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Feb. 10, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:04:21
IMPEACHMENT ILLUSION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 23
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Trump could not have incited the Capitol takeover on January 6th.
And you know why? Because it was pre-planned.
And guess where? Not on Parler, on Facebook.
Plus, is the American era over?
All coming up. 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.
Impeachment is...
Officially dead. Well, perhaps it's not officially dead, but it's a dead horse all the same.
Why? Because 44 Republican senators have voted that the trial is unconstitutional.
That the trial is illegitimate.
The trial is invalid.
It shouldn't be taking place at all.
And so, that in effect, you may say, blows up.
Whatever occurs within the trial, it doesn't matter the Democrats press forward, it doesn't matter that they produce this evidence or that evidence, because no matter what Trump did or didn't do, if the process itself is irremediably flawed, it follows that it shouldn't be happening, Trump is going to get acquitted by Trump.
The Democrats failing to come even close to the 17 Republican votes that they need for a conviction.
The fact that the trial may be held to be unconstitutional doesn't settle the matter because there is a political sort of exhibitionistic function to impeachment, for the left to push a narrative of Trump's culpability, of his evil doings, of this horrific act of 9-11 style carnage and insurrection and violence and attempted takeover of the country and so on.
The sheer nonsense of this, the preposterous aspect of this should be evident to everybody.
But the Democrats create this kind of illusion.
They want you to live in their make-believe world in which people are trying to launch a Confederate-style assault on the Capitol.
Now, let's think about this for a moment.
Let's take their words seriously for just a second.
An insurrection without weapons?
Who goes to an insurrection unarmed?
A terrorist attack where no one was murdered and all the five people who died were MAGA supporters?
What? A coup attempt in which the rebels all disbanded peacefully?
Hey, it's time to get out of here.
Okay, let's leave. Okay, goodbye.
We're going home. What kind of coup attempt is that?
Is this really a terrorist action where the terrorists issued no demands, they took no hostages, they killed nobody?
This makes absolutely no sense.
It takes you into the world of Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, where Alice says, things are getting curiouser and curiouser.
And indeed they are.
Now, I think that there is a watertight proof that Trump could not have incited the Capitol takeover, and that is that the Capitol takeover was pre-planned.
How do we know it was pre-planned?
Well, the evidence is right there in the affidavits and charging documents and FBI reports that have been made against the people, I guess a hundred or so of them, who have been charged.
Now, interestingly, in those documents, which lay out a kind of factual record, it's very clear that there were people who planned to take the Capitol.
I'm looking here at an article.
This is the Washington Post. Self-styled militia members planned on storming the U.S. Capitol days in advance of January 6, court documents say.
This talks about a group of people, including a fellow named Thomas Edward Caldwell of Berryville, Virginia, talking to a co-defendant, Jessica Watkins, an Army veteran, And she goes, we are 30 to 40 of us.
We're sticking together and sticking to the plan.
And then a little bit later, they communicate to each other, we are in the main dome right now.
We are rocking it. Another guy goes, get it.
This is everything we effing trained for.
So this was an event that was organized by a group of people.
Who planned to do this.
Interestingly, these people who did that were aware that Antifa was also involved.
And you can see this in their internal communications.
Here's a fellow named Crowell who is warning, keep eyes on people with red MAGA hats worn backward.
Saw a report, they are going to infiltrate crowd.
Think about this.
So apparently the Antifa guys were able to communicate with each other by pretending to be MAGA but wearing their hats backward.
So they would recognize each other as Antifa.
And then his friend replies, thanks brother, but we are way ahead on that.
We have infiltrators in their ranks.
So this is some guy saying that they've got infiltrators in the Antifa ranks.
So this is what's going on taken directly from court documents and FBI reports.
you Now, here's a report in the Epoch Times where you have a communication between two guys who are planning the attack.
We have a good group. We have about 30 to 40 of us.
We're sticking together. And here's the remarkable thing.
The FBI not only knew about this in advance, But the FBI warned the Capitol Police.
The FBI put out a bulletin in which it told the Capitol Police there are people who have been sharing maps of the Capitol tunnels.
You better be aware that there are people afoot who are thinking about taking the Capitol.
And then the Capitol Police, another article from the Washington Post, Capitol Police intelligence report warned three days before the attack that Congress could be targeted.
This is an internal document, a 12-page report.
I'm just going to read a couple of lines from it.
Supporters of the current presidency January 6th as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election.
This is according to the memo.
And it talks about the fact that the Capitol Police should be ready for an attempt to take the Capitol.
