Civil War, Socialism, And The Simpsons: The Dinesh D'Souza Interview
Kyle and Ethan talk to Dinesh D'Souza. He has been called a far right provocateur and is a filmmaker and the author of several books, most recently United States of Socialism. They talk about socialism, identity politics, and whether or not it's okay to laugh at Apu. Watch or listen to this episode on our podcast page, where subscribers can find full length episodes, or over on our YouTube channel. Subscribe using your favorite podcast platform here. Pre-order the new Babylon Bee Best-Of Coffee Table Book coming in 2020! Get a Sneak Peak! Topics Discussed Dinesh gives a rundown on the new socialists What's the difference between identity socialism and classic socialism? Socialists abandoning the working class The decline of Christianity in the culture and the rise of a new religion in the Left Virtue signalling versus actual virtue Debating libs vs debating atheists Dinesh's new book and what it's all about Is it okay to laugh at Apu? Defending morphing Abraham Lincoln's face into Donald Trump's Dating Ann Coulter Paid-subscriber portion The Ten Questions To watch or listen to the full length podcast, become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee interview show.
Shall I?
Go for it.
Hey, here we are.
We are here in our studio with Dinesh D'Souza on Skype.
Dinesh D'Souza is, according to Wikipedia, a far-right-wing provocateur.
Yeah, almost a Nazi, like very close.
I don't know how far you always hear far right, but you never hear far.
I don't know how far.
Yeah, far right.
So far right.
How far right are you, Mr. D'Souza?
And welcome to the show.
Hey, good to be on the show, guys.
You know, you might find that during the podcast, I kind of leaned to the right.
And that's an ideological move in case you haven't, you don't figure that one out.
It's like William F. Buckley.
Remember William F. Buckley on the old firing line?
He'd sit at a, literally at a 45-degree angle.
If you want to see him straight, you had to sit at a 45-degree angle on the couch.
And it made for some interesting kind of group viewing of the old firing line.
Oh, digging up the, we're a little young.
I never saw it.
I've seen YouTube clips.
Yeah.
Kyle's real young, though.
He doesn't even know.
I don't know what you're talking about.
You do know who William F. Buckley is?
I've heard the name.
Okay.
Sounds like an old president or something.
Okay, guys.
Well, you know what?
In the business of satire, I think you're excused because, you know, we're talking about political punditry here.
If you are political commentators and you never heard of like an economist, you've never heard of Keynes or Adam Smith.
You'd be a lot like AOC.
Remember how she goes, she goes, I got this great idea for Milton Keynes.
You know, there's Milton Friedman and there's, of course, John Maynard Keynes.
And she kind of created a murder.
And by the way, they're on opposite ends of the spec.
That'd be like some Frankenstein.
Yeah.
So it would be sort of like talking about taking Adam Smith and Karl Marx and say, you know, I got a great idea from this guy, Adam Marx, the other day.
That's AOC for you.
Cancel each other out.
They'd just be some guy.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I appreciate you going two minutes into the interview before making fun of AOC.
You showed somebody else's side.
Well, she's really raised the tone.
You know, she's, I think, well, I mean, think about it.
We just don't, we have a real underrepresentation of bartenders at high levels in politics.
So she is contributing to the diversity of our discourse.
It sounds like she just triggers you, or maybe you have like a secret crush on her.
No, no.
She doesn't trigger me, actually.
The one I find more intriguing, I mean, look, there's this socialist camp.
And so let's do a quick rundown if we can.
Bernie, my take on him is he's basically Rip Van Winkle.
He's like the guy who fell asleep for 30 years.
He woke up.
You know, he saw like Uber, Airbnb, you know, iPhones.
And he has that dazed look of a guy who can't believe it.
So that's Bernie.
And I think, you know, the Democrats realize we can't go with this guy.
I mean, phrasing breadlines, honeymooning in the Soviet Union is a bit too much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He woke up and all of a sudden there were like 30 varieties of deodorant at the store and he just lost it.
Back in my day.
I know exactly the evils of it.
Such non-essential items that people invest in when they could be doing such, you know, much nobler pursuits.
But like eating organic food.
And then there's AOC about whom the less said the better.
Ilhan Omar is the one that sort of intrigues me because in my book, and at some point I kind of have to throw in the book because I'm on the book tour, United States of Socialism.
Holding it up for yourself.
But here's the point: that Ilhan Omar is the most intriguing, I think, of the bunch because she represents this, I call it identity socialism, because it's a hybrid between classic socialism, which focused on class, and an identity politics, which is race, gender.
