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Jan. 22, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:18
SWAMP DWELLERS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep10
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How political swamps are made and drained.
How to cancel, cancel culture.
And why Biden makes no fracking sense.
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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If there's one reason that Donald Trump came to Washington, it was to clean things up.
It was to drain the swamp.
Trump promised to drain the swamp.
He never stopped talking about it.
We have begun to drain the swamp.
But did he in fact drain the swamp?
Here we are after the 2020 election and it would appear that the swamp beat him.
The swamp drained him.
And We look in examples of that all over the place.
Section 230 for the digital companies, that's still intact.
Trump never had full control of his own Justice Department, neither first with Sessions nor entirely later with William Barr.
We look at Planned Parenthood, which continued to receive funding throughout the Trump administration.
We look at all the other federal programs and bureaucracies that remain in place.
So when you have a victory or even a defeat, it's really helpful to do a little bit of a post-mortem to try to understand how you got here.
And I'd like to try to do this in a very fundamental way by asking a simple question.
How do swamps get made?
And then I wanna ask a second question.
How do swamps get drained?
The argument I wanna make is that it doesn't take an ordinary guy to drain a swamp.
In fact, you need a plumber to drain a swamp.
And by a plumber, I mean you need a certain type of person to do it.
And I'm not sure if Trump ever found those types of people.
But let's begin with the first question, which is quite simply, how do you make a swamp?
First of all, the swamp is actually sort of old.
The swamp itself is not new.
Maybe the swamp became bigger and deeper and more fetid.
But there was a swamp even under Reagan.
I remember Richard Perle Assistant Secretary in the Defense Department for nuclear weapons.
And Pearl was a friend of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, and he once told this remarkable story in which he was at a reception with Reagan, and he went running up to Reagan, kind of broke his way through the melee, and he says, Mr.
President, I've got something really important to tell you.
There are lots of people in the Defense Department and even in the State Department who are actively working to undermine your policies.
And Pearl goes, I expected Reagan to be, you know, troubled and alarmed and shocked by this information, but Reagan just gave it a belly laugh.
Richard, don't let those bums get you down.
Just keep your head down and do what you do.
In other words, Reagan knew that there was a swamp.
So how do these swamps come into place?
I think a good way to think about it is to think about a basic government program, any kind of a program.
Let's just say the government, and this could go back 30 or 40 years or even back to FDR, gets an idea of let's, for example, do something to fight poverty or let's do something, for example, to see if we can reduce the problem of drugs.
And so what the government does then is Is they allocate a bunch of money, and that bunch of money is then dispersed to various organizations who are supposed to do this task.
Let's say, for example, it's $100,000, it goes to 10 different organizations, and all of them are supposed to be fighting poverty, let's say.
And after a while, the government takes a look at this and then decides, whoa, this is really not really working.
Why don't we get rid of this program?
Now, what's going to happen? Right away, all these organizations that are getting, let's say, $10,000 each from the government become very alarmed.
They're going to lose their money. So they all hire a lobbyist for $1,000 apiece.
I'm obviously using very low numbers, but this is just for illustration.
And these lobbyists, these 10 lobbyists, now fight bitterly to protect the program.
Now, of course, the government that wants to cut the program goes, look at all these Americans.
Really, many Americans are funding this program.
Why don't we turn to the voters and see if we can rouse them to overpower these lobbyists?
But here's the problem.
Each voter has paid very little.
Let's just say a fraction of a penny for this particular program.
And so, they could care less about it.
It's not even worth their time to get involved to make a phone call And so as a result, the inaction of the people who are paying for the program, combined with the vigorous resistance of the people who have something to lose, That's how you get a swamp.
I get this insight, by the way, from what is called public choice economics, a whole group of scholars who have worked on this issue and looked at this example that I gave in miniature as a metaphor for all government programs, all of which now have these entrenched bureaucracies, all in Washington, a kind of political artillery to protect their programs.
And meanwhile, the voters are dispersed and inert and uninvolved.
And this is how government programs take on a life of their own.
They develop established interests, which work together, and sometimes Republicans are part of it, too.
They're all part of protecting, ultimately, these privileges that have built up and grown over time that are very difficult to root out.
When I come back, I'll discuss how to drain a swamp.
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Swamps are not easy to drain.
They have strong concentrations of people inside them The swamp creatures, if you will, who collaborate with each other, sometimes even across party lines.
I encountered this problem as a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House when we tried to cut government programs.
It's remarkable how we face constant resistance.
Every group, even within the Reagan administration, believed that their program was vital and that their organization was the necessary one to do the job.
So if you talk about the drug problem, for example, suddenly the Defense Department goes, oh yeah, that's our problem.
We need to basically deal with the problem in Colombia.
It's a military problem.
And then you have the Department of Health and Human Services go, oh no, no, no, it's a health problem.
We need more resources because we basically gotta deal with drugs at the level of providing needles, providing counseling, all the various health ways of tackling this problem.
And then, of course, the Department of Education jumps in and goes, oh, no, no, drugs is not a problem of either defense or of health.
