All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 14, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:49
IMPEACH THIS! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep.4
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The left's impeachment strategy, is it going to work?
I don't think so.
How is Trump going to survive an attack more vicious than anything he's faced before?
And finally, the witch hunt against the MAGA movement.
All coming up, this is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The House has impeached Donald Trump, the second impeachment, as they call it.
And of course, the immediate goal is to leave a scarlet letter on Trump toward him, not only now, but also in the future.
Now, many of us might be sitting back and wondering, why did they do this?
If there seems to be no adequate rationale for it, if the stated rationales given by the left seem to make no sense, require a kind of inflated and preposterous vocabulary, people were trying to stage a coup, they were trying to take over the government, this was like ISIS, this was like 9-11.
Now, if all of that seems...
Removed from reality.
What is the real justification for impeachment?
Well, let me suggest that there is none.
Or to put it differently, this really isn't about justification.
This isn't about giving a reason.
There really isn't a why except for they did it.
Because they could. In other words, what I'm saying is, there is a secret language in American politics that we often don't pay attention to.
It's the language of power.
In the end, politics, not just American politics, but all politics, is about power.
Now, very often people don't say things like, I crushed you because I could.
I crushed you because I'm the strong guy and you're the weak guy.
One of the remarkable things I think about reading, about learning, and I bring a lot of learning into this podcast because...
I want it to be a learning podcast.
There are some podcasts that are sort of, I call them affirmation podcasts.
You listen to the podcast because you happen to agree with what the guy doing the podcast is saying.
I want this to be that, but I want it to be much more.
Now, if you go back to Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War, there's something in that called the Malian Dialogue, a famous exchange in which the Athenians land on the tiny island of Melos.
And basically the Milesians ask them, why are you here to crush us?
And the Athenians give a brutal reply.
They basically say, we're here to crush you because we are strong and you are weak.
And it is our job, it is the law of nature, you can see it in the animal kingdom, for the strong to take advantage of the weak.
So what's wonderful about this is you very rarely hear the language of power put in such an explicit and brutal way.
But there it is in Thucydides.
When I was in college, a professor of mine, in trying to understand world events, did something very fascinating.
He made a bunch of circles, each circle representing one of the continents, and all the major countries had their own circle, a circle for Russia, a circle for China, a circle for India, a circle for the United States, and so on.
And then he asked us to ignore ideology, ignore what people say about why countries do what they do.
And he asked us, can you think about what the world should look like If you just have in it big countries, big circles, and small countries, small circles.
Can you make certain predictions about how these countries would behave?
Big countries might become, for example, rivals with each other.
Small countries that are near a big country might seek to get the protection of the big country near them.
In order to thwart irredentist conquest from other big countries.
So what I found fascinating about this is an ability to try to understand politics purely in the language or in the terms of power.
And that is sometimes a very helpful way for us to think about American politics.
My first book was called Illiberal Education.
And in that book, I talked about the paradox that colleges and the left talk about liberalism.
They talk about free speech.
Free speech was their mantra in the 60s and 70s.
And yet, I said...
Now that they're in power, they're doing the opposite.
They are suppressing liberal principles.
They are suppressing freedom of speech.
They have all these speech codes that restrict what can be said on campuses around the country.
Quite remarkable because, in a sense, I was seeing then in the early 90s, late 80s and early 90s, a preview of what was going to metastasize off the campus and move to American society.
But in a liberal education, I was puzzled.
I'm like, how can people who use the language of freedom so quickly convert To unfreedom.
How can they switch it around like that?
And, of course, the answer was they switched it around because before they were not in power and after they were.
So power actually explains the switch.
They never really believed in free speech.
It was a useful tactic for them rhetorically when they were on the outside.
Oh, we need free speech.
Don't come after us.
But the moment that they were in power, they were perfectly happy to go after their opponents.
And some of the people who stormed the Capitol, like Ashley Babbitt, I think had in their mind the idea that this is 1776, this is sort of how we stage a takeover of the system of government, or at least we force the system to pay attention to us.
We're in the right, and therefore they have to listen to us.
We have a point, and we deserve to be heard.
I think all of this misses, again, the brute language of power.
Abraham Lincoln, in 1848, in the aftermath of the Mexican War, said something very interesting.
He said this,"...any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power..." Have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better.
So here's Lincoln sort of echoing the principle of the Declaration of Independence.
Governments are built on the consent of the governed.
If you don't have consent, hey, you have the right to rise up.
You have the right.
But then Lincoln adds this phrase, and having the power.
It's not enough to have the right.