So Ilhan Omar kind of checks all the boxes.
First of all, she's black.
Second of all, she is Muslim.
Third, she is a woman.
And then she's from the desert.
So this is part of what gives her a kind of a global appeal that even AOC doesn't have.
If someone saw AOC from another country, they would just see this as an example of vulgar Americanism.
But Ilhan Omar is someone who has appeals certainly to the Islamic community worldwide.
Yeah.
Sounds like another crush that you have, Denette.
There's a lot of women on the cover.
All right.
Three out of four.
And the other one, this is interesting.
Elizabeth Warren.
Now, Elizabeth Warren technically denies that she's a socialist.
Michael Moore says that she denies it for strategic reasons, that she is, but she pretends not to be.
But that's basically who she is.
She's all about pretense.
You know, I love the old, you know, she's surprised to see her husband in her own house.
Fancy seeing you here.
Thanks for showing up.
That's really nice of you.
So, but I think you can see how powerful this identity politics has become in the Democratic Party.
Elizabeth Warren is a woman.
You think that'd be enough?
I'm a woman.
That's my Trump card.
I got that going for me.
But no, she wants to be what they call a twofer.
A twofer means you're a minority on two fronts.
You're a woman, but you're also a person of color.
Now, she doesn't have that.
This is kind of why the fake ancestry came in really handy.
And this is why it was so important for her to pretend to be an American Indian.
Yeah, that was classic.
Yeah.
Now, she could have tried to be an Asian Indian, but I don't think that would have gotten her a tenured spot at Harvard.
Yeah.
The Asian Indians don't count.
Only the, I can't say the real Indians do because we're the real Indians.
Columbus kind of got it wrong.
So the American Indians are actually the ones who, I mean, I guess the American Indians are kind of fake Indians in their own way.
And then Elizabeth Warren is a fake of a fake.
Do you ever get to play the Indian card?
Oh, the Indian card.
A lot of good that does me.
No, it doesn't help at all.
In fact, if you're a conservative, being a minority, far from being a blessing, becomes a sort of an added curse.
Now, not entirely.
I think it would be, if I were a black conservative, I would get far more heat because, as you know, there are these nasty, you know, you're an Uncle Tom, you're this, you're that.
Now, Asian Indians aren't sufficiently settled in this country to do that.
So that even if you have a sort of a left-wing Indian and they see me on Fox News or something, they go tell their mom, can you believe that they're having, you know, Tanesh J'Souza?
And their mom goes, hey, there's an Indian on TV.
You know, they're really excited.
So that helps to give me a little bit of a little bit of protection.
But no, brownie points for it?
No way.
How often, being among conservatives, do you ever do you have people confuse you for one of them Arabs?
Well, I think ever since I stopped wearing the turban, that was a little bit of a problem in the old days.
And I think also when I first came to this country, I actually had this sort of sing-song Indian accent.
I also did the, I don't do it anymore.
In fact, I can't do it, but there's the kind of classic Indian, I call it the Indian head wobble.
It's a wobble that is in between a yes and a no.
And it's really difficult to say what the Indian is saying because if you ask him something, he goes, you know, and it's the wobble.
And so I had all these things, which I think would probably have helped me if I'd kept them, hung on to them, so to speak.
And, you know, because I would then be able to do a lot of ethnic affirmation.
And when people start criticizing me, I could kind of do a massive Indian rant on them.
And it would be more intimidating if it came with a sort of unadulterated Indian accent.
One side note, you were talking about the head wobble.
Have you ever noticed Seinfeld?
When he's on Seinfeld, the sitcom, his head doesn't wobble.
But when he's just talking in normal life, his head wobbles a bunch.
You ever notice that?
He's a very wobbly head.
I wonder if he's kind of a wannabe Indian.
He may be doing, I wonder if he's trying to do the Elizabeth Warren thing.
He has this little wobble.
I don't know.
Yeah, very interesting.
I had not noticed that.
Maybe he's going to convert to Indianism for the jokes.
Well, the guy who's a full convert, Trudeau.
I mean, this Justin Trudeau guy, I don't know if you've seen his Bollywood moves on, I've seen that only on social media.
They get, I mean, their my nausea level can only take about so much of it.
But evidently, it didn't prevent him from getting re-elected.
So apparently, the Canadians, this kind of, you know, beta male kowtowing, which by the way, we're seeing in this country, you see all these rituals of worship.
