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Feb. 11, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:25
REVENGE OF THE NERDS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep24
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With impeachment slipping away, what's the left's new scheme to get Trump?
And how did these digital moguls become such tyrannical monsters? Hint, it has something to do with revenge of the nerds.
Plus my interview with religious freedom attorney Kelly Shackelford.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I think we all know the outcome of this Senate impeachment trial, but it's still highly entertaining and fun to watch.
But what is the right way to watch it?
There's a right way to watch it not only in terms of your attitude, but also in terms of your body posture.
I think in this respect we can all take a lesson from Senator Josh Hawley.
Check this out. Garrett, I noticed you tweeted about the conduct of some of the members who were not paying attention.
Tell us about what Josh Hawley was doing.
Well, I think that was one of the sort of two main takeaways from the last hour.
Again, the intractable nature of trying to get some of the folks in the room to actually engage with the material and be present and take this seriously.
Josh Hawley, who's made his disdain for this process abundantly clear in public comments, He's doing the same thing in the chamber.
All the senators have the option to use the gallery, the upstairs area, for seating for social distancing.
Josh Hawley is the only one taking advantage of that opportunity.
He's been sitting with his legs up on the seat in front of him, essentially reading nonrelated material.
So I'm really smiling at this, and I'm smiling not only at the sort of pompous, disturbed posture of these two media figures.
Oh, he's not taking the whole thing seriously.
Exactly. That's why I'm smiling.
Josh Hawley has exactly the right idea.
Show your disdain for this whole process.
And I think the key touch here isn't just that he's reading, quote, unrelated material.
I'd like to know what it was.
But the leg posture.
He has his legs up. Reminds me a little bit of what they would say about Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s.
Calvin Coolidge, like Ronald Reagan, liked to take an afternoon nap.
But Reagan would just sort of doze off for a little bit and then come back and get to work.
Calvin Coolidge would take a nap, but for that purpose, he would first change into his pajamas.
And this is key. The basic idea is that government has a limited role.
And in fact, when Calvin Coolidge would wake up two hours later, his normal line was, is the country still here?
Is the country still here?
A kind of joking reference to the idea that somehow the president is indispensable.
The country wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for him.
Let's turn back to impeachment and Trump.
Now, the reason this whole case is falling apart is that the link to Trump is never shown.
It's obvious there was a complete breakdown of security.
You've got all these people roaming the hallways unobstructed, really, not even seriously being, where were all the metal detectors?
If you or I tried to go to the Capitol, we'd never be able to get in.
It's just as difficult as getting into the White House.
Apparently Trump offered 10,000 National Guard troops before the January 6th rally.
Oddly enough, this was refused by the Capitol Police.
This was refused by the mayor of D.C. So...
You know, you've got all these absurdly exaggerated reenactments of what happened.
You know, here is a video of Chuck Schumer.
He's walking down the hallway.
Look at his expression. He looks extremely troubled.
He's now walking in the opposite direction.
Blah, blah, blah.
Sort of reminds me a little bit of when my daughter, Danielle, was a kid.
You know, she'd come, Oh, I hurt my knee!
And it was never enough to show sympathy.
She had to reenact it.
Oh, I was... Let me show you, Dad.
I was running down the hallway.
I made a turn. So this is what we're seeing.
This kind of reenactment that is supposed to give a sense of the harrowing nature of this episode.
Even though... And all this harrowing language to go with it.
None of which is apparent from what you see on the actual videos.
Now... Trump supposedly used incendiary rhetoric.
He talked about, quote, according to the House managers, fighting like hell.
Oh, really? I have in my hand a tweet from Ilhan Omar, April 8, 2020.
We must all fight like hell.
Here is a tweet from Joe Biden from 19.
That's why I've spent my whole career fighting and I will continue to fight like hell.
The Trump war room put out Jamie Raskin in a speech, September 23rd, 2020.
We must fight like hell to stop this assault on healthcare.
Eric Swalwell, video.
I'll fight like hell.
And there are many other examples.
The point is that whatever Trump said, boilerplate political rhetoric.
He's no more inciting an insurrection than Swalwell and Ilhan Omar are.
Now, the left sort of realizes that all of this is, deep down, they know it's super dumb.
