Blatant Election Fraud and Marxism's March Through Our Institutions with Dinesh D'Souza
Charlie sits down backstage at TPUSA's Student Action Summit with a good friend of The Charlie Kirk Show, Dinesh D'Souza, one of the most prolific and intelligent voices on the right who is actually waging a real fight to reclaim our nation's cultural institutions. The two explore the election fraud most know very much happened and what can still be done to stop to restore our elections, and they also discuss how we arrived at this critical place, where the left seems to control so much cultural and institutional power. From Antonio Gramsci and cultural Marxism, to the smuggling of ideological content into the heart of our culture through Hollywood and the universities, to the intentional destruction of the Western canon, this is a must listen to episode. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Joining us today is Dinesh D'Souza.
Dinesh, how are you doing?
Hey, great to be on the show.
Yeah, you've been on a couple times.
You just spoke to our students here at our Student Action Summit in Palm Beach.
You are wonderful.
Great mood.
People are fired up, and I love speaking to young people who have looking for wisdom and they already have courage.
And so it's a nice combination to appeal to.
Both inside and out, which was nice.
Yes, no, it was.
I was up on a little kind of an old-style soapbox, like one of those politicians from the 30s, you know.
And so it's a cool feeling.
Very good.
Well, there's a lot happening in our country right now.
You have been long warning about the gangsterization of American politics.
And part of that is what has been perfected in Chicago with voter fraud.
Can you just give our audience your opinion of what's happening right now with the evident and apparent theft of this election?
Yeah, the left had a strategy that we sort of knew about, but were not prepared for.
Their strategy was: we will let those guys focus on the campaign, and we will control the mechanics of the election.
So it seemed weird in retrospect that Biden was uninterested in campaigning.
This guy was just walking around with a mask, calling a kind of a lid on events by 11 a.m.
And we were at it, and Trump was at it, one rally after another.
And in a sense, we seemed invincible.
But it wasn't that they were doing nothing.
What they were doing is they were organizing the count.
They were getting the mail-in ballots out.
They were making sure that our observers were a long, safe distance away.
So they were orchestrating the mechanics of the election, which is, again, unprecedented.
Every previous election, I've lived through now six or seven American major elections.
And all of them are elections in which you fight about the argument.
And then you let the American people, this is the first time where you have this gnawing feeling that this was an election unlike any other, because this was an election in which one side made sure it controlled the counting mechanism and then dared us to sort of prove it.
And it seems that a lot of Republicans are unwilling to even look into it.
And historically, we know that voter fraud is something that has existed.
It has been perfected by the Democrat Party.
And we're not even allowed to talk about it.
Even the mention of voter fraud can get you kicked off of social media.
And so how are we supposed to unpack this now that we're basically being forced to accept Joe Biden as president?
I think it puts us in a very bad situation because it's one thing to lose fair and square.
And we have lost fair and square and we have accepted the outcome.
It's normal for people who lose to be sulky about it, but then to try to think, okay, you know what?
I'll have a better shot next time.
Under normal circumstances, we would regroup and say, look, you know what?
Maybe something went wrong with the messaging.
Maybe it is the case that Trump provoked a lot of anti-Trump blowback.
Maybe it is the case that we can now rally for a midterm and take the House and hold the Senate.
But if at the bottom of your heart you know that this is a system of election rigging that the other side has put in place and that they're not going to be held accountable for and therefore they will continue with it, then it's sort of the end of American politics.
Because ask yourself this: what is the point of us getting our message out?
What is the point of me making movies?
What is the point of me educating people?
Because at the end of the day, the other side is in control of the counting system.
So it forces, I think, us into a position in which we've got to say, if this cannot be fixed, we are now in a, I would almost say, in a revolutionary situation.
By that, I mean the social compact, which basically brings people together that you agree to abide by certain rules, is that that social contract has become effectively dissolved.
Well, when the social contract becomes dissolved, then you have chaos.
And is that by design?
And what can we possibly do to prevent against that?
Well, the left's goal is not chaos, of course.
It is enforced conformity.
And I think we have now awakened to the terrifying assembly of forces that they can bring into coordination.
Think of a guy, think of a guy, an Antifa guy on the street, and then think of a digital media censor sitting in an office somewhere, let's say at Google or at Twitter.
Now, those two guys are different guys.
They're doing something quite different, but the effect is the same.
The point of Antifa is to treat intimidation.
The point of digital censorship is to do the same thing by sending the message that if you, Charlie, you, Dinesh, you cross certain lines, we're going to drop that sword of Damocles on your head.
And so it makes us more cautious.
So, bottom line of it is: enforced conformity is what they're all about.
They want to make us live in their world.
It's Orwell, straight out.
And if we refuse to do that, we then have to think about what are the ways we can carry out that refusal.
Well, but a lot of people are wondering if they are going to continue to control the vote tabulation systems and no one seeming to fight.
But then where does this lead us?
You just said it's the end of American politics.
Well, that's the end of the country then.
It is the end of the.
It is the end.
The sad thing is that much of the world lives like this.
You know, if I were to, when I was growing up, my family voted, but they voted perfunctorily, almost like, okay, it's election time, we're going to go out and vote.
We are under no illusion that our vote is going to make any difference.
It didn't feel like you were representative government.
No, in fact, there was the belief that there's a political class that operates by its own rules.
Corruption is the name of the game.