You see the young couple, a young white couple kissing these Black Lives Matter guy's shoes and then all these kind of cult-like Jim Jones style kind of group instructions and virtue.
You know, I think I'm going out on a limb here, but I've got to trace this to the decline of Christianity in our culture because it's created a need for new forms of liturgy, new types of sacraments, new types of expressions of virtue, new types of seeking of absolution, not for anything that you did, right?
But kind of for the sins of society people are taking on and taking on the burden of what people did in 1619.
Yeah, what is the temptation of the left?
And this is a pretty serious question, honestly, towards things like that.
It feels almost, if it's not religious, it's militaristic.
It's like they want these symbols.
They like to chant a lot.
They like to chant the same words, which I find very creepy and weird.
But they're very turned on by it.
They're very turned on by it.
Now, Edmund Burke, talking about the French Revolution, said something I think quite profound.
He was observing the revolutionaries and he said, lacking decent habits of ordinary behavior, they prefer moral opinions instead.
And what he meant was that these people are actually disgusting human beings.
They don't actually practice any of the normal virtues, including simple virtues like courtesy, civility, cordiality, none of that.
They're complete jerks, but they redeem themselves by attaching themselves to these higher causes.
And they mouth that rhetoric effortlessly and with great pomposity.
The American equivalent of this is someone like Bill Clinton.
He's an absolute sex predator, a complete pervert.
But he, you know, he's when you talk about the Equal Rights Amendment, he's there with a long speech and he's got all these unbelievably these great blobiations that he's able to put out there.
And the feminists go, oh, wow, man.
Not only are they impressed, but they become all they all become part of the cover-up team for his sexual predation because they want him on their side on the kind of larger collective issues.
So same here.
You've got all these people, they wouldn't dream of helping their neighbor.
They couldn't give an ordinary thought to anyone else.
But by stepping into a rally and getting into this ritualistic chant and taking on the kind of mansion family look, the glazed eyes and all, they feel better about themselves and they feel like their sins have been redeemed because they are part of this expression of collective virtue, a substitute for individual virtue.
Do you rant about politics when you're like at Thanksgiving dinner or parties?
Like, are you the guy in the winter corner just or in a Wendy's?
When I invite people over for Thanksgiving, this is what they have got to expect.
It goes just down just like this.
It kind of reminds me, I'm going to tell you an anecdote here as I just read it.
I read a work by the French writer Flaubert.
One of his early works before he did the Madame Bovary was the temptation of Saint Sebastian, I guess it was.
He had seen a beautiful painting and he wrote a full novel about this painting.
And then he called two of his friends, well-known writers, by the way, invited them to his chateau for the weekend.
And he told them, I'm going to be reading you this novel from start to finish.
I'm going to begin on Friday and end on Sunday.
And during my reading, you're not allowed to speak.
You have to sit in complete silence.
And you can, at the end, give me your honest opinion of the work.
And so this happened.
Flaubert read the novel.
It took him two and a half days.
And when he was finished, he set it down and he turned to the two guys.
One guy was just literally speechless.
And the other guy said, you should take this novel and commit it to the flames and never speak of it again.
Was it a good speechless or a bad speechless?
I think it was intended.
I think it was a bad speechless.
It was a speechless, such as I'm too polite to say what I really think.
But the good news is that Flaubert actually did then shift gears and take up a completely different approach to writing and then produced a masterpiece, which we read to this day.
Speaking of masterpieces, you've done some movies and books, and we had some ideas for more movies that you could do.
For instance, you have Obama's America, right?
No, The Rage of Obama, The Rage of Orange.
The roots of Obama's rage.
So we were also his rap core album.
We were thinking like a sequel you could do like Obama Strikes Back.
Oh, yeah.
You mean the are you talking about the Obama national address on healing?
Yes.
Interesting.
Yeah.
It's when I was thinking to me, it's the equivalent of Al Capone doing a national symposium on the serious crime problem and what to do about it.
I say this because Obama comes out of the Alinsky school.
And the key thing with Alinsky was Alinsky's frustration was that you can't get socialism in America, he thought, because the working class is not unhappy.
So Marxist predictions about the working class being so, you know, immiserated, impoverished, exploited, that they're going to rise up and overthrow the system.
Most working class guys want a raise and they want a longer vacation and they want to join the system, not throw it, overthrow it.
So Alinsky was really mad.
And he thought, listen, grievance in the future does not exist, at least doesn't exist in a political sense.
It has to be stoked.
It has to be manufactured.
And that was Obama's game.