It's an education problem.
After all, we have people who want to use drugs and this requires educational programs.
So everybody, and these are Republicans, conservatives, pushing for the government to divert drugs.
Resources, and not just resources, but importance, policy focus to them.
So, one of the things I learned is that if you want to drain a swamp, you sort of have to do it from the inside.
You need a certain type of a skilled plumber.
Now, when Trump first came in, it was said of Trump, he's a business guy.
He's going to bring a totally different attitude to government.
And part of that is very valuable.
You may almost call it the perspective of distance.
I've talked about that even on the show.
The need to be able to see things from the outside with a certain kind of clarity.
But there's a problem that comes with that.
Imagine if I was doing this show and I had just come from India yesterday.
I would have an amazing outside perspective.
Everything in America would look fresh to me.
But I couldn't be trusted to analyze or solve any problems in America because I would have no insider knowledge, no insider perspective.
I would have no idea how things worked from the inside.
By insider here, I mean a guy like Richard Grinnell, a guy who's sort of been in the system, understands the system, has worked his way through the intelligence apparatus, and would kind of know what programs to cut, who to fire, who to leave a pink slip on their desk for, who you have to coddle at least temporarily.
Machiavelli says, for example, that we have to learn to deal and do business with people as long as they are in a position to do us harm.
Once they are safely unable to do that, then we can get rid of them and it's no problem.
So a little bit of Machiavellianism is needed here.
And I'm going to turn to Machiavelli for a moment because he helps us understand the nature of the problem.
One of the most notorious examples in The Prince, Machiavelli's Prince, Is when Cesare Borgia finds a rebellion brewing in the Romagna, the middle part of Rome, and he doesn't know what to do with it.
He's in a sense an outside guy, he's presiding over this, but there's all this trouble brewing, a swamp you might say, right in Italy.
And so what does Cesare Borgia do?
He hires a local man, an inside man, his own, let's call him Richard Grinnell, although the analogy you'll see breaks down at this point, This guy's name is Romero D'Orco.
He is a ruthless inside man, and basically Cesare Borgia tells him, come on in, kill everybody.
Just go in and do your thing.
Massacre the people you have to.
Fire the people you have to.
Clean the place up.
And so Ramiro de Orco sets to work and he is unbelievably good at this.
And there are dead bodies everywhere and people in prison and people who have been fired.
But of course there's massive public resistance and anger directed at this savage inside man.
And so how does the story conclude?
Machiavelli says, one day the people of the Romagna came out into the town square and there was the head of Ramiro de Orco on a stake.
And the people were confounded and amazed.
And what's going on here is that Cesare Borgia diverted the popular hatred onto this other guy.
So he made him do the dirty work, then he blamed him for it, and he got rid of him along with the swamp.
Now this is a story told from the Middle Ages by a Florentine author who is obviously describing things in very...
Brutal, even barbaric terms.
I don't mean the analogy to apply directly, but the point I think is not lost, and that is you need in politics to play hardball.
You need to find people who are inside the establishment, inside the swamp, But they're your people.
That alone is hard to do.
How do you identify such people?
Because they blend in with other people.
You've got to pick the guys on the team who are your guys.
And then they've got to change the architecture.
They've got to change the swamp itself.
To make sure that they're cleaning it up.
They may not be able to clean it up completely, but they're making progress in cleaning it up.
Now, if all of this seems like a very tall order to ask of Republicans to do, let's remember, Democrats do this.
Think of, for example, how the Democrats infiltrated the police agencies of government.
That hadn't happened before.
I can guarantee you the FBI hadn't been taken over by the Jimmy Carter administration.
But somehow under the Clintons and under Obama, they began this process of taking over these agencies, infiltrating them, and Holder saw himself as Obama's wingman.
That, he understood, was his job from the inside itself.
Now, obviously, they're not draining the swamp.
They are actually expanding the swamp.
But the principle is kind of the same.
The principle is how do you make bureaucracy or swamps do your bidding?
I think as we look back on Trump, His intentions were good.
His perspective was good.
He meant well, and he did try.
I kind of, I really do wish he had had a second shot at the second term.
Look at the way, for example, that even Barr was so much better than Sessions, who was a complete disgrace, a complete loser, going Ripman Winkle and us like that.
And maybe Barr would have stepped out and somebody else would have come in even better.
So Trump is a quick learner.
He was getting better at it.
And the very bad news is that he didn't have this second chance.
And therefore the swamp endures.
The swamp will probably get bigger.
We'll need to have another Trump or perhaps someone with a Trumpian spirit.
Who has not only the desire and the outside perspective, but also the inside capacities and the inside perhaps ruthlessness to once and for all truly drain the swamp.
We'll be right back. We're 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 you can expect compounded growth of our national debt and the systematic devaluation of the U.S. dollar.
So here's a question, a question I've been thinking about.
What is your plan?
What's my plan? What are we doing?
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Right upon taking office, President Biden has issued a whole series of executive orders, a kind of blizzard of executive orders.
