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Jan. 19, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:49
TRUMP’S LEGACY: A MAN IN FULL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep7
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The roots of cultural Marxism, the real Donald Trump, and will Parler come back?
My interview with Parler CEO John Mates.
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.
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Many of the most disturbing trends that we see in America, but also worldwide, trends that involve digital censorship, that involve ideological indoctrination in educational institutions,
That involve the one-sidedness and politicization even of entertainment and sports, the mobilization of the police agencies of government, the so-called deep state, the kind of gang mentality even in the publishing industry that drives dissenters out.
Now all of this comes under the rubric of the left's takeover of culture.
And this is a very serious problem, but it requires very careful thinking and very strategic action.
Much of our thinking on the subject seems to be a little bit clouded or vague.
Let's start with the simple notion.
What do we mean when we say that the left is taking over culture?
Now, there is a sort of anthropological definition of culture made famous by anthropologists like Malinowski and Claude Levi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz.
And this is the idea that culture is basically human behavior.
And so, for example, your eating habits, or the way that you sleep, or the way that you talk to your neighbors, the rituals that you practice of worship, your college reunion, pretty much everything you do, all your mores fall under this broad definition of culture.
But if you define culture this way, then it is meaningless to say that the left has taken over culture because the left isn't really regulating those things.
That's not what we're scared of.
That's not what we're worried about.
We are worried about something quite different, which is the left taking over the cultural means of production.
Or to put it differently, it's the left taking over certain key organs of the culture.
Let's kind of name them.
We're talking about the left taking over education.
Not just higher education, but elementary and secondary education.
Publishing. Media.
Not just print media, but television media.
Not just television media, but digital media.
We're also talking about the left taking over the organs of entertainment.
Again, not just movies, not just Hollywood, but even Broadway and the music industry and most, if not all, of the comedians.
So we're talking about the left establishing what may be called cultural monopoly, but maybe more accurately, cultural hegemony.
Cultural hegemony. And here we come to a critical phrase that was used by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci.
Much of his ideas were revealed in his prison notebooks.
The guy was locked up.
And Gramsci is critical, I think, to understanding what our problem is, but also what our solution is.
So Gramsci was a Marxist, but he was a Marxist who had come to terms with what can be called the crisis of Marxism.
Here's the crisis of Marxism.
Marx had predicted that by a kind of inevitable law, there would be a worker revolt that would overthrow the capitalist class and bring about socialism.
Marx didn't even think you needed to agitate for such a revolt.
He thought it would happen automatically, almost you may say by a law of science.
But it didn't happen.
It didn't happen in Germany or England where Marx thought it would come first.
It really didn't happen anywhere and it hasn't happened in Marx's way to this day anywhere in the world.
Now, Gramsci took this problem seriously and he asked why.
Why has the Marxist revolt failed?
And his answer was, it's failed because of the institutions of civil society.
The institutions of civil society.
Basically, this is what Gramsci said.
He said, look, if you're a working class guy, you're not just a worker.
You don't just exist in the economic realm.
You also are a churchgoer.
And you also belong, for example, to civic clubs.
You maybe belong to a bowling league.
You have all these friends, and together you have these fraternal associations.
And maybe in an age of social media, he would say, you've established a Facebook account.
You communicate with all your friends.
So, according to Gramsci...
The reason that workers haven't revolted, in his view, is because these workers are attached to what he called bourgeois culture.
They learn their patriotism, if you will, from military parades and paraphernalia.
They learn their religiosity from their pastors.
They learn, ultimately, fidelity to the principles of what Gramsci called bourgeois society.
And Gramsci noticed that there was one place where communist revolution, socialist revolution did succeed, Russia.
And he goes, why did it happen there?
How is it the case that it worked in this most unexpected place where Marx didn't think it was going to work?
And Gramsci's answer was it worked there because they don't have civil society.
You basically have the individual and then you have the state.
And the state was run at first by the czars, but then it was run by the Bolsheviks.
And so when you took over the state, you got everything.
But in free society, in Western society, says Gramsci, you don't have a socialist takeover until you control not just the economic means of production, but the cultural means of production.
So Gramsci sets the program.
The left, he says, needs to do what was later called a long march through the institutions.
Gramsci likens this to trench warfare.
First we take the universities.
Then through the universities we take the schools.
Why? Because it's university professors who are the teachers of the teachers.
And then we move into publishing.
And then we move into media.
And then we move into entertainment.
So slowly, and he admits that this is a project that could take a generation.
It's a kind of a soft revolution in which you occupy ground.
And when you occupy ground, you hold it and you advance.
Gramsci talks about the need of moving from holding your position to advancing.
The point I want to make is that this Gramscian project has now come to its fruition.
The left, which does not control all the organs of politics.
They certainly don't control the Supreme Court.
Even in the Senate, there's a tie.
But they do have this cultural hegemony.
And this creates for us, those of us who are not part of the left, critics of the left, a completely new situation and a new challenge.
