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Jan. 25, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:06:25
ERASING HISTORY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep11
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Did Trump incite an erection, an insurrection?
Remember Christy Swanson from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
She joins the show to talk about the politics of Hollywood.
Plus, I take on the left-wing historians.
Pow, pow, pow. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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America needs this voice.
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.
Today, Nancy Pelosi delivered the articles of impeachment to the Senate.
And Senate Majority Leader Schumer says that the impeachment trial will begin February 8th.
Schumer, however, put this in kind of an odd way.
Here's Schumer making that announcement.
But make no mistake, there will be a trial, and when that trial ends, senators will have to decide if they believe Donald John Trump incited the erection.
Hehehehe. Apparently, Trump is responsible for inciting Schumer's erection.
By the way, I don't know if Schumer had an erection, but if he did, why would Trump have incited it?
Would Schumer get turned on by watching Trump giving his speech?
Was he tubing during the debate?
And somehow, I don't think Trump's to blame for this, really.
Well, anyway, Schumer misspoke.
He was talking about the insurrection.
And Trump is evidently responsible for that.
So there's a lot of excitement on the left about all this.
And they're just having an orgy of recriminations against Trump.
In fact, Nancy Pelosi...
It's quoted saying that Trump could not only be removed from or prevented from seeking office again, he could be, quote, accessory to murder, accessory to murder for his role in inciting the riot that led to some people being killed.
AOC is in such a kind of frenzy that she said that she had to skip the inauguration because there would be Republican senators present.
I guess people like maybe Cruz or Hawley, and she felt unsafe.
I guess she felt that Hawley might jump her, or Cruz might go Zodiac on her, something like that.
The media is salivating over all this, and the reason for this, quite obviously, is that the media...
Mrs. Trump.
You can almost kind of envision the mood at CNN. Initially, it was kind of like this.
It's, oh, it's really peaceful without Trump.
Yep, yep. Very, very peaceful.
So much peace going on around here.
Silence. More silence.
Finally, hey, I wonder what Trump's up to.
I wonder what Trump's up to. Let's check into what he's doing.
So the media has been parasitic on Trump, feeding off of Trump, their ratings depend on Trump, and suddenly there's sort of no Trump.
So this whole Senate hearing is kind of a way to bring him back on stage, flog him again.
And the Republicans on this are sounding a weird note.
I want to give you some examples.
Here is Lindsey Graham.
He goes, he's against this idea of convicting Trump in a Senate trial, but his reason is what's really odd.
He goes, the healing of this great nation will be postponed.
So in other words, if you go after Trump and get him, it'll postpone healing.
It's not that Trump didn't do it.
It's not that he didn't cite anything.
It's that we have to pass on this to promote healing.
And then here's John Cornyn.
Key word is precedent.
If it happens to former President Trump, the precedent will be applied to future former presidents.
A bad idea. So here's Korn.
And again, he's not defending Trump.
He's not even saying Trump is innocent.
He's basically saying, let's just not set a harmful precedent that might apply to other people.
That's his reason for opposing it.
And then here's Senator Ron Johnson, who basically says, Democrats can't have it both ways, an unconstitutional impeachment trial and Senate confirmation of the Biden administration's national security team.
They need to choose.
So basically, Ron Johnson's point, again, is not in defense of Trump.
It's that, you know, we don't really have time for this.
We're so busy confirming Biden's team that if he wants to get on with that, he should kind of forego this.
So this is actually characteristic GOP. I mean, these are guys, if you're ever in trouble, these guys may be professional lawyers, but they're the worst guys to have defending you.
I almost imagine, you know, Jesus Christ before Pontius Pilate.
And imagine that Pontius Pilate, you know, has a trial.
He decides, okay, well, let's see if Jesus did this.
Did Jesus, in fact, incite the crowd?
And then here comes, you know, here comes Senator Johnson.
He goes, well, we don't have time for this.
We're too busy with other cases.
Let's move on. And then here's Lindsey Graham, you know, saying, well, if we convict Jesus and crucify him, you know, it's not going to be good for the healing of the Jews under the Roman Empire.
And then here is John Cornyn saying, well, what precedent will if we crucify this guy, we're going to be crucifying every Tom, Dick, and Harry?
No. No. The case against crucifying Jesus was he didn't do anything.
Now, I know there's a whole bunch of you, particularly on the left, you'll be jumping up to inertia, you're comparing Trump to Jesus.
And this is actually, your instinct to do this is the mark of your own stupidity.
Because you don't actually know what an analogy is.
There's an old saying in rhetoric, an analogy doesn't travel on all fours.
And what it really means is that when you compare A to B, You're comparing A to B in certain respects.
You're not saying that A is B. Because if A is B, then B would be A. There would be no distinction between A and B. You wouldn't even need to have two separate letters.
They would be the same thing across the board.
What I'm trying to say, and the purpose of the analogy...
Is that there was no wrongdoing here on Trump's part.
And the way to see that is to actually think about what an incitement is.