Sure, if people tell me today, they're like, Dinesh, what you're doing, if you tried to do in India, if you said about the Indian prime minister the kinds of things that you've said about Obama, for example, someone would come to your house and break your legs.
Well, they did that differently to you, but that's the point.
True.
But what I'm getting at is that American exceptionalism is an assertion that America doesn't function like that, or we operate under rule of law.
So one by one, our faith in these key institutions, let's look at them, academia.
We knew academia was left, but at least we looked at academia as a place where you could learn and debate things.
Not anymore.
The media.
We knew the media was left, but the idea that the media would become the instrument of repressing speech or that the media could somehow think for a moment about the Biden scandal.
Now, I was thinking to myself, how many news organizations are there in the country?
Hundreds.
I'm talking about the mainstream media, thousands of journalists, right?
We believe in free markets.
Now, if the majority of journalists go, I'm not going to cover the Biden scandal, surely there's going to be one enterprising reporter at the San Diego Union or the Sacramento B or the Dallas Morning News or Channel 4 in LA who goes, listen, all my idiot buddies don't want to cover this.
I will cover it.
I will become a sensation.
I will become the new Walter Cronkite.
But see, even that guy was scared because even that guy knew that he'd have no future if he tried to do that.
So how do you enforce conformity to that degree?
This, I think, is something that has become very evident and also very disturbing.
Yeah, and they enforce that conformity through a variety of different ways, social pressure, through I think digital social media has actually really hurt the diversity of ideas, which is the exact opposite of what you would actually think.
You would think because more people have access to supercomputers, more access to portals of information, more capacity to create, you'd think that there would be more people actually trying to go and push against the grain and actually try to be truth tellers.
But you have someone who I disagree with a lot of public policy, but I think is a very courageous person, Glenn Greenwald, who gets kicked out of the intercept because he just wants to cover the Hunter Biden story.
You also have Barry Weiss from the New York Times with that exact same kind of issue, New York Times opinionary page.
And so I guess this leads a lot of people begging the question, how much longer can this civilization actually continue with the cultural damage that's obviously been happening, the institutions that we have been lost, the political vote tabulation problems.
It seems as if a lot of the core, the core traditions that we had in the West that at least kept us together through these, that would allow us to survive stress tests, they're disappearing.
The left got about this business and has been about it in some ways for 100 years.
They ramped it up in the 1960s, but they thought of it in the 1930s.
There was an Italian communist named Gramsci in the third.
Antiochi.
Yeah, Antonio Gramsci.
And Gramsci is pondering this question.
Why is the working class not revolting?
You know, he's a Marxist.
He's expecting, Marx predicted the working class will revolt.
Culturally.
And so Gramsci goes, well, here's why they're not revolting.
Because even though their economic interests are driving them to revolt, they are members of families.
And their wife is telling them, don't go throw stones.
And they go to church.
And their pastor is telling them, wait for the next world.
So according to Gramsci, the reason that bourgeois, that there isn't a revolt against the bourgeoisie by the working class, is the working class has been culturally assimilated by the capitalist system.
So Gramsci goes, we have to do the opposite.
What we have to do is introduce a culture of the left.
And to do that, we have to undermine the churches, take over the universities, undermine the nuclear family, create new types of families.
So the left has been doing this.
Now, oddly enough, it is a peculiarity of the right.
And see, this is true of, say, for example, conservative entrepreneurs.
The ordinary entrepreneur focuses on his business, right?
How much thought does he give to how do I protect the entrepreneurial system from the systemic political and cultural attack that's coming?
Almost no time to that.
And the only time they give is improper.
They give to the Chamber of Commerce, which does the opposite.
So anyway, right.
And then if I go to them and say, look, I'm trying to make a movie, they will say things like, well, what is the return on my investment likely to be?
And I'm like, look, I'm going to try very hard to get you your money back, but the real reason I'm doing it is I'm trying to fight the cultural assault on the West.
If you go out West on a covered wagon and there are all these outlaws, I'm sort of like a hired gun is going to help keep those guys at bay.
So it's in your interest to support this.
This is a cost of doing business for you in the end.
It's tough to make this case, as you know, because our side doesn't think that way.
And the other side does.
Our side does not think systemically.
And I hate to use that term because it's so overused, but they don't think in terms of systems.
And that's part of the brilliance of being a conservative and being an entrepreneur is you actually think about your own specific enterprise.
And there's only so much people can focus on.
But the left and Gramsci was the beginning of the idea of cultural Marxism.
And it was kind of built out further through a lot of other thinkers.
I could use that word loosely.
And you've covered this extensively.
And I learned this from you, the Frankfurt School, Marcuse, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky to a lesser extent.
And this was furthered by the postmodernist nonsense that came into our country through Michelle Foucault and many others.
And I think what a lot of conservatives don't recognize and understand is that this is a lot less of an economic debate and a lot more of a cultural debate.
And so a lot of where we focus our attention when we come, and you wrote a whole book on this, and I want you to talk about that, on socialism as, well, it doesn't work economically.
All that stuff is true, by the way.
And you kind of get big pie graphs, you know, charts and graphs.
When in reality, the left is laughing.
They're like, we're going to destroy the capitalist system, not because we've made better arguments, but because we're going to deprive people of meaning and they're going to resort to us.
And we're going to go up to these businesses and intimidate them and accuse them of being racist and that they're so afraid of that kind of accusation that they will literally beg us to submit a list of non-negotiable demands and then accede to all of them.