The Republican Party, I'm sorry to say, is not even close to being up to the challenge, and neither is the conservative movement in general.
All you have to do is go on social media, look at the tweets of someone like Rona McDaniel, or even some of the Republican senators.
It's all filled with what I would call exhortation.
The media must pay attention to this!
There should be no place for digital censorship in our society!
If Gramsci were alive, he would laugh at this kind of meaningless nonsense, these words to quote Shakespeare that are nothing more than sound and fury signifying nothing.
You want to stop digital censorship?
Show us how you're going to stop it.
Don't tell us you're going to appeal to some higher nature on the part of Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey.
There is no higher nature.
They don't believe in higher principles.
They basically are occupying their ground and their challenges take it from us.
So we need a strategy of our own.
We need a new Antonio Gramsci of our own.
I volunteer for this position.
And I want this podcast to be a place where we don't just complain about what's wrong.
We don't just appeal to the higher motives of Jim Acosta and Nancy Pelosi and the people in Hollywood.
That is a useless, worse than useless strategy.
Rather, we look at what can be done and what is being done.
And one of the things I'm going to feature on this podcast is people who are actually doing something.
In my own career, I've tried constantly to do something.
With my first book, Illiberal Education, I tried to break up the hold of political correctness on the academy by splitting, you may say, the classical liberals from the left.
And I did that. By moving into documentary films, I said, I'm not just going to critique what Hollywood is doing.
I'm not just going to make fun of Michael Moore.
I do make fun of him.
I'm going to actually do better than what he does in making documentaries.
I'll make documentaries as, if not more successful than the fat guy.
And finally, feature films.
Debbie and I have moved into feature films.
We made the film Infidel, which can compete with any Hollywood film out there.
And we're going to do more of that.
So the bottom line of it is we've got to not just talk about things.
We've got to start doing things.
We need a Gramscian project of our own.
And this is the space for it to be examined, scrutinized, discussed, and advanced.
I'm very happy to have on the show today John Mates, the CEO of Parler.
He's in this heroic tradition of people who actually do things.
Don't just complain about Twitter.
Start a platform of your own.
And if the other guys try and get you, figure out a way to establish your own independence so you don't need them.
You have the last laugh, not they.
In this way, we will show the left that we are fully up to the challenge.
We're not going to go down like foolish suckers, pleading and imploring and appealing to sort of higher principles.
Rather, we're going to roll up our sleeves.
We're going to think. We're going to do things.
And we're going to ultimately retake the ground that has been taken from us.
We'll be right back. We are now at the mercy of one-party control and an agenda driven by tax and spend economics.
I don't need to get into the social ramifications, but fiscally expect compounded growth of our national debt and the systematic devaluation of the U.S. dollar.
So there's only one question.
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Today is Donald Trump's last official day in office.
And then he will be gone, at least for the present.
But in a strange way, with digital censorship, he has been gone already because we don't hear, at least not hear so much, from him.
But we do hear from his critics and from his haters, who have done more than perhaps anything we've seen in our lifetime, but perhaps in American history.
To vilify this man, to portray him as a kind of a Darth Vader, to give a blackened portrait of this Mephistophelian character Trump, this Nazi, this fascist, this dictator.
And that level of pathology, that pathological hatred demands explanation.
On the other side, we have the people who love Trump.
I've met a lot of those people.
And these are people who don't just like Trump.
They adore Trump.
In some ways, their American dream rides on Trump.
They have been with him through thick and thin.
They don't believe a word of the accusations against him.
And quite honestly, they are crying a little bit inside over what has happened in this election.
They are heartbroken.
I want to try in the next few episodes to get a gauge on Trump, to analyze Trump, to explain both the pathological hatred and the, you may call it, devotional affection.
I want to sort of pull out the real Donald Trump.
From behind the shadows and the mask and the adulation and the hatred.
But I'd like to start this by just talking about me and Donald Trump, my experience with Trump.
And you should know that I have not been a sort of, you may call it, original Trumpster.
When Trump ran in 2016, I wasn't in his camp and neither was my wife Debbie.
Our largest associations were with Ted Cruz.
In fact, Ted Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, married Debbie and me in 2016.
We didn't endorse Cruz.
We didn't endorse anybody, but we were seen to be sort of Cruz backers.
Partly, we didn't do it because we were making our film about the election.
And of course, when Trump became the nominee, we were on board with Trump as the Republican nominee.
Well, we would have been on board with any Republican nominee.
My first experience with Trump directly was when I was speaking at convocation at Liberty University.
This was right before Trump had one of his debates with Hillary.
And I was talking to Jerry Falwell Jr.
and we were talking about bombshell questions that Trump could drop on Hillary.
And I said, I've got a couple.
And Jerry Falwell Jr.
kind of chuckled and he pulls out his cell phone and he goes, okay, tell him.
And I'm like, tell who?
He goes, Trump. And so he calls Trump on the phone and Trump comes on right away and Jerry Falwell hands the phone to me.