And it's a lot of stuff that we would expect.
In a sense, it is the reverse of the stuff that Trump did at the very beginning.
So here are a few of them.
He orders a federal mask mandate.
He stops the building of the border wall right away.
He has torn up the so-called Muslim ban, as he calls it.
He signed an order to begin the process of rejoining the Paris Accord.
He dissolved the 1776 Commission.
And he's done a bunch of other stuff.
He apparently has some sort of a transgender order.
I'll have to look at that more carefully, but I guess Hunter Biden will now be able to use an open kimono in the women's restroom.
Most significantly for me, he has an executive order on fracking, an executive order that brings fracking to a temporary halt, and he's also blocking new leases on oil and gas for a period of 60 days.
Now, he said he would do it.
We can't be all that surprised that he did it.
He denies that he's banning fracking completely.
But let's think about this.
Fracking is actually one of the great innovations of the last decade or so, a couple of decades now.
It's a new way to pull oil out of the ground that couldn't be gotten at before.
It allows the United States to achieve something that was for a long time just a dream, energy independence.
We don't rely anymore on the Middle East.
We don't have to be drawn in to Middle Eastern catastrophes anymore.
So all of this would seem to be a great boon, not to mention the jobs that are created with the Keystone Pipeline that Biden, again, just cancelled.
So, this is a very disturbing set of developments, just because it makes no fracking sense.
Why would you want to do this?
Why would you want to terminate a completely safe procedure?
And if you say you're not terminating fracking in general, why terminate it now?
Why terminate it at all?
Well, the answer, of course, is that the Biden people are responding to...
The environmental movement to climate change.
And climate change is another ruse.
By ruse, what I mean is that the climate is not changing.
The climate all over the world is the same pretty much as it was when we were kids.
There's some natural variability.
And scientists who are paid large amounts of money to discover climate change go and take temperature readings in one section of the ocean.
And if those don't cooperate, they go take them in another part of the ocean to find something that says, Oh, the temperature has gone up one degree in the last hundred years.
There you go. Evidence of climate change.
Now, it's important to realize that all these politicians who say, listen to the science, most of these people don't know any science.
They're not listening to the science.
They're incapable of understanding the science.
Just show them a climate chart and ask them to make sense of it, and they'll look at you like, you're from Mars.
So they don't know if the earth is getting hotter or colder, and quite frankly, they don't care.
Their behavior shows that they don't care.
The Obamas just purchased this massive property in Martha's Vineyard.
These are the same Obamas who go on telling you, the oceans are rising, the cities are going to get swamped, coastal cities won't exist anymore.
Well, if coastal areas are all getting swamped, why would you invest $12 million on oceanfront real estate?
Why would the Bidens have a beach house right there in Rehoboth Beach on Delaware?
The reason is, they can look around, they can see property values are holding, and the fact that property values are holding tells you this.
It's not just that the Obamas know it's nonsense.
Buyers know it's nonsense.
Sellers know it's nonsense.
Real estate agents know it's nonsense.
Everybody knows it's nonsense.
And the market reflects that.
But at the same time, when you put aside the common sense of the market, you get this political bloviated rhetoric, which kind of offers you a reality that doesn't match anything in your experience.
It's kind of like these fashion magazines who say things like...
Ever since the beautiful Michelle Obama stepped off the stage and the ugly Melania came in and now we're back to the gorgeous Kamala Harris.
It's sort of like, I mean, I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but really?
Are we supposed not to believe our own lying eyes?
Are we supposed to ignore our experience and go with Vogue magazine tells us about this?
So here's the point I'm trying to make, and that is that...
This climate change operation is an effort for the government to establish greater control over the economy.
And that's really what the Democrats want.
But as I think back on this, and Debbie and I live in the state of Texas, We make movies and forum movies.
We look for investors.
And some of the guys we talk to are oil guys, people who deal with pipelines, they deal with fracking.
And we say to them things like, hey guys, you know what?
The Democrats basically want to destroy your industry.
They want to take away, in effect, your livelihood.
The reason we want you to invest in our movies is because we are trying to defend the infrastructure of free markets.
And capitalism and upward mobility.
Look at the fracking industry.
You've got a bunch of guys, some of whom never finished high school or just high school grads who never went to college.
And these are guys who normally would be working for $15,000, $20,000 a year, maybe a little more.
But they can make $100,000 a year working in the fracking industry.
And so they travel long distances and they live in small cabins and they work really hard.
But they're really excited that here's an industry that makes money and gives them the prospect of a good life.
All these people are now imperiled.
And so we say to these oil guys, you know, you should try to support us.
Why? Because you're sort of like the guy who goes out west in a covered wagon.
You're setting up your homestead.
And there are outlaws, in this case the left.
And they want to destroy you.
I mean, they want to tear down your fence and burn down your house and rape your wife.
And you need to hire some gunslingers of your own who are going to keep these bad guys away.
And the remarkable thing is there are so many people on our side, people who have the means, who have the resources, who say things like, well, you know, we're really upset because of Trump's tweets.