Bottom line, not only was there planning, but the FBI knew about it.
The Capitol Police Chief knew about it.
I don't know who the memo was circulated to, but the police did know.
Now, if all that's true, and that's really what the FBI is trying to establish in court in order to convict these defendants, if that's true, How could Trump have incited it?
Trump might have gotten a crowd riled up.
They may have meandered their way to the Capitol.
If they saw that they were meeting with absolutely no resistance, there might have been some people who moseyed their way into the Capitol.
But these are not the people who, quote, took the Capitol.
That was done by planning.
So bottom line of it is, Trump incited nothing.
The attack was pre-planned and that becomes, I think, an adequate defense against the idea that Trump was, in the words of the House impeachment document, singularly responsible.
Not only was Trump not singularly responsible, he wasn't responsible at all.
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I'm highly entertained by the arguments in the House manager's brief and also the arguments now floating on social media and in the media that are supposed to be proof that Trump incited violence, Trump incited a coup, Trump incited an attack on our democracy, Trump incited a takeover of the Capitol.
Now, let's start by noting that Trump explicitly disavowed violence and called upon the people at the rally to act peacefully.
Listen. Now, the House impeachment documents Quote Trump from the same speech, saying things like, quote, Fight harder!
Stop the steal!
Take back our country!
So, not only is this rhetoric completely benign, standard political rhetoric, not just for Trump, the Democrats' rhetoric is far more incendiary.
Look at Chuck Schumer.
You will reap the whirlwind, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
You won't know what hit you.
Look at the rhetoric that comes from Kamala Harris, justifying burnings, attacks.
They're not going to stop, and they shouldn't.
Look at Joe Biden.
I want to take Trump behind the yard, behind the gym.
Beat the hell out of him.
So, you're taking boilerplate rhetoric about fighting hard?
What politician hasn't used that phrase?
Fight for your country! Stand up!
Don't give in! This is not called incitement.
If this is incitement, you probably would have to lock up pretty much every member of Congress.
They'd be guilty of incitement.
Now, deep down, the left kind of knows this.
They know that their case...
is a sort of a nonsensical case.
It's sort of like, let's presume Trump is guilty.
And their reasoning sort of goes like this.
Even if Trump didn't say anything, well, he was sort of planning it.
And even if he wasn't actually planning it, he was probably thinking about it.
And even if he wasn't thinking about it, he would have thought of it.
So, this is the level of inanity to which we are forced to stoop, to even consider that Trump is guilty here.
Now, recognizing that their case is an illusion, a null entity, You're starting to see the emergence of, I would call them, novel theories to try to get Trump anyway.
Here's an interesting one by Alan Lichtman in The Hill.
Here's the smoking gun evidence to back impeachment of Trump.
And I'm going to just quote a couple of lines.
First of all, they have nothing to do with what Trump said in his speech.
No even claim of incitement.
So where's the smoking gun? Well, the smoking gun apparently comes from Trump's actions after the Capitol was already taken over.
Evidently, Trump didn't do enough to stop it.
As he watched the insurrection, Trump made no immediate demand that the rioters leave the Capitol.
Evidently, Trump made a phone call to Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, and the writer goes, Trump called Tuberville not to ask about his safety, but to discuss a strategy for objecting to the electoral vote.
The writer, Alan Lickman, admits that Trump put out some tweets, basically saying, stop the violence.
But he goes, that's not enough.
He goes, Trump sent a tweet with a minimally calming message.
And finally, he goes, Trump eventually released a video saying you have to go home now.
But he says that was not enough.
So here Trump is being faulted, not just for his, not for his action, but for his inadequate reaction.
But once again, let's compare Trump's reaction to Such as it is with how Democrats have been reacting to violence.
Look at all the Democratic leaders and mayors and governors where massive violence is going on.
People are being brutalized.
Things are set on fire.
Property damage is extensive.
Cops are being confronted and attacked.
They do nothing.
Not only do they do nothing, in many cases they praise the protesters.
It's a summer of love.
Oh, a riot is a language of the unheard.
Oh, I admire the protesters.
They're striking out for social justice.
So Trump is accused of not doing enough.
These people have been egging on Antifa and Black Lives Matter, egging on events that have led to multiple murders.
And they have the gall to say that Trump's tweets were insufficiently strongly worded.
He should have jumped on this more quickly.
This is not grounds for impeaching anyone.
This is super dumb.
And this is a case where the people who are making the accusations are far more guilty than the person they are accusing.
Now... Here's a guy, Doug Mick, with an article basically recognizing that impeachment is finished.
