PREPARE

Summary

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The Dinesh D'Souza Podcast – “PREPARE” (November 26, 2025)

Main Theme

In this episode titled “PREPARE,” Dinesh D’Souza delves into several contemporary sociopolitical and philosophical issues. He begins with a discussion on the Trump administration’s approach to designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terrorist organizations, transitions into a critique of New York Times coverage of an identity theft case involving an illegal immigrant, and features an in-depth conversation with Dr. Cary Gress on modern feminism, patriarchy, and their cultural consequences. In the closing segment, D’Souza ties in physics and cosmology with theological implications, exploring the “anthropic principle” as it relates to immortality and the existence of multiple universes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Trump Administration and the Muslim Brotherhood

• Topic introduction (02:03): D’Souza outlines the Trump administration's decision to designate “certain chapters” of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations, but not others.
• Why the Brotherhood is unique:
  • Unlike ISIS or Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood is a global, decentralized network:
  • "You won't find the Muslim Brotherhood...renting the monkey bars in Afghanistan." (03:18)
  • The organization’s strategy relies on infiltration rather than direct conflict; their motto, derived from the Quran, is “Prepare,” meaning “prepare for battle…with the enemies of Allah.” (05:04)
  • D’Souza critiques the U.S. for historically overlooking the Muslim Brotherhood’s danger in contrast to groups like Hezbollah or Hamas.
• Selective designation rationale:
  • Trump’s approach sets a terrorism “threshold,” designating only chapters involved in direct terror acts, not those acting benignly under U.S. law (e.g. running for school boards) (12:45).
  • Named concerns about Qatar’s and Turkey’s chapters being excluded, suggesting undue influence or double-dealing due to their connections and investments in U.S. institutions.
  • “Qatar plays this kind of middleman role…its influence in the United States is quite deleterious, quite nefarious.” (12:06)

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2. Critique of Progressive Media Narratives

• Inflation and blue vs. red states (18:58):
  • Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, in a wry comment, suggests moving from a blue to a red state to lower one’s inflation rate.
    • “Prices are lower in red states. Now, this is just a fact.” (23:25)
  • NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof retorts with life expectancy statistics, but D’Souza points out the logical fallacy in equating individual price impact with aggregate life expectancy differences: “If you move…what effect does it have on your life expectancy? Zero. Right.” (19:57)
• NYT profile: “Two Men, One Identity” (24:56):
  • D’Souza criticizes a New York Times article portraying both victim (whose identity was stolen) and the perpetrator (an illegal immigrant) as “victims.”
    • “This is kinda like saying…two victims. No, there aren’t two victims. There’s a victim and there’s a perpetrator.” (25:51)
  • Observes that if the perpetrator were not an illegal immigrant, NYT would not show such sympathy.
  • Memorable analogy:
    • “In the domain of art, you can have these sorts of sympathies…but this is not how I would feel if I actually ran into the Corleone in real life.” (27:26)
  • Concludes that media and progressive politics are orchestrating a “moral inversion,” blurring the lines between victim and wrongdoer based on identity.

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3. Interview: Dr. Cary Gress on Feminism, Patriarchy, and the Cultural Divide

[Begins 28:40]

a. The Social Media “Battle” Over Feminism

• D’Souza notes a gender divide on social media debates: "It seems that basically the women are feminists and the men are anti-feminists, and a lot of the acrimony seems to come out of that." (28:27)
• Dr. Gress attributes heightened tensions to men increasingly finding their voice and pushing back, while women begin to face vulnerabilities after long cultural dominance.
  • "Men have gone more conservative and women are not moving the needle very much at this stage..." (29:53)

b. Educational & Ideological Indoctrination

• D’Souza asks if feminized education contributes to the schism.
• Gress:
  • For decades, culture allowed women to criticize men freely, while men did not respond—until recently (e.g. emergence of Andrew Tate as the “mirror image of the radical feminist”). (31:08)
  • Calls the climate “like watching a bad divorce…not really a way to navigate or heal it.“ (31:14)
  • Suggests that women have lacked models of “authentic femininity,” being instead encouraged to adopt vices like “rage, contempt, and envy” for political expediency.
    • “Women who are angry are a lot more politically expedient than women who are not angry.” (32:17)

c. Conservative Men “Endorsing” Feminism & Backlash Against Conservative Women

• D’Souza reflects on conservative men embracing “happy wife, happy life” attitudes out of chivalry or avoidance.
  • “Men have been reluctant to get into it…So they tend to bow out of the debate.” (33:35)
• Now, even conservative women (e.g. Lila Rose, Ali Stuckey) are being sharply criticized by anti-feminist men online for advocating male virtues, called out for “not learning about the patriarchy.”
  • Dr. Gress: "They're actually not embodying what the patriarchy is, they're embodying a kind of machismo or something very disordered." (35:41)

d. History and Real Meaning of Patriarchy

• D’Souza: The pre-feminist patriarchy was more complex and nuanced; women worked within it, sometimes wielding power covertly.
  • “The patriarchy was hardly…my grandfather was the general and...my grandmothers were the soldiers taking orders.” (37:45)
• Dr. Gress: Real patriarchy is hierarchical but inclusive—like the military, everyone finds a role and place. In contrast, unchecked egalitarianism can lead to “ghettoization” or suppression of youth.
  • "Men don’t exclude people, they find a place for them in the hierarchy. This is what women don’t do. We want everybody to be equal..." (39:14)
  • Emphasizes the role of fathers in healthy development and cautions about the cultural absence of positive patriarchy.