That's the meaning of being a community organizer.
Your job isn't, pardon my language, but to people off and get them off so that they then, the rage can be then harnessed politically.
It's look at the George Floyd thing.
No one disputes from the very beginning, this is an injustice.
But the protester's point is: no, it's not an injustice.
It's not episodic.
It's typical.
This is the way the cops are.
This is the way America is.
This is the way America's been since 1776 or maybe 1619.
So it's that larger narrative that I'm contesting.
And that, you know, my books and movies are aimed at contesting the bogus, larger narrative that rides hitchhike, you might say, on a particular episode in which you can, the truth may lie with the particular facts of that episode.
What's your favorite nickname for Obama?
Like a lot of people said, Obama, but I feel like that was pretty weak.
No Obama.
Do you have anything?
Yeah, No Obama.
Do you have anything better?
Yeah, no.
I got to think about that one.
Nickname for Obama.
Well, I mean, the thing about Obama was, you know, I got, you know, I admire him from a distance because he represented, I mean, contrast Obama with, say, Bernie Sanders.
But Obama wasn't dumb enough to say things like, you know, breadlines are a good thing.
You know, that's Bernie.
So it's really nice to see the Venezuelans don't have any water.
What's wrong with that, guys?
That's Bernie.
That's not Obama.
Your Bernie impression needs some work.
Hey, guys, listen, if I was in the satire business, I'd be open to that critique.
But I'm not even trying to do much of an impression.
In fact, I got to tell you, in my movie, I think it was Hillary's America, I won a Razzie.
Now, a Razzie is the award you get for being the worst actor.
And I was up against Robert De Niro, who actually has been, played some amazing roles.
So it was kind of weird to be going up against him, but I beat him.
I beat him and I got the best, worst actor award.
But I can't get a worst actor award because after all, who was I playing?
I was playing myself.
Now, I'm obviously like the world's expert at being me.
So clearly my performance was a masterpiece because no one can play Dinesh like Dinesh.
But I agree, I'm probably not too good in playing Bernie.
You got to get someone at Larry David.
Yeah.
He's the obvious person.
He grew up in Bernie.
Yeah.
I would like to see a real Method actor do it, like get into his head and do maybe go live in the USSR for a while.
But yeah, and you know, I like the idea of the Razzies.
I think it's a cool idea.
Like, let's honor the worst movies, but it always just turns into a statement or they just slam on the easiest target.
Yeah, I never watched one of them.
Yeah.
That's the problem is that the reason I mean, I swept the Razzies in the election year, but the reason was simple.
It was not due to me.
I don't get any credit.
The credit goes to Trump.
They wanted to slam Trump.
They were basically all in this kind of, you know, orgy of anti-Trump mania.
And I was the closest sort of Trump guy that they could get their hands on.
So they're like, you know, go bludgeon that guy.
Let's give him 20 Razzies.
Yeah.
So you can call yourself an award-winning filmmaker, though.
I do have to offer a criticism.
I just have, I have to ask.
I saw the poster where it shows Abraham Lincoln's face and Trump's face morphed into one face.
And can you defend that?
I have a tough time comparing the two men.
Like, and maybe you really do.
So I love trained journalists.
So yeah, there you go.
Here was my reason for thinking that.
And, you know, I admit that it was intended sort of provocatively to get people to think, but not so much to think of Trump and Lincoln.
In fact, I say in the movie and in the book that Trump and Lincoln are very different men.
I mean, Lincoln was sort of melancholy, you know, he was sort of ponderous.
He'd fall into these bouts of depression.
And Trump, on the other hand, is brash, confident.
You know, he, so their styles are completely different.
Lincoln was a brooder, a reader.
And so I don't compare their personalities at all, but their situations are eerily similar.
Think about it.
You have a gangsterized Democratic Party in the 1850s.
You have the emergence of street violence.
In fact, reaching the point where a Democratic congressman goes to Republican Senator Charles Sumner's office and beats him with a cane.
And the Democrats applaud when that's announced.
So Lincoln realized Lincoln was a moderate man, but he was in an immoderate situation.
And he realized, I've got to get really tough with these guys, otherwise the whole country is going to break down in chaos.
So, you know, it's kind of funny.
Recently, I guess it was Andrew Cuomo who tweeted out.
He goes, when was the last time in U.S. history that the U.S. military was used and deployed against American citizens?
And I'm like, ever heard of 1861 to 1865 when a group of Democrats tried to break up the country and a Republican president called him the U.S. military?
