D'Souza vs. Ayers in 'ultimate fight' over American exceptionalism
'My enthusiasm for this country burns brighter than ever'
Published: 7 hours ago
What’s so exceptional about America?
In a debate Wednesday evening with leftist radical Bill Ayers, conservative bestselling author and documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza answered just that question.
America, he said, affords opportunities to its people that are unmatched by every other country on the planet.
“I’ve seen both sides of America. I’ve been in a federal confinement facility with a group of 120 hardened criminals. So no longer would I say that I live in a rarefied world of intellectual debate,” D’Souza said. “I’ve seen the upside of America, and I’ve seen the downside of America. But at the end of the day, I wouldn’t trade the United States for any other country.
“At the end of the day, my enthusiasm for American government, for the Obama administration may have dimmed. But my enthusiasm for this country burns brighter than ever.”
D’Souza participated in the rematch debate with Ayers, widely known as President Obama’s Chicago neighbor and colleague, and the founder of the Weather Underground, the leftist group that aimed to overthrow the U.S. government in the 1970s. The event, which was held at 6 p.m. EST on the University of Michigan campus, was part of a national speaking tour of college campuses by D’Souza arranged by Young America’s Foundation, YAF.
Watch the campus showdown between Bill Ayers and Dinesh D’Souza!
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http://www.wnd.com/files/2013/06/Ayers2.jpgBill Ayers
Bill Ayers
Ayers: '3 great things about America'
The debate began with Ayers urging the audience to "listen with the possibility of being changed."
He said there are "three great things about America":
1) The spirit of democracy. The idea that every human being is of incalculable value. … The idea that we're quite capable of making decisions that affect our lives without kings or queens, without autocrats or bosses, that we ourselves can make the decisions that affect our lives. That is an ideal that's never been fully realized. That's an ideal worth struggling for. And it's an ideal that's deep in our DNA as a country.
2) The inspiration of liberty, the aspiration toward liberation, the idea that all human beings ought to be free to invent and reinvent themselves, to shape our identities in every sphere of our existence without the oppressive and traditional constraints of king or queen or church or howling mob or ruling class. We should be free to be who we want to be.
3) The pursuit of social justice in large and small matters. What is social justice? It's a phrase that gets tossed around a lot. I kind of enjoyed Pope Francis' take on it when he was in the United States. But like any compelling or layered term, social justice isn't easily or neatly defined because it's not so much a point of arrival as it is a journey or a longing or a search, a quest. It's that ceaseless striving by human beings in different times and places under different conditions, vastly different circumstances, pursuing different strategies and different tactics for greater fairness, greater sustainability, greater equity, recognition, agency, peace, mobility.
"Those are the things that are great, in my mind, about America," Ayers said. "Those are the things we ought to come together and build on."
He continued, "The question of American exceptionalism is quite different from that. American exceptionalism is a problem on so many levels. But what is American exceptionalism?
"American exceptionalism is the idea that somehow we have a unique and special place in the world. And what it does to American exceptionalists, and it does it to us again and again, is it allows us to look at behavior and to judge actions not on the basis of whether they're good or bad but on the basis of who did them. So we're against torture – unless it's us who did it. And this happens again and again. We say, 'But we're Americans. We couldn't do bad things.' The problem with that is it doesn't allow us to develop an honest appraisal of either the world or of history."
Ayers said Americans should not be afraid of looking history in its face and saying, "We can account for these things."
"For example, we admitted as a country that we made a mistake when we interned Japanese citizens in concentration camps," Ayers said. "That was a terrible mistake. We gave reparations to those people. That seems to me the right thing to do, because it's a way of constantly correcting yourself. ...
"We ought to say, American exceptionalism, the idea that we're different than other people, that our desires are different than other people, is not true. And the idea that we're a force as the president said recently, the idea that we're always a force for good in the world just is not true. We overthrow governments. We've done it again and again. We've supported Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars in the last two months. This is a mistake. It's not good for us, and it distorts the possibilities of what our country could become when we lie to ourselves and lie to our children about what the consequences of our behaviors are."
Ayers said America "has a lot of work to do" in ending its "permanent war," in opposing "the resurrection of an unapologetic imperialist state," in ending mass incarceration and building public education.
"These are the kinds of agendas that we ought to talk about," he said. "What do we need to do to build an American community that's more robust, more fair, more decent and more inclusive than the one we inherited?"
See D'Souza's works at the WND Superstore, including "America: Imagine The World Without Her," "2016: Obama's America," "God Forsaken," "Roots of Obama's Rage" and "What's So Great About Christianity."
D'Souza: The real American Dream
Noting that he and Ayers agree on some issues and disagree on others, D'Souza asked: "How can two people who are both in America, looking at the same facts in front of them, come to such radically different assessments about America?"
He continued, "I'm an immigrant who grew up in a different culture. Being an immigrant exposes you to some other way of life. The immigrant coming to America is always comparing America to some other existing country."
But he said, "Ayers is comparing America to the Garden of Eden."
"In other words, he's using a utopian standard," D'Souza said. "And obviously by that utopian standard, America falls short."
One reason for the difference between the immigrant point of view and the native point of view is the native point of view is utopian and lives in "unreality," D'Souza explained.
"I came to the United States with $500 in my pocket," he said. "I came to America not knowing what to expect. And I discovered in America this bizarre thing, the American Dream."