You also have to be able to pull it off.
In other words, we all say very often that might doesn't make right, but Lincoln is saying that right by itself doesn't make might.
To have a successful revolution, you need both.
Now, what is the lesson for us in this?
The lesson for us in this is that the left is really not about principles.
I realize this is a little startling.
It kind of overturns our civics book idea of America.
My own idea of America was very much a civics book idea in the Reagan years.
It's only when I had my case against the Obama administration, I saw what the Obama Justice Department was all about.
That I realized that, no, this is really not about justice.
They're not asking, what did Dinesh do?
How does this compare with what other people did?
Should we give him the same penalty everybody else did?
They didn't care about any of that.
Their idea was, here is a guy who has been on the other side.
Here is a guy that made our guy look bad.
When Obama talked about, I'm my brother's keeper, here's a guy who went and interviewed Obama's own brother and made our great apostle Obama look like a fraud and a hypocrite.
So how do we teach him a lesson?
In other words, how do we make sure that not only Dinesh, but other people like Dinesh are deterred from taking on the great Saint Obama?
It was all about power.
That's what it was always about.
And so it's widened my way of thinking about politics.
Not that we don't pay attention to ideas and arguments, but we're not naive enough to think that that's all it's about.
The reason they impeached Trump is they had the power to do it in the House, and so they did it.
They think they can try to bully and muscle the Republicans to do it in the Senate.
And if they do, it will once again be a power play by the left.
They will use the media to try to create a drumbeat of support, intimidate the Republicans into submission, and pull it off.
What this also means is that we need to think in terms of power, not just ideas.
It's important for us to have not only right, but also might.
I was kind of excited to see that incumbent Republican congresswoman Marjorie Greene says on January 21st, I'm filing articles of impeachment against Biden.
Wow! Now, the reason this is a bold move and not a naive or stupid move is because it only takes a handful of Democrats, five or six, In order to make that impeachment go through.
So if the Republican Party is unified, if it accepts and understands the language of power, it's time to recognize that we need to do to the Democrats what they have been doing to us.
Let's recognize our power and use it.
We'll be right back. This podcast is sponsored by MyPillow.
This is a great product.
My wife Debbie and I both use it.
She loves it. She had trouble sleeping.
She goes, this pillow has solved my problems.
These pillows are awesome because you can wash and dry them.
They won't go flat. They're made in the USA. And Mike Lindell, who made this pillow, is giving you a great discount.
$29.98.
It's regularly $69.98.
That's for the queen-size pillow.
The king-size pillow is only $5 more.
So what's cool is you just have to go to MyPillow.com, click on the Radio Listener Square, and...
Use the promo code Dinesh.
You can buy pillows, of course, but you also get discounts on a bunch of other stuff.
Mike's Giza Dream bedsheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, and MyPillow towel sets.
Or call 800-876-0227 and just use the promo code Dinesh.
In the news, two important developments.
The first, of course, is that the House has impeached Donald Trump for a second time, and they did it this time with 10 Republican votes.
This has allowed the media to talk about the fact that the second impeachment was, quote, with Republican support.
The second development is that Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, Yes, no Senate trial until one day before Biden's inauguration.
What sense can we make of these developments?
I want to talk about why these developments are actually quite exciting and very hopeful.
First of all, almost no Republicans went along with this.
10 Republicans seems like, oh, there were 10 of them, but 10 Republicans out of well more than 200?
That's less than 5%.
So the bottom line of it is the Democratic effort to create a Republican stampede.
Had they gotten 30 or 40 Republican votes, this would have been jubilation.
But the truth of it is they were defeated.
The Republican Party hung together and the Republican Party stayed with Trump.
You can gauge the success of this and the importance of this in an article that's out in The New Yorker.
It's by Susan Glasser.
And it says, not even an insurrectionist mob in the Capitol can divorce the House GOP from the departing president.
So, what she's saying is, wow, the GOP is sticking with Trump.
This is horrible. And what she means from our point of view, of course, is that this is fantastic.
By the way, this is a very good formula for reading the news.
When you notice that leftists are discombobulated, you know you're doing something right.
Conversely, if you're a Liz Cheney type and the left is praising you, you suddenly find unanticipated invitations to appear on MSNBC. We're good to go.
Of course, they recognized, I think, the vast majority of Republicans, that this was a big sham.
This wasn't even an impeachment debate.
There was no debate. The whole decision to impeach was made in one day.
No real discussion, no argument and counter-argument, no effort on the part to examine the case carefully.
You can almost sum up the argument for impeachment by something that one of the impeachment managers, Eric Swalwell...