An incitement ultimately requires, first, a certain planning or intention to stoke the crowd.
Second, it requires the actual stoking of the crowd to do a particular thing.
In this case, storm the Capitol.
And finally, it requires some sort of acknowledgement or even relish.
That that has actually happened.
If you want to see incitement, you might turn, let's turn for a moment, to Mark Anthony's great speech, his great incitement, and this sure is an incitement.
For the crowd to turn and plot to attack Brutus and Cassius, the two conspirators in the Caesar case.
So in Marc Anthony's trial, he sets about trying to do this.
He knows what he's up to.
He asks for permission to speak because he wants to do an incitement.
Now, interestingly, Cassius says, And he tells Brutus, don't let him speak.
We don't want Mark Anthony.
But Brutus, being naive, kind of a typical GOP type, Brutus goes, well, let him speak.
What's wrong with having him speak?
And there goes Mark Anthony.
And he begins in a very sarcastic and sort of almost duplicitous way.
You all did see that on the looper call I thrice presented him, Caesar, with a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse.
Was this ambition... Now, this is a rhetorical question whose presumed answer is no, Caesar refused the crown.
How can he be ambitious? But, of course, the correct answer to this is yes.
We all know why Caesar refused the crown.
It would look bad for him to take on the title of a king.
What Caesar really wanted was the power of a king without the title.
And then here's Mark Anthony.
He goes on a little later. He's getting the crowd stoked up.
He knows exactly what he is doing.
And then the culmination where he gets into it.
He brings out the body of Caesar with all its wounds.
And then he begins to get the crowd to move into action.
He says he's not a great orator like Brutus.
But he goes, but were I Brutus and Brutus Anthony, there were an Anthony would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue in every wound of Caesar that should move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.
So there we go.
Anthony is calling for mutiny.
He's doing it. And then as soon as it happens, the crowd begins to say, let's go get him!
Let's go after these guys!
Let's go get Brutus! Let's go get Cassius!
Anthony steps back and basically goes, the mischief is done.
Let it now take whatever course it will.
So this is incitement.
This has all the elements of incitement, elements that are not present in the Trump case.
So the bottom line of it is that this whole thing is a farce, not because it's divisive or because it sets a bad precedent or because it promotes healing to move on.
The reason to exonerate Trump Is that in this particular case, he is an innocent man.
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As part of his slew of executive orders, Biden has a new transgender rule that is to be enforced by the Department of Education.
Basically, it means that transgenders or biological males, for example, now have access to the women's restroom, to the women's locker room, and even more significantly, to women's sports.
So you can actually have guys, biological guys, playing on girls' teams and playing against girls.
Now, this whole thing, this whole transgender issue, is to me very odd.
I'm seeing some of it not just in America, not just in the West, but sort of worldwide.
And I ask myself, what's going on here?
Is there some sort of a worldwide awareness or recognition?
Suddenly people, for the first time in history, decide that they want to sort of traverse the biological gender line?
Now, Gender is in some ways much deeper than race.
Race is biological.
There are biological differences between races.
You can see those anatomically.
There are obviously differences in melanin and so on.
But race is, to a large degree, the painted face.
And by that I mean racial differences are largely cosmetic.
They're outward. But no one can reasonably say the differences between men and women are cosmetic.
No one can reasonably say that the differences between men and women would vanish, let's say, for example, if you stop labeling them differently.
No, these are differences supplied, you may almost say, by nature.
We come into the world not even as generic human beings, but we come into the world as Adam or Eve, one or the other.
There I recognize some rare cases, hermaphrodites and so on.
But here's the point.
Boys are different from girls.
And it is ignoring this truth, this not just biological truth, but scientific truth, The left is always about, you know, let's respect the science.
Let's learn from the science.
Well, why don't we do that here?
Science tells us that the difference between boys and girls is real.
And it's not skin deep.
And it's not even simply about testosterone.
There are enormous differences in oxygen capacity.
Musculature, bone size and bone density, joint stability, levels of body fat.
And this is why we treat gender differently than race.
If you think of the whole civil rights movement, you think of the famous Brown decision, Brown versus Board of Education, overturning Racial segregation was based on the idea called separate but equal.
In other words, hey, blacks and whites should be able to drink out of separate water fountains, separate but equal.
They both get a water fountain.
They should go to different schools because, hey, separate but equal.
They both have their own schools.
And the striking down of racial segregation was based on the idea that separate is not equal.
Separate is inherently unequal.
And blacks and whites must participate together in schools and in other ways.
Now, that's not true in gender.
In gender, to this day, we have suffered but equal.
And what that means is that when you go, for example, to the track, boys run against boys, girls run against girls.
That is also true on the tennis court.
Roger Federer might play Nadal, but he's not going to play Serena Williams.
In fact, I remember some time ago, Serena Williams played a guy.
He was like the number 110-rated male player in the world.
And he beat her easily.
No one was surprised. This wasn't even really a news event for the simple reason that everyone knows that men have more upper body strength than women.
