All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 18, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:08
DOUBLE STANDARDS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep. 6
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, was Martin Luther King a conservative?
Kamala Harris's stolen virtue?
And special guest James O'Keefe of Project Veritas?
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.
Have you tried Mike Lindell's MyPillow products yet?
Mike Lindell has come out with the world's most comfortable bedsheets.
He finally found the best cotton in the world in a region where the Sahara Desert, the Nile River, and the Mediterranean Sea all come together to create the ideal weather conditions for growing cotton.
His new Giza Dream bed sheets are made with this long staple cotton, and he guarantees they will be the most comfortable sheets you'll ever own.
The first night you sleep on these sheets, you'll never want to sleep on anything else.
The Giza Dream sheets are available in a variety of colors, and like all of Mike's products, they come with a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Right now, you can buy one, get one free by calling 800-876-0227 and use promo code Dinesh.
For a limited time, you can buy one, get one free.
So call 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com and make sure you enter the promo code Dinesh.
One of the most pervasive and disturbing features of modern contemporary political rhetoric, is the seeming omnipresence today of double standards.
These double standards we see glaringly on the left, and they concern pretty much all the critical issues that we deal with today.
Here are a few examples.
From the left's point of view, military presence in Washington DC used to be very bad when Trump did it.
Now, for the inauguration, it's become very good.
Suddenly we see all these fences popping up all over the Capitol.
So the old mantra used to be, walls don't work.
Suddenly, walls do work.
They're amazing. It used to be, for the left, that lockdowns were absolutely necessary because the virus is out of control.
And we have to take severe measures because this is a global pandemic, you know, Dinesh.
Now, suddenly, in the upcoming Biden era, it's time to start opening things up.
We can't keep things locked on forever.
Sure, we've got to find ways to live with the virus, you know.
Violence. Violence used to be permissible.
What violence? There's only a very moderate amount of violence going on here.
These are mostly peaceful protests.
What's a little violence to spice things up?
Now... With the takeover of the Capitol, violence is unacceptable.
Violence is insurgency.
Round up the violent people right away, even if they're just a few people.
Let's go get them. Riots.
From the left's point of view, when BLM and Antifa were doing it, riots are the language of the unheard.
Now suddenly, riots are a form of domestic terrorism.
And finally, cops.
It used to be that cops are bad.
Not just this cop or that cop.
All cops defund the police.
Now suddenly, with the police involvement in the Capitol Hill takeover, suddenly, honor our men and women in blue.
Now, how can any intelligent person fail to see the shocking...
Hypocrisy, the shocking double standards here.
But it makes us think a little bit more about double standards themselves, because normally when you see a double standard, if you scrutinize it carefully, there's a single standard hiding behind it, a single standard that doesn't want to be confessed or acknowledged.
Here's an example.
This is a tweet from the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League.
So basically what the ADL is saying is, it's okay to dox some people, but not other people.
It's okay to dox extremists, But we who are fighting extremists should be able to dox people and report on them.
Now, of course, the key word here is extremists, and the key word also is who gets to say, who gets to define the word extremists.
And so you notice that when people apply this sort of dual measure, if you will, what they always do is modify language To create prejudice.
And so, for example, the BLM and Antifa activity is a protest.
Whereas the storming of the Capitol is a storming.
It's an insurgency. It's terrorism.
It's domestic terrorism. It's like ISIS. So by using soft words in one context and the most severe words, exaggerated words, ridiculous words in the other, you're able to show why this supposed double standard becomes defensible.
Why it's okay to overlook the one and prosecute the other.
Now, the never-Trumper or sort of never-Trumper Jonah Goldberg has a series of very interesting tweets in which he talks about the fact that conservatives should, in his view, not be indignant about liberal double standards.
And Jonah lays this out as a kind of a rant, but I think it's worth considering because he's a thoughtful guy.
Actually, my former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, I remember Jonah actually coming to D.C. as a student right out of Goucher College.
When he first came to A.E.A., he was basically running the coffee machine and the copier.
But he went on to write an important book, Liberal Fascism.
And now he's the editor of a website and he's also kind of a commentator from the anti-Trump angle or point of view.
And so Jonah's argument is this.
Basically he says that conservatives should be the people of higher standards.
Let's not say that because the left did it, therefore we should be able to do it.
Let's not hold ourselves to their standard.
Why let them define us?
If they do violence, why shouldn't we do something nobler?
Jonah says, quote, I'm not an expert on Christianity, but he implies, well, why shouldn't we turn the other cheek?
Conservatism, he says, ultimately is about right and wrong.
Our standards are not relativist, and so they shouldn't be defined by the other side.
And he gives a telling example.
He says, if my daughter, his daughter, is shoplifting...
He as a parent would consider it no defense if his daughter were then to say, Dad, all my friends were shoplifting too and nothing happened to them.
Jonah's point is it doesn't matter if nothing happened to them.
You shoplifted and something should happen to you.
So this is Jonah's argument which I want to now probe.
First of all, let's start with the shoplifting analogy.
I think it's a bogus analogy for two reasons.
First of all, This is not a case where conservatives are saying, in effect, that we want our daughters to get away with shoplifting.
We're not saying that. In fact, I don't know a single leading conservative, or Trumpster, who has argued that the people who illegally occupied the Capitol should not face penalties.
Now, they should face penalties proportional to what their intention was and what they did, but they should be held accountable.
I don't know anyone who is not saying that on our side.