I just wish that guy would stop tweeting.
Or he just doesn't have the right demeanor, Dinesh, to be president.
Or they say things to me like, well, Dinesh, you're making these movies, but, you know...
It's kind of hard to get people to go to the theater to see a documentary.
What's the profit expectation in a movie like yours?
And I go, listen, I'm going to work really hard to make your money back in the market, but I'm not doing it for the money.
I'm doing it to get the message out, and you should too.
You have far more to gain than I do in fighting this battle.
Why? Because I will thrive in a Biden administration.
I'm a public critic.
I can do a podcast like this one.
I'll have a job.
I'll have... I'll have, in fact, more material to do it with.
I'll have more butts to kick.
You won't. They're going to go after your business.
They're going to go after your livelihood.
And what I find remarkable is how conservatives and Republicans who have a direct interest in protecting the system and protecting free markets are so, in a sense, blind to what the other side wants to do to them.
Entrepreneurs are very good at what they do.
They tend to hone into a problem.
They tend to focus laser-like on the problem.
But what they don't pay attention to is the broader system of free markets, what Adam Smith called the system of natural liberty, that enables their business to succeed.
So they invest in the business, but they don't invest in the cultural and political infrastructure that is necessary to sustain their business.
And what Biden is showing is that, hey guys, I'm going to kick down the infrastructure.
Let's see what kind of sandcastle you build when I basically produce a strong wind that can knock down not just your sandcastle, but all the sandcastles on the beach.
I think it's time for us to take stock, and this will be a very eye-opening lesson in what the Democrats have in store for us.
I think it's going to be painful, but hopefully from it, we'll learn a painful lesson, and we'll learn how to fight better in the path going ahead.
I'll be right back. Cancel culture is now all around us, the new intolerance that we see in society that shuts down debate.
Reviles dissenting points of view, tries to establish a kind of uniformity or homogeneity throughout society.
We now see it in digital media.
We see it elsewhere, even in corporations.
You have groups like the National Association of Realtors now notifying realtors, hey, make sure that you don't say anything that causes waves because then we're going to have to discipline you.
And so it is really kind of eerie to see this spread through society.
But I had this eerie feeling a long time ago when I was on the American campus when I spotted this cancel culture beginning and it began there.
It began on the campus.
It was on the campus for a long time.
When I wrote my first book, Illiberal Education, I presented the campus almost as a certain kind of lunatic asylum, an asylum in the larger society where all this crazy stuff went on.
And it wasn't just that I saw it that way.
Everybody did. In fact, when Illiberal Education first came out in 1991, a lot of the liberals So, even they refused or purported to refuse to believe that this craziness was actually happening, even on the campus.
But now what has happened, which is a big change, is that the craziness of the campus has spread into the larger society.
The intolerance of the campus has become the intolerance of America.
The closing of the campus mind has become the closing of the American mind.
Debbie and I just sat down and watched a very good movie, and the movie is actually on the Salem channel.
It's called Salem Now.
You can watch it at SalemNow.com.
And in fact, they've set up a sort of a promo code, Dinesh, so the people will know, the Salem guys will know you came by watching it here or hearing about it here.
We watched it. It's called No Safe Spaces.
And the movie is made by Dennis Prager.
He's one of the narrators.
And Adam Carolla. He's the other.
So Dennis Prager is a cerebral guy.
He is a Jewish intellectual.
Adam Carolla is kind of a working glass guy who kind of worked on cars and worked as a plumber and did this and took out the trash.
And he's now become a kind of a cultural figure.
So kind of a very... Kind of Laurel and Hardy or Jekyll and Hyde, if you will.
Two very different guys bringing perspectives to bear on the same problem.
But the same problem is you can't say what you really think.
Now... Who are the people pushing this intolerance?
One very insightful thing about the movie is it takes you through the campus, from one campus to the other, and it kind of does case studies in which you see various controversies.
There's a very telling one that occurs on a very liberal campus that I've spoken at called Evergreen College.
I remember many years ago I debated a fellow named Tim Wise at Evergreen College.
And this Tim Wiseguy, I don't think he was a graduate of Evergreen College, but he represented the sensibility of Evergreen College.
And even though I would debate this guy on multiple campuses, and over a period of many years, he would recite the same recycled so-called racist horror stories as if they had happened yesterday.
So he'd recite a story...
Oh, the other day I saw this and I saw that.
Then I'd debate him five years later.
He'd tell the same story. Oh, yesterday I was the same...
And I'm like, Tim, you told me that story five years ago.
You're making up the same nonsense and recycling the same stories as if they happened again and again to you.
And yet the students at Evergreen were like...
We've got to stop the racism and so on.
Take over the campus. We need a sit-in.
We need our non-negotiable demands.
This is all like one comedy on top of the other.
And this is the craziness I witnessed with my own eyes.
One time when I was speaking about illiberal education at Tufts, I show up in the auditorium and there's a group of minority of black students in the front row in chains.
They've actually brought chains.
They've chained themselves to each other and to their seats.
And I'm like, wow.