That's why we have separate tracks and separate prizes.
Now, even in chess, I think I've pointed this out before in the podcast, even in chess, which is a purely intellectual sport, there's no physical strength involved, whatever.
But even there, you have a Women's World Chess Championship, which seems like kind of an oddity.
Why don't we just have a single tournament?
But again, there's separation there.
Now, here's the point. When boys, biological males, start playing in the girls...
Sports. The result is sort of predictable.
So here's a guy named Fallon Fox.
He's an American male mixed martial arts fighter.
He decided to compete in the women's division where he was pitted against his opponent, Tamika Brents.
In the first three minutes, he beat her up, broke her eye socket, injured her so badly she'd required seven staples to her head, and she said afterward, I've never felt so overpowered in all my life.
Now, is this where we want to go?
This is not just about men beating women on the track or even in tennis, but literally beating the heck out of them physically.
Because if you say that men can participate in the races, why can't they participate in boxing against women?
So this is what happens when you may say reason takes flight and submits itself to a certain kind of crude ideology, a crude ideology here that wants to sort of pull down these gender distinctions.
You know, gender is a social construct.
There are aspects of gender that are interpreted by culture, but gender itself is rooted in biology.
And that's why when a child is born, a doctor can look into the ultrasound and say, it's a boy!
It's a girl! The doctor isn't creating a social construct.
The doctor is actually looking for some things, some organs, some anatomical differences, and declaring what nature has decided here.
Psychology doesn't really get to fully overrule biology, and that's really what I think the left is trying to accomplish here.
They're trying to go against science and against biology to produce a result whose net effect can only be harmful to women.
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Join AMAC today. That website again is amac.us, A-M-A-C dot U-S. I've had a very strange relationship with Hollywood.
I would say kind of a love-hate relationship.
I've always loved movies since I was a kid.
I never thought I would sort of be in the movie business at all.
I think if I had gone to my parents or my grandparents and said, hey, I'm going to be making movies one day, they would think I'd taken ill.
So it's been part of my American dream to be in the movie business, making mainly documentaries.
But also Debbie and I, executive producers on the feature film Infidel.
Now, Hollywood has become, it seems, an increasingly intolerant place.
Hollywood was always perhaps a little insular, a kind of club, if you will, with its own ideas and prejudices and lifestyle.
But it seems that the idea of going out and Canceling people that you don't agree with, that has reached a new level in Hollywood.
I have always been a big fan of the actress Christy Swanson.
You'll remember her from such classic movies as Ferris Bueller's Day Off and also Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Here's a tiny clip.
I just met this girl named Buffy.
I'm Pike. Pike isn't a name, it's a fish.
I liked her, even though she seemed kind of flaky.
But, as it turns out...
You have been chosen, Buffy.
To do what? To stop the vampires.
Does Elvis talk to you?
I was provoked to bring Christie on the show because I saw a kind of wonderful tweet that she did, a kind of, I would call it a tit-for-tat, that was in response to something that the actor Macaulay Culkin, you remember him from Home Alone, Home Alone 2, he's now like 40 years old, so he's not quite the Macaulay Culkin cute kid that we all remember from those movies, but anyway, he's crusading out there.
And Christy Swanson decided to give him a little dose of his own medicine.
So, welcome Christy Swanson.
Great to have you on the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
So now they turn to sort of a movie history, because there's Trump.
He has a little cameo role in Home Alone 2, I believe.
And a bunch of people are like, let's take him out of that movie.
So they're literally talking about going back and re-editing movies to take people out.
Their hatred of Trump is to that level.
Now, what took this all to another notch was when Macaulay Culkin himself basically tweeted something to the effect of, I'll be on board with this.
And this seems to have kind of ticked you off a little bit, did it?
I guess it ticked me off.
I don't know. I don't think it's right to remove people from movies like that.
So I was just making the point that, you know, because I did two cameos in two different John Hughes films.
And, you know, I was 15 at the time and John was the kind of guy that if he connected with you, he just liked you.
You know what I mean? And he wanted to work with you more or have you do other things.
And my experience with him was in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, I had...
I had a meeting with him.
He hired me to do a role.
He ended up having to shoot that role when they were filming in Chicago.
He called me and he said, I have good news and I have bad news.
The bad news is I shot your role because of location, but I wrote you a new role.
That's the good news. I said, okay.
He goes, I'm sending it over.
It was the role of Simone in the classroom in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
While I was Working that day, he said, what are you doing this weekend?
And I said, nothing.
And he said, well, we are reshooting the end of Pretty in Pink.
I didn't direct it, but I wrote it and producing it.
And I would like you to be in the end of Pretty in Pink.
So I learned from him that if he liked you, he just wanted to work with you and have you do cameos.
And he took a lot of pride in that and fun in it.
And so I found...
And, you know, John's not here to speak for himself, unfortunately.
But, you know, how do we not know that he liked Trump and wanted him in the movie?
He wrote that role in there for him.