So, it is not unreasonable then to say, just to modify Jonah's analogy somewhat further, If my daughter was shoplifting or his daughter was shoplifting, and they were hauled up on charges, and then they were accused not of being shoplifters,
but domestic terrorists, and someone wanted to prevent them from going to college ever or getting a job ever, wanted to lock them up, let's just say, for 10 years, wanted to classify them as domestic terrorists and not let your daughter, Jonah, or mine fly on an airplane, And at the same time, the people doing this were condoning vast numbers of people for doing much worse and getting completely away with it.
Not only were those people not being held to prosecution, they were being praised for what they did.
And what they did was much worse.
I bet you would be outraged as a parent, and rightly so.
Why? Because justice isn't just a matter of being penalized.
You should be penalized proportional to what you did.
You should be penalized in such a way that other people who did the same thing are also held accountable.
Otherwise, the whole concept of equal rights under the law and equal standard of justice, the very meaning of the equality provision of the 14th Amendment, totally collapses.
But here's a deeper reason why I think the analogy is flawed.
And that is, this is not a case of a bunch of people shoplifting together.
This is more like a fight in which we step into the ring against an adversary.
And we are fighting according to the rules of boxing.
And suddenly, they kick us in the face.
In other words, they go MMA. They use mixed martial arts.
Now, we then say, wait a minute.
This is unfair. You're changing the rules of the game.
You're applying one set of rules to yourself in which you're allowed to do more violent things, more lawless things, and we are supposed to do nothing in return.
Play by the rules of the game.
Well, obviously, if we accept that standard, we would lose most, if not all, our fights.
So Jonah's counsel of virtue...
It's actually a council of defeat.
It's a guarantee for our side to lose all our fights.
Let's say a word about Christianity and this idea of turning the other cheek.
First of all, if you look at the example of Christ, he doesn't always turn the other cheek.
When the soldiers come to get him, and one of them, by the way, hits him, strikes him with a spear, Jesus doesn't say, hey, wow, you got me.
Here's my other cheek. Go get me again.
He goes, why did you strike me?
And what that tells you is that when you read phrases in the Bible, you have to read the text in context.
Obviously, there are times when you turn the other cheek, and there are times when you don't.
The political scientist Gene Kirkpatrick, in an important essay in 1979 called Dictatorships and Double Standards, Discuss this very issue of double standards and what their effect is.
And I mention this because I know that Kirkpatrick is someone Jonah respects immensely.
She's one of the icons of neoconservatism.
But here was Kirkpatrick's point in a nutshell.
It's this. We America, she said, are allied with all these tin-pot dictators.
People like Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah of Iran.
And these guys are bad guys.
They do things that are wrong.
They are, in a word, authoritarians.
But, said Jean Kirkpatrick, if we become morally indignant and say we can have nothing to do with these authoritarians, we're going to pull the Persian Raghav from under the Shah, we're going to withdraw support from Marcos and Pinochet, she said we will be helping a far greater evil.
A totalitarian power, the Soviet Empire stretching across multiple time zones.
And so Kirkpatrick made a critical difference between authoritarians, who are bad guys, and totalitarians, who are very bad guys.
Totalitarians take away all your rights.
Authoritarians take away some of your rights.
And the thrust of Kirkpatrick's point is that if you try to stand on your moral high horse, And you undermine the flawed authoritarians, you will get the incorrigible totalitarians.
A really good example was Jimmy Carter.
He pulls the Persian rug out from under the Shah on the same sort of Goldbergian ground of conscience.
I can't support this guy.
He has a secret police.
So out goes the Shah.
And who comes in? Khomeini.
So from the frying pan into the fire, we've been dealing with Islamic radicalism ever since.
I also want to show you a clip from the movie Trunk Card, which involves Abraham Lincoln.
And this clip sets the context for, I think, an even deeper discussion of how you deal with double standards and how you respond to them.
Early in the war, the Confederates passed an order that every black Union soldier captured would be executed.
In response, Lincoln signed an executive order.
It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed.
Order of retaliation, July 30, 1863.
Imagine if Abraham Lincoln had taken Jonah Goldberg's advice.
He would go, the Confederates are doing something really bad.
They're executing black soldiers.
But I'm not going to do anything in return.
I'm just going to let them, because I'm a better person.
No. Lincoln realized that this was a barbaric practice by the other side, and it required a response.
And so Lincoln decided, we will do to them what they're doing to us.
This is the only way to make them stop.
And in fact, the Confederates did stop, and Lincoln's executive order was withdrawn.
So my conclusion here is that we should not be so comfortable in living with double standards.
We should reject this Jonah Goldberg Council of Defeatism.
It is a strange type of virtue that always ensures the triumph of vice.
Good should not be such a willing accomplice of evil.
We'll be right back. We're facing a really scary prospect in America, one-party control, and that's going to produce a lot of economic problems.
Already people are predicting runaway inflation.
They're also predicting a devaluation of the currency.
And so what are you doing to protect your finances?
What are you doing to get yourself ready for this?
I'm really excited to have Birch Gold Group as an advertiser because Birch Gold Group will help you diversify a portion of your savings.
Your IRA or your eligible 401k, you can convert that into an IRA backed by gold and silver.
They are the premier precious metals IRA company in America with an A-plus BBB rating, countless five-star reviews, and thousands of satisfied customers.
There's a tidal wave of inflation coming.
Gold is your hedge.
Text Dinesh.
To 484-848 for your free information kit on Precious Metals IRA or to speak with a Birch Gold representative today.
