature. Also the way we behave in culture or the way culture behaves. So it's kind of interesting. Yeah, there, there is a Marxist element. I mean they love, appear to a love Foucault, who is all about power, all about ideology. And I'd like to see. And the reason I wrote this paper is I'd like to see them bring in more rigorous. If not, let's, let's move out of the university system because we're looking for something called truth, not politics, not ideology, and not the pushing of those ideals that you think are important.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

Hey guys, I've been talking to Professor Mark Defant, professor of geology and geochemistry. We've been talking about feminism and I'll mention again his website where I'm assuming you can find some of these papers and scholarship. Right, Mark?

[Mark Defant]

Yes.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

So it's Markmar rcdefant-e f a n t.com check it out. Mark, a real pleasure and thank you for joining me.

[Mark Defant]

Thank you for having me.

[Kevin McCullough]

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[Dinesh D'Souza]

I'm in the section of life after death, the evidence where we are asking whether there are certain aspects of human nature that are not subject to scientific laws. This may seem like a fairly outrageous, quixotic, remarkable investigation, but I suggested last time that one of those features is in fact consciousness. And today we're going to talk about a second feature that I think cannot be explained. Part of the scientific laws of the world. And that is the idea of free will. Now, our free will is very much on a par with our consciousness to the degree that we are constantly aware not only of the world that's consciousness, but we're also aware of ourselves making decisions. We're making choices. And I'm not just talking about grand moral choices. I'm not even talking about really important career decision. Should I go to law school or become a poet? I'm just talking about everyday decisions. Should I turn right or left? Do I want vanilla ice cream or chocolate? Should I. Am I feeling too lazy to get up and go work out today? I'm constantly making decisions, and I have this idea that I am choosing among options. Is that an illusion? Is that not real? Is free will itself an illusion? Now, the. We don't experience free will quite in the same way as we experience consciousness, because our consciousness ultimately is something that is basic. Our free will, however, is not basic in the sense that we don't have access to what is going on inside our brain any more than we have access, for example, to what is going on in our digestive or circulatory system. So it is possible, you have to concede, it's possible that even though we believe that we are making these free choices, we. We could in fact be mistaken. We could be mistaken about free will. I don't think you can be mistaken about consciousness. Either you have consciousness or you don't. And if you think you have it, well, you do have it. You can't be wrong about that. Just like you can't really be wrong about being in pain, right? If you are in pain, if you experience pain, you're in pain. No doctor can tell you, well, listen, you can't be in pain because your neurons aren't properly aligned or your nervous system says you can't be in pain. Ultimately, being in pain is a Subjective emotion. I called it qualia itself. You're the only one who really knows whether you are in pain and how much. Now, there are a lot of philosophers and there are some scientists who think that free will is some kind of an illusion. And the reason they think it's an illusion is that it is a violation of the closed system of the world.

[Kevin McCullough]

Hi Kevin McCullough. Think fossil fuels are climate villains that the legacy media and establishment politicos ask us to believe that they are? Think again. Did you know that fossil fuels power the systems that keep us safe? Safe from air conditioning that prevents heat stroke, to heating systems that protect against extreme cold. They also provide low cost power for our storm warning systems, giving us time to evacuate and save lives. Forget being a villain, fossil fuels have literally been the hero in the prevention of billions of deaths and the extension of life. In fact, over the past century, deaths from climate related disasters like extreme temperatures, droughts, floods, storms, wildfires have declined by 98% thanks to fossil fueled infrastructure and technology. I'm Kevin McCullough and I just want you to know the facts. Don't be fossil fooled. Get the full [e-mail] brought to you by NASDAQ listed Prairie Operating Group, a high growth, low cost producer of safe and responsible American energy. That's oilfacts.com oilfacts.com what's the closed system of the world?

