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Jan. 28, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:03:14
KAMIKAZE POLITICS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep14
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Are we in the age of kamikaze investors and kamikaze politics?
Plus, Biden's climate busters.
And an interview with Senator Rand Paul.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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America needs this voice.
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.
We are now in the age of the kamikaze investor and kamikaze politics.
And I want to discuss this and its implications in the context of a big story that has burst on the scene, as everyone talking about it.
And it's a story about the rebel investors mobilized on Reddit who are trying to overthrow some of the most powerful and financially well-endowed hedge funds on Wall Street.
So it's the little guys and a lot of little guys against a few big guys.
There's a populist thrust here which helps us to understand not just Wall Street, the implications for Wall Street, but also the implications for American politics.
Now, many of you are following the story, but some of you aren't, so I'm going to sort of try to unfurl it from the beginning.
In Wall Street, there is the idea, and this has become established over decades, that Wall Street is the smart money, but the ordinary investor is the dumb money.
The smart money knows what it's doing.
The dumb guy just jumps in and most of the time kind of loses his or her shirt.
So the Wall Street game is for the insiders to beat the outsiders.
And for a long time they were doing it and they've been doing it until now.
Now, there are a bunch of companies.
GameStop is one of them.
It's a company that sells games, and it's in malls.
And it's not been doing very well.
It's one of those companies particularly hard hit by COVID. Here's another company in the same boat, AMC, the theater chain.
I've had movies in AMC, as in Regal and Cinemark.
AMC is doing very badly, and it's partly because no one's going to the movies right now.
And so these stocks have been losing value.
And now what Wall Street does, the big guys, the insiders, is when a stock is plummeting, they short it.
Shorted basically means they bet it's going to go down more, and they're hoping to make money on this correct prediction, on this downward trajectory.
So you can make money if you predict correctly that stocks are going up, but you can also make money if you correctly predict that they're going down.
That's the meaning of shorting a stock.
Now, a bunch of guys on social media starting on Reddit and using primarily an app called Robinhood decided, we hate these rich guys.
We're going to teach them a lesson.
We're going to bust them.
And the way we're going to bust them is we're going to take these stocks in a downward trajectory, like AMC and like GameStop, and we're going to start buying them.
Call us irrational, if you will, but we're going to drive the price up.
And here's the key point. If somebody on Wall Street is betting, if some big hedge funds are betting, and they're betting billions of dollars that a stock is going to go down, and the stock, in fact, goes up, they lose a lot of money.
In fact, in theory, they can lose an infinite amount of money.
I don't need to go into the details of how that occurs, but the simple truth of it is if they make an erroneous bet on a plummeting stock, they stand to be really drained.
They will lose their shirts.
And so what's happening is that a battle sort of erupted in which the Reddit guys and the Robinhood guys were buying up these, quote, useless stocks.
And then Wall Street goes, we're going to teach these punks a lesson.
We're going to short even more.
And these guys are going to ultimately lose all their money because these stocks aren't intrinsically worth what they're bidding up the stock to be.
But the Reddit guys decided, okay, you want to fight?
Let's fight! And they began to put out the word on social media, and more people jumped in.
It became kind of a gathering snowball.
And there's more of them than there are of the Wall Street guys, even though the Wall Street guys have more money.
And so in this remarkable battle of a kind, really not seen, not only in the history of social media, but in the history of Wall Street, the Reddit guys began to win.
And the rich guys began to panic because they were losing billions.
In fact, the major hedge funds began to call other hedge funds to get loans, to get infusions of funds to cover their gargantuan losses.
Places like Melvin Capital, one of the most established firms on Wall Street, facing the prospect of being ruined by this.
And so what do the big guys do?
They do what they kind of do in these situations.
They rush for government protection.
They go to the SEC. Help us!
Block these rebel investors!
They go to Robinhood, the site.
Now think of it. Robinhood was set up for the little guy to trade, for the little investor.
And Robinhood stops trading.
Stops allowing people to buy.
GameStop stops them being able to buy AMC and other similar stocks.
Outrageous! Basically what happens is Robin Hood has become the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Robin Hood is now betting with the system against the little guy.
Now, let's look for a moment at the reasoning of the system.
The reasoning of the system is these little guys are irrational.
We need to protect them for their own good.
They surely know that these stocks aren't worth what they're willing to pay for them.
And so we've got to stop this irrational conduct right now to protect the integrity of the system.
This is crony capitalism at its finest, or I should say at its ugliest.
A collusion between big business, big money, and big government.
And in this case also you may say these tech sites like Robinhood.
Against the little guy.
And the basic idea here is that the little guy is not acting with economically rational motives.
And perhaps this is true.
But let me begin to give a reply, if I may, on behalf of the little guy.
What if the little guy is not motivated by economics at all?