The left realized early on, this again comes out of Marxism, they realized that the working class is not going to revolt.
And so what Lenin said is, we need a professional class of revolutionaries who will revolt on their behalf.
Well, the same can be true of our side.
We can say that, look, the entrepreneur has actually not going to be the one in the front lines defending capitalism.
We need a professional revolutionary class of conservatives who will do that.
But we need the entrepreneur to recognize that this class is fighting on their behalf.
But this class has got to fight not just in the political, but also in the cultural domain.
In other words, not merely to be critics of culture.
Notice that the left, they're critics of culture.
They dominate the field of, let's say, movie critics, but they also dominate the field of making movies.
Movie production, yeah.
It was very important to the left to control the means of production.
And think of it: here we are in digital media, but we don't control the means of production.
Somehow, the guys who run Twitter and Google and Instagram are leftists.
So we are at their mercy.
The left realized that for them to win, they needed to control the means of production.
I think the same is true of our side.
So this is a question we get a lot, and it might sound like a silly question, but can you help define what the left is?
You've used that term a couple times.
I use it all the time.
Believe it or not, we've gotten that question thousands of times the last couple months, and I actually have meant to address it.
Who is the left?
Is it a group of people?
Is it an ideology?
Is it a mixture of both?
I think the roots of the left, if you want to look at it in its kind of most fundamental way, is there are typically two classes of people in society that compete for power.
And this goes back to ancient times, to the very rise of capitalism.
So there was a merchant class, which were the entrepreneurs coming into power.
But who was resisting them?
Who was resisting them was, I would call it the class of people who are defined by men of letters.
So take somebody who is, for example, a courtier at the French court.
What does that guy do?
He doesn't do anything, right?
His job is to amuse the aristocracy.
Ultimately, he is a talker.
His product is words.
And there are a lot of professions built around that.
The legal profession.
A lawyer is a purveyor of words.
I'm a purveyor of words.
And I also make physical products.
I make movies and things.
But even the movies are the product of words.
So what the left, so this is a knowledge class, I would call it.
And the knowledge class deeply resents the entrepreneurial class.
And the knowledge class has always wanted to have the commanding heights of society dictated by them.
So leaving aside politics, even if we had no left and no right, you would have the kind of smart set, the big talkers of society, always telling the entrepreneurs, you don't know what you're doing.
You shouldn't be making so many cars next year.
The computer industry needs to do this.
And this is why digging in the ground for oil is bad.
So in other words, these guys, the talkers don't know how to do anything, but they want to organize everything.
Progressivism, what we call liberalism, even Marxism, all come out of those types of people.
And so that's what we would call the left.
Yes.
And by the left, what we mean today, and in America, because in Europe, the left is a little bit different.
There is an international left, which has certain commonalities.
But in America, the left is ultimately about running things through the instrumentality of the state.
It's not just that they love the state.
What they love is the idea of a centralized mechanism that puts them in the saddle.
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And so the second most common question I get from people that I run into and very accomplished business people, Tanesh, and I think you've done some really good writing and thinking on this.
And I get this question very sincerely is what do they want?
A lot of conservatives who are not in this like you and I, they cannot understand what drives these people.
What do they want?
They want to have a society in which a certain elite drawn from their sectors is calling the shots.
Like philosopher kings almost.
Philosopher kings that are allied with legal specialists that are allied with academics.
So think of why someone, think of the simple question.
Why does somebody today want to be a journalist?
Right?
First of all, it's a profession in which the value of producing a word in an article is almost zero.
The pay is miserable.
The profession is almost kind of on its way out.
But it is one of the few professions where you get to exercise, I would call it, the power of humiliation.
A journalist can target a very powerful person and say, I am going to destroy that guy's life, right?
It's a form of having power over people.
Now, ordinarily, you can't in normal life have that kind of power.
Even if you take a very powerful entrepreneur, you know, let's say, for example, somebody who makes an incredible type of software.
He can't force you or me to do anything.
We have to voluntarily go in our car and buy their stuff.
So their power over us is very limited.
In fact, they have to cater to us.
Whereas with government, it gives you a form of power that makes other people intimidated.
I think this is why, you know, people become a meter-made.
They just love the idea that they can put a little slip of paper on your car, and when you come back, it's going to discombobulate you.
It's going to ruin at least that moment, if not your whole day.
You're like, oh, my God.
You know, that someone can do that to you is part of the appeal of becoming that.
We would call these people typically sociopaths if you enjoy to inflict human suffering.
They are people that you will, you know, if you read Machiavelli is the Prince, Machiavelli would argue that there is a little streak.
There's a folio Machiavelli.
There's a little streak in human nature in all of us that is like that.
So civilization is about repressing it.
And see, part of what America is about, and this is the true meaning, I think, of Lincoln's The Better Angels of Our Nature, to create systems that suppress the kind of bullying and brutal instincts of human nature and encourage the creative, the cooperative, the collegial.
But the left, when I talk about gangsterization, what I'm getting at is they are now tapping into these darker energies.
And they're doing it on the basis that these darker energies are more powerful than their virtuous counterparts.
In other words, a bad guy is in a way more creative than a good guy, because a good guy is sort of the guy who sort of expects the rules to do the job for him.
The country is a good place.
The ordinary Republican feels like, let's move on, the election's over, let me get back to work.
It's the wildebeest mentality.
Whereas the bad guy has the mentality of the predator, which is to say, everything is dark, and you have to wait until the innocent guy can't see, and then you can jump on him and take advantage of him.