And I told Trump, I got a couple of great questions for you to put to Hillary.
And he goes, oh, that would be tremendous.
My people are awful.
Send them to me. Send them to Bannon.
I'll get them. And so I sent him the questions, which were really good, but he didn't use them.
It's very Trump.
He said he wanted them, and then he didn't do anything with them, and I didn't do anything more with Trump immediately until I got my pardon.
Again, the interesting thing about my pardon was that I didn't know Trump.
He didn't owe it to me.
Ted Cruz had approached him about it, and as Ted Cruz tells it when Cruz was in the limousine, With Trump, Cruz just said, Hey, Mr.
President, you've pardoned Scooter Libby.
You've pardoned a bunch of other guys.
You really should pardon Dinesh D'Souza.
To which Trump replied with one word.
Done. Done.
Now, there's a whole bunch of legal rigmarole.
The process took a month.
But he did it.
I was sitting in my office.
I got the phone call, and it was Trump.
Hey, Dinesh, I'm sitting here with John Kelly.
You know John Kelly, don't you?
And I'm like, no, actually I don't.
I know he's the chief of staff.
And Trump goes, well, turning to this business at hand, Dinesh, your case, he goes, I knew it was BS, he said the word, from the beginning.
And you know what? I'm in a position to do something about it, so I'm going to grant you a full pardon in the morning.
And I was thinking to myself, wow, this is so unusual because any ordinary person, even any ordinary Republican, would have had strategy meetings over this, would have consulted with pollsters, how is the media going to take it?
But Trump was indifferent to all that.
His basic view was, I know your case.
I knew it from the beginning. When I looked at it, it confirmed what I already knew.
And I'm going to fix it because I can.
And that's the end of it.
So the guy I saw had a visceral sense of what's right, what's wrong.
And he knew my case was an injustice.
And he goes, I'm going to give you your American dream back.
Just get out there and be a bigger voice for freedom than you have been before.
The funny thing was, as he was talking and as I was listening, it's funny how your mind wanders, even when you're talking to the President of the United States.
And I was thinking to myself, wow, I think what you're doing, and I think you know it as well as I do, at this very moment, you are delivering a giant up yours to the Obama administration, which he was.
And I believe he knew it, and I knew it too.
And then in 2019, in November, my family got to meet Trump for the first time.
And in person, we were at the White House.
In fact, we were led into the Oval Office and there was no one there.
We're looking around, here's a photo of us sort of like, wow, we're in the Oval Office by ourselves.
Look at all this cool stuff in here.
And then in comes Trump bustling.
The purpose of the meeting was a kind of meet and greet to sort of thank him, if you will, for the part and ended up being a 45 minute session.
And we talked about a lot of very interesting things.
We saw a glimpse of Trump's very kind of unusual personality and style.
I asked him about the Indian Prime Minister Modi, and Trump goes, with a kind of twinkle in his eye, he goes, well, you know, he's a stone-cold killer.
And then he adds, but other than that, he's a really nice guy.
He's a stone-cold killer, but other than that, a really nice guy.
My wife Debbie had brought a picture of her aunt, kind of a prosperous-looking picture, the before version, and then the effect of socialism.
Her aunt looking haggard and emaciated, and she showed it to Trump, kind of to show him this is what's happening in Venezuela.
And Trump, who knows what's happening in Venezuela, took a look at it and he quipped.
He goes, what a way to lose weight.
And Debbie, I think, didn't quite know how to take it.
She was like, but this was Trump being Trump.
There's a time for seriousness with him, but there's also a time to be jovial.
I think the most touching moment of the whole meeting was...
When Debbie said to Trump, she said, Mr.
President, you get bashed on every platform every second of every day.
A normal person cannot take that kind of abuse.
How do you take it?
And I think we all expected Trump to go, I like it.
These people are idiots. Kind of that Trumpian ego that we've all come to expect.
But interestingly, Trump didn't do that.
He sat back and he goes, guys, you know, he goes, at the end of the day, He goes, I gotta tell you, it gets to me.
He goes, why?
Because I'm knocking myself out for the country.
He goes, I'm doing my best.
We've had some amazing successes.
We just got al-Baghdadi.
It had been a complicated operation.
He described it in some detail.
And he goes, these guys won't even give me one day of credit.
All they want to talk about was the dog that went in to the tunnel.
And then he turned to me and he goes, look, Tinesh, what they're doing to you, what they tried to do to you, what they did to you, they're now doing to me.
In a way, he saw his own case, which was impeachment, this is the first impeachment, as nothing but my case from several years earlier enlarged on a massively bigger scale.
And finally, we talked about the future.
And weirdly, in retrospect, Trump asked what he should do after the election.
And I looked a little startled because I thought, aren't you running again?
But he meant, no, no, after the presidency.
After the presidency, Dinesh, what do you think I should do?
And I said to him, Mr.
President, you should start a network.
Not just a cable channel, not some rinky-dink thing with talk radio on TV. It should be like CBS. It should be like ABC. You've got a massive following.
