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Feb. 8, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza

01:05:03

IMPEACHMENT CIRCUS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 21

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	Is impeachment a circus?
	A show trial?
	A kangaroo court?
	All of the above.
	Plus Liz Cheney says the GOP is the party of Lincoln and Reagan, but not Trump.
	I respond. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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	America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy.
	In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	Hey guys, I'm in week number five of this new podcast.
	And of course it's really taken off and I'm delighted to have you listening or watching.
	Many podcasts are mainly on audio.
	I'm delighted I have a big audience both on audio and And on video.
	Please make sure that you like the podcast, that you subscribe to it.
	If you're listening on Apple, that you rate me five stars if you like what you hear.
	And also that you share it, because I want the podcast to be a real forum where we discuss important issues and think constructively about solutions as well.
	So thank you very much again for being on board.
	It's quite a journey and for me a very exciting way to present my ideas and my way of looking at the world.
	We're getting ready for the impeachment circus.
	And man, there's a lot of action and all the different...
	I mean, the acrobats are in town, the trapeze artists are here, the clowns, the ringleaders, the midgets, they're all here.
	I don't really need to designate them all.
	I guess if I had to designate a ringleader, it would be Patrick Leahy, who's going to be presiding over the...
	The trial. By the way, a very partisan Democrat.
	And he's supposedly going to be the judge.
	We don't have Chief Justice Roberts, who decided that he didn't really want to be part of the circus.
	Trapeze artist? Probably Romney.
	There he goes. Whoa!
	Clowns, these are the house impeachment managers, kind of one more clownish than the other.
	And they'll be putting on, as many clowns do, there's a serious element to them.
	They'll be sort of looking with grave faces and so on.
	But the rest of us can laugh uproariously.
	And so there it is.
	It's going to be quite a show.
	And I, for one, am looking forward to the entertainment.
	What makes this whole process kind of ironic is that we'll be talking about incitement, we'll be talking about stirring up the mob, we're going to be talking about encouraging violence, and yet the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is the one who has been actually doing all that.
	Take a look at this.
	I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.
	You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
	So you want incitement?
	There is incitement.
	You want a direct reference to violence?
	There it is. It's not in Trump's speech.
	You won't find it there. The language in Trump's speech doesn't even come close to matching the inflammatory, incendiary, directly threatening, calling people to action, if not violence.
	You won't know what hit you.
	There's a kind of violence in the language itself.
	And by the way, all of this is coming from a party that has been openly condoning violence, encouraging it.
	I mean, putting bail money up for the people who are violent, putting bail money up for arsonists, people who are assaulting other American citizens, people who have been attacking the police, and the leaders of the Democratic Party are part of this.
	So these are the people who are going to be standing, or you may say, sitting in judgment of Trump.
	And this is beyond ironic.
	This is basically the case where the evildoers themselves are the ones pronouncing judgment as if they had a shred of moral authority to do so.
	The good news, I think, is that the Trump people plan, as I've been recommending on this show, to feature this violence as part of their defense.
	I've always taken the view that this isn't just an argument about constitutionality.
	This is a case where you have to make a positive defense.
	I, Trump, did not do the incitement, but there are people who did incite violence, and here they are, and put them on trial and turn the tables, and it looks like the Trump people are going to do that, and I'm going to be looking forward to it.
	Who are the real targets of impeachment?
	Who are the Democrats really going after?
	I want to suggest that the real target of impeachment is us.
	You and me. Not even Trump!
	Let's think about why.
	What is the goal of this impeachment?
	The goal of this impeachment, and the Democrats are very, very clear about this.
	Here's a tweet by the House Democrats I'm going to read.
	Donald Trump should never, all caps, never be allowed to hold public office again.
	Convicting him disqualifies him from running any future races.
	So you might say, well, the target here is Trump.
	We want to remove him from office.
	But wait a minute. He's not in office.
	He's not the president. So it makes no sense to say that Trump is being removed.
	He's already out of there.
	He's in Florida. He's sitting in Mar-a-Lago.
	Well, we're trying to prevent them from running again.
	And what does that mean?
	Well, what that means is we're going to try to prevent people like you and me from voting for them.
	In other words, here you have a party that calls itself the Democratic Party, that's always swearing allegiance to the democratic process, trying to circumvent the democratic process by preventing a private citizen, Trump, from running again.
	Now, if they had a really good case, Trump is dangerous, Trump is terrible, Trump has embarrassed the Republican Party, Trump is not legitimate, Trump is a fascist, well, you know what?
	You'd think that they would make some headway in convincing us that this man was really dangerous, really awful, never vote for this kind of guy again, learn from your mistakes, Dinesh.
	But see, the problem is that the left and the Democrats know that the Republican base is still with Trump, which is to say we're not convinced.
	We haven't bought into your BS. We aren't sold on your lies.
	And so the bottom line of it is you have to protect America not from Trump, but from the Trump voter.
	You've got to protect America from a potential majority of Americans who say, you know what?
	We actually want Trump back.