Does that ring a bell?
It has happened before.
And while we're not in the civil war, we are kind of in a cold civil war.
And we see it's getting a little bit hotter.
And the parallels with the 1860s, I mean, I don't think we've had a level of division.
You'd have to go all that way back to find something like that.
I just don't see some of the Democratic governors being able to lead like a cavalry charge, though.
Like, I don't see Governor Newsom.
Gavinor, that's pretty good.
Gavinor Newsome.
Governor Newsom jumping on a horse and like charging in.
I don't see a good stop every few minutes and make sure his hair is all.
You bring his hair jail person with him.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
I mean, that's not the, see, the reason that the so the socialist left knows this.
I mean, they, Antifa, for example, is like, they're really good when they're taking on some female, you know, single mother who runs a shop or taking on some little old lady.
You know, they're really tough, man.
But you bring in the 82nd airborne and suddenly these guys are nowhere to be found.
Suddenly their, you know, milkshakes and cement blocks and their Halloween costumes like all disappear.
And so the way to meet them is with a little bit of fearlessness.
And this is why they resort to all these underhanded tactics.
I mean, this is why they love the deep state.
They love the idea of sicking the FBI on you.
So they'll do surveillance on you or they'll send the IRS your way to audit you for the last 10 years.
This is their game.
Or they'll, you know, some guy at BuzzFeed will write to Twitter, hey, you know, throw this guy off of Twitter because he's saying hateful things that are making me feel bad about myself.
So this is, you know, this is a kind of weenie militarism.
You know, it's like it reminds me of the toy soldiers I used to have as a kid.
They kind of walk into the wall and keep going.
You know, those are not soldiers that are going to win any battles.
But they win battles this way by rigging the rules, by using censorship, by going out on the street and by also, I would call it moral extortion.
So they get decent people and they say things like, you know, if you care about the country, take it on the knee right now.
If you care about the country, kiss my feet.
And other people go, well, gee, you know, if it avoids any conflict and it's going to make you feel better, okay, maybe I'll do it.
But they don't realize the ritual self-abasement that is being, that is involved here.
Orwell was right.
He said, ultimately, what socialism wants to do is turn us into a worm, into somebody who just conforms to what the socialist regime makes you do.
That's, by the way, why people did all those Nazi salutes and had the swastika flag hanging in the balcony.
I mean, Hitler wasn't there.
So you ask, why are you doing it?
And the real message of someone doing that is they're saying, listen, I'm a worm.
I'm an obedient servant of national socialism.
I'll do what I'm told.
I'm not going to make trouble.
That's the real message that these people are sending.
They're sending the message that they are conformists, they have no real dignity, and they can be reduced to being to wormhood.
What is the what's sexy about becoming a worm?
Why are people drawn to that?
They're being convinced by a propaganda machine that wormhood is, in fact, a noble status.
Now, it takes a lot of work to convince a person with any self-respect that that is the case.
So you need massive propaganda machines to do it.
And the left has three: they're called academia, Hollywood, and the media.
And collectively, they're very powerful because they reinforce each other.
In fact, if one puts out a big lie, it ricochets across academia.
It's then echoed in the media.
Suddenly, it appears on Wikipedia.
It's on the history channel.
And that's how people come to me with their facts.
They go, oh, fascism is obviously right-wing.
I go, Really?
Have you read the Nazi platform?
State control of banks, state control of education, state control of healthcare.
Does that sound like Trump?
Or does that sound more like, say, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders?
And they go, Well, it's not that.
You know, I was in Barnes Noble and I saw a book that said fascism is right-wing.
And I saw it then on NPR and then I saw it on Wikipedia.
So it's like the same progressive propaganda bullet is ricocheting off five different walls.
And this poor guy thinks that this provides independent corroboration that fascism is obviously right-wing, even though prior to 1945, no one thought it was right-wing, not the fascists, not the anti-fascists.
Everybody recognized it was on the left.
FDR knew it was on the left.
He said so.
So this is how propaganda embeds itself in our culture.
And then when you contest it, people think you're being hateful.
Have you ever been milkshaked?
I haven't been milkshaked.
Have you got any good stories from people hating you?
Well, I've had protesters screaming and shouting, but we're living in the age where these protesters, while screaming obscenities at me from a college campus, were selfieing themselves at exactly the same time.
So this was a combination of protest and theater.
And the other thing is, Antifa showed up at one of my events in Portland, but we knew about it because they were vandalizing the venue beforehand.