You've got... The means to do it, which is to say the money.
You've got the connections to the people who can organize and finance it.
You have the following.
You already have the audience.
So let all the networks fight over one half of the country.
You take the other half.
I still believe that this is, in a way, the best opportunity for Trump to do this now.
Why? Because as he gears up, unless he wants to basically exit the stage, he's had enough, he wants to play golf, I think the best thing for the Trump family to do is to get out of real estate and to go into the media business in a way that we never imagined.
Embrace this. This is the most valuable thing that Trump could do for the MAGA movement and for the Republican Party, because it builds us our own megaphone, which we don't currently have. Yes, we have Limbaugh.
Yes, we have somewhat of Fox News.
Yes, we have talk radio to a degree.
But we have nothing to compare with the megaphones of the left.
Trump can help us to get there.
And if he does that, it will actually be to our long-term benefit.
It will affect every election going forward.
It will allow us, if we believe our ideas are true, if we believe we can make a powerful case for them, all we need...
It's a megaphone to put those ideas before the American people and we will defeat and rout our opposition.
Bottom line? I think all of us left the Oval Office, my family, looking at each other and we thought, wow, we've always thought of Trump as this massive egotist.
He's actually not that egotistical.
He has a vulnerability to him.
He rarely shows it in public.
I honestly think if he had shown more of that part of himself, he would have been much more difficult, much more formidable as a candidate in the election.
But that's Trump.
He puts on his strong exterior, but behind it, he's not only a patriot, he's not only an entrepreneur, but he's a really nice guy with a smoldering sense of what is right.
And when he is in a position to do it, he'll always do the right thing.
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AMAC.com Our right to free speech, just like our other basic rights, depends critically on what may be called an underlying infrastructure that enables us to exercise those rights.
So, for example, you have a right to vote.
But let's say that you are not allowed to use the public roads to go vote.
Well, then your right to vote would be completely meaningless.
You have the right to worship, to go to church.
But let's say that you're under a lockdown that confines you to your house.
Well, then obviously, you might be able to worship at home on your own, but if you believe that worship is a communal activity, you can't get out there and do it.
So your right to worship becomes, in effect, meaningless.
So, in all these cases, your right to assemble, again, you need to have some way of getting from here to there to exercise your constitutional right to free assembly.
And the same is true of the right to free speech.
Our ability, for example, to publish a newspaper depends critically on being able to get the ink and buy the paper and have some mechanism of distribution.
Now, these rights can be squelched.
Not necessarily by saying you have no right to free speech but by blocking the means of exercising your rights.
And what is so striking today is that this is occurring not just in the governmental sphere but it's occurring in the private sphere.
A very telling example of this is the platform called Parler.
Parler, which was set up as a kind of, you may say, alternative to Twitter, a kind of free speech zone where people could, within the bounds of what is legal, Speak their mind, engage in debate, regardless of their ideological convictions.
A kind of true open space, a true open public square for people to argue and have it out, not just on issues of politics, but on issues more generally.
And then Parler was subjected to a kind of multi-pronged attack.
You may almost call it a kind of full-spectrum cancellation, an effort to try to block Parler from exercising this free speech right at every juncture.
This was an attack that was, it seems, coordinated because it all occurred at the same time.
An attack launched by Google, an attack launched by Apple, and Amazon, with later participation from groups like American Express, if you can believe it.
So in other words, you have all these massively powerful private companies, tech companies, but also finance companies coming together to prevent this platform from literally being able to exist.
Now, it seems to me to be the height of stupidity to say, well, folks, this is not being done explicitly by the government.
The government may, of course, sanction or permit these institutions to exist.
It might have created a legal structure for them to exist.
It might have given them Section 230 protections to exist.
But nevertheless, they are private companies and they can do whatever they want.
In reality, private companies can't do whatever they want.
If private companies could do whatever they want, they wouldn't have to follow lockdown orders.
But private companies are restricted in all kinds of ways.
They're restricted in being monopolies.
They're restricted, for example, if you look at radio and television stations, they are restricted and regulated by the Federal Communications Commission.
So this argument is a real non-starter.
But nevertheless, the practical challenge facing Parler is, so what do you do?
You're in a Biden administration in which the government is not, not, going to take away Section 230 protections.
The government is quite likely to do nothing.
Why? Because this kind of digital censorship is occurring in support of the Biden cause, of the Biden administration.
I'm very excited today to have John Mates, the CEO of Parler, on this podcast.
We're going to talk about what happened to Parler.
We're going to talk about what Parler represents and why Parler scared them so much.
Most importantly, we're going to talk about what's the road ahead.
How does Parler come out of this?
It seems to me vital that Parler beat this effort down.
This is sort of like a George Foreman rain of punches that's being thrown to put Ali on the canvas.
So if Ali goes down, then it works.
But if Ali survives it...
Then Ali emerges stronger than ever, more independent than ever, not beholden to these platforms anymore.