You know what I mean? So for the studio or SAG-AFTRA or anybody else to say, pull him out, it doesn't...
It doesn't seem right to you.
No, it doesn't make any sense.
By SAG, of course, you're referring to the Screen Actors Guild, this idea that they would now come in and sort of re-edit the movie.
Let's also remember that Trump in those days, before he was a Republican and before he was the president, was very much of a pop culture figure.
I mean, who can deny it? He had admirers across the political spectrum.
And so I think probably John Hughes thought it would be kind of funny and cool to have Trump in the movie.
So it's almost as if the political climate has shifted and now there is a hit on Trump.
See, to me, it's beyond the issue of Trump because the whole idea of going back into movie history...
And sort of taking people out who are in the movie seems to me to be very Orwellian.
It seems to me almost to be Soviet-style editing of popular culture.
It's one thing to say we won't put Trump in a new movie, but to take him out of a movie he's already in, kind of a classic movie, I mean, I find that a little bit horrific.
Yeah, I think it goes next level.
I think that it's possible what this is really, really truly about is...
Let's ruin the brand.
We want to ruin the Trump brand, and this is one way we can do that.
Or another possibility could be with SAG-AFTRA. Maybe they're concerned that he's going to get into Trump.
Filmmaking, having a studio, putting out content, TV series, newscasts, and whatever.
And if they can wipe him out of SAG, then maybe they won't have to honor any SAG contracts in the future in working with him as a producer.
I don't know. I mean, I'm thinking way ahead.
Maybe that's another reason behind all of this killing of his brand.
You know what I mean? Christy, you're a girl who grew up in Orange County in California.
You made your way to Hollywood.
You became a big star.
And let me ask you this.
What is the way, if there is a way, to fight this kind of intolerance in Hollywood?
Is it merely for people of a different point of view to start making movies outside of Hollywood?
Is there a way to persuade the intolerant people in Hollywood not to be that way?
What do you think the solution is?
I don't know what the exact solution is.
I just know for myself and my own life and how I've lived is I've been in the business 41 years.
And I have never aired my politics on the set.
I've never aired it on the red carpet while promoting a movie.
There's no place and time for that, you know, in your own personal life.
If you want to tweet or do an interview like you and I are doing right now and you want to talk about politics, I think that that's perfectly acceptable.
But to not work with someone just because you don't Don't agree with them politically, I think is wrong.
I personally have never, ever done that.
I've never turned down a role because, oh, so-and-so is in that movie and I don't like how they do their politics, so I'm not going to do their film.
I've just never behaved that way because I believe, you know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
And I think that they're just...
We're playing with danger right now.
At this point, it's just gone next level.
And if anything, it's making Hollywood.
It's putting them in a really bad position, I think, with their audience.
And it's affecting a lot of people.
And I don't think it's going to end up well if they don't stop.
Christy Swanson, you are a very nice person in a not-so-nice industry.
Thank you for joining me on the podcast.
Thank you. We're now at the mercy of one-party control and an agenda driven by tax and spend economics.
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Are atheists smarter than religious believers?
This has not been my experience.
I've actually had the pleasure.
Of debating many of the world's leading atheists.
I did about ten debates against the atheist Christopher Hitchens.
I did a bunch of debates against a whole group of other figures.
Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic Magazine, other prominent atheists across, Sam Harris and others.
And these are smart guys.
It's been fun to debate them and I think I give as good as I get.
What's funny is that typically after these debates, I meet these guys and they're, you know, they're like these village atheists.
They're sort of filled with, it's not even so much that they don't believe in God, they just hate God.
And they're not even all that smart.
They've got room temperature IQs.
But their starting point assumption is that they are apostles of reason.
And I somehow am an apostle of faith.
So they go by evidence and I just go by irrational suppositions that I picked up as a kid.
You know, probably affected by where I grew up.
Now the truth of the matter is I grew up in India where the vast majority of people are Hindu.
Not Christian as I am, or Muslim, not Christian.
And so from the very beginning, my religious beliefs had to be thought through by comparing and contrasting other cosmologies, other belief systems, including people who believe nothing at all.
But this notion that atheism has a sort of intellectual advantage over theism is widespread in the atheist community.
Now, very interestingly, this idea was taken on by a prominent astronomer and astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is himself identified with the atheist community.
I know he's gone to conferences that the atheists have put on.
And this guy's a very smart guy, a prominent astrophysicist, but he's also kind of a cultural celebrity.
He does these popular shows in which he explains the Hubble Space Telescope, and he explains the planets and the Milky Way and the universe.
And so he has been doing this on the talk shows, and he's sometimes on comedy shows, and he's a very affable character.
But recently, in a very surprising interview, this was actually on the Joe Rogan podcast, Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about why he does not call himself an atheist.
Listen. Why I don't call myself an atheist.
It's why. You can look up the dictionary definition of atheist and it kind of applies to me, but what is the definition of atheist in practice?
It is what leading atheists do and it's their conduct and it's their behavior and it's what they say.
And it's their attitude.