e. Theological Foundations of Feminism

• D’Souza: Seeks clarification that the roots of feminism are inherently anti-hierarchy—not just later “waves” but from the first-generation feminists.
• Dr. Gress connects early feminism's theological underpinnings (e.g., Mary Wollstonecraft's embrace of Unitarianism/atheism) with both philosophical and spiritual attacks on hierarchy and mediation (including Christ).
  • “First wave hadn’t really paved the way for it theologically and philosophically.” (44:38)

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4. The Anthropic Principle, Multiple Universes, and Life After Death

[Begins 46:45]

• D’Souza explains the “anthropic principle” — the universe appears finely tuned for human life.
  • If constants were even minutely different, “you would get a universe with no life at all.” (48:19)
• Scientists troubled by theological implications speculate about multiple universes (multiverse theory) to avoid invoking a Creator.
  • “The idea of multiple universes is interesting…even if it’s just made up…” (51:25)
• Cites Christian astronomer Owen Gingrich: The concept of heaven is compatible—even illuminated—by multiverse thinking.
  • “Heaven becomes a very understandable possibility under this notion…” (53:10)
• Concludes: Modern physics, far from disproving the possibility of life after death, expands its plausibility by demonstrating the flexibility and limits of material existence.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• D’Souza on the Muslim Brotherhood’s long strategy:
  • “There’s a time for blowing up a building. There’s a time for taking over a school board. There’s a time for fielding candidates in an election.” (07:46)
• On New York Times “moral inversion”:
  • “There’s a victim and there’s a perpetrator. The victim is the one who suffers unjustly…The perpetrator is not a victim because the perpetrator is getting his just desserts by being held accountable…” (25:52)
• Dr. Cary Gress on current feminist anger:
  • “Women have been really focused on exercising the vices of rage, contempt, and envy…because women who are angry are a lot more politically expedient than women who are not angry.” (32:16)
• On real patriarchy:
  • “Leadership has a very strong component of servant leadership…that the job of the leader is just not to drag everybody behind him, but rather to serve the people that he is put in charge of.” (42:19)
• On the limits of scientific atheism:
  • “Modern science has proven itself not to be the enemy of religious believers, but their unexpected ally.” (55:45)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Trump & the Muslim Brotherhood: 02:03 – 12:45
• Qatar’s double-dealing influence: 11:18 – 12:45
• Inflation & blue vs. red states: 18:58 – 24:00
• NYT Identity Theft Critique: 24:56 – 28:10
• Feminism & Gender War (Dr. Gress): 28:40 – 44:49
  • Modern feminist/anti-feminist schism: 28:40 – 31:45
  • Backlash vs. conservative women: 35:22 – 37:39
  • Patriarchy & its history: 37:39 – 44:49
• Anthropic Principle & Physics: 46:45 – 55:45

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Conclusion

Dinesh D’Souza’s “PREPARE” episode weaves through policy, media critique, gender ideology, and metaphysics, using a blend of personal insight, theory, and guest expertise. D’Souza challenges mainstream narratives on terrorism and progressive victimhood, exposes the unforeseen consequences of culture wars over gender, and finds unexpected harmony between modern science and religious possibility. Dr. Cary Gress’s contributions provide a thought-provoking dissection of feminism’s philosophical roots and its impacts on men, women, and society.

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Transcript

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[Dinesh D'Souza]

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Guys, I should mention that tomorrow being Thanksgiving and then Friday being a holiday. No podcast Thursday or Friday. We'll be back in the saddle on Monday. Coming up today, I'm going to explore why the Trump administration would designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood to be terrorists while leaving others out. And I'll consider a New York Times article that tries to make an illegal who stole another man's identity into a victim. If you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe. This is the Dinesh d' Souza podcast.

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.