So to me, John Matz, John Matz is a hero.
To me, John Matz represents an effort not just to complain about the one-sidedness of the digital world, but an effort to create something new, an alternative to it.
There is a concerted campaign going on to go after Mike Lindell and MyPillow.
This is a campaign that is being conducted with left-wing groups who go to retailers and tell them not to carry MyPillow products.
Why? Because Mike Lindell is such an enthusiastic supporter of Trump, because he's spoken on the rallies, because he's spoken out on behalf of Trump in the election.
So what I want you to do is teach these retailers a lesson.
And the way to do that is to support Mike Lindell in a way that we haven't supported him before, to go all out, if you will, for Mike Lindell.
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So welcome, John Mates.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Let me start by asking you, is it clear to you that this attack on Parler was not a coincidental ABC attack, but was a coordinated attack?
Thank you for having me on.
And yeah, that is my opinion.
It's the same day.
They had almost the same verbiage released around the same time.
And what's fascinating is all three, Google, Apple, and Amazon, they all have the same strategy to leak their emails to us, to the press, before giving it to us.
And as far as I could tell, which I haven't gotten into the details yet, But it looks like they all picked BuzzFeed as the one to release all of their emails too.
So it's hard to look at the situation where you go, For weeks, we had no problem with Google, no problem with Apple, no problem with Amazon.
Everything was normal.
There were no complaints.
There were no major issues.
And then all on the same day, they all leak the emails to a media partner, and they all then make the same allegations against us on the same day, very hot, very heavy, and without any prior real warning or notice.
To me, that feels like they were cooperating with one another and I think anybody looking at that situation would probably say the same thing.
I read that Amazon, which probably that's the most troubling of all, because these are people who, it's one thing for Apple to say, it's our app, we don't really want you on our app.
It's another thing for Google to say, in effect, the same thing.
But Amazon was essentially, you were their customer, you signed an agreement with them.
They were providing you with services, you were paying for those services.
And essentially what they did is they cut your legs out from under you by pulling your infrastructure.
Would that be a correct description?
Yes. And it's actually very fascinating because they have a contract that says they have to give us notice before termination and actually a long period of notice.
And so what Amazon has told the judge and told the courts is, No, we did not terminate Parler.
We simply gave them a permanent suspension, you know, as if that means something entirely different.
We're now moving into a little bit of Orwell territory, where you change the word as if that actually changes the significance of what you did.
Let's explore this claim.
This is from The Atlantic.
I see an article here by Caitlin Tiffany.
Which basically says, and I'm going to quote here, that Parler went from a small, spammy Twitter clone to the site that helped foment an insurrection.
Now, I want to ask this.
Is there any evidence that Parler...
Did Parler foment the capital takeover that occurred?
Did Amazon even allege or supply any proof that this was the case?
Has anybody? Well, to date, there's no real evidence that that's the case.
Of the 13 people that were arrested, it's still not known that not even one of them had a Parler account.
They did have Twitter, they did have Facebook, but they didn't have a Parler account.
And sadly, the one individual who was killed at the Capitol, she...
She did have a Parler account but hadn't used it for six plus months.
She did, however, use her Twitter account all during that day.
And so what's very fascinating is not only is there no evidence that Parler had anything to do with it, there's actually evidence that Twitter and Facebook did.
Facebook groups actually, according to an internal survey they did and released, Facebook groups put 60% of the people together through their algorithms by getting them to join these groups through algorithms pushing the event.
So it's very fascinating to see that actually there's not only is there no evidence that Parler had anything to do with it, there's actually significant evidence that Facebook is very responsible for what happened.
So you're saying, I was about to ask you whether it's the case, which seems to be quite obviously that it is, that when Amazon supplied you, I believe, with a sort of list of allegedly inciting or violent statements on Parler, you could find ten times as many very easily on any of the other platforms, from YouTube to Facebook to Google.
But what you're saying is not only that, but this particular event, this Capitol takeover, had a lot of activity on Facebook and other platforms by the people who were organizing it.
And in a sense, they bear more responsibility, it seems, than Parler does.
Is that what you're saying?
Yes, that is exactly correct.
And, you know, the fascinating thing is Amazon provided us 100 examples of content that was not allowed by their standards, right?
And so most of those were actually already taken down by the time we received those 100 examples, which were all on the same day.
I believe it was Saturday. And so the other thing that's fascinating is the same day they gave us those complaints, there were hundreds of thousands of tweets on Twitter about hanging Mike Pence.
Thank you.
You know, there were, however, 100, nearly 100 examples, which were already moderated away by the community jury on Parler.
So that is definitely, in my opinion, a double standard.
Now, you said in your interview with Mark Levin that over the weekend that Parler had grown to approximately 15 million account holders.
In other words, Parler has literally exploded and grown, you may say, tenfold from where it was, let's just say, a year ago.
Here's my question.
Do you think that the real motive for going after Parler was Entirely ideological?