The American Dream, D'Souza argued, is not just the materialistic idea of economic success.
"Although my life is materially better in America, that difference is not radical. My life has actually changed more in other ways. The most important thing that America has given me is the opportunity to be the architect of my own destiny. To be in the driver's seat of my own life. This is a country in which your major decisions – where to live, whom to love, whom to marry, what to believe, what to become – those are decisions that you, the individual, make for yourself."
What makes America different, he said, is opportunity and social mobility in which Americans may start at the bottom and make their way up the ladder.
"The proof of it is the immigrants themselves," D'Souza noted. "If America were to take down its borders, half the world would come here."
In fact, the immigrant, he said, is a very reliable indicator of American exceptionalism. While college students across America may be told that every culture is equal, "every immigrant knows that's a lie."
"The immigrant is voting with his feet, in the most decisive way possible, against his own culture and in favor of another culture," D'Souza said. "Why would he or she do that if the other culture wasn't on the balance better? ... The immigrant is, in a sense, casting a ballot for the United States."
He noted that Ayers' objections to America have a great deal to do with U.S. foreign policy.
"American foreign policy should not be indicted on the grounds that American foreign policy protects American's self-interest," D'Souza said. "Every country's foreign policy does that."
He said the real question is: Does America make the world better, or does America make the world worse?
In the last 50-100 years, D'Souza said, "America has immeasurably made the world better."
"I don't even want to imagine what the world would look like if there was no America in the 20th century."
He said the U.S. entered World War II out of self-interest after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. But in doing so, the U.S. defeated Nazi Germany and Japanese imperialism – leaving the world a better place. The U.S., D'Souza said, got into the Cold War out of self-interest but dissolved the Soviet empire and freed Eastern Europe.
"So the world is better and freer for what America did."
Thomas Jefferson called America an "empire of ideals," he noted. "We've been the kindest, gentlest empire in world history. Let's not be utopian or foolish. Someone is going to have the kind of power that America does in the world. Either we have it, or we give it to someone else. And whom? Do you think the Chinese or the Russians or the Indians or the Brazilians would use this power better – because that is the effect of withdrawing American power. Obama has withdrawn American power in the Middle East and, as a consequence, we have ISIS taking over large areas of territory and doing what ISIS does."
Other highlights: 'Free' health care and schools
Ayers denied that he hold a utopian view of America, arguing that he's asking the nation to take a hard look at reality.
"Reality tells us that we can do so much better," he said. "The richest country in the world having the greatest divide in the industrial world between rich and poor is a mistake. We can correct that. There's no reason that we have to accept that as a way of life."
He said 20 percent of the world's prisoners are incarcerated in U.S. prisons run by private corporations.
Ayers added, "The richest country in the world could have free medical care for all. that's something that's within our grasp. It's within our reach, and there's no reason we don't have it. How can you be against people having access to medical care?"
He continued, "The idea that we can't have good public schools for all kids or free health care for children, why can't we have these things, the richest country in the world? Part of the reason we don't have them is because we spend a trillion dollars a year on military bases, a thousand military bases around the world. ... We as a democracy ought to say that whatever the most privileged and the wisest parents have for their children, we should demand for our communities' children."
But D'Souza pointed out: "Funding of American schools has escalated fantastically. It has gone up many, many times from what it was. And yet the schools never seem to improve. And yet we never see people like Jesse Jackson protesting outside the public schools even though black kids can't get a good education seemingly anywhere in the whole city or in the whole state. Now why is that?
"Similarly, health care. People say, 'Health-care costs keep rising.' Why do health-care costs keep rising? Health-care costs keep rising for a really simple reason. The guy who's getting the benefit is not the guy who is paying."
Assuming Americans have a right to eat and prevent starvation, D'Souza said, "let's have Obamacare as applied to food."
"You will now be allowed to go to the grocery store and order whatever you want. Fill up your cart. You don't have to pay. Somebody else will pay. What's going to happen?
"The first thing that will happen is, you will take all kinds of stuff that you don't need. You'll fill your cart and buy 12 cartons of milk and 45 cartons of bologna, and then you go up to the counter the grocery store will realize that they can charge whatever they want because you're not paying. So they will escalate their prices. The basic idea here is that what's going on is, you and the grocery store are conspiring to rip off the taxpayer. A third man is being cheated."
So with regard to "free" education and "free" health care, he said, "is the taxpayer is being ripped off to give so-called 'free' stuff."
Last debate
In their first debate, at Dartmouth College in 2014, Ayers asserted the U.S. Constitution is “an outmoded document” that ought to be changed, as WND reported.
Ayers' Weather Underground, which he co-founded with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was blamed for dozens of bombings aimed at destroying the defense and security infrastructure of the U.S.
Ayers previously called the Weather Underground “an American Red Army” and said the objective was to: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.”
In his memoir, he wrote: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”
In a 2001 interview with the New York Times, Ayers said: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Accompanying the article was a photograph of him stepping on an American flag.
D’Souza is the maker of the popular movies "America: Imagine The World Without Her" and "2016: Obama’s America," which counter President Obama and his leftist views and policies.
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2016/02/dsouza-vs-ayers-in-ultimate-fight-over-american-exceptionalism/#7Y8bt93ZGeVM5GIA.99
