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Jan. 15, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:20
ILLIBERAL AMERICA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep. 5
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Coming up today, how impeachment died.
Also, illiberal America, how the intolerance of the campus spread into the larger culture.
And finally, Twitter, the true confessions of Jack the Ripper.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Impeachment is a dead man walking.
Thank you.
It's now become part of, you may say, The Walking Dead.
Now, that's not obvious because if you read the news, it seems like it's all about impeachment.
Oh, wow, the House has impeached Trump.
It's next moving to the Senate.
But the reality is that the whole complexion of this has changed almost overnight.
It's changed in response to a better understanding of what happened.
It's changed in response to a better understanding of the political realities on the ground.
And it's changed also in response to a recognition of the legal problems with this continuing impeachment.
So let's start with the facts of the matter.
Let's call it the moral case for impeachment.
It's completely collapsed.
Why? One of the most prominent guys just arrested for spearheading The capital takeover, the capital incursion, is an Antifa guy.
This guy was seen on social media talking about ripping Trump out of office.
He's a Black Lives Matter guy.
He's an Antifa guy.
He self-describes himself as an insurgent.
So, this is the guy on the left.
This was, by the way, something that conservatives allege from the beginning.
The media kind of scorned it.
Once again, the media is wrong.
Conservatives 1, media 0.
The second fact that's emerged is that this whole thing was planned.
Not only was it planned, the FBI knew about it before.
They had wind of it.
Why they didn't stop it is another matter, which perhaps we will find out eventually.
But for now, the simple fact that this was orchestrated, this was planned, obviously means that Trump couldn't have incited it.
This was something that was in the works.
Now, Finally, it's really clear that Trump didn't incite really anything.
Trump's speech, if you step back for a moment and read it again with a little bit of hindsight, it's political boilerplate.
It's something Trump could have said two years ago.
Nobody would have batted an eyelid.
If you want real incitement...
You've got to listen to the rhetoric of the left, which is far more incendiary than anything that Trump has said.
Let me give you a couple examples.
Do you remember the Kavanaugh hearings?
Do you remember Chuck Schumer standing out there in public and saying this?
He's talking to a crowd.
He's talking and he's addressing Kavanaugh and Gorsuch by name.
He goes, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.
You won't know what hit you.
Now, if that's not a threat, what is?
Or let's consider Kamala Harris.
She's talking about the violent protests, the arson, the burnings, the beatings, the attacks on the cops.
And she goes, these protests are going to continue.
They're not going to stop.
And they shouldn't stop.
I don't think I need to play the video.
It's been all over social media.
That's Kamala Harris. You can look it up yourself.
That's incitement. Joe Biden talking about Trump.
Joe Biden says, in effect, that he'd like to take Trump behind the gym that he grew up with as a kid and, quote, beat the hell, end quote, out of him.
That's Biden. Now, has Trump said anything equivalent about Biden?
No. But if you want to talk about the rhetoric of violence, the incitement of violence, the appeal to violence, here it is in black and white, you might say.
So as we think about this, we realize that this impeachment was, from the beginning, a hoax and a scam and a joke, which is probably the best description of it.
Now, Republicans are figuring this out, too.
They're recognizing that there is no there there.
There's no real culpability on Trump's part.
And moreover, they're recognizing that the whole Republican base is on Trump's side.
The overwhelming number of Republicans see what's going on, and any Republican who votes against this Trump is putting his career in mortal danger.
It's almost certain that the 10 or so Republicans who voted against Trump in the House will be primaried, will be challenged the next time around.
And I think the support for impeachment among Republicans in the Senate is melting as we speak.
There is no way that they're going to get 20 votes.
And finally, impeachment is legally dead.
Why? Because if you read the Constitution, And here is a judge who has read it very carefully.
This is a very interesting article in the Washington Post.
It's by J. Michael Luddig, a very respected former judge.
And he says very clearly that the plain text of the Constitution, that's a quote, makes it very obvious that any impeachment of Trump after he leaves office would be unconstitutional.
And he says that although the Constitution does disqualify A president who has been constitutionally impeached by both the House and the Senate can't run again?
Obviously, that does not apply to an unconstitutional impeachment, which means, I don't know if he wants to, but it means that Trump can run again.
So, impeachment, it may be too early to bury it, but right now, it's a walking corpse.
I'll be right back. Impeachment might be a dead horse, but the left is trying to get whatever it can out of this whole business.
In fact, I would say that the whole capital incursion has become for them their Reichstag fire event.
What do I mean by this?
In February of 1933, the German parliament, the Reichstag, was set on fire.
And when it happened, the Nazis took full advantage of it.
First of all, they used the incident To delegitimize the opposition.
They basically said that the opposition is illegitimate.
These people are traitors and they need to be treated not as our political opponents or adversaries, but rather as adversaries of the country.
They've committed treason.
They're, in effect, domestic terrorists.
So this was the exploitation of this Reichstag event for shutting down the opposition, for creating, you may say, a one-party state.
Second, the Nazis used the Reichstag fire to shut down dissent, to close newspapers, to basically end free expression in Germany.
Now, they did this through the instrument of the state, but nevertheless, the two casualties of the Reichstag fire were A, genuine political opposition and B, genuine free speech.
Now, doesn't all of this sound chillingly familiar?