And he's not looking for it, which makes it all the more appealing.
Well, we saw that in film where two television shows, two of the most successful television shows of all time, were glamorizing the bad guy, Sopranos and Breaking Bad, where it was a protagonist was a criminal and was glorified and glamorized.
And you found the brilliance of Breaking Bad, less so in the Sopranos, because Sopranos is a lot of dark comedy, but it was still a brilliant television show.
But Breaking Bad, especially, you found yourself cheering for the guy that's making meth.
You're like, yeah, I hope he gets it.
Wait a second, am I cheering for a meth dealer?
And I don't think those television shows would have succeeded in the 1980s.
I don't.
I think as if this kind of framing through the storytelling was the soft social conditioning of it's okay to break the law, to go, again, it's just a metaphor, of course, to go make methamphetamine in the desert, to go murder people as long as you could justify it in your own moral kind of framing.
And Walter White ends up being the hero throughout the entire story.
And he has obviously, you know, valleys and tropes.
I don't know if you're familiar with the television show or not, but it struck me when you're saying that there's been this kind of cinema conditioning of the framing from the hero actually being the bad guy.
It occurs on all fronts.
I mean, I could give example after example, but it's the case, I mean, even going back to the 80s, that if you look, for example, at a lot of what you would call teenage comedy, you essentially have these parents who are dummies.
Both parents are dummies, but the real dummy is always the father.
He's the biggest dummy.
Always.
And he's never as smart as his kids.
Family guy was an extension of this.
So is The Simpsons.
Right.
That the dumbest person was the male figurehead.
Exactly.
Always.
Exactly.
Bumbling idiot.
Right.
I've just watched the Queen's Gambit on Netflix.
Well, King of Queens is the same thing.
Yeah.
Anyway, I interrupted you, but yeah.
Well, no, I was just saying that the smuggling of ideological content into what other, in a sense, it's not even, you would say, we would think it's not necessary.
Why are you doing that?
But we don't realize that for them, it is necessary.
It is the point of what they're doing.
So when they talk about the 50s, they give a picture of the 50s that I think would be unrecognizable to most people who lived in the 50s.
In other words, the family is a dysfunctional institution.
The father is, on the surface, sort of pious, but in reality, a scum and a disorder.
And Mad Men was the depiction of that.
They tried to attack the 1950s through the show Mad Men.
Right.
So what are they doing?
What they're doing is they are trying to normalize the abnormal and abnormalize the normal.
And they're trying to do both simultaneously.
So they're trying to produce a kind of cultural inversion.
That's what they've done.
And they're doing it very openly, but they're counting on the consumer to kind of go along with it.
And I think for conservatives, we have been critics of it, but we haven't produced replacements for it.
In other words, we don't produce comedy.
And even a lot of our media on television is sort of talk shows, right?
But what about the young conservative who wants to be a stand-up comedian?
Where's the improv that we can send that kid to where he can start learning how to do his thing and become one day George Carlin of today?
We need to create those opportunities to create culture so we can compete with the left.
I agree.
And one of the big missteps the last couple decades have been the misallocation of capital towards Washington, D.C.-centric think tanks that just kind of publish the same white papers that have not moved the dial, where the left, they were pumping money into cinema, into television shows.
I mean, one movie that probably had more impact on the environmentalist movement was Avatar.
And Avatar was the most successful movie, I think, ever in box office.
If not, it's up there, right?
It was an unbelievable success.
But what's really the story of Avatar?
The story of Avatar is not about a bunch of blue-looking aliens that are trying to fight for a better world.
It's the evil inter-galactic colonialists that are coming to this wonderfully peaceful world, exploiting it for natural minerals, not trying to respect their natural rights, and with it polluting the planet.
What's that story supposed to be?
That's how the left views America.
The left views America through the story of Avatar.
When I think about our side and the obstacles we face, it's partly that the left has made it easy for their side to do their thing.
So let's take Michael Moore or Oliver Stone for that matter.
If Oliver Stone or Michael Moore wants to make a movie, they go to a studio and the studio goes, here's $10 million.
Go make a movie.
And once you've made the movie, you will be booked on The View the next morning and then the following day on Jimmy Fallon.
And then Bill Maher wants to have you on and on and on it goes.
So in other words, the infrastructure is all there for them.
All that Michael Moore has to do is make the movie.
But on our side, we have to do 10 different things.
We have to do the legal work and then we have to go raise the money and then we've got to make the movie.
And after you made the movie, you've got to market it with no help from the other side.
So what happens is this is a set of, I would call it, incompatible skills.
Because if you're a creative guy, you can make a movie, but you don't know where to get the money.
There are people who have the money, but they don't know how to make a movie.
And even if you could do both, they don't have the marketing reach.
So our side is laboring under, you know, we're riding the bicycle up the hill.
They're riding the bicycle down the hill.
And that's what makes their job easy.
But they have worked to create that infrastructure.
And I think we have long term the laborious job of doing it on our side.
The only good news we have, Dinesh, though, is that the typical distribution of movies has changed because of the lockdowns and the Chinese coronavirus.
I don't think movie theaters are going to be in the same form as they used to be.
There's way too much overhead, and you're already starting to see a lot of them be basically defaulted on.
You saw HBO, they're releasing all their content in January at your own leisure.
And so a lot of it's now going to over the top.
And secondly, here's the other thing, and I would love your take on this.