Time is running out, but you can protect your savings now, so text Dinesh to 484848.
Some people think Inauguration Day is going to be depressing, and perhaps in some ways it is.
But there's also going to be an element of high drama and I think huge entertainment.
Why? Because the Sun King, you might say, is exiting the stage with a good deal of fanfare.
And his replacement is basically a guy pulled out of an old folks home.
So it's going to be sort of a scene in which you've got fireworks, you've got a lighted night sky, and then the lights go out and a stumbler and a mumbler comes on the stage.
So here's a headline in the Daily Mail.
Donald Trump plans to hold unprecedented military farewell event with 21-gun salute, color guard, and martial music when he boards Air Force One for Mar-a-Lago on the morning of Biden's inauguration.
This is Trump being Trump.
He's kind of going out with a bang.
He's doing a massive up yours.
And he's, hey, he's not going to the inauguration.
I can hardly really blame him with the kind of accusations that have been made against him.
Why would he want to go? Would you go to a family member's event if they had been saying those kinds of things about you?
No, he wouldn't go. Trump is doing the normal thing.
Now, true, the press is sort of going into its usual feigned outrage.
Oh, this is unprecedented!
Actually, it's not unprecedented.
First of all, I'll give you the precedent.
John Adams. In 1801, March 4th, 1801, John Adams, the sitting president, He took a very early morning carriage and left Washington D.C. heading back to Massachusetts and he did this on the day of Jefferson's inauguration.
He didn't greet Jefferson.
He didn't go to the inauguration.
He basically shrugged his shoulders and took off.
Here's a little clip of that.
where you can see and get I think an emotional feel for the scene.
Stop caulking.
Playing John Adams.
Just an ordinary citizen.
That clip is from the documentary John Adams, which is, by the way, worth watching.
Debbie and I really enjoyed it.
A wonderful performance of Adams himself.
Now, the election of 1800 was somewhat like this election, a very tough, vicious election.
In fact, it was not only an election where the accusations flew back and forth, and Adams and Jefferson, who, by the way, were old friends, became, I won't say deadly enemies, but they certainly became enemies.
Their relationship was deeply soured.
Later, it was rehabilitated, and they both ended up dying on the same day.
It's kind of a poignant and beautiful story, but the point I want to make is that the election of 1800 was the first time in human history where power peacefully transferred from one party to the other.
Let's remember that although the Constitution was in force in 1789, We're good to go.
And the new party, Jefferson's party, the Democratic-Republicans, came in.
So this was a case of a genuine transfer of power.
And to me, looking back on it, what it tells us is that we've been here before.
We've had vicious elections before.
America will get through this.
We can enjoy the inauguration festivities.
We can take a little bit of historical distance.
Don't get too freaked out.
We'll live through it.
We'll be right back. Thank you. If you're like millions of Americans looking for an alternative to the other senior organization, I want you to know about AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens.
AMAC is the fastest growing conservative 50 plus organization in America.
Over 2 million people have joined and now carry the AMAC membership card.
AMAC was built by folks who feel the same way we do.
We're not alone. AMAC believes and stands up for the values that have made America great—faith, family, and freedom.
They believe in the sanctity of our Constitution, including the First and Second Amendments.
They're fighting the good fight against reckless government spending and the ever-expanding scope of the federal government.
They are pro-business, secure borders, support our military, and respect our veterans.
AMAC works hard to deliver real value to their members, providing the best benefits, discounts, and services you can find in one place.
I want you to join AMAC today.
So go to amac.com, A-M-A-C dot com, and join now.
We welcome everyone who cares about the future of our great republic to join and stand with us.
There's strength in numbers.
Together we can bring one clear, resounding voice to Washington, D.C. Join AMAC today.
I'd like to welcome to this podcast, we don't have a lot of guests, but I'm very pleased to have today a special guest, James O'Keefe from Project Veritas.
And this happens to be on a day when James is doing the Jamesian thing.
Which is he's blowing the whistle, this time, on these internet moguls who have been controlling, regulating, suppressing, banning, not just Trump, but a whole bunch of people across social media.
And by the way, not just in America, but abroad.
James, welcome to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Nice to have you. Hey Dinesh, great to be with you.
James, I'm going to start by reading you a tweet from CNN. A headline, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris drop a playlist for your inauguration watch party.
This is supposed to be news in the age of Biden and Harris.
Reminds me a little bit about Obama, the way that you had this sort of, almost you could call it, butt-kissing approach.
There's no real critical scrutiny.
Would you agree that we are moving into an age of, let's call it, courtier journalism, where the journalist, far from being a check on power...
Becomes a kind of like the courtier in the French court.
His job is to juggle.
His job is to amuse the king.
His job is to flatter the people in power.
Is that what we're facing?
And is that why we need people like you?
Thank you, Dinesh. Yeah, I saw that tweet.
I responded to it with journalists with a trademark symbol next to it.
Because if journalists were doing their jobs, there wouldn't be a need for people like me.
There wouldn't be a need for Project Veritas.
But journalists have become...
It's become, as Chomsky would say, and I know it's crazy I'm quoting Chomsky, but I think he's dead on point here.
They become a system-supported propaganda function which manufactures consent, which does not inform people, but it's all about narrative.
It's no longer about fact-finding.
It's about narrative. And reporters need to focus on facts.
Investigative reporting It has been said that it is the fiercest of indignation infused with the hardest of facts.
But none of that stuff is about facts.