Historians have been looking at the Reichstag fire.
It was supposedly done by a Hungarian communist named Marinus van der Luby.
But to this day, historians aren't sure if the Nazis were part of it, if they actually helped set the fire in order to stage the incident for their own political gain.
Wow. And with the arrest of this Antifa guy in the capital occupation, you can see the parallel here.
Moreover, the left is trying to make hay out of this.
And they're trying, ultimately, here's what they're doing.
They're taking a very close election in which, well, let's leave aside the issue of fraud.
It was an election that was essentially a kind of a draw.
And what I mean by that is the Senate, 50-50.
Republicans lost a couple of seats.
The House, Republicans gain about 10 seats.
So the House is now extremely close.
The presidential election, however you look at it, pretty close.
So the bottom line of it, the Supreme Court is in Republican hands.
So there's no question here.
This was not a rout. This wasn't a wipeout.
This wasn't a case where there was a mandate for the left and for the Democrats.
But... What the left is trying to do is achieve, through Reichstag manipulation, a political victory that it couldn't win at the ballot box.
They're trying to get away with stuff, namely, one, completely delegitimizing the opposition.
Making Republicans ultimately into domestic terrorists.
Not just the people who went into the Capitol, but even the people who went to D.C. Not just the people who went into D.C., but even the people who voted for Trump.
Not just the people who voted for Trump, but anybody who's a Republican or a Patriot or a conservative.
Now, recently, Don Lemon was on CNN. Basically saying that if you voted for Trump, you better be really careful because you're on the side that is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.
And Joy Reid, around the same time, said that in her office, the talk is about, quote, the debathification of the Republican Party.
An allusion to the 2003 debaathification in Iraq.
Now, one is tempted to just start screaming when you hear this kind of rhetoric.
It drives our side nuts.
But I think we have to resist that.
It's true. This is very incendiary rhetoric.
In no country that is not moving towards civil strife is this kind of language used to describe fellow citizens normal.
But... What's going on here?
First of all, let's deal with this Ku Klux Klan business because it comes up all the time.
Oh, the Ku Klux Klan voted for Trump, Dinesh!
Why is the Klan on your side?
First of all, I say, prove it.
Prove it. Prove to me that the skinheads and the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan voted for Trump.
If your sole proof is, here's a picture of three guys in Klan outfits waving an American flag or wearing a Trump sign, that's not called proof.
Proof is evidence, and evidence requires some empirical support.
So show me the voter evidence.
Show me the survey evidence.
Show me the actual studies of members of the Klan and the skinheads and the neo-Nazi party to show who they voted for.
This evidence simply does not exist.
Let me turn to Joy Reid.
First of all, debathification, really?
It is widely acknowledged today that deba'atification was a massive failure in Iraq.
Why? Because essentially all these people who were part of the Ba'ath party, who were working in Iraq from school teachers to postmasters, were all fired at one time. Fired without any kind of trial, without any kind of scrutiny of their actual participation in the regime.
And the effect was to greatly increase political instability. In fact, was to set the stage for continuing and deep-rooted ethnic and political strife that continues to this very day. Radical Islam was greatly strengthened by common consensus by de-Ba'athification.
So I don't expect Joy Reid to know any of this.
For her, it's a big word.
De-bottification! Wow!
Joy Reid is a very educated person.
Now, the other thing to remember is, let's apply the analogy here at home.
What is Joy Reid saying? Here's what she's saying.
She wants the political opposition.
The Republicans. To be treated like Saddam's Ba'at party.
She's saying she wants, in effect, if the analogy is meaningful at all, she wants every Republican who occupies any public office throughout the country, federal, state, or local, to be removed.
That's what debathification did.
It fired every Republican school teacher.
It would mean firing every Republican postmaster or post office worker.
Fire every Republican who works in the federal government.
So, again...
Joy Reid is not a serious person, so it strains credulity to keep pushing these analogies.
But I think what we have to do in an age of craziness is ground everything in actual scrutiny.
You want to talk about depotification?
Tell us what it means, Joy.
What exactly do you want to do to us?
Please explain. What you want to do, and what these people want to do, is they want a one-party state.
This is not to say they don't want an opposition.
They want a token opposition.
They want Republicans where they get to say what kind of Republican is okay.
Liz Cheney, check.
Mitt Romney, check.
They want Republicans that real Republicans don't care for.
They want to create a fictitious or staged opposition, kind of like they have in Iran or Venezuela, an opposition that makes certain types of noises but doesn't really do anything.
Sorry, Joy. Sorry, Don Lemon.
We're not going to do it.
The Republican Party is holding firm.
We really know what's going on.
And the bottom line of it is, we're not going to fall for it.
We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored by MyPillow, the incredibly successful company created by the remarkable and one-of-a-kind Mike Lindell.
Now, recently I had a conversation with Mike Lindell and I'd like to show you just a glimpse of it because it gives you a sense of the overflowing exuberance of this guy.
Here we go. Who came up with the idea for MyPillow?
I did. My daughter came upstairs, one of my daughters, she says, what are you doing?
I said, I'm going to invent this pillow.
It's going to change the world. It's going to be called MyPillow.
And she grabbed her glass of water and she said, that's really random, Dad.
Went back downstairs. So, if you want to be part of this world-changing event, you need to get on board with MyPillow.