And so we had some guys with some, you know, guns that really go off and stuff, kind of waiting to see what would happen.
And sure enough, Antifa showed up.
You know, they begin to slink around, and then one guy pulls out like a trumpet and starts playing.
So we brought out, we brought out the better angels of their nature.
Let's put it that way.
They're marching around seven times, trying to make them fall down, make the walls fall down.
So what's your take on a poo from The Simpsons?
Yeah, remember that movie came out, The Problem with Apoo.
There was an Indian guy that was saying that ruined his life because a poo of a poo's voice.
We want to hear it from your mouth if we can laugh at a poo or not.
You know, I'm a little bit, yeah, I'm a little culturally lost here.
And this happens to me from time to time.
I'm, you know, there'll be a cultural reference that I'm just like, oh, why not?
That sounds vaguely familiar, but I'm a little unplugged from it.
I guess it's the way most Americans are about politics.
You know, I've got to realize that this is yeah, I mean, they listen to politics very dimly.
I mean, I think this to me is the only rational explanation for how Biden can be leading Trump because Biden is so evidently not even fully there that the idea of turning over a great country to a man who probably doesn't remember his own middle name is frightening.
And I don't think America is going to do it.
But the reason that people ritually say, oh, you're done for Biden is they might have some anxiety about Trump, but they don't know anything about what's going on.
But they will.
They'll pay attention come around September.
And I think we'll see the debate take on a quite different cast then.
I really appreciate you being able to turn a question about The Simpsons into Slim on Biden.
You're like the master.
You're like the Master Wordsmith.
And we're just speechless here.
Well, you know, I learned many, many years ago, I learned that when somebody, this is a very good rule, by the way, for when you're on a TV show and somebody asks you a question, and either the question is so dumb that you have no intention of answering it.
Appreciate it.
But you don't want to convey that.
The key phrase to remember is the real issue is.
So you ignore the question completely and you say, you know, well, John, the real issue, you know, it's like I'm talking to Jim Acosta.
I'm like, well, Jim, you know, the real issue is.
And then I make an intelligent statement that has nothing to do with what he asked because trying to actually engage with him would simply lower my IQ.
I'm hurting.
That bad.
Come on.
It was just a question about The Simpsons, man.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I deflected.
I have to concede.
So do we double down or just move on?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I still don't know if I can laugh at that.
I'm really curious.
Yeah, but that's not that.
So he's a character that has some Indian stereotypes, like he owns the 7-Eleven type establishment.
And so he was canceled for being.
I mean, it was a white guy doing his voice.
White guy did the voice.
And so that was offensive.
Oh, yeah.
That's, I mean, look, this now, you know, people can take this stuff different ways.
And I guess one could say that if these kinds of stereotypes are deployed against blacks because of the unique history of African Americans in the country and so on, we are going to be a little more sensitive about it.
But quite frankly, I think when it comes to other groups, it should be fair game.
Humor relies on stereotypes.
And the reason stereotypes are powerful, by the way, is they usually contain a grain of truth.
If stereotypes were flatly wrong and they were the opposite of the truth, for example, they wouldn't have any power.
No one, in fact, would believe them.
So the point is that humor, you know, to put this in a little more of a serious light, the writer E.M. Forster once spoke about what he called flat and round characters.
And what he meant was when you write a novel, you can't have 35 complex characters.
You're going to have three or four complex characters.
And the rest of the characters are going to be somewhat stereotypical.
The butler, the pompous butler who walks in and plays that kind of a role.
And so writers focus in on the main characters and everybody else is a sort of a cardboard character.
And this cardboard element of looking at things is simple and simplistic even, but it can also be funny.
And I think inherently it's not wrong as long as we're aware of what we're doing.
So bottom line of it is bring on the Indian jokes.
I'm perfectly fine with them.
I think that the fact that we have sort of all gone so sensitive on ethnic jokes is kind of a big mistake.
So the Babylon Bee wrote a joke when Trump visited India.
Oh, yeah.
That he saw the, what's it called, the red dot on the Indian woman's head.
Yeah.
And he thought that someone was trying to shoot her, trying to snipe her, and he dove in the way.
Yeah.
Offensive.
Oh, gotcha.
Is that offensive or not offensive?
No, I mean, look, you guys are like, you know, you guys are the big thing on the web as far as I'm concerned.
You're the best satirical site.
And because you guys normally score, I would say an eight or a nine, I'd have to give that one about a six.
Oh, wow.
He's probably hurt.