He knows they can't win, but he wants to win anyway.
He goes, Donald Trump should be convicted by secret ballot.
So, this is a case where, let's change the rules so we can get him.
And look what's going on here.
Far from appealing to any idea of justice, I mean, secret ballots are normally understood.
To be a sign of sneakiness, of underhandedness.
Why? Because someone can strike a blow without being seen to do it.
You don't have to even stand up and go guilty.
You basically get to do it in the malevolence of secrecy.
And, of course, the writer Doug Mick knows this.
And he wants to appeal to what?
He wants to appeal to the low motives of Republicans who secretly don't like Trump.
Maybe these are people like Rubio, whom Trump has strafed in the past.
Trump has made his rivals in the Republican Party feel petty or feel small.
And the idea is, look, why don't we harvest those motives, those petty, disgusting, low aspects of human nature, and see if under cover of darkness, we can get more than five or six Republicans to strike a blow at Trump.
So this is obviously very transparent.
It's also not going to happen.
But this gives you an idea of the desperation on the left at this point in terms of trying to actually achieve a conviction.
They're not going to.
Deep down they know it.
The circus goes on.
We can sit back and enjoy it.
But at the bottom line, Trump is going to be acquitted for the second time.
And this means that they've tried twice and they failed both times.
Trump comes out ahead.
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We now know that the January 6th takeover of the Capitol was planned.
It was planned by a group of people who, days before, decided among themselves to come to Washington.
They circulated maps of tunnels.
They knew what they were doing.
They were apparently a group of 30 to 40 people who were involved.
And they are the ones who led the storming, the takeover of the Capitol.
But how did they do this planning?
How did they communicate with each other?
You might think that they did it on Parler because, after all, Parler was accused by Amazon and Google and Apple of being a forum, a platform that allowed all this violent commentary, all this organization of a coup and an insurrection and a terrorist act.
But it turns out it wasn't done on Parler.
Parler had the minimal role in this.
The larger role was Google itself.
And the biggest role was Facebook.
So think about that.
Google, which threw Parler off its platform, was more responsible than Parler for what happened on January 6th.
And Facebook was the biggest culprit of the three.
How do we know this?
Well, We know this because of a close review, and this has been done by Forbes magazine, of the charging documents of 200 or so individuals in the Capitol Hill investigation.
The nice thing about those documents is that they reflect the work of the FBI and other investigatory agencies about what communications actually occurred and where.
So, let me start by talking about Facebook's kind of denial that it had much, if anything, to do with any of this.
So, here's Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, in an interview.
I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to stop hate, don't have our standards, and don't have our transparency.
That's Sheryl Sandberg in an interview with Reuters.
Comments the Washington Post.
A growing body of evidence shows Facebook played a much larger role than Sandberg suggested.
Here's the evidence that Forbes puts forward.
Forbes reviewed data from the program on extremism at the George Washington University, which has collated a list of more than 200 charging documents.
In total, the charging documents refer to 223 individuals.
Of those documents, 73 reference Facebook.
That's far more references than other social networks.
YouTube was the second most referenced on 24.
And then Forbes adds, Parler, the app that pledged protection for free speech rights and garnered a large far-right user base, was mentioned in just eight.
Eight. So, according to Forbes, I'm quoting again, it does indicate Facebook was the writer's preferred platform.
The Forbes writer goes, Insurgency Scorecard, Facebook 97, Google 28, Parler 8.
So, all of this shows you, well, a couple of things.
First of all, the immense hypocrisy of these digital moguls who are blaming Parler, For being the venue for the capital takeover when Parler had a negligible role.
Parler is completely innocent here.
And to the degree that a platform was used, it was Facebook.
Now, the New Republic makes a point in connection with Sheryl Sandberg.
They go, you know, these little nerdy men who run these digital tech companies are kind of smart.
They know that they're creepy characters themselves.
Zuckerberg knows. So he hires an attractive woman like Sheryl Sandberg with a professional career behind her, and he pushes her out front.
I'm quoting now from The New Republic, which has an article called, Sheryl Sandberg Resigned.
Because the article shows that being a cover-up artist for all the sins of Facebook is pretty much what Sheryl Sandberg does best.
She goes out there, puts on a kind of innocent face, wide eyes.
Oh, we weren't responsible.
We are very professional in capturing hate.
Sandberg's career has, for better or worse, leveraged her usefulness to men in attaining their ambitions for her own substantial wealth and influence.
So what the New Republic is saying is that here is an ambitious woman who's essentially willing to sort of make herself a PR figure to downplay, diminish, and minimize the nefarious deeds of her employers who recognize Sandberg's usefulness in this purpose.