This wasn't on the house floor, but on television.
Swalwell is a very interesting character.
He does have one remarkable accomplishment to his name, which is that he has managed somehow to turn his name into a verb, to Swalwell, the act of swalwelling.
So, for example, sometimes when I tell Debbie, my wife, I'm going to go pick up Indian food, she says things like, don't eat too much Indian food because you'll be swalwelling all night.
So that's an accomplishment for Eric.
You've got to give it to him. But here's a clip in which Eric Swalwell on television is making the case for why Trump incited an insurgency.
It has something to do with Osama bin Laden.
Watch. They're saying holding him accountable is different from the people who directly were involved in tearing down the doors and rampaging the Capitol building.
Well, Osama bin Laden did not enter U.S. soil on September 11, but it was widely acknowledged that he was responsible for inspiring the attack on our country.
And the president, with his words, using the words fight, with the speakers that he assembled that day who called for trial by combat and said we have to take names and kick ass, that is hate speech that inspired and radicalized people.
When someone makes an analogy, particularly an incendiary one like this, Trump is sort of equivalent, you might say, to Osama bin Laden.
It's important to probe the analogy, to see where it holds true and where it doesn't.
So, it holds true in the one way that Swalwell mentioned.
Osama bin Laden was not present at 9-11.
Trump was not present at the...
So in both cases, the figure being compared was absent.
Notice that this is exonerating though, because if Trump wasn't there, he didn't take a direct part in the events.
So now let's look at the key differences between Bin Laden and Trump in terms of causation.
I'm not comparing 9-11 with the incursion in the Capitol.
There's no comparison. I'm just comparing the degree of involvement.
So Osama Bin Laden thought of 9-11.
It was his idea. He and a small group of his collaborators orchestrated it.
They planned it.
They rehearsed for it.
They put people on the monkey bars.
They did this all in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
So they conceived it, they carried it out, and when it happened, they celebrated.
Remember those videos of the sheikhs talking with Osama bin Laden?
They were all laughing at the collapse of the World Trade Center.
So the culpability is very clear.
They are the initiators, they are the organizers, and they, at the end of it, in a sense, took credit for the event by saying, high fives, guys, we pulled it off in the name of Allah.
Now, let's apply this to Trump.
Is anybody seriously claiming that Trump conceived of an occupation of the Capitol?
No, that's not even alleged. Number two, did Trump organize it?
Did Trump actually orchestrate an event that was planned?
We now know. The FBI had been informed about plans of people to make an incursion into the Capitol.
They were planning this apparently well before the rally itself.
Again, think of the implication of that.
What it means is that Trump didn't make them do it.
They were going to do it anyway. They planned it long before Trump made his so-called inciting remarks.
And finally, obviously, there is no evidence that Trump approved of the event, celebrated it.
On the contrary, he issued tweets telling people to get out of there, go home.
And of course, he came out with a strong statement condemning any kind of forced occupation or violence.
Bottom line, there is simply no analogy.
Swalwell is engaging in a certain kind of moral equivalence that is scandalously false, duplicitous and dangerous.
And the very idea that Trump is in any respect like Osama bin Laden, this is a malicious lie.
We'll be right back.
What happens next with impeachment?
It goes to the Senate.
And here we encounter that very enigmatic figure, Mitch McConnell.
What's up with Mitch McConnell?
Has Cocaine Mitch, Coke Mitch gone Diet Coke on us?
Has he sold us out?
It seemed this way initially.
A lot of us were taken aback to read an article in the New York Times claiming, based on so-called inside information, that Mitch actually supported impeachment.
He was for it. He was happy to see it.
And he wanted to sort of push it forward, if not explicitly, then behind the scenes.
Now, it turns out that this article, you know, is largely based on bogus reporting by Maggie Haberman and others.
We should know this.
I can't believe we keep falling for these frauds.
They tell us things and we go, ah!
And then we realize, wait a minute, why don't we go to the source himself?
And the McConnell people have not only in words denied that this is true, but more importantly in action.
And the action we're talking about here is Mitch McConnell basically saying that he's going to apply the break.
No impeachment trial in the Senate until, in effect, his last day, the 19th of January.
Now, I think here what frustrated so many of us about McConnell and about other Republicans in the same camp were like, what's up with Rubio?
What's up with Lindsey Graham?
By the way, I see in The Hill that Lindsey Graham has been calling Republicans, Republican colleagues.
And telling them not to vote to impeach Trump.
So this is kudos to Lindsey Graham.