That is what an atheist is today because they're the most visible exemplars of that word.
And most of their conduct I either don't agree with or simply don't engage in.
What don't you agree with?
I don't debate religious people and tell them they're idiots.
That doesn't work.
Whether or not it works, it's just not in me to do that.
I don't purge myself of words that have religious foundations in them.
I once in my Facebook, I had a friend going up in orbit to repair the Hubble telescope, one of the astronauts, and I said, Godspeed.
And then I gave the astronaut's name.
People wrote in in the thread, said, I thought you were an atheist.
How can you say Godspeed? An atheist got angry with me?
And I said, okay, first of all, this phrase is deeply historical in the space program.
When John Glenn was launched, the headline was, Godspeed John Glenn.
And every mission where we send human beings into space, somewhere there's that reference in the NASA family.
This is all great stuff.
Very candid.
Very conversational.
And this is the kind of guy you want to be in a conversation with.
At one part of that interview, Tyson makes a very interesting point.
He says that he is an agnostic because he really doesn't know.
He says there are religious believers who insist that they know.
There's definitely a God!
And then there are atheists who, with equal dogmatism, Claim that there isn't a God.
There's no God. There's no way there's a God.
And Tyson makes the point that both of these groups are professing to a knowledge that they don't have.
And only the agnostic, in a sense, is truly honest.
Because only the agnostic admits that based on reason alone, it is impossible to know for sure.
Now... By the way, I agree 100% with that analysis, and I want to make what may seem to Tyson like a surprising concession.
Based on his definition, I am also an agnostic.
And I would go even further.
Based on his definition, most religious believers are also agnostic in that sense.
And to understand why I would say this, you have to make a distinction between believing something and knowing something.
So a belief is something that you hold, but it stops short of knowledge, which is something that you know definitively and for sure and without a shadow of a doubt.
If religious believers truly knew for sure based on reason alone, there would be no room for faith.
In fact, Jesus' command to have faith.
That faith is really what saves us.
We'll become meaningless because it doesn't take any faith for me to believe in trees.
It doesn't take any faith for me to believe in my wife standing right here in front of me and producing this podcast.
I don't have to believe in Debbie.
Why? Because I know her. She's right here.
Belief is one step short of knowledge, and it creates room for faith.
Now you might say, Dinesh, well, if that's the case, why believe anything?
Why don't you just wait until you have knowledge?
And the reason is that when it comes to some issues, and life after death is one of them, You can't have full knowledge.
You never will. There's no amount of scientific experiments that you can do, not just in the past or now, but even in the future, that could establish whether there is, you might say, another world behind the world and a destiny beyond the grave.
There is no way to know such things.
And so, it was the philosopher Immanuel Kant who said, where reason cannot go, belief is not irrational.
Belief is not irrational.
Why? It is superstitious to believe in things when reason can contradict them.
And so, for example, if I say, for instance, that there are people walking around on this earth who have four eyes, that's verifiable.
We can go around and check out every single human on the planet and see if there's one with four eyes.
That's refutable. But can you refute the idea that there's life after death?
No. There's no amount of evidence that you can produce, and in fact, you don't have any.
Neither do I. This is in the realm of pure belief.
So, bottom line, why do believers believe at all?
You might say, if they can't be sure, what good does it do them?
What's the point of it? Well, number one, belief in God helps to provide an explanation for the universe, for why there is a universe, for what purpose we have in life.
For why there is a moral order, for why there's right and wrong, and why this knowledge of right and wrong seems somehow embedded in us.
And it's not an extension of Darwinian survival or self-interest.
In fact, our conscience usually militates against it.
Belief in God gives us a ground for hope that when we lose loved ones, we might see them again.
That we might have a destiny that goes beyond the grave.
And finally, the reason people believe in God, and the reason I believe in God, is quite simply because of the experience of God.
The believer has a experience of God that is not fundamentally different from any other experience that we have.
Not just experience of other people, but even that inner experience that tells us that there is a part of ourselves that is unreachable by other people.
Think about it, when you see me or you hear me, you hear the outer Dinesh.
You hear what I say, you see what I look like, but the inner Dinesh, what's going on, you may say, in my mind or in my soul, you have no idea.
That's why there's no one who can genuinely read my mind because that is interior.
But even though you don't know and no one else knows, I know.
I have a direct experience that is inner.
And so the experience of God is like that.
The experience of God is inner experience.
But it is no less real for that.
And it's no less real for not being sort of scientifically verifiable because the mode of knowing God is interior and not exterior.
So I commend Neil deGrasse Tyson for making a bold statement in a very important debate, one that covers issues I want to address regularly on this show.
But the bottom line of it is that he's saying, and I agree...
That in terms of reason, we don't know things, but we still are not irrational.
In fact, there's every good reason to believe in them.
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I had a chance to talk to Mike, this was a little several weeks ago, about his business and I want to play a small clip of that conversation now.
How did you go from an idea to organizing a business?
How many employees do you have? Right now, about 1,500.