And that means... You should go to mypillow.com.
You should go to the radio listener square and use the promo code Dinesh.
Here's the cool thing.
You can get a queen-size pillow for $29.98, and that's $40 off the regular price.
King-size pillows are only $5 more.
And Mike has all kinds of stuff.
Not just pillows. He has pajamas.
He has the Geezer Dream bed sheets.
He's got the MyPillow mattress topper.
He's got MyPillow towel sets.
This guy is becoming a veritable domestic industry all by himself.
And he pays such careful attention to his products.
Let me make sure that they are really good.
Everything that Mike does, he does really well.
Once again, go to MyPillow.com, go to the radio listener square, and use promo code Dinesh.
Or if you like, you can call 1-800-876-0227 and use promo code Dinesh.
In 1991, I published my first trade book, and it was called Illiberal Education.
This is what it looks like.
Illiberal Education.
The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus.
This book is widely credited with inventing the phrase political correctness.
But I didn't actually coin the phrase.
I heard it on the campus.
I used it in the book.
A New York Times review of the book was called The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct by Richard Bernstein.
And that's what made that phrase famous.
That's what brought that phrase into popular culture.
Later, Bill Maher had a show about it called Politically Incorrect.
Amusingly enough, I was on the last episode of that show with Bill Maher, and he got fired for making some politically incorrect remarks.
Irony of ironies.
Weirdly, he tried to blame those remarks on me, even though what he said was completely different than what I said.
This is a story I'll tell another time.
Where I'm going with this is that illiberal education was an expose of a rising tide of illiberalism on the liberal campus.
A rising tide of intolerance.
Many campuses were adopting speech codes that outlawed not only things like hate speech, but anything offensive, anything that made people uncomfortable.
In one case, there was a speech code that outlawed misdirected or inappropriately directed laughter.
And I was thinking about that recently because what's happened really in our society is that the intolerance of the campus has metastasized into the larger society.
We're now seeing it all over the place.
Shutdowns of speech.
In effect, what is digital censorship if not a certain kind of a national speech code?
A speech code in this case that is moderated, not by a bunch of campus deans, But by a handful of digital moguls, like the guy at Google and the guy at Facebook and the guy at Twitter, working in coordination with each other.
So, what is it that they are trying to police?
I think that this phrase, misdirected or inappropriately directed laughter, is the key to it.
Because we think that they're trying to police debate.
They don't want dissent.
They don't want argument. But the truth of it is, if they had argument, they could ignore us.
Because we don't have the big megaphones they do.
Argument's not what they're afraid of.
I would suggest that what they're really afraid of, more than anything else, is they're afraid of ridicule.
They're afraid that we will laugh our heads off at what complete frauds and fools they are.
And the reason that they're afraid of that is they know that they're frauds.
They know that. That's why they're so thin-skinned about it.
They go around preening and putting on airs, but they know that behind this is a very fragile ego.
Let me give a couple of examples of what I mean.
Here's a tweet by Hillary Clinton.
Her name is Dr.
Jill Biden. Get used to it.
So what Hillary's getting at here is let's all start calling her Jill Biden, Dr.
Jill Biden. Now Jill Biden has been a community college school instructor.
She's not a medical doctor.
So what's the point of this Dr.
Jill Biden? Well, obviously it is to put on airs, to act like you're some sort of a refined intellectual or even that you've got medical credentials, even though you obviously don't.
It's a form of...
People who have real achievement don't do this kind of thing.
You'll never hear, you know, I'm Dr.
Albert Einstein. Hey, that's Dr.
Stephen Hawking to you.
No. Even people who are PhDs but are geniuses in their field let their achievements speak for themselves.
They don't need this doctor nonsense.
Now, Chris Wallace was recently on Fox News, and he said, Well, what's wrong with it?
We have Dr. Henry Kissinger.
We have Dr.
Martin Luther King. So why shouldn't Jill Biden be doctor?
Now, first of all, with Henry Kissinger, I think you're dealing with the weird European thing.
Europeans love credentials.
When you meet some European guy, he hands you his card.
It's always like, you know, Gunter Rosenstein, B-A-M-A, a PhD, A-S-S-H-O-L-E. You know, this whole thing about these are my credentials.
This is what makes me an important person.
It's a European thing. Let's set it aside.
With Henry Kissinger, it was also the accent.
He had an accent going, you know, I think he still has it, into his 80s and 90s.
Martin Luther King, he didn't need the doctor.
Here's a guy of world-changing importance.
Here's a guy who can stand on the great cause that he associated himself with.
The doctor is unnecessary.
There's no reason, by the way, for people who go to theology schools and get divinity degrees to go around calling themselves doctor.
That applies to Martin Luther King.
It applies to Dr. Creflo Dollar and every other televangelist who uses the same title.
Ridicule. It's a powerful weapon.
Now let's turn from Jill Biden to Barack Obama, another guy who has a very thin skin.
He's one of the biggest narcissists on the planet.
And a lot of my troubles with the Obama administration had to do with ridicule.
The background of this is that Obama was prancing around the country, basically saying, We are our brother's keeper.
This was his left-wing, you know, mantra.
And the guy had the gall in 2014 to start an organization or to become involved with an organization called We Are Our Brother's Keeper.
So the underlying thing here is we owe a duty to our fellow man because of the biblical idea.