It's about narrative. It's about people in air-conditioned room reading off teleprompters.
So with Veritas, what we try to do is to focus on fact-finding, not characterizations, not bombast, not interpretations, but actual seeing people, their own lips moving, describing what they're really doing behind closed doors, Which is quite contrary to the narrative, which leads us to this Twitter whistleblower that came to us, recorded a staff meeting with the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, when you can hear out of his own mouth what the company intends to do.
You know, we are focused on one account right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account, and it's going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, the next few weeks.
It's going to go on beyond the inauguration.
We have to expect that.
We have to be ready for that.
It really made me laugh because you've totally got Jack's panties in a wad.
I mean, you've got his nose ring out of joint.
The guy was probably really surprised.
And why? Because his public persona is so different than what you showed about him in private.
So let me read. This is a tweet that Jack put out.
And this is from some time ago.
But this is kind of, I would call it, pious Jack.
Twitter stands for freedom of expression.
We stand for speaking truth to power.
And we stand for empowering dialogue.
So that's the PR Jack.
And what you showed is almost like the ruthless Jack.
You showed Jack talking to the troops.
And in effect, what Jack was saying is, we got the big guy.
We got Trump. But that's only the beginning.
We're going to get a whole bunch of other guys.
This is not a small thing.
This is not a temporary thing.
Essentially, we're not going to stop.
Are you surprised to see all these internet moguls playing this kind of a ideologically adjudicatory role?
Well, I think, you know, sometimes people are more honest in private or where they think they're not being recorded.
And Jack was, he's actually in French Polynesia right now.
Jack Dorsey is sort of vacationing, meditating.
He's a strange guy running his company there from French Polynesia.
And he's on this video conference with his senior leadership.
One of those people blew the whistle on him, sent Project Veritas the video.
They come to us to Veritas tips at ProtonMail, which is an encrypted email, because they trust Veritas.
And Dorsey's saying, it's not just gonna stop at Trump.
This is going to go on much beyond Trump.
It's going to affect everyone.
He talks about doing a retro, which is sort of tech speak for retrospective, going back through and banning accounts, not just the QAnon accounts, but many more accounts that are They're shrinking the Overton window.
That is the range of acceptable ideas that one can discuss on tech.
Anything that would potentially or indirectly lead to violence.
You also have this vice president of Twitter, a woman named Vijaya Gotti.
She's the one who leads the Orwellian sounding quote, trust and safety council.
And Gotti is talking about the need to eliminate anything investigating like voter fraud, That will lead to violence.
For harvesting ballots against the law.
But these tech people are saying, no, no, you shouldn't be allowed to publish that information because that might lead to violence.
So you're seeing and hearing that people say these things absent their press releases.
It's not through some, you know, prism which can distort what they're saying to make it more bureaucratic.
You actually hear them saying it on the video conference with all their staff.
Thank God for these brave whistleblowers who are following their conscience here, Dinesh, and reporting the tech executive.
Let me zoom into this Vijaya Ghade character because she's an Indian of a very familiar type.
I mentioned her on my podcast last week because she told this fabulous, and by fabulous I mean fabricated, story about how her father had to have meetings with the head of the Ku Klux Klan in her hometown so that he could continue with his business.
And I basically said, hey Vijayagadi, give me the name of your dad and his contact info if he's around.
And the clan leader, I'll verify to see if this sort of story that you've told is true.
I haven't heard from her since and I don't think I'm going to be hearing from her because she knows and I know that this story is completely made up.
But nevertheless, here's my point.
I saw an interesting phrase from her, the clip that you put out today from Vijayagadi.
And it uses the phrase, potentially inflammatory content.
So not just inflammatory content, but potentially inflammatory content.
And of course, my question is this.
I mean, I'm against censorship in general.
I don't want to have really any of it.
I recognize, of course, you can't shout fire in a crowded theater.
But short of that, I don't think we need it.
We shouldn't have it. It's bad.
But it seems to me if one is going to try to impose these kinds of standards, potentially inflammatory content...
You've got to clearly define what you mean by potentially inflammatory and you've got to apply that standard in an even-handed way.
So for example, when Joe Biden says something like, I want to take Trump behind my old high school gym and beat the hell out of him.
Isn't that potentially inflammatory?
When Kamala Harris says the protesters and the arsonists are not going to stop and they shouldn't stop, isn't that potentially inflammatory?
I mean, what I'm trying to get at is, are you indignant at the censorship itself or are you more indignant at the double standards, the way in which these bogus criteria are applied?
I mean, Dinesh, I'm glad you pointed that out.
I have the transcript in front of me.
Again, this is the quote, We decided to escalate our enforcement of the civic integrity policy and use a label that disabled engagements to stop the spread of potentially inflammatory content, which is content around election fraud.
Let's take her out of her word.
She's saying that if you...
I'm a reporter, and I expose voter fraud.
There aren't many who do that.
We actually caught a man in Minneapolis exchanging money for ballots.
That's a federal felony.
The FBI ought to prosecute it.
They don't prosecute it.
That if I'm reporting...
Information about a man giving cash for a ballot, that could be potentially inflammatory.
We're kind of beyond Orwell now.
This is, as I've said to my staff, a Kafkaesque nightmare.
We're denying our own eyes and ears.
And what's remarkable is that I just want these people to be honest.
People say they're private companies, James.
They're private companies. I know they're private companies.
And private companies ought to be investigated when they're lying to the people, when they have trillion-dollar market caps.