1,500. How did you go from an idea?
Lots of people have ideas, but they don't do anything with them.
Right. What did you do with your idea?
The first thing I did was it was problem-solution.
You know, what are the problems and what are the solutions?
And not just overall.
You have the main solution. Obviously, good sleep, whatever.
But there was different things within the pillow itself.
So I wanted one that if you ask someone, What would you like to see in a pillow?
Well, I want one that stays cool.
Here it is. I want one that could last, 10-year warranty, and you can wash and dry it, that stays healthy.
I want one that adjusts, that will actually work.
That was the biggest thing to get over.
They didn't have anything out there that would adjust and hold that height.
So it's a problem solution, and it solves each problem within the whole product.
So, this is the key.
Not just to have a great product, but to keep improving it.
Keep focusing on the needs and wants of your customer.
And Mike does that. Now, as you know, Mike's under the gun.
All these leftists are after him.
Retailers trying to cancel him.
We need to support Mike.
This is the best thing that we can do to help our own side and our own guys who stick up for their beliefs and don't back down.
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In my commentary on the 1776 report, I talked about how leftist historians routinely camouflage the deep complicity of the Democratic Party and the left.
In slavery, in segregation, in Jim Crow, in racial terrorism, and so on.
And this has stirred up a kind of hornet's nest on the left, all these leftist historians screaming and demanding that I produce evidence of this, of textbooks that actually do this.
In my commentary, I addressed the Princeton historian, Kevin Cruz.
Who was talking about Martin Luther King and claiming that Martin Luther King was in favor of affirmative action, affirmative action as we now know it, racial preferences.
And I said that even though Cruz was able to point to some remarks by King that suggested compensatory justice for the Negro, nevertheless, King did not support a specific race preference policy.
Now, Cruz responds to this in the most abusive tone, and he goes things like, you know, Dinesh, you pathetic fool, it's right there in the article.
And so I look at the article and I see, in fact, the quote that I referenced myself about compensatory justice.
The sleight of hand that Kevin Cruz is pulling here is to pretend that compensatory justice is affirmative action, that compensatory justice is the same thing as racial preferences, but in fact they're not the same things at all.
Let's look, for example, at Congress's decision to make compensatory payments.
To Japanese Americans who were interned unjustly in World War II. I can't remember the amount of the payment.
It was maybe $15,000, some number.
But the point is the payments were made to people who were in the camps and to their immediate families.
The payments weren't made just because you were a Japanese American.
You belonged to a group.
In other words, this was not a case of using preferential treatment now to address past discrimination.
That is the key meaning of affirmative action.
Let's look at how affirmative action actually plays out today.
Two guys apply for a job.
In the old days, I guess you'd say, the black guy may be better qualified, but the white guy would get the job, and that's racial discrimination.
Today, it's the opposite.
If the white guy is better qualified, the black guy might still get the job, and that's affirmative action.
Now, of course, to any outside observer, you'd see that far from the first case...
Being corrected by the second.
We're talking about four different people.
All you have are two independent cases of racial discrimination.
Neither one inherently more legitimate than the other.
Whatever the motives, in both cases you're taking a qualified guy and kicking him to the curb and giving an unqualified guy or a less qualified guy the position.
That's affirmative action the way it operates today.
Today it is the case that if a white or Asian American student who is in the top of their class with 90 percentile SAT scores applies to a college, they could be turned down in favor of a minority Latino or African American student who is at the bottom of their class and has mid-level SAT scores.
So there's no compensatory justice here at all.
The white guy or the Asian guy hasn't wronged the black guy or the Latino.
That's not even being alleged.
So, Martin Luther King's claim that compensatory justice being paid to people who have been victims of harm is totally different But I also think what's striking about all this is the abusive tone that we see from Cruz and a lot of his sidekicks.
This whole idea that, Dinesh, you're a complete fool.
You're an idiot. You've never taken a history class.
You don't know any history.
You're a loser and so on.
And I want to sort of address this head on because it's not like me to do a matching of credentials.
I never do that.
But I think it's important to basically say, who are these guys?
What gives them the arrogance to speak in this way?
Let's start with Kevin Cruz himself.
Kevin Cruz went to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I went to Dartmouth.
Dartmouth is an Ivy League college, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is not.
I don't think in the history of the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill there's anyone who has ever gotten into Dartmouth but decided to go to Chapel Hill, even though they have better barbecue over there.
Well, Kevin Kruse might say, well, I went on and I got my graduate degree at Cornell.
Well, Cornell is known as the bottom feeder, the dregs of the Ivy League in the scale of one to eight.
It's clearly number eight.
And you can sort of get the measure of Cornell by the idea that they have at Cornell, and they're the only Ivy League school to have this, they have a hotel school.
You can literally take courses on how to be a busboy.
You can write your thesis on the history of the taco.
I mean, that's Cornell.
Kevin Kruse has gone on to write some books.
Well, I've written almost 20.
He's written almost three.
My books have sold, I would say, millions.