I think it shows that the fear that some of the Trumpsters and MAGA types had, that we'd see mass desertions by the Republicans.
The Republicans are selling out the Trumpsters.
It's turning out not to be true.
Not only was it not true in the House, I don't think it's going to be true in the Senate.
There's been some speculation on whether which senators on the Republican side might vote for impeachment.
And apparently there are five or six who might.
Not that they will. I think probably Romney will.
But most of the other five, I don't even know if they will.
But I think what McConnell has done here is he sort of torpedoed impeachment.
And if he's done that, then in his own kind of McConnell way, he has come through for us.
And I won't be surprised if that's the case.
I think what McConnell is saying basically is this.
I'll punt impeachment to the end.
I'll then hand it over to Chuck Schumer.
And here's the problem for Chuck Schumer.
He can certainly go ahead with it.
He can have an impeachment trial.
He's probably going to lose because he can't get 20 Republicans if he gets five or six.
Even if he gets all five or six, it's not enough.
So then the Democrats, right at the outset, at the very time Biden wants to push his cabinet nominees through, he wants to announce his early agenda, he'll be able to do none of that.
All attention will be on the impeachment trial, and then the Democrats will lose in the end.
They will have fired a second shot, a kill shot at Trump, and they will have missed him again.
Or you may say grazed him a second time, and Trump will have the last laugh.
Sorry, morons.
You tried twice with justifications.
Stupider the second time than the first.
I gotcha.
You're not going to make it.
So I'm beginning to think that the Democrats will realize that they might be better off to let this matter die.
In other words, they've got their second impeachment.
That's all they're going to get.
And if they try to go for more, they will actually suffer a setback.
So that means that Mitch will have come through in a big way.
He will have spiked the ball.
He will have stopped the impeachment train.
He will have delivered, not in the way that Trump would have.
He's not a Trumpian figure in that sense.
But in his own Machiavellian way, I think Mitch does understand the language of power and when the time comes, he's willing to use it.
We'll be right back. One of the most striking features of the way in which the media and the left has been talking about the Capitol incursion is the whopping double standards that are used here.
Suddenly, riot has become a bad word.
It used to be a good word when the left was doing it.
Suddenly, force has become a bad word.
Suddenly, the lives of the police have become of ultimate importance.
Suddenly, it's law and order.
So this flagrant violation of double standards is something that's very difficult for us to swallow.
Let's compare, for example, what we saw in the Capitol, which is, by and large, nothing more violent than a window being broken.
Now, I realize that there were injuries, and I realize that a woman got shot in the neck, but that was one of the protesters.
She was shot by one of the Capitol police officers.
So the shooting was not by the protesters, it was of a protester.
And suddenly, protesters become a bad word.
Suddenly breaking the law has become a bad word.
So all of this means that we're dealing with people who are okay with it when it was coming from their side and are now not okay with it.
Just in case some of us have forgotten, I don't think we have, but just in case we have, let's refresh our memories with this clip.
Not everyone gathered here in Washington today came to celebrate President Trump's inauguration.
Protesters lined part of the parade route, and in some parts of the Capitol, there were confrontations with police.
And tomorrow here in Washington, a women's march and demonstrations planned across this country.
ABC's David Curley witnessed the protests firsthand.
The anger reaching a boiling point in the nation's capital after President Trump took the oath of office.
Police in riot gear facing off against the protesters just six blocks from the inaugural parade.
Unleashing pepper spray, concussion grenades, all to disperse the crowd.
Now, some people on the left can see that they are acting in a shameless and inconsistent way.
The images are too seared on our mind for them not to know that.
So they need to come up with some way to cover that up, to pretend like, oh, there's some important differences here that are being ignored.
And the phrase that they use to diffuse us exposing their double standards is called whataboutism.
So whataboutism here is the idea that when you are told, your side is told, that you did something wrong, you go, well, what about that?
And whataboutism is considered to be a sort of changing of the topic, a moving a way of responsibility from oneself onto someone or something else.
Essentially, whataboutism is distraction.
And so, for example, let's just say that there are repressive measures being used in America to suppress what communists are doing in this country.
And when those are pointed out, the people who are doing the repression say, well, yeah, but they do far worse things than the gulag.
That is whataboutism in that changing the topic, it's raising something that has no relevance to this country anyway.
And just because they do it over there doesn't mean it's okay to do it in a different way over here.
That's all true. So the problem with whataboutism is that it relies on an analogy, bringing up another subject that basically has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
That's why whataboutism is a sort of inappropriate way to talk.
And we're seeing here from the left...
A critique of us on the basis of whataboutism.