And I think that Vijay Gade, I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, Vijay Gade, I think that in many regards her trust and safety counsel has more power than the United States Congress because they determine the ideas that we hear and see.
So I just want Dinesh, these people, to be honest I think they should be honest to their stakeholders, their stockholders.
And I think there's going to be many more whistleblowers inside these companies are going to have a crisis of conscience.
They're gonna forego their half a million dollar salaries for the public's right to know this information.
And that's what we're trying to create at Veritas is a more exploratory.
Let me press you on this thing about, I just want them to be honest, because I think that deep down you and I know that they're not going to be honest.
Well, in other words, there is no conscience that we can appeal to.
Hey guys, it's kind of like going to CNN and saying, I just want you to report the news fairly.
These are people who are dug into an ideological narrative.
Their careers depend upon advancing a narrative.
So here's my point.
The Republicans had a chance to withdraw the Section 230 protection.
Maybe a slim chance, but they did have a chance.
They didn't do it. Lindsey Graham said recently, I'm on it.
I'm very indignant. I'm going to get on the case.
I personally don't have a lot of hope that now, in the opposition, the Republicans will be able to do much.
First of all, do you agree with that assessment that our legal remedies in terms of working through the legislative process at this point are basically nil?
I mean, I adhere to the Charles Murray hypothesis, which is government is in such a state of sclerosis at this point.
The Senate's tied 50-50 with Kamala Harris breaking that tie vote.
I don't really view...
I think the solutions have to be extra-legal.
Like, some have said civil disobedience.
I don't adhere to that. But I think journalism, I think exposure, I think holding Vijay Ghadi's feet to the fire by quoting her.
These are her words, by the way, not my characterization of her.
Potentially inflammatory content.
If we quote them, that is the only thing, Dinesh, that they fear.
I do not think they fear the Congress.
I do not think they fear the Biden administration.
And frankly, I don't think they fear the Republican Party.
You said once very poetically, the Republicans fear the humiliating power of the press more than they fear anything else, more than they fear their constituents.
Republicans fear the Washington Post and CNN more than they fear the people that vote them in or out of office.
Until you change that, you're never going to get the Section 230 thing implemented.
You're never going to get the reforms.
So I think it's a cultural problem.
You're right. They have almost a religious sensibility to them, a dogma, a faith, these tech people.
But I still think privately, Dinesh, the Vijay Gadis of the world and her lieutenants, they will speak more candidly.
And if we can get cameras on that and expose that, it might...
It might help wake people up a little bit.
Well, I certainly agree that exposing them is critical.
We need to know what's going on behind closed doors and no one does that better than you.
And this, to my mind, makes you one of the most important journalists in America.
Now, I recently saw that Manuel López Obrador, the Prime Minister of Mexico,...makes a remarkable statement.
He compares digital censorship to the Spanish Inquisition.
He goes,...
can a company act as if it were all powerful, omnipotent, as a sort of Spanish Inquisition on what is expressed?
And Obrador says, I'm going to go round up Angela Merkel, I'm gonna round up these other world leaders.
Basically, I think what's going on, James, is this.
It's one thing for the media and cohorts with the Biden administration to cheer internet censorship in America, right?
But do you think for one minute that Modi in India is gonna put up with that nonsense, that they start banning him and banning people from his political party.
Uganda recently shut down all of social media before an election precisely because they said, we're not going to turn over our elections to Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
Why should these American twits run what happens in our country?
So, in other words, is it possible that there could be an international revolt brewing against this kind of American...
You may say digital arrogance that's trying to set the terms of who reads and says what worldwide.
Well, that's what Gadi is saying in today's video that we released, that she's taking this globally.
I have a transcript in front of me here, and she says that we're going to be very focused on enforcing these policies on a global scale, a global approach.
A lot of our learnings in the United States have come from other markets, so what we do is global.
And You know, this is an important point you make, and my comment on it is that, you know, that we have a First Amendment in the United States.
We have a constitutional constitution.
No other country has a First Amendment like we do.
But Twitter, it eliminates borders.
This is a conversation that is global, that an Australian and an Irishman can interact with my tweet on a thread.
So this is kind of You know, this has changed the world in the last decade.
So this goes back to my point that Vijay Gaddy and Jack Dorsey do, in my opinion, have more power than all three branches of government, including Including the courts.
So their decisions, their policies on this platform carry more weight than a Supreme Court decision regarding the First Amendment.
So I just want people to know that their words are very meaningful here, and we need to take them at their word.
And you're right, it's going to interfere with foreign elections, and it's going to interfere with our own election, which is ironic because they're trying to say that people who investigate voter fraud are interfering with elections, so there's deep irony in that.
But hopefully, I keep saying it because I'm going to do a shameless plug here.
VeritasTips at ProtonMail.com.
That's V-E-R-I-T-A-S Tips at ProtonMail.com.
We have seen over a dozen new whistleblowers in the last week, Dinesh, come to us.
I hope that this creates a wellspring of courage that is contagious and people blow the whistle on more of these people.
Let me just sum up this way, James.
It seems to me that what these people are trying to do is appoint themselves the guardians of making America itself a safe space.
Maybe they want to make the world a safe space.
It's your job and my job to do what we can to make the world a little more unsafe.
Thank you very much for joining us, and we'll be right back.
Thank you. One of the deepest motives on the part of the left to suppress conservative voices is because of the fear of being ridiculed, the fear of being exposed.
Many of these characters on the left, these pipsqueaks in power, Are ridiculous figures.