	We want Trump to have a second term.
	If he didn't get one in 2020, how about we give him one in 2024?
	That is the clear and present danger that the Democrats are trying to prevent.
	So the impeachment train rolls on.
	But it is, as I'm going to show, not just a circus.
	It's also a kangaroo court.
	It's also a bit of a show trial.
	It's all of those rolled into one.
	The good news is we can enjoy the show.
	We can enjoy the circus.
	Why? Because we happen to know the outcome.
	And the outcome for Trump is acquittal.
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	Reviewing the House impeachment process, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy has compared the impeachment of Trump to a Soviet show trial.
	Here is Cassidy, and he says, I'm quoting him now, he goes...
	The president wasn't there.
	He wasn't allowed counsel.
	They didn't amass evidence.
	In five hours, they're judged, and boom, he's impeached.
	There was no process.
	You know, if it happened in the Soviet Union, we call it a show trial.
	Now, this may seem like very extreme language, and I'm going to come back to it in a second.
	But the bottom line of it is, even now when we go to the Senate, we wait for the Senate impeachment trial.
	We're not really going to have a trial in the normal sense.
	I mean, most of us are very familiar with trials.
	I mean, I've been in more than one.
	You've probably been in one or two.
	Or at least you've watched it on TV. So in a trial, you have all kinds of notable elements.
	Let's go through a couple of those.
	One. Presumption of innocence.
	That will not be the case here.
	There's no presumption of innocence.
	Tons of people who are in effect jurors have been declaring what they think and how they're going to vote in advance of the trial.
	No presumption of innocence.
	Number two, an impartial jury.
	There's no impartial jury here.
	You've got people who are committed, dug in, they're partisan, they're on one side or the other, they're going to vote in, you may say, a partisan way for the most part.
	The idea that they are going to be sifting through the arguments back and forth and making a kind of impartial, honest judgment, this is preposterous.
	We're not even going to see a semblance of this.
	The Chief Justice, as I mentioned earlier, has ducked out.
	So even the kind of appearance of impartiality is gone.
	We've got a left-wing Democrat, Leahy.
	This guy has been railing against Republicans from day one.
	You get the idea? He would jail all of us if he had the power to do it.
	And this guy is going to be presiding.
	So it's kind of fitting. This is not a normal trial, right?
	Innocent until proven guilty.
	Don't make me laugh.
	This presumption of innocent until proven guilty, this idea that you have to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, that's not even going to be applicable here.
	The house managers don't even use those phrases in their brief.
	So the idea here is that we have a trial, and it's called a trial, and it will have the trappings of a trial, but it won't really be a trial.
	Now, of course, there are people who say, Well, Dinesh, this is an impeachment.
	This is not a criminal trial.
	And moreover, an impeachment has a much lower standard.
	An impeachment is based upon the idea of high crimes and misdemeanors.
	But think of a misdemeanor.
	A misdemeanor can be kind of a trivial offense.
	So you can be impeached supposedly for a trivial offense.
	You know, it's a misdemeanor if you've done something wrong that falls short of a felony.
	It's kind of a small crime.
	So, gee, there you go, Dinesh.
	The Constitution itself authorizes impeachment for misdemeanors.
	Now, here's the key point.
	This is a very misleading argument for the simple reason that the word misdemeanor Didn't mean in the time of the founding what it means today.
	This may seem a little strange, but I turn to the historian Forrest MacDonald in his book on the American founding called Novus Ordo Seclorum.
	And MacDonald makes the point that many words that we today have one meaning had a different meaning at the time of the founding.
	He gives some notable examples.
	The word discover, he says, meant not to uncover or find out, but to disclose or reveal.
	The word nervous, which today means worried or jittery.
	In the time of the founding, nervous meant strong and vigorous.
	Take the word awful that we use a lot.
	Awful didn't mean extremely bad, terrible.
	It meant something that inspires awe.
	I'm looking at the ocean and I'm looking at the sound of thunder and it's awful.
	It fills me with awe.
	Similarly, the word misdemeanor didn't mean a trivial offense.
	It actually just meant misconduct.
	Demeanor is conduct.
	Misdemeanor meant misconduct.
	So high crimes and misdemeanors doesn't mean trivial offenses, but rather means serious offenses, serious violations of the oath of office.
	Now, let's turn for a moment to the idea of the show trial that Senator Cassidy talked about.
	In the Soviet show trials, the famous Stalin show trials, where people like Khamenev and Zinoviev and Bukharin were hauled before the show trials, They were, of course, beaten.
	They were deprived of food.
	They were made to make humiliating confessions, false confessions.
	And we don't have those elements here.
	We're obviously not living in Stalin's Russia.
	But the key meaning of a show trial is this.
	And I'm now just quoting from the definition, from a dictionary definition.
	A judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion rather than of ensuring justice.
	A show trial is a trial for show.
	It's not really aimed at establishing genuine right or wrong.
	It's not trying to figure out if the defendant, quote, did it.