So here's a journalist called Todd Perry.
He goes, whataboutism is the last refuge for someone who can't admit they're wrong.
He says, stop equating Trump's Capitol Hill insurrection to Black Lives Matter protests.
So notice right there, even in that phrase, one's an insurrection, the other's just a protest.
And then you have Jeremy Peters in the New York Times.
He says that conservative responses are, quote, full of whataboutism, misdirection, and denial.
Now, the reason that this whole line of thinking is dumb is that whataboutism does not apply when you're comparing cases that are similar.
And so, for example, if I'm speeding on the highway...
And the cops stop me.
And then I get a $5,000 ticket.
It's not whataboutism for me to say, wait a minute.
Lots of other people speed and their tickets are $120.
Why am I getting a ticket that's 50 times what somebody else got for doing pretty much the same thing?
In other words, it's not whataboutism to raise the issue of equal justice under the law.
People who violate the law, who destroy property, which occurred in both cases, in fact, occurred far more.
The people who took over the Capitol didn't knock down the monuments.
They didn't set the place on fire.
They didn't attack the cops.
So there were some fights with the cops, and I believe there was one cop who was injured, although his family has said that the public circumstances were misreported.
Bottom line of it is, it's not whataboutism to demand in this country a single standard of justice that is applied equally to protesters and dissidents on the left.
Some Americans are not more equal than others.
We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored by MyPillow, a fantastic product that you should certainly check out.
These pillows, we use them in our house and they are great.
My wife Debbie claims she's never slept so well.
She's going through that sort of time of life and she was having a lot of trouble sleeping and then she got MyPillow and now she sleeps through the night peacefully.
She loves it. These pillows are regularly $69.98 for a queen-size pillow.
You can get it for a steep discount.
$29.98, that's $40 off.
The King pillows are just $5 more.
So go to MyPillow.com, click on the radio listener square, and just use the promo code Dinesh.
You'll also get discounts on other stuff.
MyPillow Giza Dream Bedsheets, the MyPillow Mattress, Topper, and MyPillow Towel Sets.
Or you can just call 800-876-0227 and use the promo code Dinesh.
I've been thinking about Trump in the context of all that's going on.
And I feel so bad for this guy.
My wife Debbie tweeted out, what they have done to this man is simply unconscionable.
And I think, how does a normal person survive something like this?
How do you get through it?
How do you listen to all these things that are said about you, these distortions, these lies?
Doesn't it crush your psyche?
I often talk to conservatives and Republicans and they go, man, if this was me, I can't take it.
I'd go into the fetal position under the table.
I'd be emotionally crushed.
I'd be a human wreck.
So, how does Trump survive this?
I want to suggest, based on my own experience, how I think he can and should.
And the answer is actually really simple.
Don't take this stupid stuff seriously.
Treat it as the joke that it truly is.
It's very easy when we're in the heat of a moment to think that that moment is defined by the kind of emotional penumbra around it because everyone is getting all worked up and jumping up and down and you're tempted to think, oh my god, my life will never be the same.
We felt that way during the first impeachment.
Now when we look back on it, think of the beauty of hindsight.
When we look at an event like that in the rearview mirror, it's like, what was that even all about?
Who cares? Trump made a phone call?
About what? About something that Biden really did?
Trump seems to have been, in retrospect, a master of understatement in that phone call.
So similarly here, it all seems like such a big deal.
All these people pompously marching around the House floor.
The Senate is deliberating.
Blah, blah, blah. This stuff is stupid!
Now, when my case was going on, I tried throughout it to sort of, and this seems weird to say, but to enjoy it.
And what I mean is I would listen to the stuff these people were saying, and inwardly I was laughing.
So the prosecutor, for example, by the way, who was this uptight woman, you know, her favorite word was, she called herself the government.
Kind of comical. She'd go, Your Honor, the government will prove.
The government insists.
The government takes the position.
I'm thinking, the government is you?
You know, here you are, you're a career prosecutor, you went to some second-rate law school, you're trying to move up in the system, you've become suddenly the government.
Who elected you? So, the bottom line, I could step back from this and laugh.
The government. And then even when I got to the confinement center, I was in with all these thugs and so on.
And initially, I guess I was intimidated for about 10 minutes.
But after that, I realized that, hey, you know what?
Even they can see that what's going on with me, I'm a little different in why I'm there.
And I had a very interesting exchange, more than once, by the way, with some of these hardened convicts, bad guys, in which we talked about what we did And I'd like you to see their reaction, which I recreated in my movie, Hillary's America.
Watch. I wonder what way of life got these guys here.