And the truth of it is they kind of know it.
You can pick it up if you watch the signal.
So consider, for example, Kamala Harris, you know, and that irritating cackle.
The point of that is, I know I'm a fraud.
And you know I'm a fraud.
But let's both pretend that I'm not a fraud.
But what Kamala Harris fears is people who can see through the charade and actually factually expose her fraudulence, her basic dishonesty of character.
I'm not just talking about the fact she made a gaffe, she made a mistake.
I'm talking about her distortion of basically who she is.
So let's start with Kamala Harris' self-portrait.
And this is from a recent interview that she did with Elle magazine.
She basically said, told a story that she's been apparently telling for years.
She's been telling it in her book.
She's been telling it in various interviews.
And here we have a clip of Kamala Harris telling this very same story to Jimmy Fallon.
Did you get that energy from your parents or the thought of, hey, I have to fight for what's right and I gotta get out there?
I mean, when were you out there protesting?
Well, I was in a stroller.
I was in a stroller.
And so I was out there.
And in fact, my mother used to have a very funny story about I was fussing.
And she said, Kamala, what do you want?
And I said, Kamala, what do you want?
And I said, freedom. No, no, no.
So there it is, the story, the trademark cackle, Jimmy Fallon playing along.
Oh, he can't believe it!
What a story! And this is the Game of Frauds.
Because two internet sleuths, Freddie Engels and a guy named Andre Domiz, recognize the story.
They go, we've heard this before.
As it turns out, the story is plagiarized.
It never happened to Kamala Harris.
It's actually a story told by Martin Luther King.
In a 1965 interview in Playboy, Martin Luther King told the story this way.
I'm now going to quote Martin Luther King.
I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother.
What do you want?
The policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, Feed him. Feed him.
Now, Some of the fact-checking sites.
And here I want to show how the fact-checking sites are sort of in on it.
They put on their thick glasses.
We're going to scrutinize the truth of this story.
And they basically go, it's partly true.
It's partly true. Really?
Let's look at what they mean by that.
I'm now quoting from Snopes.
They admit that the story is right there in the King interview.
But they then say this.
We are unable to determine that Harris, who heard the account from her now deceased mother, deliberately plagiarized it from King.
In other words, it could be true.
The mother's dead, so we have no way to know for sure.
After all, we'd like to call the mother, you know, and see if she'll admit it that she made it up.
So this is how they cover up.
They know that Kamala Harris made the story up.
She lifted it right from King.
But they are trying to cover for her.
Now, let's ask the serious question.
Is it possible that Kamala Harris is, in fact, the little girl in King's story?
Could it be that he was referring to her?
The answer, it turns out, is no.
That's impossible. Why?
First of all, King is being interviewed in 1965.
He's talking about events that occurred earlier in Birmingham, and he's talking about a little girl who was 7 to 8 years old, obviously someone born in the 50s.
When was Kamala Harris born?
October of 1964.
So the simple fact of the matter is she could not possibly be the girl in the story.
So this is a made-up story which raises the very interesting question, why would she make it up?
And the answer is pretty obvious.
She's making it up because she needs an artificial history A fabricated history to compensate for her real history.
Here's Kamala Harris's real history.
She is descended in a straight line from one of, if not the largest slave owner in Jamaica, a man named Donald Harris.
I'm sorry, her father, Donald Harris, wrote an article in a Jamaican magazine saying that he, and therefore Kamala, are descended in a straight line from a large Jamaican slave owner, a man named Hamilton Brown, who owned five plantations and well over 100 slaves.
So that's Kamala's real history.
She's descended not from slaves, or not merely from slaves, but from slave owners.
She doesn't want to admit this, of course, and she never has admitted it.
And when I disclosed it, providing genealogical records and so on, it's really funny, but all the sort of liberal pundits like Nicole Hannah-Jones, who's, by the way, the author of the so-called New York Times 1619 Project, And Nicole Hannah-Jones jumps in and tweets, Dinesh, you got cell-phoned because, you know, don't you know about rape on the plantation?
The implication here, of course, is that, yeah, Kamala Harris may be descended from a slave owner, but he obviously raped some slave on the plantation, and that's Kamala's real history.
The only problem with this... Is that Nicole Hannah-Jones was too lazy to look at the genealogical chart where she would see very clearly that this had nothing to do with plantation rape.
The son of the slave owner, Hamilton Brown, who was also named Hamilton Brown, married a free colored woman named Jesse and Prince.
The two of them had a daughter named Christiana Brown, and that's the lineage of Kamala Harris.
So in other words, this had nothing to do with plantation shenanigans or rape.
So Nicole Hannah-Jones then recognized, oh, Dinesh is right, but instead of admitting it, she's not going to admit it, she just deletes her tweet, erasing it, if you will, from history.
Bottom line, what's going on here?
Why am I telling you all this?
I'm telling you all this because we live in an age of identity politics.
And in identity politics, particularly on the left, it's really important for Kamala Harris to align herself with the party of victims, with a kind of history of victimology.
But she has no such history.
She's descended from the planter, not the field hand.
What she does is she drops the real history and lifts the Martin Luther King story to give her an invented history.
Knowing that this will not get mainstream scrutiny, that her own side will play along with this.
After all, to some degree, even she is a pawn of their agenda.
But this is the kind of entrenched dishonesty.
And notice who's involved here.
Jimmy Fallon's involved.
Kamala Harris is involved.
Nicole Hannah-Jones is involved.