I mean, remember I was at this time in my late 20s or just turned 30 and I was a little flustered by this.
I'm like, how do you cope with this?
Because the moment I began to speak, they would rattle their chains.
So you can imagine how unnerving this was.
Now, I was actually, you may almost call it saved by the bell because what happened is more people kept pouring into the auditorium.
And so they realized that the auditorium couldn't hold everybody who wanted to come.
And so the fire marshal or someone said, no, no, no, no, no.
We've got to move to another auditorium.
And this was the beautiful thing.
As we all got up to leave, these guys were chained to their seats.
They couldn't get, they were like, where's the key, man?
Who has the key? So we had this laughable scene.
We're all leaving and these idiots in the front row were like manacled to themselves.
In a sense, you could almost say that they're oppression and inconvenience.
They did it to themselves.
So I was laughing my head off as I left the stage.
It's one of the more memorable, one of my better memories thinking back to the days of illiberal education now a few decades ago.
In No Safe Spaces, the movie I've been talking about, there's a very insightful observation by an evolutionary biologist, Brett Weinstein, and he's talking about the campus, and he's talking about his experiences in Evergreen, but he is predicting, and remember, this happened before the prediction kind of came to pass, he's predicting where all this campus craziness is really going to go.
Watch. It cannot help but be true that if this is allowed to continue, that it is going to work its way into the entire apparatus of government, journalism, maybe most seriously into the tech sector, which has become the governance apparatus for the new public square.
YouTube and Google, Facebook and Twitter dictate whose voices can be heard.
And if those entities start Trying to engineer the conversation to adhere to the rules laid out with these phony Trojan horse terms, disaster will be the result.
Facebook is a place where more than a billion people worldwide come to share their thoughts and feelings.
Sometimes they post content that's upsetting or insensitive.
And some of those things can make people feel unsafe, like bullying, hate speech, or violence.
That's why we have global community standards to decide what and who should be removed.
We have a problem in that our public dialogue is passing through private servers where no protections exist.
In other words, if you are not able to access the internet in the same way as someone else because the content of what you are saying has been deemed unacceptable, then that shapes the conversation that we are having with each other.
It's really important to know that Brett Weinstein made these comments before these things came to pass.
He was prescient about where the culture was going, and what he predicted has now come true.
The asylum of the American campus still exists, but it's now part of a larger asylum that we call America.
I'll be right back.
I woke up this morning in my my pillow pajamas and I was a little bit like a kid on the couch.
I'm like, Debbie, Debbie, you know, touch these pajamas.
Touch them. See how soft they are.
It's just because they're so comfortable.
And of course, I've been sleeping the previous night on a MyPillow pillow and on MyPillow sheets.
So let's just say that Mike Lindell has come into our lives in a pretty big way and we're really happy about it.
He's a great guy and he makes terrific stuff.
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The first night you sleep on them, you'll never want to sleep on anything else.
I'll tell you some good news. I've been asking people to support Mike as these retailers go after him and you've been doing it.
Mike will text me from time to time and he goes, oh my gosh, Tinesh, your audience is responding like nobody's business.
So I'm really thrilled that we're coming together to support this entrepreneur who makes great products and we're doing it to show him that they're not going to be able to take him down.
We are going to sustain this guy.
We're going to reward him for the good stuff he's doing and for the great stuff he makes.
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I've been talking on this show about Mike Lindell and his experiences of being cancelled, you might say, by these retail companies.
Companies that, by the way, he had been doing business with for quite a while and doing very well by them.
And yet, suddenly and virtually instantly and seemingly in some sort of coordination, by which I mean just that it happens at the same time, so there would seem to be some sort of communication.
They're all one after the other.
Phone call, phone call, phone call.
We're not carrying your stuff.
Now, Mike knows, and they know, these companies do.
And by the way, I'm inviting the CEOs of these companies to, you know, come on the show and explain their position because normally they just put out these meaningless bureaucratic statements that say absolutely nothing like, we have been re-evaluating our inventory and have made a...
Decision in the best interest of our customers.
And when I see this kind of thing, I'm not sure if I'm listening to a robot or a human being that has just learned to put out messages like a robot.
I mean, we live in sort of a robotic age.
And so, you know, sometimes when I'm on the phone, I give my number out like I'm a robot.
Two, seven, one, three, two, five.
So we've learned the robotic style, but companies have perfected it.
Now, why are these companies doing this?
Is it because there's a wave of customer dissatisfaction?
Not at all. There's a left-wing guerrilla movement that goes to these companies and threatens them, threatens to accuse them of racism, threatens to shut them down, threatens to bring demonstrators to their front door, and the companies run scared.
By and large, corporate America doesn't know how to deal with any of this.
They don't realize that they don't need to worry about it.
The whole thing is an orchestrated scam.
There's no real customer dissatisfaction behind it.
It is a made-up crusade.
But these people are such fools that the press officer goes running and, Oh, I got a call from the New York Times!
Oh, I got a call from Media Matters!
Oh, these groups are calling me!
What do I do? What do I do?