What if the little guy believes that he has been screwed over by big politics and big money and big Wall Street?
People often feel that in real life.
Think of it. Let's say you have a sibling, and your parents put that sibling in charge of, made them the executor of the family estate.
And the sibling took 90% of the family inheritance and gave you 10%.
Let's say, moreover, that the sibling had every right to do that.
They were in charge of the process, and so what they did was legal.
But nevertheless, you are furious.
Now, a kind of true libertarian would say to you, oh, you know, you should not be upset about this because, think about it, you've still got 10%.
You're better off than you were before from a purely economically rational point of view.
If you are homo economicus, you should say, wow, it's just a little bit of a windfall for me.
True, my brother got 10 times more or 9 times more, but why should I be upset about that?
Well, the fact of the matter is we are not homo economicus.
We are driven by other motives.
In this case, it would be a deep sense of injustice, a sense of being screwed over.
And it would not be entirely irrational for the guy who has been treated that way to go, I'm going to devote the rest of my life to ruining this other guy who screwed me.
I don't care if I lose my 10%.
I'm going to try to prevent him from getting his 90%.
And I think that's a little bit of what's going on here.
The little guy is striking back, and the little guy may have $5,000 or $10,000, and they're willing to lose it, but they're willing to take Melvin Capital with them.
They're willing to take all these smarmy, self-satisfied, smart money guys, and in their own words, put them out on the street.
Teach them a lesson.
Now, I see something very similar going on in politics.
Look at all the people who accosted Romney, started screaming at him on the airplane.
Look at all the people who accosted Lindsey Graham.
Look at even all the people who came to the Capitol.
I'm not just talking about the people who went in the Capitol, but who came to DC. These are people who feel powerless.
They feel like no one's listening to them.
They're extremely angry.
And so kamikaze investment...
It has its political equivalent in kamikaze politics.
And kamikaze politics is, I don't care if what you're telling me to do is, quote, irrational.
It is rational from my point of view.
Because my point of view is that you deserve to be screwed over.
You deserve to be taught a lesson.
And this has now become a potent force in American politics.
It's not just on the right, by the way.
The Reddit guys aren't right-wingers.
There are little guys on the left, some of them, and some of them on the right, and some of them who don't even think of themselves as political.
In some ways, I think we'd have to admit that even some of the Antifa guys who are out there lashing out at the system, they too are motivated by this Somewhat nihilistic.
But by nihilistic here, we don't mean that they believe in nothing.
It's that they just don't believe in the system.
They don't believe that our institutions are responsive to them.
And I think they're right.
In that sense, my emotional sympathies are with the rebels.
I do want to see these crony capitalists taught a lesson.
I do want to see these unresponsive politicians taught a lesson.
So if that's kamikaze politics and that's kamikaze investment, let's have more of it.
We are now at the mercy of one-party control and an agenda driven by tax and spend economics.
It's not good. I don't need to go into all the social ramifications, but fiscally you can expend compounded growth of our national debt and you can expect the systematic devaluation of the U.S. dollar.
So, what's your plan?
What are you doing right now to protect your savings and your retirement?
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Citing what he calls an existential threat to mankind, President Biden has taken sweeping actions to, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, fight climate change.
Now, these actions are pretty comprehensive.
I won't go into all of them.
He's blocking new oil and gas leases.
He's created a White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, another national climate task force.
So all this swelling of the bureaucracy, but even more startling.
He wants climate to be a key element of our foreign policy.
So, unlike the old days, we're not going to fight the Soviet Union.
Apparently we're not going to be fighting China.
We're not going to be fighting the Islamic radicals.
We're going to be fighting the climate.
We're going to be fighting the climate.
Now, first of all, there seems to be a kind of deep hubris about all this.
A deep hubris that somehow the climate...
is susceptible to being fought and to being changed.
Let me start with a simple proposition.
Could the resources of the United States be somehow deployed to alter the climate in a one-mile radius around my house?
Let's see if you can do it.
Change the climate. Can you control it?
No. And if you can't do it for a one-mile radius around my house, how on Earth, so to speak, can you do it for the whole Earth, for the entire planet?
People say, well, Dinesh, you're confusing weather and climate.
No, I'm not. It's actually much easier to control the weather.
Weather is temporary. Weather is local.
Climate is... You may say, is universal.
If you can't control the weather, you actually think you can control the climate, the average temperature of the entire Earth, measured over a long period of time?
Are you insane? Now, George Carlin, the comedian, had some very insightful things to say about the mentality behind this.
Planet is fine!
Compared to the people, the planet is doing great.
It's been here four and a half billion years.
Do you ever think about the arithmetic?
Planet has been here four and a half billion years.
We've been here what? 100,000?
Maybe 200,000?
And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years.