Bottom line, social media is for people to communicate.
In the end, I'm not even really blaming Facebook.
I'm just exposing the hypocrisy of all these people who ride their mighty high horse and who coordinate vicious attacks on platforms like Parler when they themselves have been the primary venue for the organized takeover of the Capitol that occurred on January 6th.
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Big tech has, in a quite literal sense, become Big Brother.
You have this oligopoly of a handful of people, maybe six, maybe ten, and they have formed, you may almost call it a big brotherhood because they work together, they work in cahoots with each other, and their goal is control of communications and control with the view of restriction, suppression, and censorship.
Now, this is something that Orwell foresaw as coming from the state, but it's coming here from a consortium of groups that work in alliance with the state.
And what can be done about Big Brother?
I want to begin this conversation by looking at a thoughtful article by Rachel Bovard in The Federalist.
It's time for conservatives to take on big tech giants, big tech tyrants.
Here's how. Now, much of the article is not about here's how.
It lays out the tyranny of big tech.
But I'll skip over that part and the assumption that we already know that.
Then Rachel Bovard turns to the libertarians, the free marketeers, the people who have actually been the loudest cheerleaders of big tech as an instrument of social media.
And civic freedom.
Which is, by the way, how big tech sold itself to the American people in the first place.
We're champions of freedom.
And the libertarians went along with this and they thought, we don't have to take the word of these big tech moguls because the market and market incentives Are going to breed competition, are going to prevent these big tech moguls from acting against their own economic self-interest.
They will do things to maximize profits.
Obviously, they're not going to ban large numbers of people.
Why would they want to lose large numbers of customers?
This would be like Walmart telling all kinds of people, you can't shop at our store!
You can't use our real estate!
Stay away from here! Why would Walmart do that?
This was kind of the libertarian argument.
But of course, what Rachel Bovard points out is that the libertarians didn't realize that these big tech guys could reach a point where they have enough power and enough money.
That they could act on non-economic motives.
They don't care if you don't use their platform.
They don't care if they ban 10,000 or 100,000 people.
They've got a billion or more than a billion users.
They're rich beyond belief.
So what if they don't make an extra $50 here or even $500 there or even $50 million there?
That's about what they draw in every day.
So the libertarian fallacy is the fallacy of assuming that we are, and they are, the big tech moguls are, homo economicus, who will act purely from economic motives.
And Rachel Bovard's conclusion then is that the right must change its position on antitrust, must recognize that That this is not a case of, let the market work!
It's going to sort all this out.
No, the market's not going to work.
And not only is the market going to not work by itself, it's going to shut out competitors.
And the classic example, of course, is Parler.
At first, the big tech moguls were like, well, this is our sandbox.
This is our platform.
We don't have to let you on here.
This is our yard. Go play somewhere else.
But then, and this is where the test came when conservatives were like, okay, we'll have our own platform.
We'll go elsewhere. And then they go, let's launch a coordinated attack on that platform.
Let's shut that one down so you, in effect, have no place to go, which is to say you have no voice.
Now... I think Rachel Bovard is right that the argument that we, the market, will sort this out is complete nonsense.
It's been proven wrong.
Proven wrong. But I think when Rachel Bovard goes on to say, we need antitrust, and then she goes on to go, it's time to deprioritize and end the billions of federal subsidies to big tech companies.
And then she goes on, Section 230, big text, congressionally granted legal immunity should be reformed.
And then she goes, the right can do more.
And I'm thinking to myself, the right can do more.
None of the things that you've just described are even remotely close to happening.
No one is going to make, no one is going to repeal Section 230.
And you know why? Why?
Because the Democrats have the power.
They're in league with big tech.
They want Section 230.
They want big tech to ban their political opponents.
So this is not a case.
It's a little bit late, a late realization at a time when we're not in a position to do very much about it.
We're just going to have to live with...
A federal government that by and large, now there's an antitrust case that is going on against Google and there are state attorneys general that are involved in this and I'm watching that eagerly to see whether that is a potential legal, that is a potential way to make some legal headway against this big tech tyranny.
But it seems to me that in policy terms we're pretty much out of options.
I think the way forward is to build new platforms, to bring Parler back, roaring back, stronger than ever, showing that the strike against it is not successful, showing that Parler can get by just fine.
Without Google and without Apple and without Amazon, we stand on our own and we're stronger for doing so.
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I want to talk about instigating violence, not violence against political leaders, who, by the way, have protection.