And all of them then go under their desk and they start sweating.
It's a really disgraceful sight.
And then they decide, Okay, we're going to have to call Mike and cancel his stuff.
Now, what do we, we...
Who can see this spectacle of fear and cowardice and weakness.
And we think to ourselves, what can we do to fortify these people's backbone?
Or better still, what do we do to apply some pressure from the other side that will teach them a lesson?
We'll tell them, hey guys, you know what?
If you think you're going to pay a price on this side for doing this, we're going to make you pay a bigger price on the other side.
But what is that bigger price and how do we impose it on them?
I don't have an easy solution to this problem, but what I will say is the solutions I often see are clearly guaranteed not to work.
So let me start with the famous boycott.
I'm never going to go to Bed Bath& Beyond again.
You think they care?
You think that your abstaining from going to Bed Bath& Beyond is going to do it?
Well, we're going to get some other patriots on board.
Well, let's say you put it out on social media.
How many patriots are going to respond?
10? 30?
Let's say it's 100. That's not enough to shake a major corporation to its core.
Well, it turns out in this context that I have an experience...
A very illuminating experience of shaking a major corporation to its core.
In fact, I'll sort of give you one of the punchlines.
I'm sitting across from the CEO of this multi-billion dollar corporation.
In fact, it happens to be Costco.
And the CEO looks me in the eye and he says, and I quote him now, Dinesh, you are destroying Costco.
I think he expected me to be very ashamed.
Inwardly, I was like, I'm destroying Costco.
This is awesome. I didn't realize I had that kind of power.
Who should I take on next?
But this was all inside my mind.
I kept a very stoic, expressionless face.
I'm adorned with appropriate cosmetic sympathy, and I listen to him.
Now, let me back up and tell the story because I think it's eye-opening for thinking about what makes a corporation respond, what makes them change their ways.
In 2014, I published the book, America, Imagine a World Without It, with an accompanying movie that came out at roughly the same time.
Now, my books have sold and continue to sell very well in Costco.
Costco made a big order for the book.
And I was merely going about promoting the book when suddenly I get a call from a journalist who says, hey, Dinesh, they've pulled your books.
Out of Costco. And I'm like, what?
Are you telling me you walked into some local Costco and the local manager didn't like the book and pulled him from the shelves?
And the journalist goes, no.
He goes, your books have been pulled from every Costco in America.
And I go, what?
He goes, oh no, there's been a policy decision at the highest levels to yank your book out of Costco.
Nationwide. And so I was naturally kind of amazed by this and flustered by it.
And I think this is how it happened.
The guys who started Costco, the top brass at Costco, were Obama guys.
Jim Sinigal, the guy who founded Costco, big Obama donor, Obama supporter.
There are other top guys at Costco who have been Obama guys as well.
So I think what happened is that one of Obama's people...
I don't know if it's Rahm Emanuel, someone like that, walks into Costco, what?
I can't believe that Costco's stalking Dinesh D'Souza's book.
Dinesh D'Souza is the guy who made fun of Obama.
He made that movie, 2016, Obama's America.
Let's go get him.
And so, obviously, they made some phone calls to Costco and said, we can't believe you're stalking Dinesh's book, and Costco obligingly decides to pull it.
So there's the pressure, and remember, it's inside pressure, that is coming from the other side.
So now what happens? Costco pulls my book, and they've clearly decided to do it, and they have a reason to do it, which is to please the great Obama.
And what's going to happen?
So this journalist writes an article on a website.
It's a conservative website.
And it talks about the outrageousness of pulling a patriotic book.
By the way, this was not a book on Obama.
It was just a celebration of America and argument for intellectual patriotism.
Read it if you can. America, Imagine a World Without Her.
That's the title. And a book written from the immigrant point of view.
And they, by the way, pulled it right around the 4th of July.
So there was a kind of vein of outrage that ran through this website.
Not just the article, but all the responses to the article.
Hundreds of them. Basically saying, what the heck?
Why would you pull a Patriots book on the 4th of July?
What is the matter with you, Costco?
And remember, a lot of Costco shoppers...
Are conservative-leaning people.
They're people who, by and large, have small businesses.
They're the kind of people who are likely to lean to the right.
And these people began to complain bitterly and angrily on this site.
But the reaction from Costco was essentially nothing.
Zero. Zip. Why?
Because they don't care about a conservative website.
But sometime along the way, somebody on that site who was part of this ongoing dialogue decided, let's take the conversation over to the Costco website.
And so what happened, and this was almost like a kind of snowball gaining snow, hundreds of people on the website became thousands of people on the Costco site, and these people were super pissed!
So what they began to do is review all the Costco products negatively.
Not just the decision to take my book away, but we hate the Costco grills.
Their barbecue grills suck.
Their food is horrible. They just began to trash the site by saying how everything Costco did was horrible.
And many of them went the extra mile.
They would take their Costco executive membership card with a scissors and take pictures of themselves cutting up their car.
They'll never go to Costco again.
To heck with their membership, even though they paid for it.