	It's aimed at smearing the defendant, discrediting the defendant, not necessarily in the direct court of the trial itself.
	As I mentioned, there's no impartial judge, there's no impartial jury, but rather convicting the defendant in the public arena.
	With a view, as I said, to preventing Trump from holding office again.
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	Liz Cheney is on the warpath against Trump.
	Now you might think that Liz Cheney would be chastened by the fact that there was a vote In the Republican House to see if she should be thrown off her number three position in the GOP leadership.
	This was coming on the heels of a number of counties in Liz Cheney's own district voting to chastise her, to censure her for her voting to impeach Trump.
	But having survived the House GOP challenge and evidently with the support of GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, Liz Cheney has decided, I'm gonna go full Never Trump.
	I'm gonna basically now go on Chris Wallace's show on Fox News Sunday and let Trump have it.
	Listen. Is this still the party of Donald Trump and does Marjorie Taylor Greene still hold a solid place in that party?
	Chris, we're the party of Abraham Lincoln.
	We're the party of Ronald Reagan.
	We have to really take a hard look at who we are and what we stand for, what we believe in.
	I think when you look at both his actions leading up to what happened on January 6th, the fact that he was impeached in a bipartisan fashion, the fact that he lost the presidency, the fact that we lost the Senate, we have to be in a position where we can say we stand for principles, we stand for ideals.
	Somebody who has provoked an attack on the United States Capitol to prevent the counting of electoral votes, which resulted in five people dying who refused to stand up immediately when he was asked and stop the violence.
	That is a person who does not have a role as a leader of our party going forward.
	Let's consider what Liz Cheney is really calling for.
	She wants to eradicate the GOP, not just of Trump the person, but of Trump's influence, of Trumpsters, of people who are in the same vein as Trump.
	So let's consider who those people are and how many they make up.
	The bottom line of it is Trump has huge support in the Republican Party, 85 to 90 percent.
	Liz Cheney, by contrast, her support has plummeted, I think the latest figure, 13% approval in Wyoming right now.
	13%. So essentially what Liz Cheney wants to do is preserve, apparently, this principled 13% and eradicate the GOP of the remaining 87%.
	Really?
	That would make the GOP about as big as the Libertarian Party.
	So the political wisdom of this, you may say, is questionable to say the least.
	You have a woman who couldn't be elected dog catcher today in Wyoming calling for a president who is as if not more popular than Reagan in his own party to be, quote, purged.
	This, to me, borders on political idiocy.
	It makes absolutely no sense.
	But rather than focus on that, I want to focus on the actual content of Liz Cheney's comment.
	She basically goes, this is the party of Lincoln and of Reagan, but it's not the party of Trump because never before have we seen such an assault by one branch of the government against another.
	So this is evidently Trump's doing.
	He drove an assault.
	On one branch of the government, the executive branch, on the legislative branch.
	Okay. Let's see if it's true that this is so unprecedented.
	And I'm going to begin with Liz Cheney's own example, Abraham Lincoln.
	Number one. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.
	Now, if I read the Constitution, or you do, you'll see that the power to suspend habeas corpus is solely given to Congress.
	The executive power does not have the authority to do it.
	Now, Lincoln had a convoluted argument.
	He basically said Congress can't meet.
	It's being thwarted for meeting by the Confederacy.
	But the bottom line of it is Lincoln arrogated to himself a constitutional power that's given to one branch of government, and Lincoln took it upon himself.
	Number two... Lincoln arrests and made multiple arrests of members of the opposition party and locked them up.
	Now, Trump hasn't done that.
	Lincoln went much further than Trump.
	In fact, Lincoln had arrested a Northern Democratic congressman from Ohio, Clement Vallandingham.
	Held him without trial, and when there was a public uproar, finally Lincoln released him to the Confederacy.
	He essentially kicked him out of the United States, even though Vallandingham was not a Southern Democrat, he was a Northern Democrat, as I said, from Ohio.
	He was a part of the Northern side, but nevertheless Lincoln got rid of him, essentially expelled him from the country, so to speak.
	So this notion that our great founder, Lincoln, didn't do these awful things to Trump, this is laughable.
	This is apparently Liz Cheney showing her complete and utter ignorance of history.
	Now, let's turn to Reagan.
	Because, again, Liz Cheney's kind of assuming that there's kind of this straight line from Lincoln to Reagan.
	I'm assuming she thinks it includes Bush because, you know, her father, Dick Cheney, was Bush's vice president.
	So, you've got this kind of real Republican Party, and then you've got this Trump usurpation.
	But I want to focus on the real differences between Reagan and Bush because the Reagan doctrine is not only not similar, it is the exact opposite of the Bush doctrine.
	The Bush doctrine, advocated by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and continually advocated by Liz Cheney, is essentially for preemptive use of force.
	It's essentially for, you may almost say, looking for foreign wars to get involved in.
	And during Bush, we saw the United States get involved in at least two, Afghanistan and Iraq, and escalate in both cases.