And so the really smart leftists are trying to go to something new, get Trump some other way.
Here's Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School in an article co-written with another guy.
He goes, impeachment won't keep Trump from running again.
Here's a better way. He's basically saying, let's drop the whole impeachment nonsense, going nowhere, and let's try to get Trump on the 14th Amendment.
This is a whole new thing.
Now, the 14th Amendment, Section 3, which was actually passed right after the Civil War, was basically aimed at preventing another insurrection, another massive armed rebellion of the kind mounted by the southern states against the Union.
And so civil officers that support that, or are part of that, are barred from serving in public office.
But of course, we're not in a civil war.
There isn't a massive armed insurrection.
It is a parody of the events of January 6th to liken it to the assault on Fort Sumter or the invasion of Pennsylvania by Lee.
So these preposterous analogies.
And so you can see the desperation of the other side.
They kind of have to get Trump.
He's sort of, we've got the target.
We've got the crime.
We've got the criminal. We just now have to find a crime.
It's a criminal in search of a crime.
Now, the political scientist Jonathan Turley makes a point that, you know, you keep accusing Trump of crimes.
And by the way, they've been doing this for years.
Turley has a funny line.
He goes, Donald Trump may be the most convicted man never charged in America.
All these people say he's guilty of this crime and that crime, and it goes way back.
Here's former Washington prosecutor and Washington Post columnist talking about Trump committed bribery in the Ukraine.
Former House Impeachment Counsel Norm Eisen.
Trump was guilty of a crime in his collaboration with Russia.
Here's another guy, a law school dean at the University of Connecticut, where he talks about Trump committed more criminal acts.
Now, when they keep talking about criminal acts, the point is, if you've got Trump on a crime, you don't actually have to impeach him.
You can actually charge him.
And even, by the way, if he survives this impeachment business, as he will if he's acquitted, he can still be charged with a crime.
But, of course, Turley makes a key point.
Crimes require criminal intent.
And here's the key point.
The House managers don't even bother to show intent.
Why? Because they can't.
So here's what they do.
They focus not on Trump's intent.
They focus not even on what Trump said.
They focus on how Trump's words were interpreted.
How the people listening to them thought This is what he meant.
This is what was in his mind.
This is what he was implying.
And that's why you have all these interviews.
Now... This is not really real, genuine prosecution.
It convinces nobody. No wonder Lindsey Graham basically said the House Democrats are kind of losing votes every day.
Their case gets increasingly far-fetched and preposterous.
But I think it just shows the desperation of their attempt to get Trump.
They're not going to get him this time.
Better luck next time, guys.
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I've always been kind of a student of language and rhetoric, and one of the reasons I find this whole Senate impeachment trial so interesting is you could call it language inflation.
We keep hearing this language that is bloated to such a point that it doesn't resemble the reality that we saw on January 6th or we even see in the very videos that the House managers produce.
What they say doesn't match what we see.
So we keep hearing, for example, about the coup attempt.
Well, I'm looking for a coup.
I see people who disband and get out of there like 20 minutes later.
What kind of a coup is that?
Is that how coups normally occur?
I keep hearing about, well, you know, there's an insurrection.
Except I don't see any insurrection.
I don't see insurrectionists.
I just see a bunch of crowds and people pushing their way here and then peeking their heads in here and taking selfies over there.
That's an insurrection.
It's a riot! The rioters went here, the rioters went there.
Except we've been seeing riots for months.
We know what a riot looks like.
This is not a riot. So, what are we supposed to do when language takes on this kind of fake quality?
Here's a classic example of it.
One of the House managers is talking about how the people who occupy the Capitol believed that they were doing so on the direct orders of one Donald J. Trump.
Listen. They believed that they were following his orders.
They said so.
I thought I was following my president.
I thought I was following what we were called to do.
President Trump requested that we be in D.C. on the 6th.
Now, if you were paying close attention, you'd realize that none of these people says Trump told me to occupy the Capitol.
They don't say that. They carefully clip the videos where he goes, we were invited by Trump.
Yes, you were invited to D.C. by Trump.
You weren't invited to storm the Capitol.
So what happens is you've got these people and their words are clipped in a way to suggest that they were, quote, taking orders from Trump, but they don't say they were.