I want to talk about an important decision from the Trump administration that outlaws, quote, certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, this is a big development. In fact, Sebastian Gorka texted me the announcement the moment it came out and said something like history, meaning this is historic. And I think he's quite right about this because in a way, since 9 11, the United States has been targeting some of these violent jihadi organizations, isis, Al Qaeda, and then abroad groups like Boko Haram and others. But leaving Alone may be the most dangerous and the most powerful organization of radical Islam in the world, and that is the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is harder to target because it doesn't function quite, quite in the same way as these other organizations. You won't find the Muslim Brotherhood, you know, renting the monkey bars in Afghanistan. The Muslim Brotherhood does not directly lob rockets into Israel the way Hezbollah does, or launches an October 7th type attack like Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood is a cluster. It's a global cluster. It's a network that has very common themes but is also widely decentralized and it exists pretty much in many, if not all, parts of the world. It exists all over Europe. It's got deep veins in the United States. It all goes back to the 1920s, when an Egyptian school teacher named Hassan Al Banna decided that Islam was in a bad way because essentially, Islam had succumbed to Westernization. And no wonder the Western powers were winning, because they're better at Westernization than the Muslims. And this Westernization, according to Al Bana, had made Islam weak, but also alienated Islam from itself, alienated Islam from the way Islam has been since the seventh century. So the Muslim Brotherhood saw itself as reviving. You could call it original. Original Islam. And. And it did so, by and large, by saying that we have to do two things. One is we have to defeat these dictatorial regimes, these pro Western dictatorial regimes in the Muslim world who have become instruments of Westernization and secularization. So we need to establish Islamic control over our own societies. That's job one and job two. We need to sort of take the old battle to the enemy, the west, but in a new way. So this is not going to be Islamic armies marching Saladin style or Muhammad the Conqueror style, as in the days of the Crusades, but rather this is going to be essentially war by infiltration. The Muslim Brotherhood is going to infiltrate Western societies, sort of take them over from within, find allies in those societies that are blind to what the Muslim Brotherhood's agenda is. And so in no way is the Muslim Brotherhood rejecting terrorism. Not at all. They're quite willing to engage in it, but they recognize that. That there's a time and a place for everything. So in other words, there's a time for blowing up a building. There's a time for taking over a school board, There's a time for fielding candidates in an election. All of it is aimed toward the goal of bringing even the west under Islamic subjugation. Now, the Muslim Brotherhood has a green flag, and it has a book, two swords, and there's some writing on it. And I see from my friend Dan Burmawi, whom I had on this podcast, by the way, an Egyptian convert to Christianity. Dan goes. This is the logo of the Muslim Brotherhood. Do you know what the word on it says? It is the word prepare. Prepare. That's the title of today's episode of the podcast. Prepare. Prepare for what? Well, it's from the Quran. Basically, it is prepare for the battle between you and the enemies of Allah. And the enemies of Allah are basically the Jews and the Christians and the unbelievers. So the Muslim Brotherhood is a very ambitious and I would say a dangerous organization. By the way, Obama tried to put the Muslim Brotherhood in charge of Egypt. This was part of the so called Arab Spring. And Obama did what the Muslim Brotherhood wanted, which is yank out US Support for Mubarak, the dictator, the secular dictator, the dictator working with the west as an ally of America. Let's get rid of him, let's bring in the Muslim Brotherhood. And Obama was successful in doing that, although subsequently there was an Egyptian military couple. And so the Muslim Brotherhood has been ejected from power. Now, I see a bunch of people who find the Trump Declaration and order to be very inadequate. Why? Because it designates, quote, certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood. And the certain chapters seems to mean chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood that are in certain countries but not in other countries. And Qatar and Turkey appear to be excluded here. And of course, the fear on our side is that that's because Qatar has got massive influence in the United States. Let's remember, Qatar gave Trump a plane. They've put billions of dollars into universities. They have put huge amounts of money into the worldwide media. And so Qatar has, in a way insulated itself. And it's posing as, you know, we're trying to help the Trump administration, we're on the side of the United States. And yet these people are very much working with the Muslim Brotherhood. And you could say they are also part of this worldwide effort that I've been describing. Now, the Muslim Brotherhood operates in many different capacities and many different levels. And one way to explain or maybe even defend what Trump is doing is he's saying, in effect, that certain things that the Muslim Brotherhood does are not outlawed under the principles of our society. So, for example, if you have a Muslim Brotherhood chapter, and their main goal, let's just say, is to buy private land, establish Muslim schools, and let's say they want to run Islamic candidates for the school board. All of this could be problematic because it is part of the, this global project of domination. But it's not illegal. It'd be hard to say that some Muslim running for a school board is thereby automatically doing something that is a terrorist action. And on what basis would you just outlaw it? I can't really think of any. At least I can't think of any, given our current system, which of course allows citizens to run for school board, allows citizens to run for Congress, and so on. So I think the Trump approach here, although it might be blind to the double dealing of the Qataris, this remains, I think, an unresolved question. The Qataris are obviously in the position to do certain favors. They were actually crucial in getting the Israeli hostages back. So Qatar plays this kind of middleman role. But I think overall its influence in the United States is quite deleterious, quite nefarious. But I think what the Trump administration is saying that when it comes to terrorism, and this is what we're talking about, we're talking about designating the Muslim Brotherhood not as, quote, harmful, not as something that requires surveillance or we need to keep an eye on it. It's designating the organizations as terrorists. And in order to be a terrorist, you have to sort of plan terrorist things, you have to do terrorist deeds. You can't be designated as a terrorist simply by virtue of being a Muslim. And so I think what the Trump administration is saying is we're going to set up a threshold and we're going to see which of the chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood meet this threshold. Of course there's going to have to be a review, there's going to have to be a procedure and a process. But if these chapters meet that criterion, then yes, they do deserve that designation. So we're not going to try to use a kind of one size fits all on all the chapters. Some of the chapters may be doing things that, whether we agree with them or not, are, from the point of view of terrorism, benign. And other chapters may be crossing the line. So I take this to be the underlying rationale. The Trump administration recognizes that there is real bad stuff going on within and in the name of the Muslim Brotherhood. At the same time, it's recognizing that not all the chapters are equally culpable. So let's start by getting the really bad guys who meet that threshold that justifies our labeling them and treating them as terrorist organizations. Incorporating a wide variety of whole food ingredients into my daily routine is key for me and I do it this way. Balance of nature Fruits and veggies in a capsule. These fruit and veggie supplements make it simple. They give me the fruits and veggies I need and that I simply just don't have the time or energy to eat. 