The content that they're producing is such garbage right now because they're turning their back on the Western canon.
And as soon as you start to do that, it's really hard to keep a captive audience because it's built into our DNA and into our spirit to actually want to cheer for a righteous and heroic person to fight for truth, protect the innocent, and slay the bad guy.
That's actually something that's built into us.
That's why Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars are the same story.
It's just told differently, which is an estranged orphan is raised by his uncle, goes on a journey, and actually ends up fighting the evil within himself.
It's the same thing, just told in different framing.
When you start to have stories of just kind of these meandering social justice warrior activists that are contemplating whether or not they should get a gender change and it takes them 45 minutes to tell that story, I don't know if that's, I think that there's a great market opportunity for us.
I couldn't agree more.
The left tries, they know that stories have a kind of an anchor in good and evil.
They try to make our side into the evil guys.
Oh, it's always the evil capitalist with the cigar.
It's the bad, it's a businessman, it's the patriarchal dad, it's the small town pastor who's a secret member of the Ku Klux Klan.
I mean, these are their standard plus.
So true.
But yeah, I think we can enter into a period of great cultural creativity, which can be driven by our side by tapping into instincts that we have, but we just haven't developed because a lot of our energy has been in the political sphere.
So I think we need to pay attention to that, but simultaneously to build a culture.
Look, the greatest thing that the left had in this election, quite apart from election rigging, is the media.
The media.
It's not a level playing field.
If it was just us against them, we would beat them.
But them plus the media is a very difficult obstacle to face.
So how could it be that we have allowed the situation to reach the point it has?
We're very late in the game in getting on this stuff, but I still think we can make a lot of progress if we pay attention to it.
Look, it's Christmas season.
A lot of you guys are emailing us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
How do I give back this Christmas season?
Look, I know it's been a tough year, but those of us that are Christians, we are called to help and to assist regardless of the circumstances around us.
Whether we had a blessed year or a tough year, it's time to step up and do something.
I think we all know that.
That's why we are partnering with Angel Tree.
Angel Tree is great.
They help kids whose parents are in prison.
It's not even about the fact of what their parents did.
It's the fact that the kids are alone.
And the kids, if they do not hear from their parents, they're more likely to also get involved in crime in the future.
So let's really communicate the love of Jesus Christ with a personalized note from their dad and an access to a Bible in either Spanish or English.
And that's what the Fellowship Angel Tree program does.
Last year, the Angel Tree program blessed over 300,000 children of prisoners all across America.
What's so cool is that if you give directly, it doesn't go to overhead or all that stuff.
It goes straight to the kid, especially this Christmas season.
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Very, very important.
Thank you guys so much for that.
And part of it is that the left, and when we mean the left, we mean the entire body from the financiers to the kind of activist class.
They were okay with loss leaders for decades.
They were okay with very risky investments.
They were okay with the potential of things not working out.
And now all of a sudden they have all these success stories.
But Google and Facebook, there were plenty of that went under.
But it was all under this idea of having institutional cultural control.
And conservatives never played on that terrain at all.
I mean, conservatives have been very, very successful, obviously, entrepreneurially, but the allocation of capital, I think, has been unequal.
I'd love your thought on that.
Well, they did it under false pretenses.
When Twitter and Instagram and Facebook came along, they said, look, we're going to be like ATT.
We're the phone company.
We're creating a platform.
And the great thing about this platform is it allows you to do things that you can't just do with the phone.
You can find your long-lost college friend.
You can have robust debate.
So I think far, we were not suspicious.
We were like, this is great.
In fact, if the media is left-wing, we can all flee to social media and we'll find opportunity here.
Little did we know that these guys would be the worst of the worst.
I mean, that these guys would basically say, look, we're just going to start putting warning labels on you.
I mean, imagine if the phone company said, we're going to start listening in on your calls, Charlie.
And we are going to, the reason we're doing this is we just don't like the amount of hate that is on the phone lines.
We're going to monitor hate, but we're also going to monitor inaccuracy, misinformation.
So if you say the wrong things, we're going to give you some warnings.
We're going to interrupt your phone calls.
We're going to limit, maybe you can only make a few more.
You're joking.
That's coming next.
Right.
No long-distance phone calls.
Even though you paid your bill, we're going to terminate your service.
I mean, people would be, you'd shut down ATD tomorrow if that happened.
Yeah, but give it a decade at its current pace.
They'll do that soon.
So think about it.
So this is the totalitarian mindset.
And I think, you know, part of what's been for me eye-opening is in the 80s when you, if you said the word tyrant, you would think of like Stalin, right?
Some guy in a Cossack outfit, toothbrush, mustache, someone who's conducting, you know, who's doing Chinese torture to his opponents.
Now, when I think of a tyrant, I don't think of Stalin.
I think of like Governor Whitmer.
You know, I think of, I see her, and all I hear is like, don't do that.
And I think to myself, you know, in a small village of ancient times, she would be like the town nag.
She'd be like on some street corner, pointing her finger, yelling at people.
But the only people she could really terrorize was her poor husband and her unfortunate kids and maybe her neighbor, right?
But when you put her in charge of the state of Michigan, you put a police force at her disposal, a whole set of laws, you take this nasty individual and you make her a tyrant.
So I want to kind of close on that issue, which I'm trying to warn people really what we're up against, which is we live in a country with a police state.
And you made a series of movies that made you targeted by our own federal government.