Snopes is involved. It's a collaboration of...
fundamentally dishonest people all coming together to put out a bogus narrative.
We'll be right back. If you're thinking of replacing your carpets due to stains and odors, you must try Genesis 950.
The reviews are absolutely amazing.
This is a product that actually works.
With water, it breaks down the bonds of stains and odors, so they are gone for good.
It's antibacterial component removes pet odors from carpets and padding.
It can be used in a carpet cleaning machine and it's green so it's safe for your family and pets.
Genesis 950 is made in America.
If you're tired of pet cleaners that just don't work, it's time to buy Genesis 950.
One gallon of industrial-strength Genesis 950 makes up 7 gallons of cleaner.
But Genesis 950 isn't just for pet stains.
It's great for bathrooms, kitchens, floors, upholstery, and grease stains.
Consider Genesis 950 before purchasing new carpets.
Genesis 950 has great customer service.
Order a 1-gallon direct at Genesis950.com to receive a free spray bottle, free shipping, and a $10 coupon using code Dinesh.
That's Genesis950.com.
The coupon is only available for one-gallon purchase.
Genesis950. It's much cheaper than replacing your carpets.
Today is Martin Luther King Day, and...
We are already being barraged by the usual types of laudatory bromides that typically go with this kind of a day.
I'd like to take the occasion to do a little bit more of a serious look at King.
The left today is not all that happy with Martin Luther King.
They don't really like him.
And they are sort of trying to preserve his memory and his name while pushing away his ideas.
They don't like not just Martin Luther King's famous line that he dreams of a country where we are judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
By the way, think of how that contradicts the whole racial grievance industry.
Think of how it contradicts all this emphasis on blackness and on race as a shaper of identity.
Today's philosophy is shaped by the title of Cornel West's book, Race Matters.
Whereas for King, we should be moving inexorably toward a society where race doesn't matter.
Not that race doesn't exist.
We're not colorblind in the sense that we genuinely don't see it, but we're colorblind in the sense that we don't attach legal or political weight to it.
For example, when I look at you, I see whether you have thin or bushy eyebrows.
I see, for example, if you have a certain type of hair.
But the point is, that doesn't matter.
That's not how I judge you as a person.
That's the true meaning of the idea of colorblindness.
Some years ago, I was in a debate with Jesse Jackson, and we ended up arguing about the issue of, would Martin Luther King support affirmative action today?
Jackson saying yes, and I saying no.
But even as I argued it out, I realized there's a certain kind of anachronism in trying to figure this out.
Because the truth of it is, it's silly to change the lens in the camera, change the place and time, and to take a man, really, of the 20th century, in the middle of the 20th century, and go, well, what if he was around in 2020?
What would Martin Luther King think about this, or what would he think about that?
And the true answer to that question is, we don't know.
What I did with Jesse Jackson was I said, okay, Jesse Jackson, you keep saying, I knew Martin Luther King.
I was Martin Luther King's best friend.
Let me ask you this.
Can you cite a single example in his life where Martin Luther King, in any public capacity, in any speech, in any writing, in any public statement, supported race-based preferences?
And this is the kind of thing that, you know, Jackson was, he was discombobulated.
He did his usual thing. You know, he clears his throat, plays with his mustache.
Bottom line of it is he had to admit, no, no such statement exists.
And this is crushing for the left because they can say Martin Luther King would have done this and he would have done that.
But the fact is that he did not ever support racial preferences.
Now, he did move left and And he moved left because he supported the so-called Poor People's Campaign.
He became much more of an economic redistributionist.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AOC put out a quote today where Martin Luther King says that he was more socialistic than he was capitalistic.
And that statement has to be read in context because the so-called socialism that King was talking about is modest compared to anything that we're talking about today.
I think King was simply saying that he wanted to move more in the redistributionist welfare state direction.
Then he wanted to move in the laissez-faire or free market direction.
So, yes, king was moving left.
That's sort of the late king.
That's not the king that we actually remember or even cherish today.
The king we cherish today was the king who spoke about America being, quote, a beloved community.
And by the way, the left doesn't like that idea either.
Why? Because in a beloved community, black lives matter, but all lives also matter.
A beloved community ultimately is about erasing those distinctions.
It's a single community governed ultimately by a transcendence of race.
This is what the left can't stand.
Their politics are based on division, driving a wedge in society, not just based on race, but also based on gender and sexual orientation.
So ultimately the left is all about the politics of division and therefore standing against them, solemn, Profound and immovable is the legacy of Martin Luther King.
We'll be right back. The other day I got a text from Mike Lindell of MyPillow.
He goes, Dinesh, you're my top salesman.
You're selling tons of MyPillows.
And I'm like, Mike, that is truly flattering.
I mostly thought of myself as a think tank guy and a movie maker and an intellectual, but I've now reached the pinnacle of my career.
I'm the top salesman of MyPillow.
Guys, I'm joking about this, but let me tell you, I just got Mike Lindell's pajamas in the mail, and I'm pretty excited to get them on.
They look amazing. They look fantastic.
Everything Mike does is really top-notch.
And his pillows are, of course, his sort of Trademark.
You can get a queen-size premium eye pillow.
It's $29.98, normally $69.98, so that's $40 off.
King pillows are only $5 more.
Mike Lindell is a real patriot.
He's someone who's taken a lot of heat for his beliefs.
I think we should support Mike.
But support him not just because he's on our side, but because he makes great stuff.
He makes great pillows, and he makes great dream sheets, and he makes great mattress toppers, and he makes great towel sets.