And even when they imply that Trump invited them, the implication only applies to come to the rally.
And that's it. So, this does to me raise a deeper question that when you have all these dishonest interpretations of what's going on, what is the correct interpretation?
Who are these people? I'm not talking about the 30 or 40 or so who made pre-plans.
to take the capital.
That's a whole different group and their motives are different and perhaps for another day.
I'm just talking about the crowd that kind of moseyed its way in there with apparently only token resistance and then started wandering the hallways and picking up objects and yelling and screaming and waving flags.
Who were those people? What were they up to?
Now, I've been able to ferret out I think three motives that are all worth thinking about.
The first one It appears that these people, first of all, their Blythe attitude suggests to me something very simple.
They saw something not only similar but far worse occurring in state capitals and even at the Supreme Court and all over the country.
With nothing, with no consequences.
In other words, they saw Antifa and BLM doing things that they wouldn't even dream of doing.
They didn't smash the statues in the Capitol.
They didn't pull down the statues of all the people they didn't like.
They didn't set the place on fire.
They didn't do that. So they thought, man, if those guys can get away with it, what's going to happen to us?
Isn't there one system of justice in America?
No. They thought there was.
That might have been one of their serious mistakes.
Number two. These guys seem to have thought, and this is very naive, that this was 1776.
I see this actually in a tweet put out by Brandon Strzok, the founder of Walkaway.
I'm looking at the FBI sheet, the criminal complaint, which quotes a tweet.
In which Brandon says, I'm completely confused.
For six to eight weeks, everybody on the right has been saying 1776, and that if Congress moves forward, it will mean a revolution.
So Congress moves forward.
Patriots stormed the Capitol.
Now everybody is virtue signaling their embarrassment that this happened.
I want to emphasize, Brandon Strzok did not enter the Capitol.
But Brandon Strzok is basically saying, hey, wait a minute, I thought it was 1776.
Well, It isn't 1776.
It never was 1776 this year.
And we should not confuse a protest with a revolution.
A revolution is a whole different matter.
You shouldn't play at revolution.
I think a third factor that often gets ignored is The nature of crowds.
Now here I turn to the sociologist, the Italian sociologist Elias Kennedy's great book, Crowds and Power, where he says some very insightful things about crowds.
The first thing he says is that the thing about a crowd is that in a crowd you lose your personality.
Canetti talks about the fact that normally we're very sensitive to being touched.
If you're asleep and somebody just kind of comes and touches your nose, you're immediately aware of it.
You're very aware of your individuality.
But in a crowd, you lose your individuality.
And he says that that's actually why people like crowds.
Because in a crowd, it's almost like a new body is created, which is the collective crowd that has its own personality.
Karnetti talks about the discharge, the kind of feeling of discharging yourself into a larger whole.
And he goes, before the discharge, the crowd does not actually exist.
It's the discharge which creates it.
This is the moment where those who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.
And then Canetti says people don't really lose their differences.
It's an illusion. The people who feel equal haven't really become equal, nor will they feel equal forever.
At some point they'll return to their homes, they'll return to their families.
But this is the nature of crowds, that when a crowd moves in one direction, it's not just that people are physically carried along, but they are sort of emotionally carried along, almost as though a single being is moving in that direction.
I say this, this by the way applies to crowds on the right, on the left, it applies to all kinds of crowds.
But it's part of the reason that crowds do things.
That if we as individuals were to consider them, we wouldn't do them.
But we're tempted to do them in a crowd because of the nature.
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How did the digital moguls, tech moguls, become such tyrannical monsters?
How did the people who positioned themselves To be the great enemies of the dictatorial state of, you may say, Big Brother of 1984.
How did they become Big Brother?
How did they become the, you can call it, Big Brotherhood of six or ten guys who essentially want to control, manipulate, regulate, censor, suppress, and destroy?
I think back to that wonderfully liberating Apple commercial of 1984 which talked about 1984, talked about Orwell, and talked about fighting against Big Brother.
Here's a little glimpse of it.
On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.
Now, this commercial is fascinating, and if you watch the whole thing, which you can online, you'll see that they start off with the whole concept of the big state.
You've got Big Brother himself, and Big Brother's talking about everyone having, quote, One will.
The unification of thoughts.