Do you think part of it was an effort to prevent competition?
Because think about it, if you're out of business, then Twitter can suspend people at random and they have no place else to go.
Otherwise, they'd say, sorry, Twitter, goodbye, we're moving over to Parler.
So by removing the competition, you essentially have created a Twitter monopoly.
So do you think it's the ideological motive or the economic motive or some combination of both?
I think there's a few things at play.
So if you look at the court filings that we did against Amazon, they were notified as early as October that there was a very high chance that President Trump was joining Parler.
And the reason we had to notify Amazon is because they needed to prepare servers and spin up infrastructure.
So they were coordinating that event with us.
They were planning that with us because, you know, had he joined, they would need to be working overtime to spin up extra servers for us.
And so, you know, October, November, December, they were getting status updates.
And then what's very fascinating is the morning of that they send us all these notices on Friday.
It's actually funny to read the text in hindsight.
It's funny and creepy.
You know, you look at the text and it says, you know, from Amazon's rep, you know, I'm looking at it and it goes, so is Trump joining?
I heard on Hannity he joined.
And I said, I'm pretty certain he joined, but he has a shadow account.
And then no response.
And then I said, hey, Apple sent us an angry message.
You know, is everything okay? Okay, so I just got your message.
What's going on? And so it literally occurred like that as I'm reading the messages in real time.
So it's as if I just told them it's likely Trump has an account.
And then immediately we get piled on by Apple, Google, and Amazon.
Well, wait a minute now, because you're introducing now a third motive, which I never even thought of.
And that is that they have effectively silenced Trump across all major platforms.
This is a guy who had a combined follower account of Over 100 million, if you add up his Twitter, his Instagram, and his Facebook.
They shut him down on those fronts.
Could it be that if Trump is on the verge of building his new following on Parler, that that was the reason they decided to go after you?
I think that was entirely their primary motive, is that they didn't want him to have a platform, and that was it.
And so they used everything else as an excuse, because if it really was violence that was their problem, we could have worked with them and talked to them.
We were also, anytime any illegal activity happened, we were cooperating with the authorities to make sure people were found.
And so... If violence and incitement was really their problem, they would have been looking at places like Twitter, where it is rampant, very, very rampant.
Or they would be looking at places like Facebook, where events were organized.
They have all these facts.
They didn't care about those.
And so to me, it felt like the primary motive was really the idea that Trump could have been joining.
And they knew that Parler, standing for free speech, means everybody has a right to speak.
They knew that we wouldn't ban him.
And so I think that was their primary motive.
And their secondary motive was also that of competition.
They have a monopoly on speech.
Amazon controls a lot of infrastructure.
Apple controls the ability to access iPhones.
If you don't have access to iPhone, then you can't get your, if you can't get access to the App Store, you cannot be on the iPhone at all, which most influencers use iPhones.
If Apple or Google decides to ban your app, they follow suit with one another.
And as you saw with what happened to Parler, when Amazon, Apple, or Google, any of them come out and make a harsh statement saying they will not support you, We get SMS vendors saying no, credit card processors saying no.
Every other backup cloud vendor in the United States, let's say six plus of the next top cloud storage providers other than Amazon for infrastructure said no.
Amazon then cited, hey, why not just build your own data center then?
And they literally said that in their brief, which is shocking because we're a software company.
We're not a hardware company. So, you know, it's like saying to McDonald's, you know, or like saying to Burger King, you know, why don't you make your own water lines or power grid?
Like, come on, don't be ridiculous.
Here's a couple of tweets from Oliver Darcy, a journalist.
He's quoting something that Alex Stamos said to Brian Stelter on CNN. I want to show why this is actually spiraling out of control, even beyond Parler.
We are going to have to figure out the OAN, the One American News, and Newsmax problem.
This is sort of dictatorial talk.
These companies have freedom of speech, but I'm not sure.
We need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and such bringing them into tens of millions of homes.
So basically what they're getting at here is the same thing.
You've got these conservative outlets.
How about if we block their infrastructure so that even though they have a right to free speech, the right is meaningless because they can't get their content into your home?
Where do you think this kind of high-tech infrastructure gangsterism is going to take us?
I mean, isn't it a fact that if it continues, then we can theoretically say that it's being done by private companies, but the simple fact of it is that we will have no genuine free speech in America, and moreover, the 75 to 80 million people who voted for Trump It's weird because looking at the landscape,
you know, we've seen a lot of strange and horribly abusive governments throughout history.
The one thing that we haven't seen, which I think is what's forming here, is not a government, but a kind of country ran by a few big companies.
Because it seems that there is an outrage mob.
It's a very vocal, vocal minority, which is on Twitter.
They're out there saying, hey, everybody, go after Parler now.
And so they work together, they target every vendor that works with us, and then they target every client of those vendors, and they say, cancel Parler.
And so it seems very weird that the country in the marketplace is not ruled by a government, rather it's ruled by an outrage mob who goes to these corporations and determines who can and cannot exist in the marketplace.