We are our brother's keeper, a phrase clearly lifted from the story of Cain and Abel.
Here's a tiny snippet from my film, 2016 Obama's America, that exposes Obama's hypocrisy.
During the campaign, I was surfing the web.
I saw a story, I believe on CNN, that Obama's half-brother, George Obama, was living in Nairobi in a hut.
And I thought, this has got to be some kind of a joke.
But I click on the story and there's a picture.
And it looks like something, you know, out of Slumdog Millionaire.
A kid in his 20s standing with his arms outstretched and the arms reflect the size of the hut.
That's it. As you know, during the time of the election there were some news reports in CNN and elsewhere.
The theme of the articles was that Obama had not done anything to help you.
Recently, President Obama spoke, and he was quoting from the famous story of Cain and Abel, that we are brother's keeper.
Now, my point is, you are his brother.
Has he been your keeper?
Go ask him. A couple of years after my movie came out, I was sitting in my office, and I get a phone call, and I look at the phone, and it says, from Kenya.
I'm like, Kenya? It was George Obama.
His child was seriously ill and he said, Dinesh, would it be possible to wire me a thousand dollars?
And I said, George, I said, you are the half-brother of the most powerful man in the world.
Isn't there somebody else you can call?
And George said, no.
And so I said, okay.
I walked down to The bank and I wired him a thousand dollars, but I mentioned this only because it shows what a flagrant hypocrite Barack Obama is.
This guy is a fraud to the core.
Everything that he does in public is for show.
In reality, he lives a lifestyle of a billionaire.
And all his rhetoric about being our brother's keeper applies to other people, but not to him.
So what we have in our society is we have a whole group of people.
These are self-styled social justice warriors, but their social justice principles don't apply to themselves.
They talk about white privilege and making room for minorities.
But if you say to this guy, will you give up your job?
And on the condition that it's given to a minority, they're like, oh no, I'm not doing it.
Will you give up your position at Princeton to make room for a Latino or a black guy to take your place?
No. Their idea is I'm happy to sacrifice some other guy so I can look like I'm a good guy.
So this is the essence of the left.
It's a combination of stupidity, incompetence, preening, posturing, and fraud.
And you might say, well, wait a minute, Dinesh.
Didn't all these people, Michelle Obama, didn't she go to Princeton?
Didn't Barack Obama go to Columbia, Harvard Law School?
And my answer to that is two words.
Affirmative action. On another case of this podcast, I'm going to be reading from Michelle Obama's thesis to illustrate...
The embarrassment, the intellectual embarrassment of a Michelle Obama graduating from Princeton.
It's not just something that shows you a lot about Michelle, it shows you a lot about Princeton and what these universities have now become.
Bottom line. There is a pressing need for us not to submit to this kind of bullying, to speak up and to use not only refutation, not just whining complaint, but merciless expose and ridicule, which I want to suggest that I specialize in and so does this podcast.
And if you hang with me, you'll be getting a lot more of it.
Enjoy. We'll be right back.
The permanent suspension of Donald Trump from Twitter was clearly a kind of cultural event.
It must have actually been traumatic for Trump.
Why? Because he lived on Twitter.
I mean, it was part of his identity.
It was the way he disclosed his personality to America.
And of course, it was his way of getting around the media.
That's what made his Twitter so powerful.
I actually think Trump was one of the funniest and most effective tweeters of all time when people would say to me, oh, Dinesh, please find a way to take away his Twitter.
A congressman would say this to me.
I'd be like, take away his Twitter?
And do what? Give it to you? What would you do with it?
You wouldn't have the slightest idea.
So Trump, I'm sure, took this as a heavy blow.
Now, who suspended Trump on Twitter?
You might think the answer is, well, we all know Jack Dorsey.
But in reality, the true architect of this was apparently a woman named Vijaya Gade, an Indian woman, a child of Indian parents who moved to America in the 1970s, early 80s.
A woman who went to Cornell and New York University Law School and then went off to Silicon Valley.
Now, Vijaya Ghade is probably part of the great Indian diaspora.
These are very conservative Indian families that have come to America with conservative values.
If you look at the way they behave, it's like to the right of Pat Robertson.
So then you ask, how do these people become dyed-in-the-wool leftists?
How do they absorb an ideology that would seem so alien to the way they were raised and to what they believe and what they think?
I think the answer to this question is very simple.
What happens to these Asian Americans who go to elite schools and plant themselves in progressive cities like San Francisco or Silicon Valley is they assimilate to progressive culture.
In other words, they want to become American, and becoming American for them means assimilating to the culture of Yale, or the culture of Cornell, or the culture of San Francisco.
Now, when they do this, they have to become artificial people.
What I mean by that is they have to come up with made-up stories About all the great gender discrimination that they suffered and how they're victims of racism from start to finish.
And many of these stories are either laid on thick, exaggerated, or made up out of whole cloth.
I was watching an interview that Vijay Agade gave back at her alma mater, NYU Law School, and it contains this remarkable anecdote about her father, Having to have a meeting with a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Watch. My parents and I immigrated to this country in the 70s.
I grew up in a small town in Texas on the Gulf Coast near the border of Louisiana.
It was a very challenging location for an immigrant family.
And, you know, my parents went through quite a bit to be a part of that community.
I've told this story before.