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I'm going to quote him, you know the best way to bring your inflation rate down? Move from a blue state to a red state. And he goes on to argue that the inflation rate in blue states is higher than those of red states. And this is a pretty benign observation. Of course, he's doing it in a wry way to rebut someone in the media who's trying to get him on the issue of prices, because after all, what is inflation but the rising price level? So Besant is going, hey, you're worried about high prices? Well, prices are lower in red states. Now, Nicholas Kristof, who is a columnist for the New York Times, does this rebuttal of Scott Besant, quote, you know the best way to bring your life expectancy down? Move from a blue state to a red state. Red states have a life expectancy 2.2 years shorter than blue states. Now this appears to be kind of a clever rebuttal or riposte, but in fact, if you think about it, it's a logical fallacy. It makes absolutely no sense. Why? Because if you move from one state to Another, let's say you move from a red state to a blue state. What effect does it have on your life expectancy? Zero. Right. If I'm a Texan and I move to, let's just say Wisconsin, my life expectancy is going to be unchanged. But the prices that I pay for things, that's going to change. So I used to live in California, and California has very high prices across the board. Real estate in California costs, I would say, one and a half times what it costs in Texas. That's a huge difference. Gas costs usually $2, maybe $2.50 per gallon more in California than it does in Texas. And this applies kind of across the board. Utilities. Water costs a lot more. Food typically. I'd go into a grocery store in California, fill up my cart, it's going to be like $150 in Texas, the exact same. Buy the exact same stuff, fill up the cart the exact same way with the exact same items, and it's like 90 bucks. So again, there's a. What I'm getting at is that Scott Besant is right. There is a price difference. It's cheaper to live in Texas than California. And that's just a fact. The life expectancy thing is completely bogus because your life expectancy, by and large, obviously, if there's differences in pollution and so on, there can be marginal impacts on life expectancy. But by and large, your life expectancy is going to be the same whether you move from a red state to a blue state or the or the other way around. Now, I mentioned that Nicholas Kristof is at the New York Times. Here's a New York Times article that's very telling. I'm going to read the headline. Two Men, One Identity. They Both Paid the Price. What's the New York Times really getting at here? Well, what it's getting at is that you have a guy who is an illegal alien. And not only an illegal alien, this guy is actually also a criminal. This is a guy who has multiple anchor babies with US Citizenship, so he's collecting benefits from them. This is a guy who's had multiple DUI arrests. This is the guy who's been deported three times. This is a guy who's actually killed someone by running down a grandfather and little girl on a sidewalk and killed the grandfather. So this is the illegal alien. And what does he do? He steals the identity of another guy. And the title of the New York Times article is Two Men, One Identity. They Both paid the price. So the basic idea of the article is we're Going to be. This is a sad story about two victims. One guy is a victim because his identity got stolen. And as a result, this guy was like beside himself. Not only was he facing financial jeopardy and risk, but apparently the IRS was after him and was after him for things that he never did. His identity had been stolen. So this guy's clearly a victim. No doubt about that. Where's the other victim? Well, according to the New York Times, the other victim is the thief is the illegal. Now how can that guy possibly be a victim? Well, according to the Times, he's a victim because he's now facing years in prison because he's been arrested for stealing the other guy's identity. Now this is just downright insane. This is kind of like saying a home invader, a person whose home is invaded. Two victims. No, there aren't two victims. There's a victim and there's a perpetrator. The victim is the one who suffers unjustly because of what the perpetrator did. The perpetrator is not a victim because the perpetrator is getting his just desserts by being held accountable according to the law. Here is the progressive writer Jill Filipovic. This article is such a good and sad story and I hope any decent person would find a way to sympathize with both these men. Now, I admit that the New York Times article, as you read it, is pretty artful. It doesn't disclose the full extent of the criminality of the illegal. It tries to humanize him to the point of making you feel, oh wow, well this is guy also a guy in a tough spot. And look, the illegals have it so difficult. And so he had to do this, or at least he was driven to do it. And, and even if I don't, even if I believe that the person does deserve consequences, I should at least feel sorry for him. It kind of reminded me a little bit. And we have this experience, I think when we, when we watch films, is take a film like the Godfather, which is a brilliant portrait of the internal lives, the family connections, but also the kind of camaraderie, the loyalty and some of the virtues of some grotesque criminals. I mean, you have to remember that these mafia families, the Corleone's and so on, are don't hesitate to murder people who come in their way and they do it almost casually. And I'm not just talking about the Godfather talking about Goodfellas, I'm talking about Casino. I'm talking about a whole bunch of. But here's the point. The point Is that in the world of art or movie making, they tell the story in such a way that you're like, oh, man, this is really interesting. I can really identify with these gangsters. And. And to the degree that they get blown away or they're killed in the end, you actually do feel sorry for them. You were maybe even a little bit against your wishes, rooting for them all along. And so here we see the way in which art and real life are different. Because in the domain of art, you can have these sorts of sympathies, but then when you step back and you do a little moral reflection, you realize these are real monsters. They actually deserve to be put away for life. They deserve the death penalty. And so sympathy, even if granted conditionally or granted for two hours while I'm in a black room watching it in my, you know, home theater or watching it in a. In a theater is one thing, but this is not how I would feel if I actually ran into the Corleone in real life, Particularly if I was on the receiving end. If I was. You know, if I had a store in Canal street and they were shaking me down and extorting payments from me every month, I certainly wouldn't have decided. God, you know, the. The Mafia is really cool, man. You know, look. Look. Look at all their cool behavior. Look at all the cool stuff that they have. And they're really funny and they're really interesting. And. No, I would basically see them for what they were and what they. What they are. And the same is really true here. What you have is a grotesque crime being perpetrated. And by the way, the reason for the New York Times sympathy is solely because the guy is an illegal. Think about that. Because let's just say you just had a bunch of. Let's say just a bunch of white guys who were identity thieves, robbing other people's identities and like, destroying their lives. Do you think there would be a sympathetic article in the New York Times? Look, you've got these guys, and they're, you know, they're stealing other people's identity, and they're all victims, too. No, they'd never do that. The reason they're doing that is that in this case, the burglar, if you will, the thief is an illegal. And so you see the way here in which, not only in the Democratic Party, the political establishment, but also in the media, you have this insidious effort ultimately to create a moral inversion and to take even bad deeds, in this case outright crimes, and try to say that not only is the victim of these crimes. The victim. But the perpetrator of the crimes is also a victim. Have you heard about the new movie Call Sign Courage? It's the story of Space Force Commander Matt Lohmeyer. He's the one who blew the lid off the military's DEI agenda. He saw how Marxist messaging, critical race theory and rampant DEI training was changing the culture of the military. 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That's 833-850-2229 or go to preborn.comdinesh preborn.com/dinesh Guys, we're seeing a very interesting debate, maybe a battle is the right word playing out in social media over issues of feminism and anti feminism and patriarchy and all of it. And I've Got the perfect guest to discuss all this. It's Dr. Cary Gress. She's a media expert. She's author of the new book called Something Wicked, which deals with issues of feminism and in fact, the relationship between feminism and the kind of, you may almost call it New Church of the Left. You can follow Carrie on X caric A R R I E Gres G R E S S or the website is just carygrass.com Kerry, thanks for joining me. I don't know if you've been witnessing as I have, this kind of massive skirmish all over social media over men and women and relationships. And it doesn't seem to be couched so much in terms of jobs or the workplace. Even though that comes into play, it seems to do with what are the things that men and women expect of each other or what do each of them bring to the table. And if I can summarize the debate, I would summarize it this way. It seems that basically the women are feminists and the men are anti feminists. And a lot of the acrimony seems to come out of that. Do you agree with this and can you tell us a little bit of what you think the nub of the issue is here?