200 years versus four and a half billion.
And we have the conceit to think that somehow we're a threat?
That somehow we're going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just floating around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us.
Been through all kinds of things worse than us.
Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
Where is George Carlin when we need him now?
Now, of course, I can see the kind of imperious leftist go, Oh, George, you're not familiar with the science.
Oh, Dinesh, don't be such a climate denier, such a denier of science.
Well... Science is based on hypothesis, experiment, testing, prediction, verification.
Now, the same climate crew in the 1970s was warning about global cooling.
Global cooling. There's a book on this which was endorsed by all these prominent scientists called Global Cooling.
Look it up. So for 10 years, they were talking about global cooling.
Then they started talking about global warming.
And because they realized this sounds kind of stupid, the Earth is cooling, the Earth is warming, then they switched to climate change.
But the most important point here is that all their predictions have been wrong.
Go back to Al Gore.
Listen to his rhetoric based on the science.
Oh, we only have five years left, guys.
We only have 10 years left.
We only have 15 years left.
And when the 15 years passes, we have another 15 years left.
So this is called making predictions that are...
Invalidated by events.
This is called the phenomenon of the end of the world has to be constantly postponed.
You know who else does this stuff?
Televangelists. I remember the 1980s reading Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, based on biblical prophecy.
The idea was, the end of the world is at hand, it's coming, and it's only a few years away.
And then when it doesn't happen, oh, well, the end of the world is coming, it's just going to happen a little bit later now, and a little bit later, and a little bit later.
The record of the climate change crowd is exactly the same as the record of the televangelists, which is they have been, on this point, 100% wrong 100% of the time.
It is the most dismal record of any scientific hypothesis that I can remember, certainly in my lifetime.
Now... This notion of fighting climate change reminds me a lot about this guy.
Here's my copy of Herodotus, The Histories.
And in it, there's a remarkable scene.
The Persian king Xerxes is trying to cross the Hellespont, which is now the Dardanelles.
At that time, it seemed to be the dividing line of water between Asia and Europe.
And Xerxes' troops had a lot of difficulty crossing the Hellespont.
You may say that the ocean was, the river was uncooperative.
And so when Xerxes got some of his troops to the other side, he ordered the Hellespont, the river, to be flogged.
300 lashes to the river.
Why? To punish the river for making all these difficulties for the Persians.
And of course, we read this in Herodotus and we kind of laugh and we go, it wasn't stupid, you know, trying to, what do you think you can control the oceans or seas?
You think you can actually control the sea?
But our morons are trying to do the same thing.
They're stupider than Xerxes.
Herodotus treated Xerxes as a barbarian because he says his behavior is fundamentally irrational.
Herodotus liked people from other cultures.
He didn't call them all barbarians, but he called Xerxes a barbarian.
Why? Because of this hubristic, idiotic notion that you can somehow manipulate...
The world, nature, to your end.
I think we are in possession of the left, not us, in possession of a similar hubris, a similar stupidity, and this notion of sort of controlling the Earth's temperature is our version of flogging the Hellespont.
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Welcome, Senator Paul, to the podcast.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it. I know you've been in impeachment discussions and impeachment hearings all the time, and this is probably the topic at the front of your mind.
So let's start there.
I noticed that Chief Justice Roberts is skipping the Senate impeachment trial.
Is that because he thinks that the trial is unconstitutional?
And if so, do you agree with him?
You know, I haven't been asked to speak for him, but I'm glad to give you what I think is his opinion.
I think by not coming across the street, by not coming to this, that it does cast a pall over this.
It, I think, indicates an illegitimacy to the procedure.
The Constitution says the Chief Justice shall preside when you impeach the President.
Well, it isn't an impeachment of the President.
It's an impeachment of a former President.
So I think the Chief Justice says, heck, I'm not going over there.
But the question is, is there anything in the Constitution about impeaching former presidents or private citizens?
There isn't. So I think the Chief Justice, by not coming, is sending a message one way or another.
He is sending a message.
And I think one of the interesting things is, Nobody's asked this, but I am almost positive that Chuck Schumer spoke with Justice Roberts.
Don't you think he called him up and said, would you come?
Because for the Democrats, the justice coming looks like, oh, this is very important, and we have this impartial chief justice coming.
You've got to know they wanted him to come, and very quietly, it just was sort of rolled out, oh, we're going to have a Democrat who's in favor of impeachment, who voted for the last impeachment to preside over this, not the chief justice.
I guarantee there was a conversation between Schumer and Chief Justice, and the Chief Justice said it's not constitutional for me to be there.
It really does cast a pall over what they're doing.
And then the vote the other day really shows that at least myself and 45 total Republicans think it's unconstitutional to impeach a private citizen.
Do you think that the motive from the Democrats and from the left is essentially one of preventing Trump from running again?