I try not to get emotional, but it's a very hard story.
My dad had a master's degree, but he couldn't find work.
He took a job at the time selling insurance door-to-door and collecting premiums door-to-door.
He wasn't even allowed to have that job until he went to the local leader of the KKK and asked permission because his company and his boss feared for his safety as a person of color walking around in white communities and knocking on doors.
And my dad tells this story, but it was a very pragmatic, practical decision for him to have to do that.
He had no choice. He had to feed his family.
Now, I call bullshit on this one.
My reaction is that this is not, in fact, true.
I can't believe it.
It makes no sense to me.
Okay, Vijay Agade, if you want to keep telling this story, here's what I suggest.
Give me the name of your father if he's still around.
Give me the name of this so-called KKK leader that your father had this session with to get his endorsement.
And I will verify the story and give the result, whatever it is, here on this show.
The reason I don't believe it is when I hear stories about things that rub me the wrong way, I try to create a mental picture of what must have happened.
And so here is my imaginative rendition of the meeting of Vijaya Ghade's father and the leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ding dong! Who the hell are you?
I am Mr. Gade.
What are you doing here?
I am here to seek your endorsement.
Are you some kind of Italian?
No, I am actually Indian.
What tribe?
No, no, no.
I am Asian Indian.
I am from India. Do you know what we do with people like you?
I have heard some very troubling stories.
Well, what the hell do you want?
I would like to seek your endorsement.
For what? Well, I would like to sell insurance in this community, and I am informed that your endorsement will enable me to do that unimpeded.
I don't know what the hell you just said, but listen, buddy, you go do it.
Let me just give you one piece of advice.
Wear a Confederate hat.
Oh, that will be absolutely no problem.
I like hats.
Well, get the hell out of here.
And then, when Mr.
Gotti leaves, a voice from the back room to the Ku Klux Klan leader.
Hey Jasper, who was that out there?
Mildred, you won't believe what the tide just brought in.
Well, that's my skit.
And as you can see, it's a little far-fetched.
Bottom line, what we're seeing here is this minority woman, Vijaya Ghade, becoming part of a vicious hit job on Trump, conducted in collaboration with her very strange boss, Jack Dorsey.
We'll be talking about him next.
We'll be right back. There is no bigger symbol of illiberal America.
than internet and digital censorship.
And we're not talking about censorship by one entity, but I would call it coordinated censorship.
Censorship by collusion.
Censorship in which Twitter does something because Facebook did something, because Google did something, and then other companies like Amazon will jump in.
It's almost like a bunch of bullies all jumping in to throw blows at the same guy.
And one of the head bullies Is Jack Dorsey at Twitter.
Now, recently, Jack Dorsey, in a very strange set of tweets, appeared to be doing some rather odd backpedaling and some rather odd soul-searching.
So let me read a couple of his tweets.
I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban real Donald Trump from Twitter or how we got here.
After a clear warning we take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had.
Was this correct?
He kind of puts out there.
Was this correct? As if he's seeking popular referendum for what he already did.
Here's another one, which almost seems to call his own actions into question.
Having to take these actions fragment, he means fragments, the public conversation.
They divide us.
They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning.
And sets a precedent, he means they set a precedent, I feel is dangerous.
The power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.
Wow. Is Jack really stepping back and applying some introspection?
Did this all come out from his long walk on the beach with Sean Penn, the man that my wife Debbie called Sean Pendejo, Sean the stupid in Spanish?
Jack appears here to be open to other points of view.
He appears to be someone who is stepping outside himself and sort of examining his own actions.
And I'm tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I'm tempted to say to him, Jack, listen, don't just hang around with Sean Penn.
Don't just hang around with freaks like yourself.
I realize that it's comfortable for you to do it that way, but if you really want to have and hear different points of view, Why don't you hang out with people who have real families?
Hang out with people who actually work real jobs?
Hang out with normal people?
Widen your perspective, truly.
Now, Then I see, just yesterday I believe it was, that Project Veritas released a series of videos on Jack, one very telling one, in which you see a very different Jack.
It's almost like you've got the public Jack, he's a head-scratcher, he's trying to figure out what he's really doing, and then you see him behind the scenes, you hear him in a sense on candid camera, and here he's basically saying, oh yeah, you know...
We're not just focused on one account, Trump.
Kind of like, we got that guy.
But there's a lot more of this to come.
In other words, we're ready to knife a whole bunch of other people.
We're not going to stop. We're hitting our groove here.
So this is almost like the CEO who's in the public relations conference.
Or the politician.
And then the moment that the cameras go off, he's in the back room, he's cutting deals, cash is changing hands.
So you begin to see the real Jack.
And the real Jack is a real Jack.
So what's going on here is that Twitter, I think, is trying to save face.
Why? They're trying to save face because there is a movement building against them that they are only now beginning to see.
First of all, where is that movement coming from?
Let me tell you this. It's not coming from Lindsey Graham.
Here's Lindsey Graham tweeting...
A few days ago.
I'm more determined than ever to strip Section 230 protections from big tech that let them be immune from lawsuits.
He's more determined than ever.
Now, when Lindsey Graham had the ability to do this, when Republicans had the House, Republicans had the Senate, he didn't do it.
Now that he's going to be out of power, where the Democrats control the House and the Senate and the presidency, now Lindsey Graham's really going to be on the case.