And they posted those photos on the Costco website.
And you can only imagine the consternation that Costco felt when a major vehicle of doing business was being trashed, you might almost say, in this way.
Costco went berserk and literally within a day, the leadership of Costco made emergency phone calls to my publisher.
Please fly Dinesh up to Seattle, to the Northwest.
We need to have an emergency meeting with him.
I had the emergency meeting and that's when the CEO looked me in the eye And he implied, for example, that his job was even in the balance, that he might get fired over this.
That's when he said to me, you're destroying Costco.
And the actual reply that came out of my mouth was, no, sir, I'm not destroying Costco.
You have antagonized your own customers.
You are to blame for this.
You did this. You take the responsibility, and I hope you correct it.
I shook hands with him and I left.
By the time I had landed back in San Diego, where I lived at the time, Costco made a 180-degree U-turn.
They immediately rescinded their ban.
Not only did they restock all my books, but they said that, Dinesh, when your movie comes out, we're putting up individual standees.
So all the other movies are going to be on one table.
Your movie is going to be prominently displayed on a separate table.
In other words, Costco made amends.
And this is also very important because some of the guys on my team had said to me, oh Dinesh, you should go take a picture of yourself cutting up your Costco card.
And I said, no, no, I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to see what Costco does.
And it turns out Costco did the right thing.
They did the ban and then they rescinded the ban.
And I've had extremely good relations with Costco ever since.
So I tell the story not because it is directly applicable to any situation.
I tell it because it happened to me.
It involves a major corporation.
It involves a major corporation that did the wrong thing.
And I was able, through a combination, again, not of my own doing, but with a little bit of luck, to help them do the right thing.
And they did the right thing.
And we would like to see the right thing occur in other circumstances as well.
Fighting cancel culture requires us to be aware of how cancel culture works.
That way, we're in a better position to undo it.
I'll be right back. Today is the anniversary of the notorious Roe vs.
Wade decision that legalized abortion, that overturned state laws in all 50 states on abortion in 1973.
It's widely regarded by constitutional scholars to be a catastrophic decision, a decision perhaps even in the league of the Dred Scott decision, which in effect legalized slavery in the territories.
I'm really happy to have on the show, while this is one of those all-in-the-family moments, my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, who has written an important book on abortion.
In fact, a different type of a book than most of these books.
Generally, we feel like we kind of know the contours of the abortion debate.
Yes, I've heard this. Yes, I've heard that.
This is a book that opens up new windows into that debate and gives us a fresh way to look at it.
So I urge you to get the book, The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America.
Hey, Danielle, nice to have you on the show.
Thanks. Let me begin with...
Your opening chapter, in which you make a very startling observation, you look at abortion in a wider context, and you say we can think of it as one of the forms of mass killing in the world.
So can you maybe begin by saying, how many casualties have we had in America since Roe vs.
Wade, in the roughly 45 or so years since Roe, and then put that in the context of mass killing in general?
Yeah, today it's been 48 years since Roe v.
Wade, and there have been over 61 million abortions in America alone since Roe v.
Wade. But if we look at the worldwide casualties, if we look at just 2018, for example, we can see that HIV-AIDS took about 1.7 million lives, cancer took about 8.2 million lives, whereas abortion took about 41.9 million lives.
So it is definitely the greatest form of mass killing in the world going on today.
Now, it seems to me that, by and large, when we think of mass killing, we don't think of it happening here.
We think of mass killing, oh, there was a famine in Rwanda and lots of people got killed, there was genocide occurring in some place in Africa, or the Chinese government is cracking down on dissidents over there in Shanghai.
But I think part of the tragedy of abortion, the relevance of it to us here in America, is that this is a form of mass killing that is going on You can almost speak about the mass killing next door.
Do you feel that this gives the debate a particular horror and poignancy?
Absolutely, especially when we consider that Planned Parenthood receives federal funding.
They're the largest abortion operation in America, the largest abortion provider.
So when they say that they are actually about these other services that they perform, in reality, they're performing hundreds of thousands of abortions per year.
And in America, we have usually between about 800,000 or so, maybe even up to a million abortions a year.
And so we absolutely are a great offender of abortion.
And even now, when we look at what's happening with the Mexico City policy, we can see that under Biden, we are going to be funding abortion overseas.
What do you think about the election?
I mean, I know you're someone who had talked about, you talked about in your last chapter, the prospects for overturning Roe, the prospects for improving life chances of the unborn.
Now, conservatives appear to have a majority on the court and it's no longer an even balance.
Maybe it's 5-4, maybe it's 6-3.
On the other hand, I think you'd have to say that the group most decisively affected by the 2020 election result is the unborn because to some degree for them, it's a death sentence.
Absolutely.
What are your thoughts about where we stand with Roe and going forward?
What can we expect from a Biden administration?
We can expect that Roe v.
Wade will just be seen as the baseline.
Roe v. Wade won't be seen as the end point.
It's just the starting point for the radical left that allows them to do things that are even worse.