When the Capitol takeover occurred, when Ashley Babbitt tried to come through the window, what happened?
Bam, bam, she shot through the neck.
And one can debate that, whether that degree of force was necessary.
I think not. But nevertheless, the point is that political leaders, even if they denounce guns, oh, we don't want any guns, they're surrounded by people with a lot of guns.
But what about violence aimed at ordinary Americans, Americans going about their normal lives?
Here's Maxine Waters engaging in some genuine incitement.
Listen. And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd.
And you push back on them.
And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.
I'm struck here not only by her language.
And notice, by the way, there's no comparison between the language of confront, disrupt, make these people feel unwelcome, make their lives difficult, make them miserable, don't accept them.
So this is incitement.
This is a direct call to action.
By the way, there's nothing comparable to this in Trump.
Trump is talking about... Let's go.
Let's march peacefully and patriotically.
Let's let them know this or that.
There's no sense that Trump is telling people, go up to your legislators, confront them, take them over, disrupt their lives.
There's none of that. But we see it here in Maxine Waters and she's urging a crowd, which is very responsive, is very excited about this advice, to do this to their fellow citizens.
Now, this mentality is pervasive on the left, and recently I saw it in an article in the LA Times.
It's written by a woman named Virginia Heffernan.
And the article is about, quote, the Trumpites next door.
So, apparently this woman went out to a weekend in the country, and while she was there, her neighbors, who are Trump supporters, unsolicited, because it was a heavy snow, came over and plowed her driveway without asking.
They just did it. They wanted to be nice.
And Virginia Heffernan, who obviously does have a trace of humanity, you might say, was pleased.
She goes, of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks.
And man, it really looks like the guy back dragged the driveway like a pro.
But how much thanks?
It's almost like her humanity is her original response and then her ideology is now starting to kick in because she realizes that these are Trump supporters.
And so she goes on a kind of journey that's worth following here because you begin to see the progressive mind in action.
She starts off kind of slightly going off the deep end, but only slightly.
She goes, this is kind of weird.
Back in the city, people don't sweep other people's walkways for nothing.
So she's taking an act of generosity that normally you'd go, it's nice to be in the country.
People are nicer out here. But she uses the standard of the city to basically say, this is weird behavior.
In New York City, people don't say hello to me.
They don't do my driveway like this.
So the country people must be weird.
That's her starting point.
Then she goes on to say, she starts talking about Hezbollah.
Hezbollah. The Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon.
She goes, hey, Hezbollah also gives away stuff for free.
She goes, the favors Hezbollah does probably doesn't involve snow plows, but Hezbollah feeds the elderly.
They feed the hungry.
She talks about Louis Farrakhan, who is known to be, quote, unfailingly magnanimous.
And then she starts talking about Nazi sympathizers.
Yes, Nazi sympathizers.
She talks about when she lived with an upper-middle-class French family as a teenager.
She says they didn't want to go to the 100th birthday celebration for Charles de Gaulle.
Why? Because they sympathized with Philippe Petain, the Nazi collaborator.
They had a picture of him on the wall.
This was the Vichy regime in France.
In other words, the pro-Nazi regime.
And you might think, where is this woman going with this?
Well, where she's going with it is she's implying that Trump supporters are Nazi sympathizers.
And this is the core of the problem.
When you start describing ordinary business people, Christians, patriots, conservatives, as Nazi sympathizers, then you bring out a response from the left that is commensurate with that.
You begin to say, treat them like Nazis.
And of course, Nazis, by and large, are rounded up.
They are arrested.
They're shot. They're killed.
And all that is done with relative impunity because the basic assumption is that these are incorrigibly bad people who, if you didn't do it to them, would do it to you.
Now, none of it is true in this case.
The analogies are intended to turn fellow citizens...
Not only into enemies, but into mortal dangers to free society and to democracy.
So here is the mentality that then brings out Antifa.
Antifa is kind of a logical response to this.
Because if we are the fascists, then you need anti-fascists to corral us.
I don't think Virginia Heffernan intends all this.
I'm looking at her picture and she seems like a comfortable upper middle class woman who is just sort of...
Expressing woke sensibilities, I don't think even she realizes, at least I hope she doesn't, the kind of dangerous, vicious, and even murderous impulses behind what she is saying, and the kind of whirlwind that this kind of rhetoric from the left threatens to unleash on our society.
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I was perusing the Twitter of the Supreme Mullah of Iran.
I sometimes do this kind of thing.
And of course, I can't read Farsi, so I have to hit the translate button.
But he has a very interesting pinned tweet that he put up just recently.