His books have sold, I would say, tens.
He sold tens of books, mainly probably by forcing his students to buy them.
And then you might say, well, wait a minute.
He's an acclaimed historian, Dinesh, and you're not.
Or really? Well, let's compare.
My work has been praised by three of the greatest historians of the last 50 years.
My book, Illiberal Education, was reviewed in the New York Review of Books on the cover by C. Van Woodward, the Yale historian, author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
Two of my books were blurbed by Eugene Genovese, widely considered the greatest living scholar, well, no longer living, the late Eugene Genovese, of slavery, but while he lived.
My book, The End of Racism, was reviewed by George Fredrickson, the Marxist scholar at Stanford, again considered one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century.
Now, what about Cruz? I have here a copy of Cruz's book, White Flight.
I look in the back. The first blurb is by Ronald Brownstein, who's not a historian at all.
In fact, he's a journalist who's written books denouncing the Republican Party, the usual kind of tripe you get from this kind of journalist.
I looked down the list, I see a blurb by a guy named Clay Risen.
And I thought, where does this guy teach history?
Well, it turns out he's a...
New York Times journalist, and according to his own bio, Clay Rison is a deputy editor of the New York Times and one of the country's leading authorities on whiskey and other spirits.
Clay Rison is the author of a book called Whiskey, Bourbon, and Rye.
He probably wrote this review under the influence of alcohol.
So, the point I want to make is, and it's a point that Trump has really made, when Trump gave a speech where he talked about, who are the real elite?
You know, these guys like Kevin Cruz and all his sidekicks, these people went to second-rate schools, they published nothing, yet they go around preening as if they are the cat's meow, they are the cultural elite of society, even though by every measure, education, reading, breadth of learning...
Capacity for debate, financial success.
By every measure, we have it over them.
And so, normally, I'd let the matter go and focus on the issues, but these are guys who are constantly parading their credentials.
And what I want to say is that when you look more closely, you realize that behind all this strutting and preening, what you see is hollow men hiding behind a facade.
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The historian Kevin Cruz at Princeton has challenged me to produce even one example.
Let me read his tweet.
He's addressing Dinesh.
He goes, you keep claiming progressive historians ignore democratic ties to slavery and segregation.
He goes, I've repeatedly asked you to show even one example of this trend that you insist is widespread.
Go on, show your work.
Well, I think I should do that.
And I'm going to focus today...
I don't want to focus on the kind of third-rate historians that do work that is peripheral to the field.
I want to pick on the big guys.
And so I'm going to take on two of the most famous progressive historians.
One is Eric Foner at Columbia, the author of the book Reconstruction.
And the other is the historian Robert Dalek, the biographer of Franklin Roosevelt.
I think he also did a massive work on Lyndon Johnson, which I could do a whole other show on, but I'm going to focus really on these two because they cover the territory that...
That Cruz is talking about.
In other words, he wants me to give examples that deal with slavery, with Reconstruction, with segregation, with racism, so I intend to do exactly that.
Let's start with Eric Foner.
Now, Eric Foner has written a book that is a 700-page book on Reconstruction.
And yet in that book, he leaves something very critical out.
So let me say what that something is.
After the Civil War, the Republicans got together and passed The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
The 13th Amendment was the amendment that ended slavery permanently.
The 14th Amendment established equal rights under the law.
The 15th Amendment gave blacks the right to vote.
These are absolutely critical amendments.
They altered the Constitution in a radical way.
They established rights that even the civil rights movement much later would be completely dependent upon.
The Civil Rights Movement, for example, the Voting Rights Act was dependent upon the 15th Amendment.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 appealed to the 14th Amendment and its equal rights provision.
So here's my point. When you look at the actual voting, you find that Democrats vigorously opposed all three.
Let me give you some numbers.
The Civil War is over, and you might think that the Democrats, and we're talking here about the Northern Democrats, remember the Southern Democrats hadn't even been let back into the Union yet.
The Northern Democrats would at least say, hey, the war is over, we need to get rid of slavery once and for all.
And yet, the 13th Amendment was supported by the Republicans, and only 16 of 80 Democrats, Northern Democrats, voted for it.
The vast majority of Democrats, even after the Civil War, did not want an amendment that outlawed slavery.
Now let's turn to the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment.
How many Democrats voted for those?
Zero. Not one in the House, not one in the Senate.
Now to repeat, these are not Southern Democrats.
They're not Confederates.
The Confederacy is not, the Confederate states haven't been readmitted yet.
These are all Northern Democrats.
And so the key lesson from this is that the opposition to slavery came entirely from the Republican Party.
And the vast majority of Democrats, even in the North, We're what Lincoln called the fire in the rear.
They were, in a sense, backers of the Confederate cause.
They, too, wanted to deprive blacks of fundamental rights.
Now, you would think, in a book on Reconstruction, on this very subject, these votes would be recorded.
That Eric Foner would go, this was the roll call vote.
He goes into all kinds of absurd minutiae about Reconstruction, but he leaves the vote count out.