And just let me be very clear: the fact that you were even investigated and prosecuted is a disgrace to our country, considering what other people are allowed to get away with.
It's such a, I believe, a like incredibly inconsequential action.
And I've just, I mean, I've said that publicly.
I'll say it again, especially when we see what other people are doing.
But they targeted you for a reason.
These are my words, not you.
Because you were disruptive.
And they're now doing this to Steve Bannon.
They're doing this to Wayne Lapierre.
They're investigating him.
They did this to Roger Stone.
They have a pattern of going after truth tellers.
Can you just give some people some context of really what we're up against?
And if you don't feel comfortable commenting on it, but I believe this is one of the most dangerous things we're about to see, which is the re-weaponization of our police state.
Well, what happens is the ordinary guy refuses to believe it until it happens to you, right?
So that the ordinary guy today probably thinks in America that if they come after you, it's going to be like two guys with a folder who are going to come up to your front door and ask you questions.
No, as Roger Stone discovered, it's helicopters, it's armored vehicles, it's drawn machine guns, it's get, you know, it's drag you out of your house.
So you don't believe it's America until you have some experience of it, or you know someone directly who does.
In my case, which looking back on it, it was a small case, but it was a preview of things to come because what happened to Flynn later is the same thing.
I think with Obama, you had a guy who was a narcissist and who thought that he's sort of above any kind of it's not just criticism, it is exposing his hypocrisy.
So he had his family ties.
Yeah, he had been traipsing around the country.
We are Brothers Keeper.
And of course, no pushback from the reporters don't ask, you're your brother's keeper.
Well, you know, how much money did you give in charity last year?
Why is your half-brother living in poverty in Africa?
Exactly.
So I went to Kenya.
I was sitting in the slum with his half-brother.
And we talked to her.
Well, this is the other guy, George Obama.
Yeah.
And, you know, and so it exposes, and only a way a movie can do.
Because it's one thing if I wrote an article, I interviewed George Obama, George told me this.
It's another thing to be like, here's George Obama.
This is the president's half-brother.
They have the same dad.
And here's a guy living in what you would call, you know, this is a guy right out of slum dog millionaire.
You know, he's living in third world slum.
What has Obama done to help him?
Nothing.
So this is the kind of thing that infuriated Obama.
So I believe what happened.
On a personal level.
Yeah.
So, you know, he activates Holder.
Holder activates this guy named Preet Barara, who is.
He's still around.
Yeah, exactly.
And so they had, this is the weaponization of the government.
Let's go see what we got on this guy.
And that ultimately, again, this happens in other countries all the time.
It's normal, but it's not normal in America.
And so my own case, for me, looking back, I'm actually very glad in retrospect it happened to me because it was an intellectual wake-up call.
It told me American politics is not this kind of civilized, great debate that I thought it was.
That it's a little bit more of a knockdown, drag out fight against some really bad guys.
And we have to take stock of that.
Well, and let's just be clear: you reimbursed somebody for a campaign contribution.
You didn't commit armed robbery.
Oh, no.
I mean, this is the idea of my crime, and I'll spell it out very clearly.
So, Wendy Long, my college friend, see, when I came to America, I fell in with a bunch of young conservatives.
Yeah, Dartmouth.
And because my family is 5,000 miles away, they became my sort of surrogate family.
So they were kind of like, they introduced me to America.
So I felt this great sense of gratitude, of obligation.
Later, when Wendy's running for office, I gave her $10,000, which was the campaign finance limit.
And then she would call me every two days.
Dinesh, can you serve on my finance committee?
Dinesh, I know these Indian doctors.
Can you meet them?
Because, hey, you're Indian, they're Indian.
You know, maybe they'll give some money to my campaign.
But I was promoting my Obama movie.
So I kind of felt guilty that I can't help my friend as much as I'd like to.
So I called up two of my friends and I said, hey, guys, you like Wendy Long?
Do you mind giving her $10,000?
I'll reimburse you.
Now, in America, if anyone else did that, you will get a letter from the federal election commission.
A kind of a warning, maybe a $5,000 fine and 20 hours of community service.
Don't do it again.
And don't do it again.
Especially if it's a first-time offense.
And the most important thing here is there is no allegation of corruption.
I wasn't trying to buy office.
I wasn't trying to get an appointment.
She didn't even win, right?
And I didn't even tell her I did it.
I didn't even tell Wendy, I'm giving you the money through two of my, I didn't even mention it.
I just did it.
So there was no allegation that I was benefiting in any way.
So the campaign finance laws are there to prevent corruption.
Some guy goes, hey, listen, I'll give you the money, but when you get in office, you give my business a tax break.
That's the quid pro quo.
That's what was completely absent here.
So that's why, that's what made my, and even to this day, the left is like, well, you're a felon.
You pleaded guilty.
No, you got pardoned, so you're not a felon.
I'm not a felon.
But what happened with Flynn and me is that they used the plea, you pleaded guilty, as you admit you did it.
It's not an admission of guilt.
The way I view it, you can say whatever you want.
I think it's, please grant me mercy because I know how this is going to end when you stack the jury that you've already polluted.
It's illegal bludgeoning.
And I think, as conservatives, it's opened our eyes to the fact that when you have this system in place, it actually puts a lot of innocent people in prison.
Absolutely.
Because when they weigh the odds, you know, you take a doctor, right?
And they'll say, if they want to go after a doctor, they will go after him for.
Medicare fraud reimbursement.
Yeah, either that or like administering illegal painkillers.