[Dinesh D'Souza]

It's the idea that ultimately we live in a world where ultimately everything moves according to physical laws. A couple of centuries ago, the scientist Pierre Laplace, who apparently famously had a conversation with Napoleon about this point, and Laplace was basically saying that if we knew the location and momentum of every particle in the universe, we could in principle predict all future events. Why? Because billiard balls don't move unless they are hit by a stick or another billiard ball. And so if you know the motion and you know the location of every particle, well, even though in practice this would be an impossibly large enterprise, nevertheless, in principle you could, you could be able to tell what was going to happen because this would affect that, that would affect something else, and so on. It's not that you can actually figure it out, but the idea is it happens in a determined way. There's no room in this picture for free will at all. But now let's step back and think about the implications of saying that we don't have free will. Because if you don't have free will, then none of the decisions that you've made in your life were actually made by you. They were determined. So think back to your decisions. The girl you asked to the prom, or how you decided to go on vacation to Spain, or even if you say I love you to my wife. The whole thing. What are you planning to do in retirement? The idea is that none of this, none of your choices, past, present or future, are in fact, free. And if this is the case, the entire literature and history, not just of Western civilization, but all civilization, becomes ultimately incomprehensible. In fact, it makes no sense because no one made any decisions. Hitler didn't decide to invade Poland. Churchill didn't decide to resist him. The Achilles didn't decide to go fight in the Persian wars. Every character from Oedipus to Gatsby, all of them were merely acting according to unconscious and uncontrolled brain states. Something else was making them do what they do. And so if there is no free will, the American founders didn't choose to adopt a Constitution in Philadelphia, nor did America elect Obama or Trump as president. Nor is there anything that we can plan to do or intend to do to fix Social Security or Medicare. If there's no free will, there are no good deeds and no bad deeds either, because no one has any choice in the matter. You can't blame Hitler for killing the Jews. You can't side with Abraham Lincoln in declaring slavery wrong because he didn't have the free will to do it, and you don't either. So in the end, all of this is an invalidation of what would appear to be the entire human experience altogether. There's a. There's something fundamentally deranged about claiming that there's no free will. And I'll give a small example. This is not in the book, but it's something I came across recently. I see one of the new atheists, not so new anymore, Sam Harris, and he has a book out about how we have no free will. And yet what I see is a video by Sam Harris talking to us about why we should buy his book. Now, think about it. If we don't have free will, why is he trying to, quote, persuade us? Why is he trying to tell us it's a really good idea to buy my book? I want you, Dinesh, to make a decision to go to Barnes and Noble or go to Amazon and order my book. Wait, doesn't that presume that I have the free will to decide if I want to buy his book? What is the point of persuasion? If no one has free will at all? The whole thing becomes senseless. And at some level, the Philosophers and scientists who pompously decry free will, they know that, so they try to salvage free will in the way that I'm about to describe now. I'll answer them the next time, but I'm just going to describe this salvaging operation, which is actually pretty ingenious, but in the end, it doesn't really work. So the people who want to salvage free will or some element of free will distinguish between two kinds of free will. The first kind of free will is I am free because nothing external to me is interfering with me, right? So let's say, for example, think of a car, a remote control car that is going on a. Going around a track or going. Going around in my living room, if there are no other cars that are coming in its way and blocking it, the car is free. It can actually go wherever it wants. Nothing is stopping it from the outside. And so that you can say the car has free action, or free will, if you want to call it that. The car can go wherever it wants. So it's free in that sense. But of course, the car is not free in the sense that. Who is manipulating the remote control? Well, I am. I'm actually steering the car. I'm directing it where to go. So according to philosophers, we have free will in the sense of the car. The car is free, and we are free because nothing is stopping us. Let's say, for example, I decide I would rather go to Washington, D.C. and be part of the Reagan revolution than go to business school. This is an actual decision that I made when I was in my early 20s. And so the philosopher would say, well, Dinesh, you were free to make that decision because nothing was stopping you from that course of action. You had a job offer in Washington, D.C. obviously it was geographically accessible to you. You were in America, so you were eligible to take that kind of a job. So since nothing was stopping you, you were obviously free to make that decision. But if I were to say, well, yeah, but inside my mind, was I free to really make a choice about whether to do DC or whether or do business school, they would say, no, you're not free in that sense. Why? Because your mind is not uncaused. Certain things are causing you to do what you do, and you may not be aware of those things, but that doesn't mean that the cause isn't there anyway. And they go on to say that if we don't believe that certain things can cause other people to do things, why would businesses buy advertising? Why would we have universities where professors try to teach you the basics of physics and chemistry. What are they doing other than trying to cause your mind to respond in a certain way? And so the idea here is that we can choose what we will, but we cannot will what we will. In other words, the internal processes of shaping our will, that's not in our control, that is caused, that is predetermined. So we don't have free will in that sense, but what we do have is a more limited kind of freedom, which is the freedom of the freedom from external constraint. And free will operates only in that second and narrower sense.

[Kevin McCullough]

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