So what are you in for? Drug smuggling.
Armed robbery. Mass slaughter.
Murder. Got in a bar fight.
And I set him on fire.
What are you in here for?
A friend of mine was running for office and I gave her more than I was allowed to give.
LAUGHING...
That was good.
So they laughed and I laughed.
And the reason I was right to laugh and the reason I'm still laughing Is that they didn't get me.
You tried to get me, you stupid bastards, and you failed.
You didn't. You actually helped me.
You actually made my career bigger than it was before.
Thank you very much. And far from being wounded by the whole thing, I got a presidential pardon.
I was on the front page of every newspaper in the country leading the news.
And I've got all my rights back.
So it didn't work.
And it's not going to work with Trump either.
Whatever they say, whatever they do, whatever Trump's future, he has been an extremely consequential president.
He defined the debate almost every second that he was in office.
He would set almost the talking subject for the world with a tweet.
The election we just had was all about him on both sides.
Even the people who voted for Biden didn't really vote for Biden.
Who can vote for Biden? Even Jill Biden voted against Trump.
And I'd like to end this segment by reading from Teddy Roosevelt's speech, A Man in the Arena, because I think this applies to Trump.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who actually does strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement,
and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
We'll be right back.
In the wake of the takeover of the Capitol, there has been a massive effort on the part of the media to demonize not only the people who were in the Capitol, but also the people who went to the rally.
Even if they were on the outside, even if they didn't even know what was happening in the Capitol and had no part of it, there's an effort to say that they too are complicit.
And who else is complicit?
Everybody who voted for Trump.
The entire Trump movement, the so-called MAGA or Make America Great Again movement, all those guys enabled what happened, have enabled Trump just as he has enabled them.
I thought it'd be helpful to try to explore this concept of who is MAGA? Who are these Trumpsters?
And as it turns out, I've got someone to come on the show who knows a lot about this.
My daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill.
And it's her birthday today.
So welcome, Danielle, and happy birthday.
Cheers on turning 26.
Cheers. It seems like only yesterday you were three years old and playing with your Barbies and wow, how fast time goes.
Danielle is the author of a new book called The Choice.
The subtitle is The Abortion Divide in America.
Really the best book on abortion that's been published in many years and looks hard at a lot of the left-wing arguments about abortion and debunks them, defeats them.
But Daniel, you have also been on the board of Women for Trump.
You have been on the Trump bus.
You have also spoken at rallies.
You weren't in DC this time around, but you've been in DC before.
And so you have directly experienced, I would call it, the Trump phenomenon.
You've been part of it, but you've also observed it.
Now, I do want to point out that you're not a classic Trumpster in the sense that you were born in Virginia, you grew up in California, you went to Dartmouth, you now live in New York.
So, you are not the stereotypical working class voter that supposedly defines the Trump phenomenon.
But you have seen those people up close.
You've gotten to know them.
And I want to sort of very candidly discuss who these people are.
And I want to start by the people who were actually in the Capitol.
Now, do you believe that the people who broke into the Capitol...
Were all Trumpsters?
Or do you think that there was also some infiltration by left-wing or Antifa types?
I think there was definitely infiltration from Antifa and outsiders and people who were there who were not necessarily Trumpsters.
Now, I think a lot of the people who were in DC that weekend had nothing to do with the Capitol.
They didn't even know that people were doing that.
They didn't know that that was even going on.
But I think of the people that were in there, once it happened, a lot of them didn't even necessarily identify as Trumpsters.
But yes, there were some that were.
So I think it's more complicated.
Now, there clearly were Trumpsters in the building, and you can see that because they appear to have Trump attire, and they also appear to be doing sort of Trump-style, almost say mocking the system.
One guy was, for example, running off with Nancy Pelosi's podium and so on.
Let me ask you a question. What do you think motivated these people to go so far?
An ordinary American you'd think would know, listen, the Capitol is kind of sacrosanct.
It's supposed to be highly protected.
If I go in there, if I force my way in there, even if there's no police opposition, there could be Secret Service in there who will shoot me.
So people took a lot of risk in doing it.
Why do you think that they went to such an extreme?
Is it just because Trump conned them into something?
What was their real motive, as you understand it?
Yeah, well, I think a lot of Americans, not just some of those people, but a lot of people all around the country believe that the election was stolen.
And even if we debate it, that's great.
But I think that what they experienced was that there was never actually a genuine trial The Supreme Court decided not to take the case on this.
So they wanted things to be done legally.
And many of us were hoping for some kind of legal trial where all of the evidence could have been exposed.