Now, very difficult to defend against.
It's a discretionary call.
You administer these painkillers.
And then they go, listen, if you get convicted, you'll spend three years in prison and never practice medicine again.
Or you plead guilty to it, you pay a $50,000 fine.
Foundation for six months.
Right.
So who's going to take everyone's going to plead, even if they didn't do it?
And if they said anything less than their plea, they could jeopardize their plea publicly.
I mean, basically, if all of a sudden they told their friends, oh, I just did that for this, this, and this, right?
They have to be very careful, at least during the parameters.
Is that correct?
It's absolutely true.
They have you at the, once you plead, you agree to things, you forego your right of appeal.
It's a long process.
It's a long thing.
You have to, you know.
And I was, you know, the pardon is very lucky, but it's very rare.
When I called my lawyer, Ben Brafman, who's a very celebrity attorney, he's represented Puff Diddy and so on.
I told him, I said, I got this pardon.
What do I do?
He goes, Dinesh, in all my years of experience, I have never represented anyone who's gotten a pardon.
He goes, you have no idea what a meteoric event this is and rare.
He goes, I don't know.
So what I'm getting at is that that was an incredible blessing to me because it cleared my record and it sort of gave me back my American dream.
Yeah, and it's an outrage what happened.
This is our government that targeted you.
And meanwhile, Rosie O'Donnell was using fake names to use campaign contributions and there was no investigation in her.
Hunter Biden does whatever he wants.
And to date, there's no indictments.
Hillary Clinton, all this, but somehow you had to go through that entire process.
And Steve Bannon is now going through the same sort of thing because Steve was very, you know, very effective.
Say what you want about Steve, very effective in criticizing the kind of left power complex.
I think Steve's case is very similar to yours, where they kind of said, well, what can we possibly get on this guy?
And I tell conservatives all the time, especially as we're entering this new phase, you've got to act, you have to message, and you have to operate as if they're going to indict you tomorrow.
They want all of us in jail.
And that's not an understatement.
Well, it's worrisome for our side because you've got entrepreneurs and people who think, wow, I mean, you know, when the deck is stacked like that, it's easier to give in.
It's easier to conform and play by the rules, which is kind of what the left wants.
So, you know, on the one hand, I do warn people about what the government can do to you, but I'm also worried about discouraging our side.
No, I agree.
I tell people, I didn't mean to stop your train of thought.
No, not at all.
The downside is that people are going to say, ah, maybe if I just don't give to Republicans or finance the movie and just do my job and just go on vacation, I can fly under the radar.
Right, exactly.
It's very important.
For example, in movies, we have to be able to assure our investors that their names will never be disclosed under any circumstances.
Case closed.
And we've lived up to that.
But if we couldn't give them that protection, then there would be at least some of them who would be like, oh, Dinesh, you know what?
This is a very, I'm drawing myself into a thicket.
I don't know if I want to be in the middle of it.
I've got grandchildren.
I've got a comfortable life.
So we have to also make it easy for our side.
We can't demand Herculean levels of courage because Herculean levels of courage are rare.
Well, I also believe, and this is my own opinion, that if conservative attorney generals in these states started prosecuting a lot of the fraud the left does, there would be a stasis.
I really believe that.
I think that if all of a sudden, and I don't mean to overly politicize this, but why Hunter Biden has not been indicted by the Arkansas Attorney General for crimes committed in Arkansas, I don't understand.
And by the way, that's just as serious of an indictment in the federal court.
I mean, you have to answer for that.
This is the key.
If we were to start indicting people, if Michael Moore were to be indicted.
Not making up crimes.
I'm not saying that.
I'm not saying that either.
But I'm saying if we were to go after them with the same vigor that they go after us, they would immediately stop.
There would all of a sudden be a truce.
They'd say, wait a second, hold on.
We don't want Michael Moore to go for Michael Moore with, if I remember correctly, suspicious financing of his movies back in the early 2000s.
I'm just drawing on memory here.
There's plenty of examples of people that basically do whatever they want, and they know they are going to get away with it.
Hunter Biden with firearm charges, drug paraphernalia, dropping off rental cars with illegal substances, get away on all of it.
And you don't need the feds there.
These are conservative states that he's in.
The other thing is that we are always looking to cross every T and dot every I, and they indict first and ask questions later.
They indict and then they pollute the jury.
Well, not only that, but when their idea is this, like take Durham.
Durham is basically trying to get the goods on everybody, let's just say, before even he thinks about an indictment.
I don't know exactly what he's doing, but I'm just describing what appears to be the process.
The left would never go about it that way.
Their idea would be indict 10 guys and then get those 10 guys to rat out the next 10 guys.
So they use the judicial prosecutorial process itself as a form of investigation.
There's no investigation that precedes the indictment.
The indictment kicks off the investigation.
And then they use the arrest as a way to confiscate devices and then charge on more stuff.
Right.
And then all of a sudden they confiscate devices.
They go through emails.
They go through text messages.
And then they say, oh, wow.
Okay.
Now we really got something.
You know, we indicted you for tax fraud, but now we got these 900 other things that we found.
Right.
And they lead with the indictment.
And the idea that Peter Strzok is now teaching at Georgetown, people really think he's going to jail, think again.
We missed that window.
They have now him framed as this loving professor who's adored by his students, goes on cable television.
He was the chief spy catcher.
Court of public opinion.