I think you can see why there are so many people who find this a little hard to swallow.
They find it not only unbelievable, but insulting to hear this kind of rhetoric.
It's like, do you take us to be...
You think we were born yesterday?
I like Lindsey Graham.
I think he came through on Kavanaugh.
He has a feisty personality at times, but it's this side of him that makes me just go white with rage.
Now... The good news is not coming from Lindsey Graham.
I read that...
This is an article in AP News.
That Manuel Lopez Obrador, the president of Mexico, is assembling an international coalition, includes Angela Merkel from Germany, many other countries, mobilizing globally against internet censorship in the United States.
Why? Because they don't want it to go global.
They don't want Twitter deciding what you can hear when the German elections are going on.
In Uganda, they already banned social media for exactly this reason.
Why? Because psycho Jack and psycho Mark Zuckerberg were jumping in and banning people in Uganda, banning politicians, banning people that they basically decided.
And who gives them the right to decide what should be talked about in Uganda?
What kind of Yankee arrogance is this?
And so the world is basically starting to get a little pissed off.
Why? Because they don't want to be pissed on.
Because they want to step in and say, we're not going to allow this to happen over here.
I'm quite sure that Modi in India doesn't want Zuckerberg and Dorsey deciding what kind of debate occurs in New Delhi or Calcutta or Bombay.
So we have a remarkable phenomenon here, which is normally it's America that teaches the world.
Normally America leads the world.
But it may be that in starting to put a brake on digital censorship, It is the world, and this will come as a relief to me for one, that leads America.
We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored by MyPillow.
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I'm joined in this segment by my wife, Debbie, and we are going to be discussing Hollywood.
In other words, progressive or liberal culture, which extends beyond the media and beyond politics.
It extends all the way into digital media, but it also extends into the world of entertainment.
And this is where the left is really dominant.
They have virtually, you may almost say, a monoculture.
It's not just enough to understand this culture.
It's also important for us to respond intelligently to it.
And I don't believe just complaining about it is going to be sufficient.
It's kind of like complaining about the media.
The media does this, the media does that.
Well, first of all, there isn't a singular media.
There are multiple media organizations.
There are people who work in media.
And when we say the media, what we really mean is that they've got more than we do.
They've got a bigger side than we do.
And the same is true in Hollywood.
They've got a huge side.
We've got almost no side.
They make all the movies.
We make almost none.
Now, we have, with Debbie and me together, partnering on making political documentaries.
But the documentary is not the gold standard of Hollywood.
The feature film is.
And we want to talk a little bit about Hollywood in general, but also about our attempt, our first attempt, to step beyond documentaries into the world of feature films and compete where Hollywood thinks it's invincible.
We think that this is a way not just to criticize Hollywood, but to beat them at their own game.
Now, the culture of Hollywood is very insular.
It's very narrow. And Debbie, you have, in the last few years, we have encountered this culture kind of from the inside.
And we've seen how insular and almost parochial it is and how it tries to drive outsiders out.
What's your take on how conservatives can sort of start to make their way into Hollywood?
Well, I mean, I think, you know, first of all, Hollywood is extremely hypocritical because, as you know, they have moved towards making sure that they have minorities in movies, sometimes more minorities than non-minorities, and so they're trying to be very fair about it.
They are not fair about the thought, you know...
The diversity of ideas.
Diversity of ideas. They're just not, they're not there.
They don't like conservatives.
Unfortunately, a lot of actors in Hollywood have either decided not to say that they're conservative and they go kind of underground, or they say they're conservative and then they never work again.
I mean, this organization that they have in Hollywood, literally people show up in disguise or they don't release publicly the names of who belong.
And so think about it. We essentially have a blacklist in Hollywood, which if you want to be a producer.
Exactly. What I think is that, in a way, this is bad for us, but it's also bad for them.
Because one of the casualties of this kind of narrow-mindedness is not only does it blind you to a whole part of the world that you know nothing about, that you can see only in stereotypes, but it even takes something that relies on a little bit of pushing the envelope, namely comedy.
And it just kills it dead.
Dead. And I know how much you love comedy and you love comedians.
And the more, like, you know, out there they are, the more they say that really, you know, is politically incorrect.
Well, it's only because comedy relies on taboo.
It speaks feelings that people have that they can't express.
Now, here's a clip we want to show you of Jerry Seinfeld.
Talking about how on the campus and many other places, essentially comedy is dying in America.
Well, I will say comedy, it's interesting.
Comedy is, I do think, is supposed to push the line, push towards the line as the medium.
There are more people now who will let you know if they think you went over the line than ever before.
Don't I know it? I mean, you have to feel the same way about comedy.
Yeah, but they keep moving the lines in for no reason.
Right. I do this joke about...
The way people need to justify their cell phone.
I need to have it with me because people are so important.
You know I said well, they don't seem very important the way you scroll through them like a gay French King Well, that's very offensive to the gay French king yeah I did this line recently in front of an audience.
Comedy is where you can kind of feel like an opinion.
And they thought, what do you mean gay?
What are you talking about gay? What are you saying gay?
What are you doing? What do you mean?
You know? And I thought, are you kidding me?
I mean, we can't even...
Now, I really commend Jerry Seinfeld for speaking out on this.