I'm not saying it's bad.
It's just not a knee slapper, if you know what I mean.
It's really hard to do.
It's hard to get somebody to really guffaw.
And I've seen a lot of sort of attempted satirical stuff.
And once in a while, I kind of do a grin or a mild chuckle, but it's hard to make you laugh.
But you guys have that capacity.
So I know my congratulations to you.
But, you know, you can't hit it.
You can't hit it out of the park every time.
So I give the dot joke kind of a single.
You want to see the Photoshop, though.
If you see the Photoshop, you probably upgrade it a little bit.
So you've debated atheists and stuff.
Would you rather own atheists or own libs?
Like, what's more rewarding to you?
Oh, I mean, there's really no comparison here because when you're talking about the atheists, you're talking about people of a pretty high intellectual caliber.
You're talking about people like Christopher Hitchens, who was not sort of a philosopher, but was somebody who's incredibly good on his feet, a very nimble debater, and had the ability to like really, you know, in sort of boxing terms, you know, shake you with a rhetorical blow.
And so in debating that kind of guy, you take your life in your hands.
He'll say things you don't expect.
He'll say things like, hey, Dinesh, well, you know what?
I just came back from North Korea.
You know what?
I met God.
His name is Kim Jong-il.
And you know what?
He's a tyrant.
But here's the good news.
At some point, he will die and I will die and the tyranny will end.
But in heaven, the tyranny never ends because God is a tyrant forever.
You know, so all this, this kind of stuff I can't say is sort of intellectually breathtaking, but it's a little unnerving because you've got to figure out what to say.
Now, liberals are never like that.
For me to debate even, I mean, take it, never have me on her show for a simple reason.
For her to be me to go up against her, it's like one hand clapping because there's nothing that she can say that I haven't already thought of.
And not only that, but by the time she finishes saying it, not only do I have the answer, but I've anticipated what she's going to say in response and I have the answer to that.
And she knows this.
So her solution is never have Dinesh on because it's too embarrassing.
So the bottom line for places like MSNBC in the rare times they put on a conservative, it's usually kind of a stupid conservative because they want to pick someone that they can kind of get the better of.
That's their game.
But they're not into real discussion or debate because they know that if they put me on, hey, Dinesh, prove to me that fascism is really left-wing.
And I speak for 90 seconds and at the end of it, she hasn't, will have nothing to say.
Yeah.
They should just let you debate yourself.
Like you could argue and then now you're going to say this and then I'll say this.
Now you're going to say this.
And you just jump back and forth.
Kind of like speeding Gonzalez.
I would probably be able to say better what she believes than she could.
And so it's sad because this kind of debate would be healthy.
And look, I mean, don't get me wrong, Rachel Maddows, and I'm not saying she's an intelligent person.
I'm just saying she's not in the caliber of a Richard Dawkins, a Daniel Dennett.
These are people who are intellectuals who have weight and who know things as opposed to somebody who's just a kind of a glib TV personality.
So we got to get to our 10 questions here, but I really wanted to ask you this because I followed you pretty closely back when you were more in the apologetics debate circuit and I read your books and I did notice that you took a shift.
And I don't even, I wouldn't, I would say you're an incredibly intelligent guy.
You know what you're doing.
I believe everything you do is calculated.
I'm curious.
I don't even know how to put this into words.
I don't want it to sound insulting, but it seems that your audience, I wouldn't say you changed.
It's almost like you changed who you were aiming at audience-wise when you started making the movies and stuff like that.
I don't know.
I'm just curious, your take on the Dinesh shift that I think a lot of people cite from the man himself.
Well, sure, there is a shift, but I would say it is a reasonable shift motivated by shifts in our culture.
So, for example, I would admit that I have a kind of Twitter persona.
It's a little more combative than I am in person.
I speak to the medium.
So, for example, my books are a little more scholarly in tone, not as scholarly as they used to be, but there's a reason for that too.
But they have a lot of references and so on.
And the movies are more emotional.
They're driven more by narrative than they are by argument.
Why?
Because that's what a movie is.
A movie is a story.
And even if it's a non-fiction movie, it has to have all the elements of a fiction story.
Now, the typical sort of political intellectual doesn't understand that.
So they're like, oh, Dinesh, you know, you've kind of sold out to the, you know, no, I haven't sold out.
I've adopted a different mode of communication and I have to surf on that wave.
I've got to be true to that genre.
And so for years, I was a kind of conservative intellectual and I saw my job as persuading intellectuals in the middle or maybe slightly left of center to change their mind.