I'm under the opinion personally that Andrew McCabe was brought up in front of a grand jury and they couldn't get a grand jury to agree to indict him.
And the reason is, and other people agree with me.
This is not a, you know, Sarah Carter, I believe, has this belief too, is that they just kept parading him on TV and they kept writing affectionately about him on CNN.
And you remember he went on 60 Minutes like a year and a half ago and he had that book.
It's hard to get, I think a grand jury is usually 26 people, 24 people, hard to get that in the D.C. area when they're seeing how wonderful of a person he is.
What you're saying is that the left is able to use these cultural accolades to provide a certain kind of legal protection.
Legal shield.
Legal shield.
The other thing that they do with these same cultural accolades is they're able to court court people like John Roberts.
So look at Chief Justice John Roberts.
It's a human motive once you're the Chief Justice.
What is it that you want out of life at this point?
Well, you want to go down in the history books for your opinions, but you also want to be the kind of grand figure of society.
You want to be on the board of the Lincoln Center.
You want to be there at the Oscars.
You want your college to give you an honorary degree.
So, what the left has done is they've established a kind of ironclad control over these accolades so that they're able to say, hey, John Roberts, if you turn out to be a kind of scalia, we will villainize you.
We will say you're disgracing the court.
We will demand that your alma mater not give you that honorary.
And your kids will not get into college, and your wife will be sneered at when she goes to the ground.
And they won't be cool.
They will be the most uncool people in America.
And so those human motives then go, oh, well, that is so exasperating.
After all this effort I've made to reach this pinnacle in life, to have all the honors associated with it taken away from me, why don't I just kind of play the middle of the road?
So this is a form of very sophisticated manipulation of people who have that human desire to be liked or appreciated in the culture.
Yeah, and it's psychological warfare, is what they've done.
I'll never forget a story someone told me of John Roberts, who goes to a country club in the suburbs of D.C. without disclosing too much of the story.
Basically, he goes to a country club like any senator would and talks to people and takes pictures, you know, when appropriate.
You know, obviously, I think there's restrictions against that at that certain club.
The point is that he's a human being, and human beings talk to other human beings and they want to be loved.
And we tell these students all the time: unless you're willing to lose everything, then get out.
This fight is not for the people that want to go run for the popularity contest.
All of your friends, most of your family, they will try to destroy your life.
And that's what Clarence Thomas has basically said publicly and privately: there's nothing else you can take from me.
After what you tried to do for me in that Senate hearing and try to destroy my name, my reputation, he's like, I will never forget that.
And I think Gorsuch is the same.
I hope Kavanaugh stays the same.
Amy Coney Barrett, Alito, has been great in a lot of different ways.
But I think you're exactly right.
And just to kind of close the point on this, which is that you talk about the gangsterization of our country.
The legal system is the one that I think conservatives have really got to wake up to because the justice system has this facade, this mirage, and this appearance of, well, we're not political.
You know, we are very much just about doing the job.
But I have some very, how do they decide who gets indicted and who doesn't?
How do they decide what is the threshold of evidence when you do actually go indict somebody?
Because what you say, Dinesh, is they have suspicion from the New York Times, a leak, indict, then we get all their devices, and then we really start to do what we need to do.
I think that we need to have a re-examination of, I would call it the Reaganite court strategy, which goes back 40 years.
The Reaganite court strategy is that we are committed to a neutral process and that there is a neutral process of adjudication.
Now, the left has given up on that.
Their view is that all processes should be judged by the conclusions they produce.
So when they look at picking judges, they only ask one question: Is this judge, apart from things like do they have the proper academic credentials?
The only question they ask is, is this guy going to be a reliable vote on our side?
Yes or no?
If yes, we appoint.
If no, we reject.
We are looking at some third factor, which is a judge committed to umpire-style procedural application of the rules.
But in reality, as you say, there's a huge amount of discretion built into the process.
Take the Texas case.
Texas produced an argument.
There are arguments on both sides.
Which argument should carry more weight?
Yes, the court might say, Do I want to open up the nasty precedent where one state gets to quarterback what another state is doing?
And I grant that the court may go, we don't want to open up that Pandora's box, right?
But what about the Pandora's box of giving up on the idea of having a fair election itself?
If you're willing to admit even the possibility that there is systematic fraud, that's the end of democracy.
So even our concept of majority and minority, think of it, the court is a protector of minority rights.
But to be a protector of minority rights, you need to know who the minority is.
If you have an election where the very status of the majority and the minority is open to question, then that what could be a more important precedent than that to allow that to go unchecked is so what I'm getting at is there's no neutral procedure that gives you the answer and says, okay, you know, we don't want to take the Texas case because the Constitution says this.
No, the Constitution says what it says, and that reasonable people can offer competing interpretations of what it means.
It's well said.
Well, Dinesh, how can people support you and get behind what you're doing?
Well, I'm all over social media on Twitter and Parlor.
My movies, both Infidel and Feature Film.
See, I'm trying to push even into the feature film genre to compete with Hollywood there.
So it's a political thriller called Infidel.
It's out there in video on demand.
So is Trump Card, which, by the way, remains incredibly relevant because all this kind of gangsterization is continuing apace even after the election.
I'm looking to figure out ways in which we can build cultural institutions of our own, academic institutions, media institutions, and then entertainment institutions and bring those different media formats together.
So that's going to be, I think, where I'm going to put my energies in the next few years.
Well, very good.
Dinesh, thank you so much for joining us.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Please email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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