But unfortunately, we were never given that day in court.
And so when people say, you know, we're the party of law and order, I think that then a lot of people on our side would say, well, if you stole the election, though, that's not really law and order.
So then what is expected of us?
Do we just fall into this system of Law and order, but it's a law and order where they're the only ones who can ever be in control.
They're ousting Trump and so on.
And of course, that doesn't mean that the actions of the Capitol are justified, but I think the thought has to be, well, then what do we do?
We hopefully can change the system so that there is more voter accountability and so on.
But how can people hope that that will happen if the legal roots are exhausted?
You texted me an article I'm holding in my hand.
It's a very sad article about one of the guys.
His name is Christopher Stanton, who is 53 years old.
He's got a Christopher Stanton, Georgia.
He's 53 years old, and he's got kids.
And he recently took his own life.
He committed suicide. It turns out he was one of the guys who was in the Capitol.
Now, he didn't do any vandalism that I can see.
But he was charged with trespassing and entering Capitol property against the will.
But interestingly, he faced a maximum penalty of a $1,000 fine and 180 days in jail.
So when I read this, I thought, how sad, however misguided and foolish this action.
Nevertheless, the charges the guy is facing aren't that severe.
Why would someone take their own life over something like this, which you would think you'd be able to live down?
Why do you think he might have done it?
Yeah, well, I think it's clear that in any other situation, if there was a misdemeanor or something similar, and that's what they were charged with, assuming that he was charged with something rather minor, If they were charged with that same thing in a different situation, I think it would be treated like that.
But he probably thought that this is going to be a political witch hunt.
This is going to be a situation where he's labeled a domestic terrorist, maybe not even legally, but socially, by the media, probably amongst everyone he works with, his friends and his family and so on.
So I think a lot of people know just the amount of demonization that the left turns to and Of course, I think that that led him to then take his own life.
So what you're really saying is that even apart from the law, the ability to make him into a pariah was so terrifying to him.
What they could do to his name and probably his family's reputation That that might have propelled him to do what he did.
I mean, how horrific that that would occur.
There's an article in Reuters about the fact that a lot of public employees, and this would apply to cops, school teachers, people who went to D.C. Now, these are not people who were in the Capitol.
These were just people who were in D.C. for the MAGA protest.
But because they are government employees, There are investigations of them, if they were in the military, if they're working, let's just say, in the public school system.
They talk, for example, about two Pennsylvania school teachers, one from Allentown and one from Susquehanna Township.
Who posted images of themselves at the rally in social media.
And then I'm reading, both have been placed under investigation according to local news reports.
So even though nothing has happened to them yet, the Allentown teacher actually has been suspended pending this investigation.
So what do you make of this effort to carry the, you may almost call it the prosecution, beyond the people who are directly culpable to now make it a crime, so to speak, or at least something that can cause you to get fired, just for showing up at a political rally to express your point of view?
What's happening? Right.
If you were just at a political rally, you had absolutely nothing to do with the Capitol.
You didn't go inside it.
You didn't go near it. You just showed up to a peaceful rally and were just there.
I think that that's absolutely horrible that businesses would do that to people like this.
But in a way, it's not shocking because so many businesses are unfortunately intimidated by the left.
Maybe they are leftist themselves or they're just afraid of the left and think that the image The blowback that they'll get maybe from a school from parents or from, you know, whoever it is that then they feel like they have to take these actions against someone who wasn't even involved in it.
And I think that this happens beyond businesses.
This happens amongst peers.
This happens in schools.
We've talked about before about campuses and what happens if you're a student.
So I think that All these situations just show how the left is really leveling up in terms of their demonization of Trumpsters, basically acting like every single Trump supporter all across America, all 74 or so million people who voted for Trump are basically just as bad as Trump and anything that the left wants to do to them,
they justify it. I mean, you had an experience in college, this obviously long precedes the occupation of the Capitol, where you were in a sorority.
You did nothing more than, I guess, they suspected you of being someone who might vote for Trump.
Tell us about that. What happened to you at Dartmouth?
Yeah, I was mostly involved in Christian organizations at Dartmouth.
I was leading women's Bible courses in an organization called Christian Union, and I was mostly focused on that.
But my senior year of school, I had tweeted, because I tweeted occasionally, that I voted for Trump, but the Lord is King of Kings, and politics ultimately passes away.
And that is what really triggered them to say, oh, you know, we didn't realize that Danielle was voting for Trump.
And so that's when then they proceeded to kind of You don't want to socially ostracize me and so on.