[Dr. Cary Gress]

Yeah, no, I think that's a really great insight. You know, I've been working on this issue. I've been writing on it for more than 10 years. And in the last two years in particular, it's really, it feels like it's really come to a head. And I think part of the issue is, is that men are finally finding their voice on this issue. I think up until recently men have felt like, oh, it's a, you know, we just want to support women, we'll do whatever. And that was just kind of the way things went. And I think simultaneously women are beginning to realize that, you know, there's some pushback here, that they're doing a lot of things that are not helping themselves. They're not helping men, their families or even the country for that matter. When you look at what's going on with our voting situation and of course the birth earth is another major issue. But women have been in this very privileged place for a long time and so it's hard to sort of start looking at that and, and, and realizing there's some vulnerability here and that kind of these front row seats that women have had might be taken away from us and might also require us to rethink the things that most of us have held dear and sacred for, you know, really all of our lives because the indoctrination is so deep. So, yeah, I think your summary of it couches it properly because men have gone more conservative and women are not moving the needle very much at this stage of the game.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

Now, is that. Because the kind of feminization of our education system at the elementary, but also at the college levels has caused women, in a sense, to expect men to be more feminine, which is to say more like them, more relational and so on. Whereas men, who are typically the targets of this kind of attack, or propaganda, if we can call it that, are revolting in the opposite direction and basically saying we flatly refuse. And in fact, we are going to kind of turn our fire on women. I mean, I don't think it's very healthy what's going on. And yet, as you say, it might be a necessary reaction to the ideological battering ram that has been going on now for several decades.

[Dr. Cary Gress]

Yeah, yeah, I think this has been going on for a long time. And for. It seems like since it started, women have had the capacity to really tear into men, and men haven't said anything. You know, it's actually kind of remarkable that you haven't had the rise of people like Andrew Tate's until recently. And I think Andrew Tate is. Is kind of the mirror image of the radical feminist. He's just coming at it from a different and more extreme, you know, angle as a man. So I. I think that's what's going on. It's like watching a bad divorce, you know, where. Where the women are siding with the women and the men are siding with the men. And that's not really a way to. To navigate it or to heal it. So I. I think this is the bigger issue, is we need to look at the ideology behind it. So we also need to look specifically at the way in which women have been indoctrinated. And, you know, most women, if you talk to them privately, will say, well, maybe there's something wrong with this, or maybe we can think of this in a different way, but we've never been shown a different way. You know, anyone who doesn't agree wholeheartedly with a feminist agenda is really labeled as a doormat, or, you know, someone who doesn't have the capacity to think. And so that. I think that's what's driving it so much, is that women haven't had real models of what authentic feminine femininity can actually look like. And so I think that's incumbent upon us as conservatives to really start presenting a different view of what womanhood looks like, than the predominant view that's, you know, seems to be everywhere. And the only way in which we can think. So that's really what's driving it, is women have been told and, you know, our emotions have been formed. In fact, this is one of the things I talk about in the book extensively, is just the way women have been pushed to be. Instead of the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity, women have been really focused on exercising the vices of rage, contempt, and envy. So those are the things that have been stirred up in us a lot. And that's what's creating a significant amount of the acrimony. And a lot of this is on purpose because the fact that women who are angry are a lot more politically expedient than women who are not angry. So if you look at something like the Women's March, this isn't populated with very reasonable, calm, rational women. It's clearly something meant to even stir up anger further. So all of those things are at play. But I think finding a way to model authentic femininity is a really important thing that we need to do on the right.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