	So this idea that America is the world's policeman, that America should use force first, ask questions later, should launch attacks even when the danger has not occurred, That's the point of a preemptive strike.
	I'm anticipating danger.
	It hasn't really happened, but I'm going to strike anyway.
	Now, none of this is even visible in Reagan.
	With Reagan, you have a great deal of abstemiousness, of caution, of prudence in the use of force.
	Even when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan with 100,000 troops, if there ever was a case for using force, that would seem to be it.
	But the only force that Reagan used was essentially to provide supplies and weapons to the Afghan Mujahid in the so-called freedom fighters.
	And even in other cases, in the case of Angola, for example, with Savimbi, in the case of Mozambique, in the case of the Contras in Nicaragua, Reagan did not directly commit U.S. troops at all.
	So this idea that the Republican Party sort of was all of one mind...
	And that the Cheney family has all been part of this Republican mainstream and that Trump is somehow not.
	No. I would say that if Reagan had to choose between Trump's caution.
	Remember, Trump was not unwilling to use force.
	He used force in multiple cases.
	Trump is actually closer to Reagan than Bush was in terms of foreign policy.
	Bottom line. Liz Cheney, I think, is in the name of proclaiming fidelity to some, quote, old Republican Party that she's trying to revive.
	Is trying to revive a Republican Party that, A, not only does not exist now, the base has moved.
	But, B, didn't even exist then.
	She's papering over important differences in the Republican Party between Reagan and her father.
	Between Reagan and W. Between Reagan and her.
	So my message to Liz Cheney is, if that's the Republican Party you want, that's not the Republican Party you're going to get.
	We want you in the Republican Party.
	But if we're going to have a majority party, we don't just need you.
	We also need all of us.
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	What is the definition of provocation or incitement or a, quote, call to violence that is being applied against Trump in the Senate impeachment trial?
	For the House managers, an incitement is really simple.
	You say really provocative things that get people stirred up.
	And then somebody goes out and does something really bad, ergo, their actions can now be blamed on you, the insider.
	That's the train of reasoning that calls Trump to account.
	Never mind that Trump's incitement, such as it is, is not direct.
	It's veiled at best.
	There is no call to take the capital.
	There is no call to violence.
	There's language that explicitly says the opposite.
	And I just want to show that if one takes a little glance back at history, that one can find innumerable cases where there's a terrible, violent act, which can then be attributed to some statement or speech.
	And so the standard absolutely collapses upon scrutiny because it is so...
	Straightforwardly dumb.
	The example I have in mind involves John Brown, the abolitionist, the domestic terrorist, it would not be an exaggeration to say, and Abraham Lincoln.
	So let me start with John Brown.
	John Brown, in 1858, launched a massive raid on a pro-slavery settlement in Pottawatomie Creek, in which five men...
	Reputed slave owners were dragged out of their cabins and hacked to death by John Brown and his followers.
	This came to be known as the Potawatomi Massacre.
	Later, of course, John Brown launched the infamous attack on Harper's Ferry, where he rounded up some 60 hostages and was ultimately captured and executed.
	What made John Brown do it?
	What instigated this violence?
	And the answer is John Brown was instigated by the anti-slavery movement.
	The anti-slavery movement used, in many cases, incendiary rhetoric.
	And the incendiary rhetoric arguably caused Brown to commit not just this law-breaking act, but these vicious murders that resulted in his execution.
	So let's now turn to Abraham Lincoln.
	Who in 1858, June 16th, gave his infamous, famous, house divided speech.
	I'm going to look at some of the rhetoric in Lincoln's speech.
	He goes, a house divided against itself cannot stand.
	He says, either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, And place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south.
	So it's either going to be the United States of slavery or a free country.
	And then this is how the speech ends.
	Listen to this rhetoric, and I want to compare it with Trump's.
	This is actually far more inflammatory than anything Trump said.
	We, he's talking about the Republicans, did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger with every external circumstance against us.
	Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds and formed and fought the battle through under constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy.
	Enemy. Did we brave all then to falter now?
	When that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent, the result is not doubtful.
	We shall not fail. If we stand firm, we will not fail.
	Now, this is a, you may say, call to arms by Lincoln against a domestic enemy, the Southern Democrats.
	That makes Trump seem positively meek and mild-mannered.
	Trump's incitement is nothing as compared to Lincoln's incitement.
	And my point, again, is not to fault Lincoln.
	I'm a huge admirer, I would say even a disciple of Lincoln, but rather to show how flimsy and downright ridiculous It's not enough to show that violence took place.
	It's important to show that the person being challenged, in this case Trump, caused the violence to take place, called for the violence, directed the violence, and then planned the violence, exalted in the violence.
	None of those elements are even present here.
	You couldn't get an impeachment against Lincoln if you tried, and the case against Trump is equally without merit.
	It's really fun for me to talk to Mike Lindell, particularly about his ideas, but also about his company and the way in which his company represents the turbocharged, creative, innovative face of capitalism itself.
	Here's a little conversation between me and Mike about capitalism.