I know that Biden and Harris both want to overturn the Hyde Amendment, forcing every American to use their federal tax dollars to pay for abortions.
As far as Roe v.
Wade being overturned, we would have to rely on the court for that.
But as we know, We can't really rely on the court that often.
So I hope that we can, but it may take longer now because of everything going on.
Many people think about abortion and they feel like, you know, yes, partial birth abortion, abortion in the third trimester is horrible, but the routine type of abortion that occurs six weeks into pregnancy, the so-called first trimester abortion, there's nothing wrong with that.
But you show in the book that there's a lot wrong with that.
Can you talk a little bit about what happens in the first trimester, the so-called good abortions?
What is a so-called good abortion, according to the left?
Well, in the first trimester, even around just 18 days in, we already can see the baby's heartbeat.
Even around six weeks, we can detect its brain waves.
In the first trimester alone, it can hiccup, toe point, squint, things like that, make facial expressions.
Even every single organ that it will ever have throughout its entire life is already there in the first trimester.
And only after the first trimester does development continue, even to the point where After birth, even up to 25 years old, our brains are constantly developing.
So we're really just talking about stages of development.
But when it comes to the abortions, I guess that the left acts as though maybe are their favorites or something, if there are any favorites.
I guess it would be the abortion pill, which can be taken up to about 10 weeks in pregnancy.
So Very early on after that, it won't really work.
But it's two pills, mifepristone and misopristol.
And one of those kind of works to kill the baby and the other one works to expel the baby.
This is something you would take at home.
It's usually a very bloody, painful experience of expelling that.
Even Planned Parenthood and Nerol say that That when you get rid of the baby, you would be likely to see blood and pregnancy tissue the size of a large lemon.
You could even see a tiny face when that happens.
And it's usually, according to things I've read, quite actually more painful even than some of the surgical abortion procedures because for the abortion pill, it's happening at home and you're not in a surgical setting.
We'll be right back to talk a little bit more about all this.
Thanks for joining us.
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I'm back with Danielle D'Souza Gill.
Now, Biden's press secretary was recently asked about the Mexico City policy about abortion.
She kind of dodged the question and talked about how Biden was a Catholic and that that shouldn't be questioned.
Sometimes abortion is seen as a religious issue, that you have a certain view on abortion because of your theology.
My question to you is, is there a secular, and maybe even one could say, an atheist case for pro-life?
Absolutely. The atheist Christopher Hitchens, whom you've debated in the past, was actually pro-life.
He called himself a materialist, so he believed that we don't merely have bodies, but we are bodies, and all we are are bodies.
There is no afterlife.
There's merely pure annihilation.
And so he would argue that life is the greatest thing that we have.
And in order to, you know, maximize life, we have to have life.
And so to take another's life is really the worst thing that you can do because we only have one life.
So I think that even if you're secular, you're not religious, then you can absolutely be pro-life.
To me, one of the most interesting chapters of your book, and this in a way kind of spells out why your book is different than most books on this kind of topic, you actually have a discussion of the philosopher John Rawls.
Now John Rawls is normally thought of as somebody that is discussed in the context of social justice, economic redistribution.
So what does John Rawls have to do with abortion?
Well, he lays out this argument where he basically says put yourself in what he calls the original position.
And the original position is kind of removed from, let's say, society and where you end up in life.
Imagine that you don't know where you'll be born, what family you'll have.
You don't know your economic situation, your health.
You don't know any of these things.
You are just completely removed from society.
So if you are completely removed, how would we design society?
Let me stop you right there because I want to set a framework for this.
I think... I think what you're saying and what Rawls is saying is that when we think about social justice, we're all prejudiced because we're all prejudiced in favor of our own circumstances.
So if I'm a rich guy, I'm kind of going to look at things from the rich guy's point of view.
And if I'm white, I'm going to look at it from the white guy's point of view.
And Rawls is saying if you want to be truly fair, You have to subtract out all these, you may call it, accidents of circumstance.
And that's why he develops this notion called the veil of ignorance.
So let's apply this veil of ignorance, will you, to abortion.
And what result do you get when you think about it that way?
Yeah, he says that when we remove ourselves from our position, that we are able to more clearly think of what is a fair way to have society.
And I say, this isn't something he says, I say that if we don't know what's going to happen to us, then we would, of course, not allow abortion, because we could be one of those people who would end up being aborted.
If you're So kind of what you're saying is that everybody who is for abortion has already been born.
It's almost like they have already gone up the ladder and they're happy to kick the ladder out for someone else.
But if they were in a position where they didn't know in advance if they were someone who is already going to be born or someone who is actually coming down the birth canal, they wouldn't be voting for their own execution, would they?
Absolutely not. And we can really only look at society and how to make it better by allowing people to be born in the first place.
If we don't even allow for that, then the only people who are debating this are people who have had the privilege of being born.
This remains, I think, in some ways, the most pressing issue of our time.
It's an issue that isn't going away, but the tragedy continues all around us.
And I'm sorry to say I think it's going to intensify in the Biden years.
Thanks, Danielle. Always fun having you on the show.
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