In other words, preventing the American people being the deciders of whether or not they want Trump in 2024.
That could be short-circuited if he was somehow thwarted from being able to run.
Do you think that's really—or do you just think it's mere vindictiveness?
They just feel like, listen, we have a chance to hit him while he's down.
Let's just try to drive the stake in just because we hate him so much.
I think it's a little bit of both.
I think they do want to prevent him from running, and they want to prevent anybody from being able to nominate him.
But they also found out when 45 of us voted no, that basically the impeachment trial is dead on arrival— So now their goal is more vindictiveness and bitterness.
And really, Biden had a chance here.
They asked Biden about this.
He had a chance. He said he wants to unify the country.
He had a chance to rise above this, and he could have been a statesman.
He could have said, like with Nixon, I just don't think that it's worth doing this.
After this, it just divides the country, and I want to unify the country, and I'm against impeachment.
It would have ended right there.
The Democrats would have dropped it if the incoming president had said that.
But this is why Biden's words may not really mean what he wants.
You know, what he's indicating about unity may not actually be true.
Now, a bunch of Republicans have been talking about the fact that this impeachment trial is a bad idea, but their reasons for it have been things like, we need to unify the country, we need to move on, we don't have time, this will set a bad precedent.
From your comments, I take it that you actually have a deeper reason and it's that the guy didn't really do it.
And when you compare what Trump did to what the left is doing, man, if you're really looking for impeachment, it's very easy to find on the other side.
Can you spell this idea out a little bit?
You know, I think Americans want equal justice is about treating people fairly and treating both parties the same.
And so my point has been that if we're going to examine President Trump's words, we should also examine the words of Democrats.
If you examine President Trump's words, you find that he said, go fight like hell for your country and make sure your voices are heard.
Well, your voice is not an implement of violence.
This is about having your voice heard.
He also said peacefully and patriotically march down there.
The other, a lot of facts argue against this.
The violence apparently was going on at the Capitol while he was still giving a speech, so it wasn't the same group of people, it was different sets of people.
There's also evidence that people all over Facebook were planning this violence weeks in advance, so it really had nothing to do with the President's speech.
But going back to Democrat words and Democrat speech, I was there at the ball field a couple years ago when a crazed Bernie Sanders' supporter came and shot us up, firing hundreds of bullets at us, nearly killing Steve Scalise, wounding four others.
Two Capitol Hill where police were wounded in the process of bringing the guy down.
And we would have died without the protection of Capitol Hill police that day.
But people need to realize what this guy was enraged about.
Democrats were saying at the time that the Republican plan for health care was you get sick and you die.
So can you imagine if your child had leukemia or cancer and you were losing your child and you thought, you know, the Democrats say the Republicans want my child to die.
You could see how that is inciting language.
That's inflammatory. It's intemperate language.
But you know what? After the shooting, and I was there and I was interviewed hundreds of times, I never once blamed Bernie Sanders for that.
I never brought it up. I never said that he was responsible.
In fact, we all worry that someday we'll give a speech and that somebody who is a lunatic or somebody who's mentally ill will commit some violence.
Nobody wants that.
And I don't think Bernie wanted that.
But was Bernie's language and was Democrat language intemperate?
Yeah, and probably worse than anything Trump has ever said, to tell you the truth.
There's others. Cory Booker has said, get up in their face.
Get up in the face of those Congress people.
Maxine Waters says, form a mob.
Attack them in restaurants.
The mayor of Seattle, she said, they'd taken over part of our city.
A violent insurrection.
They had taken over part of our city.
And she said, oh, it's just a summer of love.
But even the worst one, and this is the one they really need to contemplate, even if they want to censor President Trump, Kamala Harris, during the summer, said that it was a good idea to give money to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to bail out people who had been in these protests.
One of the guys that was bailed out immediately got out, cracked someone's skull, and caused an intracranial hemorrhage.
And this is somebody that Kamala Harris encouraged the group to bail him out.
Was she encouraging violence by saying violent protesters that are put in prison that we should help get them out?
That's not only encouraging, that's sort of being a participant in violence.
So that's what I've told them.
They don't want to hear it. I said, look, even they said, what about censoring the president?
I said, well, yeah, if you want to censor the president, then probably we should censor Kamala Harris.
But the real story is no Republican has ever called for any of that because we don't think it's right to censor or impeach Kamala Harris, but also it's not right to do the same thing to the president either.
Well, it does seem to me critical that if they push ahead with this, which it seems they're going to, that you put this counter evidence forward because this becomes a showcase for the American people.
And if the American people believe, as I think they do in a uniform standard of justice, then the American people can see for themselves How, in effect, the left is saying that they want one standard for themselves and another standard for Republicans.
We'll be right back. I want to ask you a couple of questions about some important themes in your great book on socialism.