And yet, when he says that it's sort of incomprehensible that this sort of gay issue would be so sensitive, we've actually seen, and one of our, a guy we interview in the movie Trump Card, is Isaiah Washington.
Say who Isaiah Washington is.
So, Isaiah Washington is an actor, a Hollywood actor, who was in a show, Grey's Anatomy, that I know everybody knows what Grey's Anatomy is, the doctor show.
And he played Dr.
Burke. And my 21-year-old daughter loved watching him.
She loved Dr. Burke. So, he was a mainstream guy, mainstream actor on Grey's Anatomy.
He makes the very insightful point, I think, in Trunk Card.
A movie, by the way, that's in your home.
You can watch it on all kinds of platforms.
And trunkcardthemovie.com is the website.
It's a movie that's more relevant than ever.
In any case, Isaiah Washington says that one of the sort of...
One of the secret drivers of left-wing politics in Hollywood is what he calls the revenge of the hurt.
And what he means is that there are a lot of guys, he says, who were gay or they were different.
They might have grown up in conservative America, but they felt that they didn't belong or they were maybe treated badly by their parents or their pastors or whoever.
And so they fled to Hollywood and their idea was huge.
Here, anything goes.
Here, there are no moral rules.
There are no lines. Here, I can be myself.
And so, a lot of the politics of Hollywood, it's almost the politics that arises out of the grievances of sexual orientation in this case.
But it makes the politics particularly, I think, personal and bitter and vengeful.
And that's what makes it a really unpleasant place to be.
I'm glad we don't live there. Me too.
And I'm glad that we can make movies and not have to live there.
Because it's not a really good place to be for people like us.
This is our first feature film.
It's called Infidel.
It's not a niche movie.
It's not really a, quote, Christian movie per se.
It's not a right-wing movie per se.
It's a political thriller about a patriotic Christian guy who gets entrapped in the politics of radical Islam.
Tell a little bit about how the movie came about and why we, who have been in the political world, decided to make not a documentary but a feature film.
Yeah, so one of our trips to India, you know, the plane ride is very long, so we get to talk about all kinds of things, and we concocted this story on an airplane going to India.
And we thought it would be really cool to have an actual movie that depicted real events that are happening in our world right now without those barriers of having the terrorist only be a Russian, right?
We're like, you know, we need to do it reflecting what's actually happening in real life.
And we do know that there are people that go to Iran and get put in prison in Iran and are never seen again.
We know that happens.
So we wanted to do a story that depicted that.
And so it was really kind of a cool thing because we were just jotting down names of actors that we thought would be really amazing to play the lead role.
And I told you, I said, I would love to see Jim Caviezel play the lead role.
And that was kind of an idea, kind of a, you know, a wish list kind of thing.
Well, we went on to find a really talented Iranian-American director, Cyrus Naraste.
And we said to him, hey, how about Jim Caviezel for the lead?
And he's like, oh, you guys can't afford Jim Caviezel.
No way is he going to do this kind of a role.
And so we decided that we might be able to afford him in a sort of a cameo role, a small character role in the movie.
So we sent him the script and the remarkable thing was he...
He read it, and then he called Cyrus, and he said, hey, who's playing the lead?
I kind of see myself in that role, and you could hardly believe it.
Yeah, I was like, I knew it!
I knew it, you know?
I knew he was going to play the lead.
He does an amazing job.
So this is a conservative movie, kind of in the way that Braveheart is a conservative movie.
In other words, it embodies, you may say, patriotic virtues.
And because it does that, it does it in a way that Hollywood would never make today.
The old Hollywood could have made a movie like Infidel.
Now what I find interesting is when Infidel was released in theaters, and this was a tough sled because, of course, many theaters remain.
The position of theaters is very spotty.
But nevertheless, rave reviews from the audience, 85%, 90%.
I'm used to like 5% from the critics.
You know, I'm used to getting Razzies.
I get awards for making the worst movie.
I even get worst actor awards.
Even though you play yourself.
Yeah. Who can be better at playing himself than the real thing, the real Dinesh?
But anyway, the point is that we got good reviews for Infidel even from the critics, even though our names are on the movie.
So bottom line, Infidel...
That was another issue, is were we willing to put our name in the movie?
And that was a very crucial...
But I mean, think what a sick society is.
It is. We have to think about things like, do we have to fly underground?
Absolutely. But that is what we were talking about, is the fact that we have to go underground because we don't want the movie to be affected because of who we are.
Well, and what that means is we don't want critics to bash the movie, regardless of what's in the movie.
They just will go, oh, Dinesh, Debbie, okay, fine.
The movie is extremely boring.
I couldn't even sit through it.
I was falling asleep.
And I wasn't even lying on my pillow.
So let's draw the lesson of what we're trying to get at here.
What we're trying to get at is it's not enough to critique progressive culture.
You have to fight it by doing it.
If you want more media, you don't want to talk about the media being all on the left.
Let's create more sources of conservative media.
This podcast is a good example of that.
You want to see more conservative movies?
You don't want Hollywood to be so one-sided?
Fine. Let's be the other side.
It's not easy. We'll tell you another time the obstacles that are involved in trying to do this kind of thing.
It's very easy on the other side.
It's extremely difficult on our side.
But look, that's normal when you're an outsider trying to do something in which the dominant forces are on the other side.
Exactly. So we're going to show you a little quick little glimpse at Infidel.