It's just one line and very striking.
The post-US era has started.
The post-U.S. era has started.
So this is Khamenei.
And what he's saying is that we have been living in the American era and the American era is now done.
One is tempted to sort of respond in an intemperate fashion and go, this is horrible, this guy's a lunatic, he's a tyrant, and so on.
I'm not going to do that.
I actually want to ponder whether he's right.
Is it true that we are finished with America?
And by we here, I mean the world.
Is America no longer numero uno?
Is America no longer the world's sole superpower?
Let's think about this.
The American era, I think, really began after World War II. Now, America was the world's leading economy long before that.
Really, in the 1890s or so, America overtook Britain as the largest economy in the world.
But America didn't dominate the world.
We lived in, well, you could call it a multipolar world, in which there was more than one kind of great power.
But after World War II, there were two great powers.
There was the United States and there was the Soviet Union.
It was a bipolar world.
And then as we went into the 80s and 90s, the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States was left, you may say, the lone man standing there.
A remarkable book came out at that time, written by actually my colleague, Francis Fukuyama, at the Hoover Institution.
He teaches at Stanford.
It was called The End of History and the Last Man.
Now, the end of history is a kind of startling term because it implies that history can come to an end.
The idea that history can come to an end may seem ridiculous to people.
How can history come to an end?
Don't things continue to go on?
Yes, but there's a certain view of history implied here.
The view that history is directional.
It's moving in a particular way.
There's a kind of arrow of history.
And Fukuyama, building on an argument from Hegel, basically said history is directional.
It is moving in a certain way.
And what is that way? Where is history going?
History is going to the full and final triumph of, you may call it, liberal capitalist democracy.
The whole world is going to get there eventually, but the important thing is that the ideological battle has been settled and there are no real intellectual rivals to liberal capitalist democracy left in the world.
Kind of an amazing claim that the ideological debates in the world have essentially been settled.
Now, people can argue about what type of democracy, parliamentary or presidential.
They can argue about what type of capitalism, capitalism with a small welfare state or a medium-sized welfare state.
But those are arguments over detail.
Fukuyama's point is that the arrow of history has, you may say, spoken, spoken.
And it's a brilliant book.
It's very well worth reading.
It teaches you a lot about history and philosophy.
And Fukuyama has a detailed knowledge of the Soviet Union and of politics, at least the politics of the time.
And yet the book turns out to be spectacularly wrong.
History, in that sense, has not ended.
Capitalism has not triumphed.
In fact, we're seeing the serious restoration of various forms of socialism, not just in faraway countries like Cuba or Venezuela, smaller countries, but also the prospect of socialism in the big countries, including the United States, United States of Socialism, the title of my last book.
Second, it's no longer clear that tyranny has been defeated and that freedom has won.
More than a billion people, in fact, the largest country in the world, China, is under a massive tyranny, a tyranny in some ways comparable to the Soviet Union, in which the state decides everything.
Yes, there's a kind of capitalist economic system, but even then, it's state-run capitalism, not the capitalism that Fukuyama had in mind at all, but a capitalism with the state as the quarterback of it.
Now, all of this is to say that not only has history not ended and serious rivals emerged in the world, but it seems that what Khamenei is saying in this tweet is the United States is losing power while other countries, notably China, are gaining power.
And what he's implying and he might be right is we are once again moving back to the way the world has been for most of history.
It's a multipolar world, and a multipolar world can include a United States, and the United States might even be powerful, but it won't be it.
Remember, Coke is it.
No. There's going to be Pepsi, and there's going to be a whole bunch of Sprite, and a whole bunch of other things, and the United States will have to fend for itself in a place where it no longer gets to call the shots.
Will that be a better world?
In my opinion, no.
Because it puts various forms of tyranny, various forms of economic suppression and suppression of liberty sort of in competition.
With the defense of liberty.
But are we? Are we in the United States, is our government anymore a champion of liberty?
Forget about abroad, even at home.
All these things which were once taken for granted, which were once the premises of our discussion, should we export freedom, Dinesh, around the world?
Well, what if we don't have freedom at home?
What's there to export? What are we asking other people to do?
Establish digital control over the public space?
Suddenly all these assumptions have to be turned into questions.
Suddenly it's not clear that the United States and some of the things that are going on now should be exported.
It's not a recipe I want for India and for other countries.
Suddenly we reflect upon what this Khamenei character is saying.
And we begin to start thinking in ways we haven't thought before.
The United States no longer calls the shots, and that may not be an entirely bad thing.
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I'm back. I'm joined by Debbie.