It seems to me, just thinking back over the last several decades, watching this feminist debate play out, that even the conservative men, and maybe this is for reasons of chivalry I'm not really sure, were pushed back into a kind of endorsement of the feminist ethic. I mean, I think, for example, I'm not thinking of people who are all that political. I'm thinking about the guy who says things like, happy wife, happy life. Or I'm thinking about the guy who says, my wife is always right. Now my wife is actually here, and she's nodding vigorously, but she's right. You know what? You know what I mean? What I mean is that men have been sort of reluctant to get into it, particularly with these angry feminist types. And so they tend to bow out of the debate and sort of talk about something else. And I wonder if that has contributed to the problem. I mean, young people do seem to be. Do not seem to share this kind of ethic. They're going back to, I think, a much more tell it like it is. You know, you can be frank, but so can I. And so we get a lot of mutual bashing on social media. Now, there's one new wrinkle that's come up, and I want your take on this, and that is that I find that from some of these angry young men, even conservative women are getting bashed. And I think here, particularly of Ali Stuckey, but also Lila Rose, recently Both of them said what I think, to your mind and mine would be pretty innocuous statements like we need men to be loyal and virtuous and stay off the porn. And then you get this procession of men saying, stop telling us what to do. You're supposed to be subordinate. You haven't learned about the patriarchy, so you're now getting this kind of. So what do you make of this idea that somehow these young men are only willing to take instruction from older men and not from conservative women?

[Dr. Cary Gress]

Yeah, I think, you know, there's, it's a challenge because of the fact that you've got these younger men who are trying, trying in a certain respect to do what their parents or their fathers didn't do, their grandfathers didn't do. They're trying to right the ship. But the problem is, is that they're going too far and they're actually not embodying what the patriarchy is. They're embodying a kind of machismo or something. Andrew Tatus Tatish Something very disordered. And so I think that's the problem is, you know, this doesn't mean that you get to be rude and awful to every, every woman. That's not what the patriarchy is or how it, how it works. And wisdom is wisdom. You know, we need to pay attention to it from, from whence it comes. But I think that the issue is, is that because men have not wanted to engage with feminists, and frankly, I don't blame men at all for this because we all know how, what it's like to argue with a feminist. You know, you're, you're usually not going to win. There's usually going to be revenge and it's going to be, you know, come back to you when you least expect it. Because this is. Women can hold grudges. So I think that that's. All of these things are problems. You know, you don't have to listen too long to men who are in positions where they've got kind of a girl boss or a mean girl above them in a career, and they just bow out. They don't want to engage. They just try to stay under the radar until they get that next promotion or have a different kind of boss. And women can do the same thing, too. But this has been part of the problem, is that, that the feminist culture has really taken over in a way where there's not an authentic engagement of the human person. So I think that's the fundamental problem. But younger men are trying to right that and that's their problem is they're going too far in one direction instead of saying, okay, what does it really look like to be a good man and to really understand that, you know, the word authority is connected to the word for cultivating and gardening. You know, that there's a kind of image of a man who's able to bring the best out of people and provide for them in a way that they can grow to be the people that they're meant to be, instead of it being about power. And that's what feminism is about, is about power. And so this is just the. The pendulum swinging the other direction. And it's clearly about power as well.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

You know, I wonder if part of it is that there is not a good understanding of what the old world looked like. When I think of the old world, I think of my parents generation, but I think even more of my grandparents generation. And in that generation, I had two extremely feisty and somewhat bossy grandmothers, and yet they were fully within a patriarchy, and they accepted the patriarchy, but they were always very sneakily navigating around its edges, kind of wryly playing my grandfathers, even as they kind of acknowledged their authority. So the patriarchy was hardly. It didn't resemble an army where my grandfather was the general and. And my grandmothers were the soldiers taking orders. And that seems to be, I think, the false expectation now that that is what it means to submit to your husband. So can you say a word about your scholar? You've looked at this in a historical lens and say a word about what does, in fact, you could call it decent patriarchy look like?