	Who takes the risk in your business?
	I take all 100%.
	So in other words, I'm not saying you've had a bad quarter, but if you do, your employees still get paid.
	But if you made a loss, you would take that loss.
	Now the reason I say this is because I want to sum up.
	Not only did you come up with the idea for the business, you organize the business, you market the business, and you take all the risks.
	So when somebody like an Ilhan Omar or an AOC, or going back to Mark, says all you do is supply the capital, what do you say?
	That's the biggest fallacy in history.
	Mike Lindell is an all-around great guy, as you can see.
	And apart from Trump, I've never seen a guy who has been under so much attack as Mike, founder and CEO of MyPillow.
	The left has been going after his business.
	Retailers have been canceling him.
	And now the latest? He's been banned across social media.
	Not just that they banned him on Twitter and other platforms, they won't even allow him to buy ads searching his own name.
	And why? Because Mike has made an explosive documentary film that they don't want you to watch.
	What? Are we living in the Soviet Union?
	The Soviet Empire collapsed in 1992?
	Are we trying to bring it back to the United States?
	This is not America as we know it.
	Well, you know what? Millions of people have already seen Mike's movie.
	You can see it if you want at michaeljlindell.com.
	And I think it's important that we all support Mike.
	We need to defeat this effort to destroy him and his business.
	This company is awesome.
	Here you can see me and Debbie in our MyPillow robes.
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	Do we have political prisoners in the United States right now?
	Most of us would answer, no, we're not there.
	We're certainly not there yet.
	And in fact, there is an outcry in the United States and elsewhere about political prisoners abroad.
	Alexei Navalny in Putin's Russia has been imprisoned without trial.
	There is a legitimate movement pushing for his release.
	Senate Republican McConnell, the Republican leader, has been outspoken in condemning the incarceration of Navalny.
	But here's a remarkable article on the website American Greatness by the writer Julie Kelly.
	It's an article I recommend to you.
	It's called America's Political Prisoners First.
	And Julie Kelly begins by portraying a man named Quay Griffin, who is the founder of the group Cowboys for Trump.
	Now, I don't know a lot about this group, but I would see them all over social media.
	You've got this guy who's clearly a character.
	He looks like some kind of an old-style cowboy with boots and a hat.
	And there he is on a horse, and he would be putting out these kind of patriotic messages, very supportive of Trump.
	He was evidently a presence at a number of the Trump rallies.
	And he was in Washington, D.C., On January 6th.
	Did he go into the Capitol?
	No. Did he forcibly take over?
	No. He didn't do any of that.
	Yet, this man, the head of Cowboys for Trump, is in jail right now and was recently denied bail.
	So, what is his offense?
	Well, his offense, as it turns out, is extremely minor.
	It's not assaulting a police officer.
	It's not breaking any windows.
	It's not even running off with Nancy Pelosi's podium.
	He's charged with one minor count of trespassing.
	That's it. And why?
	Because they discovered that at some point on January 6th, he didn't enter the Capitol, but he moved within the so-called restricted area of the building.
	Now, this is laughable.
	But, not only are they holding him, But they're acting as if he is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
	In fact, when his case came up before a judge, the judge basically said, this man is a danger to society.
	A danger to society.
	In fact, the judge says, I'm now quoting, That if released, he would, quote, deny the authority of the judicial officers appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
	He's rejecting our judicial system.
	Now, what is the basis for these outlandish assertions by the judge?
	It's very simple.
	When interviewed, this guy, Griffin, of Cowboys for Trump says, I believe the election was stolen.
	So what? So what if he believes that?
	He might accept the evidence.
	Maybe there's no evidence.
	Maybe there's a limited amount of evidence that he's exaggerating.
	But is it possible to take a guy and on the basis that he believes, quote, the wrong thing about the election, pronounce him to be some kind of a clear and present danger for society?
	He'll have no respect for laws, Dinesh, because he doesn't accept that the vote was valid.
	And therefore, lock him up?
	What? Indefinitely? Permanently?
	Is this America?
	So, Julie Kelly's point is that he's not alone.
	More than 200 people have been charged so far.
	Now, I'm not denying that there are people who illegitimately enter the Capitol building.
	That is flatly illegal.
	I'm not defending that.
	Those people should be held to account.
	And there were some of them that even planned to do that.
	We know now from reporting that there were people who came to Washington to get into the Capitol.
	And that would be a genuine and serious offense.
	But... We're now talking about people who just went to Washington, D.C., who were part of the group that believed that Trump is right, who were part of the group who believed that there were election irregularities, and who are now being hounded, and in some cases, like this guy, being locked up.
	On what is clearly the most trivial of trivial offenses, the equivalent, maybe not even the equivalent, of a parking ticket.
	Hey, he entered a restricted area of the Capitol.
	Even though he's unarmed, he posed no danger to anyone, he didn't threaten anyone, he didn't do anything.
	Now, Julie Kelly's point is really pretty simple.