It's very strange to see, and it's extremely dangerous.
The weird thing is, and I'm libertarian leaning, I've never been about big government.
I've never been about government involvement.
I've always been about private corporations.
But witnessing this, it makes me think someone needs to rein in these companies.
They're too powerful.
And if you're providing infrastructure services, what does it matter what we're doing as long as it's legal?
And so Amazon claims Section 230 gives them the right to boot us from their infrastructure.
But, you know, the content that they're claiming they want to boot us over, we have Section 230 immunity over as well.
And so it doesn't quite make sense that they get to weaponize theirs against our company for stuff that we're immune from anyway, legally speaking.
So it's kind of a big old headache, and it doesn't make any sense why they can all do this.
And it could happen to literally any company and any person at any point in time if they wanted to do it to you.
It seems to me to be an American streak of fascism, if you will, and I don't use that word lightly.
I've written a book about it.
Fascism is the coordination of the government with private industry to achieve a shared, coordinated objective.
These people here talking about this outrage mob, these are the sort of digital brownshirts who essentially are the equivalent of Mussolini's thugs on the street.
This is why it seems to me imperative that this effort against Parler fail.
So here's my question.
What do you need?
What are you doing?
What can people do to help you to beat these thugs so that you can come out, Parla come back, come back sooner rather than later, and prove that this, you may say, blitzkrieg against you didn't work.
Well, we're going to come through this stronger, and we're not going to give up or give in.
We can't let them destroy our businesses like this.
And so the only thing that we can do, which will drive them completely insane, is to succeed.
If you saw the article by, what is it, the Daily Beast yesterday, they said, oh no, the parlor hell site is back.
You know, because we got our static website, it drives them mad.
They are foaming at the mouth that we're even getting a static website up, let alone coming back.
And so only thing we can do is really succeed here.
And to do this, it's going to be difficult.
We have, there's only probably less than 10 companies in the United States who can offer infrastructure security for us.
None of them wanted to work with us.
So now we have to go international.
And it's sad that our American values aren't here to say free speech.
We're not here to say you have a right to run your own business.
They're not here to uphold American values.
And so we have to go outside the country, really, to find security for our site.
Have you checked? What about checking India?
Because I know that India is probably one of the most pro-American countries in the world today.
The Indians believe in free speech.
They like the American model of free speech.
I'm sure there are tons of people appalled at what's going on in America.
If I can be helpful in hooking you up with some Indian companies that might be very happy to take this on, please let me know.
I will. And India and Europe, you know, everywhere, even Russia and China are more open to the opportunity of free speech right now than the United States' business sector is.
And so this is really, really scary.
But we're going to come through this because we're going to figure out the partners who are really our friends, who are going to stick by us no matter what.
And that's what we're finding right now.
And we have to rebuild this infrastructure, not just for Parler, but we're going to have to rebuild it for every other company because OAN is next.
Newsmax is next. Fox News is after that.
All of these private companies will work their way, taking out the next easiest player until they can completely destroy any opposition.
And that's what they're doing.
This is a political movement to them.
And so in order to stop this, we have to be I mean, won't it be ironic if it is Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico and foreign entities that step up and go, we believe more in the First Amendment than you do anymore in America, or at least the left does anymore in America.
Let me leave you by asking this question, John.
Seems to me that you're saying to the question, will Parler be back now?
Yes. But my question now is, can you let people know about when?
Lots of people with big accounts, me included, miss Parler.
And we're thinking, like, when, when, when?
You know how we are in the impatient age of digital media.
What can you tell us about the when?
Do you have any indication of when you're going to be up and running?
Hopefully by the end of this month, as in January 2021.
That is awesome. I'm delighted to hear it.
John, you're a hero for what you're doing.
If you succeed, you will be bigger than ever.
This is going to be awesome. I'm going to be on your side and I want this show to be a forum not only for featuring solutions but for featuring the people who don't just complain but make it happen.
You make it happen. Thank you for being on this show.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
I don't think anyone can deny that.
Even his critics will have to admit that their mania, their frenzy, their rabid hatred of Trump cannot be directed at a lukewarm figure.
They attacked him because they were terrified of him.
They recognized that he had the power to change the way people think, the way the country does business, our relationship to our government.
I can't think as I look across the sweep of American history of very many consequential one-term presidents.
Probably the example that jumps to mind is Polk.
James Polk, Democrat, the middle of the 19th century.
Polk's great achievement in one term was to virtually double the size of the United States.
He won the Mexican War.
And got a whole bunch of territory, then the Gadsden purchase, plus California, plus Oregon.
Suddenly this country, which was already getting larger, became huge, became what we now know as the United States.
And Polk did that, and he did it pretty much in one term.
I think Trump is a figure of that kind of Polkian dimension.
But how will he be remembered?
Now, Winston Churchill liked to say that he would be remembered very kindly by history because he intended to write it.
But I actually don't think that that's why Churchill is kindly remembered by history.