[Dr. Cary Gress]

Yeah, I mean, I think we have examples. Someone like George Bailey and It's a Wonderful Life is a great example of this. Someone who has to forego things that he may want in his life, but because he's providing and caring for others, not just his family. But in the case of It's a Wonderful Life, it's really the whole community that you see the way in which he's cultivating these relationships and taking care of people such that they can have a much better life than what it looks like under, you know, his. His nemesis. So I think, you know, the big thing, too, is also to recognize the egalitarian nature of feminism. And the hierarchy and the patriarchy are kind of one and the same. They're the structure by which men organize themselves. And one of the things that's really beautiful about it is that if you look at something like the military, men don't exclude people. They find a place for them in the hierarchy. And this is what women don't do. We want everybody to be equal. And if you're too above us, we are going to pull you down. And if you're beneath us, we get rid of you. This is obviously in a vicious form. Of course. Women have incredible virtues, but those are not really used and demonstrated much today. But so the point being that there's something about the beauty of recognizing the gifts that everybody has, but it's a structure through which everybody kind of knows their place. They have a role in it. And we have to recognize that that's really what Mary Wollstonecraft and the Enlightenment thinkers like her husband, William Godwin, and then, you know, coming down through all of the godless egalitarians was to get rid of all of that. And so what you're missing out then is. Is certainly the place for everyone, the roles and the capacity that men have to see very easily, the gifts that people have. And this is what a good father does. Also, there's a reason why matriarchies always end up in a kind of ghettoization, and it's because women want to nurture and hold their children close to them, but they don't. We don't always see it's the. The way in which we can help our children best by either pushing them out of the nest or telling them, you know, to protect certain gifts that they have, like sexuality of young women. If a lot of the women in the culture today who don't have fathers had role models that said, you need to stop abusing your sexuality and being promiscuous as young women, we would have. We live in a very different culture. And I think this is what a good father does, is help children understand what needs to be protected and then what needs to be let out into the world in different stages and. And, you know, use their gifts. So it's almost like a. I've heard the image of a. Like a hydraulic dam, that the father is the one who sort of holds things in and then releases them when they need to. You know, children need to be. Go out into the world. So I think there's a lot of incredible ways to look at it. We. We've been beating up on the patriarchy for so long, you would be able to really say what it is other than kind of this machismo, but that's really not what it is. That's really a. A characterization or a mischaracterization of it that has, you know, been perpetuated for so many Decades and even centuries, that it's. It's hard to really know the good of it until it's gone. And then we really see what's missing when it comes to things like police and military and the order that it brings to our lives.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

I take you, Carrie, to be saying two things, and maybe we can close out with this question. I think one thing you're saying is that leadership has a very strong component of servant leadership.

[Dr. Cary Gress]

Absolutely.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

Which is a very Christian idea, isn't it? That the job of the leader is just not to drag everybody behind him, but rather to serve the people that he is put in charge of. And I think that's a very important point. But the other point you're making, which I think is a little more controversial, and that is you're saying that the problem is not that the first wave of feminism was good and then the second wave of feminism went off the tracks. I think you're saying that feminism, from the very beginning. This is Susan B. Anthony and Mary Wollstonecraft. They began with an attack on the idea of subordination or hierarchy or patriarchy. And thus early feminism, or some people call it first wave feminism, sowed the seeds of the chaos of second wave feminism. Is that right?

[Dr. Cary Gress]

No, that's absolutely right. And I think it goes much deeper than just kind of philosophical ideas. There are actually theological ideas involved. And one of them, which Mary Wollstonecraft was very involved in, was this idea of Unitarianism that she. She started as an Anglican, then went to becoming a dissenter, and then became a Unitarian. Like a lot of the men around her, either they were unitarians or atheists. Dr. Richard Price, who's considered the first leftist thinker, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Joseph Johnson, all of these different men were Unitarians. And so she took on this idea because Unitarians don't believe in the divinity of Christ. They just believe in kind of an abstract God that you get to through reason. And Wollstonecraft believed that if you had any man as a mediator between you and God, that that was. That was thwarting the potential of a woman. So even Jesus is actually going to act as a way to. To block the potential of a woman. And it's only through a woman's reason that she's going to be able to reach God. Well, this idea was really perpetuated throughout the 1800s, and it was something that was believed in very much by the first wave women. Women like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan. Susan B. Anthony, who did eventually say she was an atheist. So these theological ideas are at play and certainly very much at the beginning of the movement and created this cornerstone stone of idea for what would become the second wave. But the second wave never would have happened if the first wave hadn't really paved the way for it theologically and philosophically.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

This is really fascinating stuff. The book is called Something Wicked. I've been talking to Dr. Cary Gress. Follow her on X at Carrie Gress or the website carygress.com Carrie, as always, thank you very much for joining me.

[Dr. Cary Gress]

Thank you.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

Really good stuff. Thank you.

[Dr. Cary Gress]

My pleasure. Thank you.