But I think that it just kind of shows that even if you don't storm the Capitol or whatever it is, even if you don't necessarily say something that's even that offensive, they take it as you're our enemy and we have to end you.
So in America, it's just gotten to the point where we're really facing a side that Isn't interested in compromising or having any unity with us.
They're not interested in getting to know our views or our perspective on this.
And even with the election, the integrity of the election, they're not interested in actually responding to our claims.
They're not interested in looking into them.
They just want to fact check you, suppress your voice, and make it so that if you want to say anything about that, you're banned on social media.
I want to ask you about, in pursuing this MAGA phenomenon, there's a movie on Netflix called Hillbilly Elegy.
It's kind of a startling movie because it shows characters that you don't normally see in movies.
It shows a window into American life that you rarely see depicted in magazines or in the media.
I want to give people a small peek into this movie, so here's a snippet from the trailer.
Don't look at that. Come on. Come on. Don't you look at me.
You look at me.
You let her get away with this every time.
I told you that I would do better.
You always say that. You're lying.
I always try.
You gotta think about these kids.
What do you think I've been thinking about since I was 18 years old, huh?
Never had a life where I wasn't thinking about the kids.
Daniel, what resemblance do you see between the world depicted in Hillbilly Elegy and the phenomenon of the working class Trumpsters?
Was that an accurate depiction of what they were like?
What did you get out of the movie?
What political message, if any, did you get out of that film?
In general, I think Trumpsters are actually pretty diverse.
They're not at all only white people, as the left likes to act.
They're white supremacists.
They're not just males.
They're not just a certain demographic or any of that.
I think that there are...
I mean, if anything, Trump actually picked up more women, more minorities, more people, all kinds of backgrounds.
And so I think that that characterization of Trump voters, which the left likes to act like, oh, this is just the Trump voter, you know, It's kind of inaccurate, but I think that the film showed a lot of what the left likes to ignore in terms of rural poverty and A lot of people who are really forgotten by the left.
The left acts like those people don't matter.
And I think that was something that, you know, the left was really interested in in 2016 about that phenomenon.
But since the movie came out, I think they went on to kind of demonize it and act like it was a horrible film because, you know, they didn't want to draw any attention to that again now that their vehemence in Trump has really escalated.
Daniel, thank you very much.
Great to have you on the show, thanks.
Thanks.
This episode of the Dinesh D'Souza podcast is sponsored by MyPillow.
I wanna thank Mike Lindell, the founder and CEO of MyPillow for sponsoring this podcast.
And Mike, you've got a lot of products, more than I even anticipated.
Debbie, my wife, just ordered me MyPillow pajamas.
I didn't even realize you had gotten into the pajama business, but we're waiting for a pair of navy blue pajamas that are on their way.
You have a range of fantastic products, MyPillow does.
Not just the pillow itself, which is unbelievably comfortable.
You can wash it.
It doesn't go flat. It's made in the USA. It's normally $69.98, but you can get a queen size pillow for $29.98 or a king size pillow for just $5 more.
So go to MyPillow.com, click on the radio listener square, use the promo code Dinesh.
As I say, there's pajamas, there's the Geezer Dream bedsheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, also MyPillow towel sets, or you can just call 1-800-876-0227.
Just remember to use promo code Dinesh.
This is the fourth episode of the Dinesh D'Souza podcast, and I really want to, well, first of all, tell you what it's been like for me.
It's my first week. It's a big change in the kind of stuff I do.
Um, I think I started out kind of a wee bit nervous, maybe a little tense.
Um, I was sort of giving a speech, if you will, maybe at the beginning, and I'm trying to learn to kick back and relax to make the podcast more conversational.
Just sort of, rather than let you hear my conclusions, let you just see my kind of mind working, uh, working, you may say in real time on the podcast itself.
Uh, I only have guests occasionally, but I want to have guests that really throw windows of light into the topics I'm talking about.
I don't care if they're famous or not.
And I want the podcast to be something that goes beyond just affirming what you believe.
I want it to be something that tells you stuff you don't know gives you insights where you go man I never thought of that directs you to books and ideas that you may want to check out for yourself.
It's been really fun for me.
I want you to if you like what you hear and what you see if you're hearing this podcast please rate my podcast on Apple if you'll give me a five star rating that would be really awesome help me get the word out if you're watching it on video the podcast is on both YouTube and Rumble also on the Salem platform which is called Salem now Salem now.com I want to thank the Salem media company for co-sponsoring being part of this podcast with
We're undertaking a real wonderful voyage together, and I'm looking forward to many podcasts to come.
▲
Export Selection