So go to MyPillow.com, click on the radio listener square, and use promo code Dinesh.
You'll get deep discounts on all Mike's stuff.
Once again, go to MyPillow.com and put in promo code Dinesh.
Or you can just call 800-876-0227.
Make sure to use promo code Dinesh.
Was Martin Luther King a conservative?
Now, here we have to make a distinction between conservative and Republican.
I'm not saying that Martin Luther King was a Republican.
He wasn't.
But neither was he a Democrat.
He was unaffiliated with both parties.
I'm going to make the argument, however, that Martin Luther King was, in the very core meaning of the term, conservative.
Let me start with the issue of whether he was a Republican.
Now, Martin Luther King explicitly distanced himself from both parties.
Here's a quote. I am not inextricably bound to either party.
He never fully identified with either one.
Now, he was pretty good friends with Nixon.
I believe he voted for Kennedy in the 60 campaign.
He certainly voted for LBJ, Lyndon Johnson, in 64.
And he made some very nasty comments about Barry Goldwater.
The reason for this is that Barry Goldwater had opposed the Civil Rights Act.
I think what makes this very tragic is Barry Goldwater was a libertarian.
He opposed the act on libertarian grounds.
He was not a racist. In fact, he was one of the co-founders of the Phoenix NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
He had helped to integrate the National Guard.
And the public schools in Arizona.
But because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds, he didn't think the government should be allowed to restrict private discrimination.
Yes, the government could impose equal rights under the law on government functions, but the invasion into the private sector, he thought that was going too far.
That was not the province of government.
So King slanders him, I think unfairly.
And that's why many people think, here's smoking gun proof that King was never a Republican.
Well, it's proof that he wasn't ever a Goldwater Republican.
But King was also very well aware of something that the left today tries to conceal, that the racist Dixiecrats, the people blocking the Civil Rights Act, were overwhelmingly, in fact, were all...
In the Democratic Party.
Later, one or two moved into the Republican Party, Strom Thurmond and one guy in the House.
But the vast majority of Dixiecrats all stayed in the Democratic Party.
They died as Democrats.
They've been, they're lionized to this day.
There are buildings named after them in Washington, D.C. King knew all this.
He wasn't, in that sense, he didn't deceive the public and he didn't deceive himself.
Now, what about the idea of King being a conservative?
You can't answer this question without asking a simple question.
Who is a conservative?
What is a conservative in the American context?
People abuse this word conservative and they sometimes apply it and I'd call it an operational sense.
So conservatives are against change.
No. Was Trump against change?
No. Conservatives want to change things.
If it were up to me, I would change the tax code, I would change the size of government, I would change U.S. commitments abroad, and lots of things I'd change.
So, my conservatism has nothing to do with opposing change.
Yeah, Dinesh, the segregationists were all conservatives because they opposed change.
First of all, this is just a meaningless statement.
Segregation itself developed after the Civil War.
It became entrenched in the 1890s.
It's not something that goes back to time immemorial.
The segregation laws in the South were enacted by democratic legislatures, democratic governors, and so on.
And yes, the segregationists wanted to keep those laws, but that doesn't make them conservative in any meaningful sense of the word.
So here's what conservatism in America today means.
It's conserving The principles of the American Revolution.
Conserving the principles of the American Revolution.
Now, the American Revolution was in a sense a classically liberal revolution.
One could argue that revolutions by definition can't be conservative because they bring about a dramatic upheaval, a turning of the tables, a new order.
The American Revolution did all that.
But nevertheless, that's a revolution we want, we can live with, and we're trying to preserve the principles of that revolution.
Today. Now, Martin Luther King, in his most famous speech, I Have a Dream, said the following, I am submitting a promissory note, and I am demanding that it be cashed.
Right away raising the question, what note?
Who wrote the note?
Did the Southern segregationists unwittingly give him some sort of note that he could then cash?
No! So what was Martin Luther King talking about?
Well, he was talking about the Declaration of Independence.
He was talking about the Charter of American Liberty, the document that, in a sense, is the guiding spirit of the Constitution.
All men are created equal.
Now, here's the great irony.
That document was penned by Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia planter who, on his Monticello plantation, had over 200 slaves.
So, think about it.
Martin Luther King, in demanding freedom, is cashing a check, to use his own terms, that was written by a Southern slave owner.
And this, I think, captures in a little glimpse, in a little kaleidoscopic glimpse, the complexity of American history, which is that Jefferson's principles were better than he was.
He was able to articulate a principle of freedom, even though he fell short, woefully short, in practicing that principle.
So when I say conservatism is about conserving the principles of the founding, we're talking about the principles of the founding, not the practices of the founders.
And so King knew that.
He made that distinction in his mind.
He recognized, I don't have to embrace Jefferson's plantation habits.
The way, for example, that he related to the slaves, whether or not he had a relationship with Sally Hemings, all that is beside to the side.
The real issue is that it was this principle, and how strange it is, that a slave owner would articulate such a principle that he knew stood against everything that his own life represented.
But I think Jefferson wanted America to be a better place, to become a better place, than it was.
And King understood that.
And so Lincoln understood that also.
So one can see, in a way, the Civil Rights Movement, but also the Civil War, as two massive attempts, successful attempts, to cash in on the principles introduced by Jefferson at the outset.
Martin Luther King did not look to a progressive future that was untethered to the past.
He wasn't trying to move away from the founding.
He was trying to move toward the founding.
▲
Export Selection