Not for that reason. Churchill is kindly remembered by history for a different reason, and that is, Britain had already lost the war against the Nazis.
Germany had won.
Britain was on its knees, defeated.
But Churchill knew that the only way for Britain to win was to go into a kind of collective national illusion.
Pretend you haven't lost.
Hang in there, if you will, and wait for the cavalry to arrive.
Now the cavalry, it turned out, was not only the United States, but also Russia, as it turned out.
But Churchill's great achievement, and this was partly the role of his marvelous rhetoric, was to hold his defeated island nation together until his allies, in this case, ironically, Stalin, but also FDR in America, came to the rescue and collectively or jointly smashed the Nazi power and gave England a second lease on life.
It is sometimes said that history will remember every president, every American president, by only one line.
It kind of shows that history is sort of cruel.
It doesn't have room for a lot of, on the one hand, on the other hand.
And so it's pretty much, Washington was the father of the country.
That's his one line. Lincoln freed the slaves.
Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.
That's what Margaret Thatcher said about Reagan.
And that's his one line.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to do a better one.
So what about Trump?
With Trump, it's really hard because Trump is a figure of so many dimensions.
Several years ago, the novelist Tom Wolfe wrote a novel called A Man in Full, a description of Coakley, a kind of Georgia magnet, who has all these different dimensions to him.
He is, in a way, a great man, but he's also terribly flawed.
He's immensely successful, but he accumulates gargantuan loads of debt.
And so you have this great figure, a man in full.
And Trump is indeed a man in full.
But because he has so many dimensions, it's hard to know which one to zoom in on.
And I want to give my own stab.
It's very dangerous to do a sort of first draft of history, literally the day the guy is leaving office.
But I want to suggest that Trump will be remembered as the billionaire who became the unlikely implausible defender of the forgotten American.
This rich man with his own life and his golf courses and his towering buildings became the champion of ordinary working class Americans that America seems to have forgotten.
I'll say more about this when I come back.
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History, I believe, will remember Donald Trump, however it remembers him, as the champion of the forgotten American.
Now, who are these forgotten Americans?
A good place to start is to begin with the movie, the 1978 movie by Michael Cimino, called The Deer Hunter.
I'd seen that movie many years ago, but I saw it again recently and it had a powerful effect on me because in a way it showed me a window into working class America.
And so the movie begins with all the smelting fires of the steel industry in Pittsburgh.
And this goes on for minutes.
You couldn't make a movie like this today.
People would sort of leave the room.
But Michael Cimino just sits on it.
He lets you see the hard life that these guys have, these blue-collar guys, and they're covered in sweat, and their flames are going all over their face, and they've got some protective equipment, but every now and then there's an injury, and that is the hard life that they live.
And then suddenly the film cuts to Vietnam and the fires of Vietnam and the fiery villages and the villages being set on fire and the fire being shot at the helicopters.
And suddenly you realize that the fires of Vietnam are not all that different from the fires of Pittsburgh.
That these guys have it tough either place.
And they go through hell, so to speak.
And they do it in a very uncomplaining way.
What's so striking is I came to America in 1978, all this debate about the aftermath of Vietnam, the justice of the war, the typical pointy-headed intellectuals and professors all going on and on about the injustice of the war, the domino effect.
Was communism really such a big threat, Dinesh?
There's none of this in the movie.
These guys look at it totally differently.
We're called, and so we go.
It is a stoic, accept life as it comes, recognize that you have obligations to your country, and it is your job to fulfill them.
And this war takes a terrible toll on these people.
And they come back, and their lives are broken, and their friend is dead, and another friend is in a wheelchair.
And you can see this suffering that they're going through, and they're inarticulate about that.
They hardly speak about it.
You have Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Michael Savage, and their ability to convey emotion while saying little or nothing.
Half the time this movie is spoken in little trite phrases and little grunts in which you have to excavate the emotion out of it.
But these are the forgotten Americans.
And in the closing scene of this movie, To me, it's very moving because these people whose lives are totally broken just look at each other and they start singing God Bless America.
I think it's Meryl Streep who starts.
She just begins in a very sad tone to talk about God Bless America.
And these aren't people who've enjoyed the American dream.
If I sing God Bless America, I celebrate a life that would have been much different in India.
But here in America, I've seen success.
I've had the American dream.
For these people, their American dream is broken.
But still, they sing, God bless America.
Their love for their country is truly unconditional.
These are the people that our economy has forgotten.
They've been buffered by technology.
Their jobs have been made obsolete by outsourcing.
There are illegal immigrants coming to this country who work for less.
So you've seen the decimation of families and communities.
You've seen downward mobility that these people have suffered for the first time in American history.
You'd have to go back to the aftermath of the Civil War and what happened in the South to find Americans who have seen their standard of living go down.
So Trump stood up for these people, and he gave them a voice.
I'm not one of these people, but I care about them.
I'm not indifferent to them, and neither is Trump.
We've got to remember, it's their America too.
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