[Dinesh D'Souza]

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I expect today to finish my discussion of life after death in the context of modern physics. This chapter is called the Physics of Immortality. I've talked about Einstein, I've talked about the universe having a beginning. I'm now going to talk about one of the other spectacular findings of modern science. And this is called the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle is sometimes called the fine tuned universe. And what does it really mean? Well, what it means is that the universe is constructed in such a way not just the Earth, not just our planet, the entire universe. It is constructed on a plan or on a program where if you were to adjust the dials even slightly, you would Get a completely different universe and you would get a universe with no life at all. So in other words, the point being that if we want to have life and our kind of life, human beings in a world, the world has to be made this way. It cannot be made any other way. The, the physicist Stephen Hawking says this in his book A Brief History of Time. If the rate of expansion, he's talking about the rate of expansion of the universe one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it even reached its present size. The astronomer Martin Rees, who's the astronomer of the Royal Laboratory in Britain, has a book called Just Six Numbers. And he puts it somewhat differently. He goes, the numbers, by the way, are some key constants that govern the laws of the universe. And he says the nature of our universe is remarkably sensitive to these numbers. If you imagine setting up a universe by adjusting six dials, the tuning must be precise in order to yield a universe that could harbor life. The point being that you can imagine, like God sitting at the dials, if God were to spin the dials at all, move them even to the slightest degree, no universe, no life. Now, this is a big problem for modern atheism. In fact, the physicist Leonard Susskind, who is also an atheist, calls the anthropic principle quote, a huge embarrassment. He says it is, quote, hated by most physicists. And he gives the reason. He goes, the principle points to a creator. And so he goes, real science requires explanations that do not involve supernatural agents. Now, some of the physicists who don't like the idea of a fine tuned universe, and they don't like it for one good reason, and that is that a fine tuned universe implies a fine tuner. How else do you get it? Why are the dials set like this when of course, there are an infinite range of possibilities? So how do you get around? How do you escape from this idea of a fine tuned universe? Well, the answer is kind of simple and also at the same time outrageous. And that is science can posit. And by posit here, what we mean is assume or make up or conjecture other universes, many universes, what is sometimes known as multiple universes. But nobody by multiple universes means like three or seven. What they mean by multiple universes is a whole bunch of universes, possibly an infinity of universes, a sort of massive smorgasbord of universes in which our universe is only one. Now, when you say something so outrageous, so outlandish in the literal sense of the word, you need to have some evidence for it. And so I ask, what is the empirical data? What is the slightest evidence that we have multiple universes? I mean, forget about multiple universes. What's the slightest evidence that there is a single universe other than our own? There such evidence? Answer no. And so now we are in a very odd situation because we are living in what we know to be a fine tuned universe that seems to point to a creator. And to get out of that, scientists and atheists are positing many universes that by the way, they have no evidence for in order to explain away the fine tuning of the one universe that we do in fact inhabit. Now, how does the many universes idea get away from the fine tuning? Well, the answer is kind of simple. Let's say, for example, I call out a number and that number is a very complex number. And then I spin a roulette wheel and that number comes up. Wow. It's a massive, massive coincidence. And this coincidence demands some explanation. How was I able to call out this single number in advance? Did I know something? Is the whole system rigged? But let's say, for example, I call out a really remarkable number and we have a roulette wheel that we spin an infinite number of times. Well, at some point that number is going to come up. So if you have an infinity of universes, then any single universe, however odd, however remarkable, however fine tuned, is going to at some point turn up in the great roulette wheel of universes, so to speak. So, so this is the way that atheists and scientists who are atheists try to say, well look, it's, you know, it's kind of surprising. We live in a fine tuned universe, but if there's an infinity of them out there, then ours just happens to be the one that has these characteristics that gives rise to creatures like this. But it's not all that surprising because the roulette wheel is having, you can say an infinite number of turns. But now it's, it's easy to ridicule the idea of multiple universes by basically saying you've just made the whole thing up. And, and that is actually true. But in some ways you could say that the idea of multiple universes is interesting. And it's interesting for this reason. The Harvard astronomer named Owen Gingrich, who is a Christian believer, has an essay on this idea of multiple universes. And he goes, listen, he goes, as a Christian, he goes, this doesn't really bother me at all. And here's what he writes, quote, christians have long envisioned a world with which they have no physical contact. Not the heavens, which is. People talk about the heavens very generically, but heaven, the emperor. And then he says this. It is a totally other place without evil and suffering, where the inhabitants never grow old. It thus cannot be our present world embodied. For the remodeling would strike at the very heart of our physical understanding. To suspend the rules of our cosmos would be tantamount to being in another universe. So what is this guy really saying? What he's saying is, look, if there's only one universe, ours, then it's kind of hard to get our heads around the idea of heaven or hell. How can we. How can there be these other realms? If Carl Sagan is right that this universe is all there is, all there was, all that there ever will be, well, that's it. The rules of our universe are the only rules. But Professor Gingrich is saying if there are multiple universes, then these universes, by the way, are going to have their own laws. They're going to have their own rules, they're going to have their own principles. They're going to. If they have matter, if they have matter at all, it's going to be a different kind of matter. And the mathematical principles governing these universes will also be different. So what he's getting at is that heaven becomes a very understandable possibility under this notion, multiple universes. And so my conclusion of this chapter can be put this way. Certainly the idea of heaven and its own laws is not contradicted by anything that we know about modern science. What modern physics has really done is expanded our horizons. It's shown how life after death is possible within our existing framework of physical reality. The materialist objection has proven to be kind of a dud. The idea that matter has a sort of predictable course of behavior. Matter, the matter in the universe, is exactly like the matter that we experience. All of this has been shown to be speculative nonsense, even though it comes from eminent philosophers like Bertrand Russell. And so, at least in the realm of physics, next time we're going to move into the realm of biology. Modern science has proven itself not to be the enemy of religious believers, but their unexpected ally.

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