	All of this is occurring at a time when there are people on the left who have stormed buildings, who are storming buildings right now, who have taken over government buildings by force, who have beaten up cops, who have beaten up people who stand in their way, who have set buildings on fire, who have caused a billion dollars in damage.
	And those are people who are not indicted.
	In fact, they're not even investigated.
	In some cases, it's catch and release.
	You catch them, let them go. Right away.
	So they evidently do not pose a clear and present danger to society.
	And all of this is telling Julie Kelly, I think correctly, and me, that we have a two-tier system of justice currently in the United States.
	I don't know any other way to read this glaring fact.
	It doesn't matter how much the media covers it up.
	They don't cover the Antifa riots.
	They don't cover the fact that Antifa just a day or two was storming in Washington, D.C., threatening people in restaurants.
	Almost no media coverage.
	You'd have to go to conservative journalists on social media to even find out what's going on.
	But the fact that you don't cover something doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
	It is happening. It's happening right now.
	And evidently, our FBI has become so rotted, so corrupted, perhaps even at the ground level, but certainly from above, that it's taking, you may almost call it, a one-eyed view of justice.
	Lady Justice is clearly not blind in this case.
	And Julie Kelly's conclusion is a poignant one.
	What does it make for America to get on its moral high horse and demand the release of Navalny, all these far away dissidents who have been unjustly incarcerated while it maintains dead silence about Americans?
	Who are also locked up, staring at the ceiling and at the windows, unable to get out.
	And on, I think it's not an exaggeration to say, trumped up charges.
	Trumped up in the sense that they don't apply to other people who did the same thing.
	It makes you wonder at the end if...
	American exceptionalism itself is over.
	And that we no longer get to say that America is special.
	Things like that don't happen here.
	This is America after all.
	Those are things that one could say about America.
	But today, when you say it, it gives you pause.
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	One of the most disgusting features of modern tyranny, according to George Orwell, is the way in which tyrannical systems are able to recruit ordinary people to participate in them.
	Of course, maybe the most gruesome example would be in the Soviet Union or under Mao's Cultural Revolution, the idea that Parents or children would turn against family members or people would turn against their neighbor.
	They would call in, hey, my neighbor is doing this, my neighbor is doing that.
	So you turn ordinary people into accessories of the tyrannical state.
	But we don't think that that sort of thing can really happen in America where one of the key aspects of the American system has been the distinction between Between the state and society.
	And in fact, most of our constitutional protections are protections against the state.
	Think of the Bill of Rights. Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of the press.
	We have the right against unreasonable search and seizure.
	But that is by the state, by instruments of the state.
	The police can't break into my car.
	But these rights...
	Don't exist against other private individuals or private entities because the founders apparently didn't think that the private sector could be recruited into any kind of tyrannical system.
	But evidently in that sense they are proving wrong.
	I saw a very disturbing story on Tucker Carlson on Fox about Bank of America.
	Now Debbie and I I have a big account at Bank of America.
	They're one of our main banks and we use a branch close to our house.
	We have good relationships with the people who work there.
	We like Bank of America.
	But this article caused me to kind of swallow.
	It startled me because what Tucker Carlson reported is that Bank of America has been handing over account information and client information of its customers to the FBI. It's turned over the account information of hundreds of people in connection with January 6th.
	Now, you might say, did the FBI identify the, quote, insurgents and domestic terrorists who took over the building and then asked Bank of America, hey, did these guys bank here because we're trying to find out more information about them?
	No, not at all.
	Apparently, the FBI went to Bank of America and said this...
	Why don't you run through a search of all charges on bank credit cards or withdrawals from the bank that indicate that people are going to Washington D.C. or making a hotel reservation in Washington D.C. or making an airline reservation to go to Washington D.C. or to come back within the timeframe of the so-called riots.
	And apparently Bank of America was only too happy, or at least was willing, by the way, without the knowledge of these customers, to fork over this information to the government.
	Now, I'm somewhat relieved to see that as a result of that, There was only one person out of 211 who was brought in for questioning and that person was promptly cleared.
	In other words, the guy didn't do anything.
	But that's just the point.
	The Bank of America is turning over data of people who didn't do anything to the federal government to be investigated as potential domestic terrorists.
	Bank of America will not address these charges.
	They won't say they did it.
	They won't say they didn't. They only say this.
	We don't comment on our communications with law enforcement.
	All banks have responsibilities under federal law to cooperate with law enforcement inquiries in full compliance with the law.
	Now, what this tells me is that Bank of America did it.
	They're kind of acknowledging they did it, and they're saying, sort of, we had to do it.
	But they're also saying, we do this kind of stuff sort of all the time.
	And I think it's worth knowing, and I don't know the answer to this, whether other banks are in the same position.
	Is it only Bank of America?
	Or are Citibank and Chase Bank and Wells Fargo Bank also conducting similar, you may say, searches through their databases?
	And identifying not people who did anything, not even people who there's probable cause to believe they did anything, but just people who, quote, arranged to go to D.C. I mean, this is outright harassment of Trump supporters.