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Senator Paul, you are the author of a terrific book, The Case Against Socialism, and there's a lot in the book.
You do a comparison of Chile and Venezuela, for example, showing how one became an exhibit of capitalist success, the other of socialist failure.
But I want to talk to you about a theme that you do touch upon and delve into, and that's because we keep hearing on the left today that they want to model their socialism on Scandinavia.
They'll say things like, well, we're not trying to have Soviet socialism or Maoist socialism or even Cuban or even Venezuelan socialism.
Our model is what's going on in the Nordic countries.
People are pretty happy over there, aren't they?
So is it a fact that the left is pursuing the Scandinavian model?
And if not, why not?
What's important about the historical examples of socialism that people say they don't want is Mao didn't advertise the Great Famine when he sold his socialism on China.
Neither did Stalin advertise that he was going to kill 31 million people.
Hitler didn't say, oh, we'll have a Holocaust.
They were preaching a socialism that was supposed to be at the time much more benign, but turned out not to be.
Scandinavia is the same thing.
We don't have a gulag in Scandinavia, but what they've been promoting and practicing is they want a benign, a Kinder, gentler form of socialism.
That's what Bernie Sanders preaches.
They're going to want democratic socialism.
And they point to Scandinavia.
The only problem is, you know, Sweden isn't socialist.
You know, they've had a big welfare state.
They have high taxes. But they really have really not embraced socialism.
They have private property.
They have a private stock market.
Ludwig von Mises was the famous free market economist.
who said, what's the one thing that is most important to have to have freedom and to have a free market or to indicate a free market?
And he said a stock exchange.
Sweden's had a private stock exchange for, you know, 150 years.
So there's a lot of evidence that they're not really a socialist paradise.
But interestingly, the things that they do have, Bernie says, and so did President Obama, they want to emulate Sweden in such a great place as socialist paradise.
But interestingly, some of the things they have are not what Bernie or Obama are for.
They actually have had low corporate taxes.
They've had corporate taxes in the low 20% really for a couple decades preceding our reduction in the corporate income tax.
For many, many years, Sweden was a better place to do business as far as corporate income taxes than here.
The other thing Bernie says he wants is, oh, we want that Swedish socialism.
But the interesting thing about taxes in Sweden, they're high, but they're actually not as progressive as our taxes are.
And the other interesting thing is, is the poor pay quite a bit.
The high taxes start at a much lower level.
So you can make $60,000 over there and you're in the 60 percentile for what your income tax is going to be.
The taxes are very high at a low level.
And also they have something called a value-added tax, which is a 25% sales tax.
And poor people, as a percentage of their income, pay more sales tax, you know, at a higher percentage than rich people do.
So it's what we call a regressive tax.
So over here, they say, oh, we're at the top 1%, the rich are going to pay for it.
Well, that's not what they do in Sweden.
The poor pay the taxes.
The middle class pay the taxes.
Everybody pays an extraordinary amount of taxes, but it isn't just heaped on the rich.
It's really actually a lot of the taxes paid for by the poor.
So almost everything they say about Scandinavia is wrong.
It is a high tax place.
It is a welfare state, but it's not really socialism.
And really, most of the policies they follow aren't the ones that Bernie and President Obama and others have advocated for here.
Senator Paul, thanks for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Representative Tulsi Gabbard is politically unpredictable.
Not so much chameleonic, it's just that she's hard to peg ideologically.
But one of the things she is is kind of a truth-teller, and by that I mean she calls it as she sees it, and she sometimes has her finger on the pulse of very big things that are happening in the culture.
Watch. The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 to try to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities were behaving like domestic enemies of our country.
But let's be clear.
The John Brennans, Adam Schiffes and the oligarchs in big tech who are trying to undermine our constitutionally protected rights and turn our country into a police state with KGB-style surveillance are also domestic enemies and much more powerful and therefore dangerous than the mob that stormed the Capitol.
Now, for her to call out Schiff and Brennan in this way, I think is fantastic and very brave for a Democrat.
And you can kind of see here why the Democrats tried to throw her.
They threw her off the debate platform.
They can't control her.
I also think that her analogy to the KGB, now to some people, it may seem a little bit far-fetched.
Oh, we're not the Soviet Union.
But I think Tulsi Gabbard's point is that things can move in a very bad direction and sometimes pretty fast.
And we've seen that happen, by the way, in lots of places.
The Nuremberg Laws have been called a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.
The Nuremberg Laws, you can say, quote, merely made Jews into second-class citizens, but it wasn't a very long step from there to rounding them up and sending them into ovens.
And all of that happened really in the space of a few years.
My wife, Debbie, will tell you that when Hugo Chavez was elected in 1999, he said, I'm not a socialist.