And hi, Annie. Hello, Annie.
Hello, Mr. D'Souza.
Hello. Well, you are here for a kind of a purpose, which is that a lot of people don't know that you are a regular columnist for a publication or website that's called El American.
So tell people about what is El American.
El American is a publication, written publication right now, For conservative Latinos, meaning anyone, you know, that is an immigrant from any Latin American country, Mexican-Americans from the United States, you know, all freedom-loving people in America that happen to have Latino origin, like myself.
And so, right now, we don't really have that.
There's Univision, Telemundo, as we know, it's very left-wing.
Latinos that are conservative feel disenfranchised because they don't have any kind of news News outlet that reflects their conservative views and so El American is set up that they not only have American news but they have Latin American news and you know so it's world news and with a conservative point of view and so I was very happy to come on board a few months ago I've done about 10 I think this is going to be my 11th op-ed with them And,
you know, sometimes I just in the middle of the night think of something and I'm like, you know, this is something I need to write about because it's just not being said enough.
Your latest article is called Land of the Free, and this struck me.
You say, you're talking about free speech and elections, and you say, the trouble is not whether I believe there was or wasn't election fraud, but the fact that I cannot even utter a word about it.
I will get shut down, censored, removed, ridiculed for even having an opinion on the matter.
And you say that that is far worse than anything else going on.
So this is the censorship, you would say, is our number one problem in America.
I believe that. Going forward, I think that if we don't have any kind of outlet, we're definitely going to feel like we are enslaved.
You know, and not free.
And so my article is land of the free question mark.
Are we the land of the free?
Because, you know, as you know, even back with COVID-19, when they were coming out with all of these remedies for COVID-19, We were, in a sense, being shut down any time we mentioned a drug called hydrochloroquine.
And even several doctors, I believe they were called frontline doctors, came out saying that patients would benefit greatly from hydrochloroquine.
Now, at the time, the digital moguls decided, this is misinformation, this is not the position of the CDC, so they were banning people for using hashtags that had to do with hydroxychloroquine.
Now, I find it interesting. Here's an article, and it's...
A new Meridian Health Study shows that people with mild symptoms of COVID-19 may be helped by, guess what?
Hydroxychloroquine. And this is a recently published study looking at people who were outpatients.
They were significantly less likely to end up in the hospital.
I'm now quoting Andrew Ipp.
Who's a lymphoma physician, director of this Hackensack Meridian system.
This is only an observational study.
We can only recommend it in the context of a clinical trial.
There may be a benefit for using this drug in an outpatient setting.
So he's being very cautious.
He says it's a clinical trial.
This is an observational study.
We need more clinical trials.
But he also says...
That all the sort of side effects that were said to come with hydroxychloroquine, cardiac arrhythmia, and so on.
He goes, we didn't find that.
The drug is safe. And a National Institutes of Health clinical trial last year concluded also that hydroxychloroquine was safe to use.
And then this newspaper interviews a bunch of physicians who basically said that if you give it in the early course of the illness, It's going to help.
Now, one of the doctors on the front line, Dr.
Stella Emanuel, who's seen this new research and who was demonized earlier has something to say about it.
Let's listen. I demand an apology from the media.
I'm talking about CNN, CNBC, and all the other, like New York Times, and all those people that called me crazy, from Hollywood.
I mean, from people that sat around and made videos calling me crazy when I said hydroxychloroquine worked and we should not allow people to die.
I'm talking about FDA, CDC, NIH. I'm talking about all of you, my colleagues, the ones that called me names, that threatened to report me to the boards and all that stuff because I said hydroxychloroquine works.
Now you have all these studies that are saying it works.
I mean, I see why she's annoyed, you know, when you not only ban someone but demonize them.
You shut them up and then you pile on them.
You feel the sense of helplessness, right?
Now, if we think back to America, this wasn't the way it was.
I mean, let's think back to when people said that Obama was born in Kenya.
Right. Right?
I mean, I explicitly repudiated that theory in my movie, Obama's America.
How did you feel about, was Obama born in Kenya?
Yeah. Well, I wrote in the article, I said that I was on board with that mentality.
I was like, yeah, I think he was born in Kenya.
Of course, you know, I didn't have any evidence and later found out, you know, probably not.
He was probably born in Hawaii.
But even if he had been born in Kenya, his mother was an American citizen.
And like my mother, I'm an American citizen because of her.
So he himself would be the same.
So that was even...
So your dad's Venezuelan, but your mom was from the Rio Grande Valley, yes.
So I was an American citizen through her, through blood, which would have been the same case with him.