	Hundreds of thousands of people showed up in DC. They had legitimate reasons to be in DC. They have every right to be in DC. DC is the center of political protest.
	There's nothing wrong in going to protest there.
	Whether your cause is right or wrong, whether your beliefs are right or wrong, there's no kind of precondition for protesting.
	You have to be right. Your cause has to be validated by some independent authority.
	What independent authority?
	So it looks to me like the government is treating this January 6th as some kind of a, you may almost call it September 11th operation.
	And they are casting a wide net that doesn't just focus on the perpetrators, but focuses on all kinds of innocents who were there, but who didn't do anything.
	And that Bank of America and perhaps other banks are being recruited As instruments of this witch hunt, because it is a witch hunt.
	And I think Bank of America, it may be that they had no choice but to participate in this.
	But if that's the case, it's a sad statement about the way in which the private sphere, society, you might say, has now been recruited to do the genuinely evil doings of the state itself.
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	The greatest danger to our basic liberties today doesn't seem to come directly from the state, but from private entities working in coordination with the state to achieve, you may say, a state end. I mentioned a short while ago Bank of America turning over account information and travel information and hotel reservation information and airline reservation information.
	To the FBI. Not on people who are believed to have, quote, entered or stormed the Capitol, but just on people who went to Washington, D.C. Think about that.
	Think about where the danger today to our free speech rights comes from.
	Primarily, it comes from digital media.
	It comes from the mainstream media working in cahoots with digital media moguls to ban people.
	To ban people for just raising or talking about subjects.
	Entire subjects.
	Have been put beyond the pale.
	By the way, this didn't just start with the election.
	It started earlier. Remember all the people who were banned for talking about hydroxychloroquine?
	That was taboo.
	And so you could get thrown off a platform just for using a hashtag about that.
	And then more recently for talking about voter fraud.
	These are topics that are sort of put beyond the pale.
	You can't discuss them.
	Wow. That's where we are today.
	And it makes me think not so much about socialist states like even Venezuela or China or Cuba, because in those cases, by and large, the attack on civil liberties does come directly from the state.
	The state itself is planning and orchestrating and directing the attack.
	But here it's coming from, as I say, private entities, independent media.
	Independent digital media, but working in coordination.
	And the key word here is coordination.
	Now, the Nazis had a term for coordination.
	And it was the term Gleichschaltung.
	And Gleichschaltung literally means coordination.
	And the Nazi idea was that the private sector in Germany needs to be coordinated to march in lockstep with the Nazi state.
	In other words, it's not enough to have the state with all its terrifying power.
	We've got to bring the cultural institutions of society also into line.
	And together with Gleichschotung, there was a...
	Another phrase, Selbsgleichschaltung, which ultimately means self-coordination.
	What that means is that you, the ordinary Nazi citizen, the citizen of Nazi Germany, need to demonstrate what you are doing to fall in line with the state.
	When you think, for example, of all the people who did the Heil Hitler and flew swastika flags off their balconies...
	Was that because they were enthusiasts of the Nazis?
	No. They were signaling their conformity.
	They were signaling, I too am a worm.
	I too am conforming to this forced coordination across not just the state but across society.
	Now... The very fact that I'm bringing up Nazi Germany, and I'm not bringing up the Nazi Germany of the Holocaust.
	This is early Nazi Germany of the 30s, before even World War II. People say, well, what is the relevance of this, Dinesh, to today?
	Well, are we Nazi Germany?
	Is that what you're implying? Nazi Germany had nothing to do with the United States.
	We went to war with Nazi Germany, Dinesh.
	Well, we did go to war with Nazi Germany.
	In 1941. Notice we didn't go to war with Nazi Germany directly.
	When Germany invaded Poland, the United States did nothing in 1939.
	We got in the war, America did, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
	So that was really the provocation that got us in the war.
	But what is not known and deeply suppressed, by the way, by the progressive left in school and college textbooks is the way in which there were close ties between FDR and the fascists, FDR and Mussolini.
	FDR was an admirer of Mussolini.
	Mussolini reviews FDR's book favorably, says basically, this guy's a fascist.
	Here's a line from the Nazi newspaper called the Volkischer Beobachter, reviewing FDR's book called Looking Forward, which is about the New Deal.
	And this is the Nazi paper.
	Many passages in President Roosevelt's book could have been written by a National Socialist.
	Wow. One can assume he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy.
	I have long maintained that Nazism was on the left, and here you have confirmation, the Nazi paper praising FDR. Why?
	Because his New Deal ideas sound a lot like National Socialism.
	So when people say today, Well, the Nazis weren't really Socialists, Dinesh!
	Yes, they were. Read the Nazi platform.
	It's imbued with socialist ideas.
	The philosophy is everything in the state, nothing outside the state.
	But back to Gleitschelton, the idea here was to force the universities to conform to Nazi ideology.
	Martin Heidegger, the great philosopher, was part of this.
	Heidegger basically was part of Gleichschaltung in Nazi academia.
	But it wasn't just academia.