And over time, I realized that, first of all, for these people, head scratching is a lifelong pursuit.
They enjoy it.
And so even if you win the argument, 10 years later, they're still scratching their head.
It's ultimately, I mean, it's literally a self-indulgent kind of navel gazing.
And I thought to myself, why am I wasting my life doing just that?
There are a whole bunch of people in America, and not all of them went to the best schools, but they want to be educated.
They want to know about American history.
They want to know about what the American dream means, what the Constitution actually says.
And for someone like me who's grown up in a different culture, I have an ability, I think, to communicate that with a sort of freshness.
So I said, look, let me do that.
Let me speak to people who actually want to learn from what I have to say instead of doing arm wrestling with some guy from the new republic over the black dropout rate, you know, as a result of affirmative action.
And sure enough, I mean, I see these guys on C-SPAN, you know, today, and they're saying the same thing that they were saying in 1992.
And so I'm glad I got out of DC.
I stopped doing that kind of navel gazing thing.
I feel much better about myself.
And these guys, on the other hand, here they sit, they eat in the same restaurants.
They're bitter about their lives.
They kind of totally missed the boat on Trump.
And so now they've decided to become never Trump, kind of making a virtue of being an idiot and missing the boat.
And so there you are.
These are all my, you know, these are the people I used to hang out with.
And they're somehow a little bit less appealing to me now.
Did you get any tats when you were in the slammer?
Well, I was in a confinement center, which has bad news and good news to it.
I mean, the bad news is that it's not a white-collar prison.
In white-collar prison, you're like hanging out with accountants, you know, playing chess and the mayor of some town who embezzles some money and you're basically, you know, playing tennis.
But that's not me.
I was in a facility where I mean, I had, you know, the full gamut.
I mean, I had, you know, I had white supremacists and coyotes and drug smugglers and murderers.
But the good news, if I can put it this way, was we slept in a dorm as opposed to cell, because in a cell, you're on with one guy and you're a little more vulnerable because it's a private, semi-private space.
But in a dorm, in a weird way, you're protected by the fact that you're in a large group and there's not a whole lot they can do to you.
And besides, most of those guys that serve their sentences, they were just in a transitional confinement center before being free.
So they didn't want to do something dumb that would get them back in the slam for another five years.
And so they had a self-interest in behaving themselves.
And that accrued, I think, to my protection.
So no tats.
Oh, the tats.
No, I was thinking about that at the time.
I was doing a lot of stuff with Megan Kelly.
And she was like, well, you know, it'd be kind of cool to know you became my show.
And you sort of had, but, you know, this was just literally banter.
I never seriously considered it.
It's, you know, I don't, I don't look upon my body as a billboard.
This is kind of why I write books and articles.
I'd rather express my views that way instead of sticking them on my forehead or my arm.
I would take you for a Trump stamp kind of guy because you're such a big Trump fan.
Well, you know, I'm actually not a kind of classic Trumpster in that sense because a lot of the classic Trumpsters jumped on board the moment Trump declared his candidacy.
Most of the guys we think of as Trumpsters were like that.
They were loyal to him from day one.
I've always been more of a kind of mainstream conservative.
And I make my movies to unify the kind of conservative Republican camp.
And so I don't endorse people in the primaries.
I didn't endorse Trump.
I waited until Trump was the nominee.
And then I kind of got behind Trump, but I got behind Romney.
I got behind McCain.
So in that sense, I was acting in the characteristic mode of recognizing American politics is fought in teams.
And ultimately, you just have to decide which team you're on.
All right.
Come on, God's team.
So we're going to go to our 10 questions now.
Lightning round.
You can answer them as fast as you want.
I don't know what exactly much time you have left here.
So I'll do my best.
Okay, ready?
It's not the time.
I'm more scared of the questions, but go for it.
Yeah, and in your book, this is a new book, United States of Socialism.
The book is out or is it coming?
Oh, yeah.
It's just out this week.
Yep.
Beautiful.
Cool.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Thanks again.
We'll talk to you next time.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
First thing you do as president, first order you give as president.
My apologetics does draw on the Catholic intellectual tradition, but what I discovered coming on to America is the great force of the evangelical notion of a personal relationship with God and with Christ.
He's good when he's done.
Can you turn that talk about beer into a discussion on it like AOC or something?
And we thank you for coming on.
Wait, wait, wait, real quick, real quick.
I once read a Wikipedia article that said that you dated Ann Coulter.
True?
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