Why? Why?
Why? Because he wants to camouflage the degree of complicity, not just of Democrats, but of Northern Democrats.
The whole game that Foner plays throughout the book, and it's a very cunning game.
He stops talking about Republicans and Democrats at one point, and he starts talking in a sense about progressives and conservatives.
And here's his key move. Republicans are now described as progressives.
Why? Because in Foner's opinion, they are the sort of predecessors.
There's no real progressive movement yet, but Foner must think that they're sort of the early version of the progressives.
And this is the sneaky move.
He starts calling the Confederates.
And the Democrats in general, conservatives.
So you notice what he's doing is he's flipping the blame.
He's shifting from a partisan role count to an ideological role count.
And what is his goal? His goal is sort of to link the racist Democrats of the past with conservatives today.
That's what he's up to.
And all of this is going on through a very sneaky sleight of hand throughout the book.
Now, let's begin to ask for a moment, what sense do these terms even make?
Are conservatives in the way that Foner describes them in any way related to conservatives now?
No. He's talking about conservatism in an operational sense.
Anybody who wants to hold on to something that exists is a conservative.
Anybody who wants to change things, as the Republicans did, becomes a progressive.
So what's happening here, now, when you look at things like segregation, let's remember that segregation had not yet been established.
Segregation, in terms of law, was established starting in the 1880s and continued through the 1890s, the early part of the 20th century.
And so it makes no sense to talk about conserving anything.
The America that existed before the Civil War was gone.
Nobody was conserving anything.
The main issue was, where do we go from here?
And the people who wanted to liberate blacks were the Republicans, and the people who wanted to block them were the Democrats.
And Foner, through a cunning use of this conservative-progressive dichotomy, hides this critical fact.
So, that's Foner.
Now we turn to...
Robert Dalek and his massive book.
Again, this is a book that is, I'm looking at the last page, it's almost 700 pages.
So it's another major doorstopper.
It tells you everything you wanted to know about FDR, except the really damning, inconvenient stuff.
Now, we learned from the Columbia historian Ira Katznelson in his book Fear Itself that FDR made all kinds of dirty deals with the racists in his own party.
FDR was perfectly willing to cut these deals to get the New Deal through.
And so what he did was he told a Southern racist, a Southern Democratic racist, listen, If you vote for the New Deal, I will do certain things for you in return.
And let's look at what these things are because they're extremely horrific.
First, The racist Democrats said, you've got to cut blacks out of the New Deal.
You've got to make sure that New Deal programs have an exemption both for farm labor and domestic workers.
Why? Because there was a preponderance of blacks in those professions at that time.
And so by making them exempt from New Deal programs and benefits, you're basically going to make sure that blacks are cut out of the New Deal.
FDR agrees. Number two, the racists of his own party asked of FDR that he continue with segregation.
Not just segregation that was established by law, but even segregation, for example, of the armed forces.
Remember that FDR could have unilaterally, on his own, ended segregation in the armed forces.
The Southern Democratic racists demanded that he not do it.
And FDR, again, agreed.
The FDR administration made this Faustian or dirty bargain.
And third, most damning of all, The Democratic racists insisted that FDR block anti-lynching laws.
Think about this. These are the so-called Negro barbecues, the horrific events where people were hanging from trees and Democrats were standing around the trees and eating burgers and fries.
And the Democratic racist told FDR, you've got to block these anti-lynching laws that Republicans are pushing and the FDR administration agreed again.
So think of the price of FDR getting the New Deal.
He was willing to go into bed with the worst people in America who happened to be in his own party.
Now... Where is this described?
Where is this laid out?
Where is this all spelled out in Robert Dalek's book, Franklin Roosevelt?
The 700-page book that is standard reading for all kinds of people who teach about FDR, and the answer is...
He doesn't really go into any of it.
He has the mildest illusions about New Deal programs, but even then written away to camouflage what's really going on.
He's camouflaging the dirty operation within the Democratic Party that screwed blacks over for half a century.
It was only Republicans later in the 50s who said, okay, blacks need to be included in Social Security.
Okay, we've got to continue to push for these anti-lynching laws.
The bottom line of it is the Republicans were pushing to end lynching.
And the Democrats were doing their best to stop them.
Dalek will have none of it.
He wants to give this canonized Saint FDR picture in which FDR's only flaws are things like, he wasn't progressive enough!
He should have gone even further.
So these two books, and they're written by eminent well-known historians, are classic examples of ways in which the Democratic Party's deep complicity I haven't even gotten into slavery.
There are all kinds of things I still need to get into, and I'm going to pick that up perhaps tomorrow.
I've only kind of scratched the surface of this whole thing, but I think I've met the Cruz challenge.
Give me examples. Give me just one example.
I've given two very prominent ones of historians who have done their best to manipulate the record, hide how bad the Democrats really were in all this stuff.
And this is the indoctrination that finds its way not just to students in the classroom, but also into the media and ultimately more broadly into the culture.
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