	It was in the film industry.
	It was in media.
	The outright lying of the German press.
	Here's an interesting line by Goebbels, which I think would apply very much to our media today.
	Propaganda is always a means to an end.
	The propaganda that produces the desired result is good.
	And all other propaganda is bad.
	So Goebbels is saying propaganda isn't really about truth or falsehood.
	That doesn't matter. If propaganda achieves its goal, and let's say in this case the goal is, let's get Biden into the White House, it's good.
	It doesn't matter if you have to suppress truthful stories to achieve it.
	It doesn't matter if you have to advance brazen lies, promote brazen double standards.
	All of that is justified because we have to get the result, quote, by any means necessary.
	We see this very much in Goebbels.
	We see this very much in the attitude of a lot of people in the media thinking about the recent election, thinking about what needed to be done to get Trump out.
	And now that Trump is out, the Gleikschaltung is extending to the rest of us.
	The basic idea here is let's unify.
	The Nazis wanted to unify too, but let's unify against A demonized opponent.
	Now in the case of the Nazis, the demonized opponent was the Jews.
	Let's unify against the Jews.
	And that means making the Jews into potential criminals, treating them as an alien presence in German society.
	And I don't think, for any of us, Who are on the conservative side, we can say that we don't know that feeling now.
	Because we are being portrayed as aliens in our own country, there are outright efforts to demonize us, silence us, use the rhetoric of domestic terrorism against us.
	It is, I would say, only one step short from the rhetoric of elimination or extermination.
	But I wouldn't be entirely surprised if that is next.
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	And while I appreciate all questions, we've gotten a bunch of them.
	We especially like the audio questions because they're kind of fun to play.
	A number of people listen to this podcast on audio, so it's fun to play them as audio.
	They're very easy to do. Just record a short audio.
	Keep it under a minute, your question, on your phone.
	And then just email it.
	Email it to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
	Questiondinesh at gmail.com.
	So that being said... Hi, Mr.
	Souza. Thank you so much for your podcast.
	It's amazing and for taking my question.
	I've read almost all your books and watched all your movies.
	They're excellent stuff. Your podcasts are amazing.
	It shows you understand everything at the top of your mind and can respond.
	I sure wish the Republicans would be able to learn from you in that.
	But my question gets back to, I have a 13-year-old son, soon to be 14, and I'm trying to get him to understand the difference between the left and the right.
	And I was wondering if you could recommend any, either of your books or other books that are going to be for around that age, because it's, you know, they're still kind of not quite understanding the real world, but they're getting there.
	I mean, I discuss politics a lot with my son, and we bring up the inconsistencies of the views of the left and the right, and he understands it, but I'd love to be able to get a book for him that he could read and learn from.
	Thank you. The question is from Joe and it's about the core difference.
	How do you convey to a teenager the core difference between the left and the right?
	I think kind of a, well, first of all, in terms of books, I wrote a book many years ago called Letters to a Young Conservative.
	It's a book that was written in the form of letters to a teenager or a young college student laying out the basis.
	Who is a liberal? Who is a conservative?
	How does a libertarian differ from liberal and conservative?
	So it's a very easy-to-read short handbook that I would recommend.
	But I would also recommend my book, America, Imagine a World Without Her, because in some ways you could almost say today that the difference between the left and the right is over America itself.
	It's over American exceptionalism.
	By and large, the right is for it and wants to protect and accentuate the aspects of American exceptionalism, and the Democrats want to diminish them.
	So, for example, the right would believe that America was a society that's created based upon liberty, to accentuate liberty, to realize the promise of the Declaration of Independence, whereas for the left, progress, and the word progressive here is kind of revealing, because they interpret progress as meaning moving away from the American founding, rejecting the principles, not just the practices, but the principles of the founders.
	If the left had its way, and it somewhat has its way today, they will try to, one by one, eradicate the principles of American exceptionalism.
	Now, Reagan in 1980, when he spoke of America, you could think of Reaganism as represented by three simple things.
	One, the idea that the world is a dangerous place and we sometimes need force, although prudent force, for America to survive and prosper in the world.
	That we are not the world's policemen, but we are the world's exemplar.
	In other words, we're not going to impose our way on others, but we're happy to share the recipe of American success.
	Reagan also believed in the free market system, the idea that the private economy left to itself will create more abundance, more prosperity, more opportunity, more social mobility, but also third, and this third part often gets left out, the idea of the traditional or decent society.
	In other words, it's not simply that America is free.
	I mean, think of it this way. If 350 million Americans are free and they all decide to become, let's just say, strippers or pornographers, would the American founders go, man, the American dream has been a smashing success.
	This is kind of what we all hoped for.
	No. They would have been horrified.
	They would be like, man, what went wrong here?
	Why? Because for the American founders, liberty isn't some sort of neutral concept.
	Liberty has actual content.
	So these principles of Reaganism, a kind of distilled essence, I think, of the principles of the founding, this is what conservatives today fight to conserve, and this is what the progressive left today fights to overthrow.

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