We have a little 15 second trailer that we want to show you in case you haven't seen it.
It's available everywhere.
Everywhere you can download a movie.
Apple. It's on Amazon Prime.
Amazon Prime. Pretty much everywhere.
Cable. So go to Infidel911.com and it will give you a list of every place that it is playing.
And you can also buy DVDs at stores, Target, Walmart, anywhere they sell DVDs.
Sometimes when people see movies that are on the conservative side, they go, oh, I'm doing this to support a cause.
We want you to see this movie because it's just a hell of a movie.
It's really good. And I think you'll see from the trailer the production quality.
This is a movie that could compete with any movie in Hollywood.
Watch. My husband was kidnapped in Cairo.
This is terrorism.
The days of Entebbe are long over.
Why is he saying, what do you want?
I came here to plead for his life.
Come on, take me.
We're getting out of here.
Infidel, rated R.
We've been talking in this show about illiberal America, a big topic.
topic, we are not even at the beginning of exhausting it.
But part of what I've been getting at here is that the way that we fight illiberal America is, number one, Through the power of refutation and ridicule.
You'll be seeing a lot of that on this show.
Number two, by creating our own stuff, our own cultural products.
And it may be that we are going to have to do this independent of an infrastructure that we could previously take for granted.
In other words, we can't just create our own parlor.
Why? Because Amazon will pull the server.
But what if we have our own servers?
In that case, we are liberated from them.
We're almost like the kid who got kicked out of the home, and it's bad at first.
But the truth of it is, eventually the kid realizes, I'm 18 years old, I can get a job, I can stand on my own two feet, and I'm better off for that.
We can be better off for it.
One other thing I would like to draw our attention to is the importance of language, because we're living at a time when language is routinely abused.
The English writer George Orwell, who's a kind of constant presence on this show, Orwell has a wonderful essay called Politics and the English Language, and he talks about how for many people words don't have any meaning.
Words are basically just a certain kind of a noise.
And people don't use words in a way that point or mean to anything.
Instead of saying something as simple as, this is Orwell's example, he goes, someone will say, in my opinion, it's not an unjustifiable assumption, instead of saying, I think.
And you can see right here, we're basically...
In my opinion, it's not an unjustifiable assumption.
Well, that's the kind of thing you'll hear on CNN from some pundit who's trying to posture before the audience or some politician behind a podium.
Orwell believes that language needs to have a certain cleanliness to it so that people know what things mean.
We're living at a time when, if you listen to news reports, for example, they'll talk about the riot on Capitol Hill.
We didn't see a riot, but to them it's a riot.
But the stuff that happened earlier from Black Lives Matter and Antifa, that wasn't a riot.
That was a protest.
This is a riot. All you hear, even Republican congressmen using the word terrorist, terrorist.
Now, a terrorist typically is somebody who deliberately targets civilians in order to achieve some sort of political objective.
In that sense, you may say 9-11, the attack on the World Trade Center, was a terrorist attack.
Or ISIS grabbing a hold of some American hostage and saying, if you don't release all these Muslim radicals, we're going to kill this guy.
That's terrorism. We know what it is.
That word is automatically applied to a situation that's radically different.
Why? Not to create clarity, but to obscure clarity.
To actually try to make it seem that these things are the same, even though to no person who's observing it, no person with common sense or a conscience, is there anything even remotely similar.
Trump is a dictator!
Really? Who is Trump exactly dictating to?
First of all, he's dictating to no one right now because he doesn't have social media, but who was he dictating to before?
Trump is like Mussolini.
Trump is like Hitler.
Let me be brutally honest about this.
If Trump was truly Hitler, Jim Acosta would be a lampshade.
What I'm trying to get at is that's who Hitler was.
Hitler would not brook the slightest discontent.
Even his own advisors were terrified of him that he would drop the axe on them if they merely disagreed with him on a single point.
So, do you now still want to maintain that Trump is Hitler?
That's an abuse of language.
It's an abuse of common sense.
So, a little bit of Orwell, keeping in mind, keeping a constant check on the words we hear and looking to see what they actually mean is a very liberating experience.
Let me close by saying that this is the end of the first week of my podcast.
My podcast has, like, exploded.
It's literally growing by leaps and bounds.
I was in the top 10 podcasts on day one and I keep just moving up the charts.
And this is to me very humbling because it's really not due to me.
I'm just letting you see a window into my world and my mind and my family and how we see things and I'm calling it like I see it.
It's really all credit to you.
And if you believe that this podcast is offering something different, something valuable, a new way of looking at the world, an incisive way of understanding things, if it makes you laugh, please share it.
Please tell other people about it.
Please draw more people to the podcast.
We need... People sometimes ask me, well, Dinesh, what can I do?
Well, what you can do is help build these alternative platforms.
So that we're able to ultimately create our own cultural power, giving us our own voice, so we are not dependent on the other side.
We don't go begging to them asking for favors.
We don't just whine about what they have done to us.
For a change, we do it for ourselves.
This episode is sponsored by MyPillow, which is evidently the only pillow that makes Debbie, my wife, sleep like a baby.
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So go to MyPillow.com, just click on the radio listener square and use the promo code Dinesh.
You'll get big discounts on the other stuff, MyPillow products, Giza Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, MyPillow towel sets.
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