And in fact, for several years, his radical, extreme socialist policies didn't kick in.
He didn't even start the Socialist Party of Venezuela until several years later, 2007 or 2008, I believe.
So, what Tulsi Gabbard is saying is there are disturbing trends in America.
That are pushing us in a very frightening direction.
And I'd like to support that by looking at a couple that I've just almost picked up, you may say, right around me.
So here's a story from the Washington Post.
The Washington Post had a story from the 2019 campaign.
Very eye-opening.
They were following around Kamala Harris and they talked about a scene in which Kamala Harris is mocking a guy in prison begging for food and water.
She goes, a morsel of food, please!
Kamala said, shoving her hands forward as if clutching a metal plate, her voice now trembling like an old British man locked in a Dickensian jail cell.
And water! I just want water!
So, basically, this is what I would call reporting at its finest.
Why? Because it captures an aspect of someone's personality.
It shows that here's someone...
Who has a very low regard for people.
Likes to see people in a cringing position and laughs.
You know, this is like some Iranian mullah laughing at a dissident in prison or laughing at someone who's having their throat cut.
It's a disgusting side of Kamala Harris and there it is in the Washington Post.
So, here's the key point of the story.
The Washington Post went back And deleted that anecdote.
This is called erasing history.
The problem was the anecdote was too telling.
Saint Kamala is now in the White House along with Biden.
And it can't be very good for her image to see her laughing at some guy begging for food in prison.
It doesn't make her look good. So let's go and, in an Orwellian fashion, remove that story.
Here's another interesting story.
From the New York Times. Son tipped off FBI about his father who is charged in Capitol riot.
Quote, I put my emotions behind me to do what I thought was right, says Jackson Reffitt.
The guy turns in his own dad.
And he goes, I put my emotions behind me.
This is not just your emotions.
This is the person who has worked his whole life to give you a life.
This is someone who brought you, in part, into the world, along with your mom.
This is somebody who has made untold sacrifices for you, sacrifices they don't expect to be reciprocated.
There are other cultures where parents look after the kids, but the kids are then expected to look after the parents.
That's not the case in American culture.
But is it too much for a parent to expect a modicum of respect, a modicum of gratitude?
But no, you've got this kid who not only does something horrible, but feels good about it.
This is right, I'm going to quote now directly from Orwell.
Nearly all children nowadays, we're talking now about in the world of 1984 of complete tyranny, nearly all children nowadays were horrible.
What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the spies, they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages.
And yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the party.
On the contrary, they adored the party and everything connected with it.
All their ferocity was turned outwards against the enemies of the state, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought criminals.
It was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children.
That's Orwell. Is that not an echo of the world we are living in now?
And then we have censorship.
Censorship not just in digital media, but censorship.
Proposals for censorship of all media.
Here's Anand Giridharadas, a fellow Indian.
It's always exasperating for me when fellow Indians...
Reveal themselves to be unbelievably stupid and tyrannical.
They're ruining the reputation of Asian Americans and Asian Indians in this country.
We're supposed to be nice people.
We're supposed to be funny.
We're supposed to be smart.
But Anand Giridharadas is none of the above.
Here's what he says. Is it time for this question to be front and center?
Should Fox News be allowed to exist?
This guy literally thinks it is a government decision whether Fox News should be allowed to exist.
So private media companies should not be allowed to exist.
Why? Because according to this clown, from his point of view, they're putting out misinformation.
Obviously, who gets to decide what misinformation is, Anand?
What if we decide you're putting out misinformation?
Should we, some collective we, get to shut you up?
Oh, no, no, Dinesh, I'm a very clever Indian.
I'm putting out very thorough information.
So this is the voice of tyranny speaking.
This is what Tilsey Gabbard is warning about.
And my only advice to Tilsey is, sadly, it is your side, it is the Democrats, who are leading this effort.
And so, since you are already on to them, I'd like you to think about Exiting that side and joining the side of freedom.
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Will the Democrats be successful if they try to kill the filibuster?
Now, there was an argument, a negotiation about this between the former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the new incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer And according to the press, McConnell gave in.
He surrendered. He agreed to withdraw his demand that the filibuster be left in place.
This does not seem to actually be a true reflection of what happened.
Very interestingly, two Democratic senators, Kristen Sinema of Arizona, And Joe Manchin, West Virginia, came out publicly and said that, A, they will not support any effort to get rid of the filibuster, and B, their minds could not be changed on this issue, meaning they're not susceptible to some sort of democratic pressure.
President Biden was asked about the filibuster, and his office affirmed, quote, He has spoken to this many times.
His position has not changed.
In short, Biden opposes overturning the filibuster.
Now, this is a very important issue because the filibuster is a weapon for the Republicans to block very bad things from coming down the pike.