So anyway, all that to say, I wasn't kicked off of any platform for saying it.
Maybe a shadow ban here and there on Facebook.
That was my primary source.
But the idea that this couldn't be discussed or talked about, I mean, it would be unthinkable.
Exactly. People assume that you have a free speech right to say it.
Absolutely. Maybe it's a crackpot theory, but so what?
Exactly. So that was that for me.
That situation. I mean, someone who says I saw an alien outside my trailer, you know, you can say to the guy, listen, maybe you don't have four beers the next time, you know, but the point is you don't want to shut him up.
Exactly. Take away his free speech rights.
Shut, you know, and like in the case of our friend Mike Lindell, with his stores, you know, taking out, you know, not being able to sell his merchandise because of what he believes.
You know, something that he said he found out and he wants to tell the world about it and he shut down for it.
What country is this?
I mean, did you hear that this David Hogg is trying to start a pillow company to compete with Lindell?
I mean, they're literally starting a liberal equivalent to a pillow company.
I think it really shows you how Mike has kind of gotten under their skin.
And he's gotten under his skin for doing nothing more than this, his kind of overt, you may almost call it innocent, public Christianity and patriotism.
I mean, that's why I'm on the warpath for this guy, because I basically feel like we should not let a guy like him be taken down.
We support him by buying his stuff.
I mean, before it was COVID, right?
What you could do about that.
And then now this, right?
What's next? If we talk about God, are we going to be shut down because of that?
What's to stop them from picking and choosing what they choose to say we can and can't say?
Earlier I talked about how the proposed remedies repeal Section 230.
That's not going to happen. You offer a remedy at the very end.
Say what that is. I do.
I think we need to create our own institutions.
We need to create our own movie theaters, our movie studios.
We need to create our own stores.
Our own websites, our own servers, pretty much our own everything.
Because, I mean, we saw in the case of Parler that even the servers, which Amazon ran.
Exactly. So Amazon's pulling out the infrastructure.
Yes. So you're saying we might need not only to have our own content, but our own infrastructure to deliver that content.
And then that's how you break the tyranny of the digital models.
We have to. We have to create, in a sense, our own United States of America.
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It's mailbox time and we have a question from Mike.
Hi Dinesh, it's Mike.
Really enjoying your podcast.
Two quick questions.
The first, I understand you make exceptionally good oatmeal.
What is your secret?
Second question is, I have just been accepted into a graduate program to study US history.
If you were in my shoes, what would your thesis be?
Thanks. Whoa!
On the oatmeal front, I don't think I have any secret formula.
I just do it the straightforward way and turns out that oatmeal with a little maple sugar and some sliced bananas is really good stuff.
Now let's turn to history.
Boy, I have a lot of ideas for you.
I'll just throw out one because it came to me recently.
I was thinking about Lyndon Johnson, and I was thinking about the progressive narrative, which is that Lyndon Johnson, well, there are two facts about Lyndon Johnson that we know.
He was a vicious racist in his early career, and he signed the Civil Rights and promoted the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Now, the left uses these two facts to create a narrative, and the narrative is that Lyndon Johnson used to be a small-town racist, but he underwent a journey of moral conversion and enlightenment that mirrors the same journey undertaken by the Democratic Party, which once used to be the party of bigotry, but became the party of diversity and enlightenment.
So, Lyndon Johnson is very pivotal to this democratic narrative.
He represents it. And yet I realize that this kind of little morality tale about Lyndon Johnson can't be true.
It can't be true. Why?
Because there are numerous instances, well attested, attested by Robert Caro in his multi-volume biography of LBJ, attested by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, attested by the man who was LBJ's chauffeur, that Lyndon Johnson was a notorious racist his whole life.
He was regularly using the N-word after he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So the progressive narrative, although it's supposed to be this kind of story of the Democratic Party, is clearly wrong.
So then we have a paradox.
How could a man who's a notorious bigot Who essentially calls his chauffeur the N-word.
He refuses even to use his name.
And he insults the man when the man just says, listen, call me Robert.
He won't do it. He won't do it.
So how would this horrible character, why would he?
What nefarious motives would cause a notorious racist nevertheless To become the champion of the Civil Rights Act.
A fascinating story that in my view has never fully been told.
I try to sketch out an argument in my own work, but I think that there is a deep historical study to be done here on LBJ, one that doesn't suck up or get suckered in by the progressive narrative, but takes the question head on and offers an interesting and original answer that would be very helpful for conservative analysis of LBJ. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple,
Google, and Spotify.
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