The filibuster allows Republicans to take to the floor and speak about them and, frankly, keep speaking about them.
Never stop. Go on and on.
Go on and on for hours. Go on and on for days.
And the idea here is to drag out the debate to such a point that the issue basically dies on the shelf.
Now, you can overturn a filibuster, but You need a supermajority to do that.
And the Democrats, of course, do not have a supermajority.
They don't really even have a real majority.
It's 50-50 in the Senate.
They have a bare majority, but no supermajority.
So the filibuster becomes a blocking instrument for the Republicans, a very valuable one.
And it looks like for now, and perhaps for the next two years, it will be largely in place.
So I'm very happy about that.
But when I listen to these filibusters from Republicans, I'm actually very disappointed at their content.
Because now you might say, Dinesh, who cares what the content is?
Well, I mean, I care and it's on C-SPAN and it's out in the public domain.
Here you have these Republicans and they're reading interminably from legislative tracks or they read from the phone book.
So I would like to actually offer myself, as a volunteer, To be what could be called filibuster librarian.
Filibuster librarian.
And what that means is that I would supply the Republicans with really good reading material.
You don't need to read from the phone book.
You can read from Cicero's Orations, The Denunciation of Cataline.
You can read from John Stuart Mills on Liberty.
There are all kinds of great messages, and if we think that we're not educating our young people and we're not, that there's been a kind of degradation of the public tone, not to mention that there are important public issues that are directly addressed by these great books, well, why not grab this opportunity to import the great books?
What a sight it would be!
You'd have to go back to Britain in the age of Disraeli when this kind of high rhetoric was brought into American government.
And so I'd like to make an appeal to certainly the smart guys in the Senate.
I'd like to appeal to Rand Paul and I'd like to appeal to Ted Cruz and others that, hey, if you're looking for filibuster material, call my office.
Call me. I'll be happy to supply it.
The filibuster is a useful, effective tool.
And we can use it not just to block bad stuff from coming down the pike, but putting out some really interesting good ideas of their own for people who want to listen and think about them.
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The FBI has arrested Brandon Strzok, the founder and leader of the walk-away movement.
I know Brandon.
I spoke at one of his inaugural events.
I joined him at an event we both spoke at together in Portland.
And he's a very sincere, very passionate guy.
He was evidently in D.C. He was at the Capitol.
And he has been now charged with being one of the terrorists, one of the insurrectionists, one of the ISIS-types trying to overthrow the government, except that it doesn't seem like he was any of those things.
I'm going to actually look for a moment at the charges.
Now, Brandon has been released pending his trial, but let's look at the actual charges against him.
One, Impeding a law enforcement officer during civil disorder.
That's perhaps the most serious one, and I'll come back to that in a minute.
That, as we will see, is rather dubious.
Engaging in disorderly conduct with intent to disturb a hearing before Congress.
Now, what did Brandon Strzok do?
Did he even enter the Capitol?
The answer, from what we can figure out, appears to be no.
He didn't go in.
He was outside.
So, the question then becomes, if Brandon was protesting outside the Capitol, he didn't force his way in, he didn't go into the building, he didn't run off with Nancy's podium, he didn't do any of that, what did he actually do?
Now, the first thing he did was he allegedly When a Capitol Police officer was making his way through the crowd with a riot shield over his head, Strzok urged others to wrestle it from him.
This is in the FBI documents.
He urged others to wrestle it from him.
He didn't wrestle it, but he said, apparently, take it away from him, take it, take it.
Now, whether or not that constitutes an offense, I don't know.
Whether Brandon actually even did this, I don't know.
This is what is alleged against him.
But this, it seems to me, is a charge and a serious charge that he was somehow calling upon, although not doing, the taking away of a police officer's equipment.
Obviously, if he did that, I would find that inexcusable.
If he called for it, I would find it reprehensible and I'm not sure if he did either.
But let's go on.
The FBI documents actually claim that Brandon was urging the crowd to, quote, go, go, go.
Now, again, is urging the crowd outside the building to go, go, go, does that constitute some kind of offense?
The FBI documents even claim Fault Brandon for what he said at a speech in a different place earlier in the day.
And again, I'm looking at the documents.
During his speech the day before the ride, Strzok referred to the audience as, quote, patriots.
So? And referred repeatedly to a revolution.
So? Strzok also told attendees to, quote, fight back.
So? And added, we are sending a message to the Democrats.
We are not going away.
You've got a problem. So?
The point here is that what we have, it seems here, is a prosecutorial machinery that is sort of spun out of control.
Spun out of control in the sense that they think that they can get you for showing up in Washington, and they can get you for making a speech, and they can grab onto your rhetoric and say things like, he used the word patriots.
In Basically, this is, most of this, to me, sheer nonsense.
And I have some advice for Brandon.
First, don't talk to the FBI. I didn't talk to the FBI, and I was right not to do it.
Flynn talked to the FBI to his, I think, enduring regret.
They were framing him. They were setting him up.
The second thing is, while...
You're dealing with these people?
Document everything. Make notes.
By the way, when I was before this judge in New York, he said, I'm going to send you off to confinement.
And I'm like... In effect, I said to the judge, I'd like to...
I'm a filmmaker. I'd like to record my confinement.
Oh, no, no, no!
He didn't want people knowing what was really happening.
He wanted to keep it from public view.
Well, what did I do in my movie, Hillary's America?
I recreated those scenes.
So you could see. But I couldn't use the actual confinement center.
I had to build structures and hire actors.
And so I tried to make it as real as possible.
Some people thought it was real.
They thought that was my actual confinement.
Document everything, Brandon.
And finally, this is more of an emotional point.
You have to somehow critically distance yourself from these events, almost as if you are observing them.
This is a little hard to do, but it's a very good way to cope with these situations, I say as someone who's been there.
If you distance yourself from it, you can not only more objectively see what's going on, but you can almost inwardly laugh about it.
You create a separate self that can observe Brandon Strzok, the defendant, and observe the prosecutors.
And we can really make certain types of judgments about who are the real crooks here?
Is Brandon Strzok the defendant, the evil man, the country?
...who are trying to get Brandon Strzok, and they're the people who really should be locked up.
You can make some sort of a judgment about that.
So my message to Brandon Strzok is I don't know what happened at the Capitol.
I wasn't there. I'm reading, trying to make sense of it through the documents.
But you're a good guy.
You're a passionate guy.
They're out to screw you.
Don't trust them as far as you can throw them.
And hold your head up.
You can come out of this. And as Nietzsche said, whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
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I'm having a lot of fun with this podcast.
I'm now in week three of the podcast.
It's a lot of work, both for Debbie, my producer, and me, but we love it.
We're enjoying it and we're thrilled that the podcast is finding a big audience.
We're already one of the biggest podcasts, not only in the country, but in the world.
If you like the podcast, please share it.
Let other people know about it.
I think this can be a real forum, a real place where we think through and figure out ways to press our opinions on the public sphere, to shape the direction of the country.
One of my regrets about the podcast is it's not interactive.
You hear from me, but I don't really hear from you.
And I'm trying to correct that.
So I now have an email, a public email, questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Questiondinesh at gmail.com.
And that means I'd like you...
If you're provoked or stimulated to ask a question, send it in.
And pretty much at the end of each podcast, when I can, I'm going to pick questions and just address them.
I'll read the question or read or summarize the question, and then I'm going to give my answer.
So I'm going to set an example today.
By kicking off with a question, we put a little tag up on the podcast yesterday and the day before.
We've got a whole bunch of questions in already.
Here's one from Sam, who asks a simple question with all this craziness going on around the country and maybe around the world.
Is this a fulfillment of biblical prophecy?
Can we kind of read the hand of God in all this?
How do we relate what's going on to biblical prophecy?
And that's a very important, and I think in some ways a profound question.
And here's my only way of thinking about it, and that's this.
We are under the sovereignty of God.
God is in charge of everything.
But God has also given us free will to act in the world.
And that means that the world takes on, you may say, an unpredictable element.
Unpredictable, not in the sense that God doesn't know what's going to happen, but that in the sense that we are free to choose what's going to happen.
Now, the Bible does have some prophecies that are very clear-cut.
To me, the most stunning was the prophecy in the Bible about the Reassembly, the coming together of Israel.
The nation of Israel, which was dispersed after the Romans destroyed the temple in, I believe, 70 A.D., the scattering of the Jews into a worldwide diaspora.
Who could have predicted that that would be undone, the Jews would return to their native homeland?
So that remains, I think, the most stunning vindication of biblical prophecy in our lifetime.
That happened in 1948, a few years before I was born.
But having said that, I think it is a mistake to try to read the book of Revelation or the Bible and trace a straight line to current events.
That's a very tricky enterprise.
It's one thing to believe, as Washington did, as Lincoln did, as many American presidents have, that America is a providential nation.
That God has blessed the United States and that America is part of God's kind of unfurling great plan.
But even Lincoln would say in the dark days of the Civil War that how God's plan is playing out in the world remains a mystery.
In the end of it, we have difficulty deciphering the ways of God.
He can figure us out.
We can't always figure Him out.
And so, I don't see anything wrong in thinking about biblical prophecy, in looking for signs that match things going on in the world.
But we should be a little careful about claiming to be people who, quote, know God's will, or know what God means, or even more, know the date of the end of the world.
Even the Bible itself cautions us that no one except the Father knows that.
Bottom line, it's more important for us to be ready for things when they come.
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