Big Brother is talking about, quote, a garden of pure ideology.
Everybody is locked into the same ideology.
And then what happens? You basically see a young woman running up to the screen and smashing it with a hammer.
And then you have these liberating words.
Apple will introduce Macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.
Talk about false promises.
We are moving toward 1984 and guess what?
These very tech moguls are taking us there.
They are the face of Big Brother.
They are Big Brother.
So it makes you begin to think about how did people who were You know, harmless nerds and little bohemians and people who liked alternative food and yoga and thought of themselves as rebelling against the state.
How did they become these monsters?
What happened to them?
What happened to that hippie sensibility, that bohemian love of freedom, that sense of wanting to be left alone and do your own thing?
I think the answer to this can be found, well, in two things.
One is in the movie Revenge of the Nerds, a movie about a bunch of misfits and, I would say, uncool cats who decide to strike back against all the cool people and have their revenge for all the injuries that have been foisted on them.
The philosopher Nietzsche, my second source, calls this resentment.
And for Nietzsche, resentment is more than resentment.
It is this kind of gnawing hatred that grows in your soul, that makes you want to avenge yourself.
It creates a deep sense of injury, of victimization, and this, Nietzsche says, can take terrible and tyrannical forms.
By the way, Adolf Hitler was a Bohemian.
I discussed this in my book, The Big Lie.
Hitler came of age in the Schwabing, Bohemian neighborhoods around Munich.
Remember, Hitler was an artist.
He was a painter. He hung out with these guys.
But he had this deep sense of injury and grievance directed against the Jews.
I have a scene in the movie Death of a Nation where you see Hitler taking his revenge, striking out in this case against one of his rivals, Ernst Röhm, who was the head of the Brown Shirts.
Here it is. Some progressives tried to portray Hitler as a right-winger by insisting he was anti-gay.
But Hitler knew that the brownshirt leader, Ernst Rohn, was a notorious homosexual, as were many other brownshirts.
When Hitler showed up to arrest Rohn, he encountered a remarkable scene.
Halt, my lord!
Röhm, you are arrested!
You are a traitor!
Röhm publicly suggested that he, not Hitler, was the true leader of the Nazi party.
To be continued...
I even When Heinrich Himmler urged Hitler to purge the gay brownshirts out of the Nazi movement...
Some of this, of course, is in German, but I'll interpret it for you.
Basically, Hitler comes to arrest Rome and he finds himself in the middle of a kind of an orgy.
Why? Because these brown shirts were themselves Bohemians.
It was all part of this Bohemian culture, but a Bohemian culture suffused with resentment.
Let's come back to Revenge of the Nerds, because if you look at these tech moguls and you go into their backgrounds, I've looked at some of their high school pictures.
These guys were total misfits.
Even Steve Jobs. I mean, Steve Jobs was a loner.
According to Walter Isaacson in his very fine biography of Jobs, Jobs was regularly bullied in school.
He became kind of a hermit, and he'd go hang out in a garage and basically play on the computer, play on little machines, work on technology, which was his refuge from humanity.
And this is true of all these other guys, Dorsey and Zuckerberg, nerds to the core.
And I'm sure that as nerds, they were treated as nerds, and high school and middle school even can be really cruel.
People look down on you.
And so they had all these little injuries that they gathered because they were seen as uncool and they were seen as freaks.
You know, get away from me!
And they nurse their grievances.
But see, here's the problem.
When you nurse your grievances, you resolve, I'm going to get those people one day.
When I get strong and powerful, I'll have my revenge.
But see, the problem is when you get older, all those people are gone.
All those frat boys and sorority girls and members of exclusive clubs and pom-pom girls and cheerleaders and football stars and big men on campus.
All those people have gone on with their lives.
There's no one to get, so to speak.
And so you have to displace your anger onto something else.
And you know what they displace it on?
Americana. Because they identify fraternities and sororities and football games with America.
And so later on, they package this resentment and then they displace it.
Imagine, for example, a Trump rally.
They go, Oh, did you see the violent rhetoric that Trump used at the rally?
I mean, it flashes their mind back to high school pep rallies.
I mean, think of a nerd.
What does a nerd do at a high school pep rally?
He's not welcome.
The best he can do is operate the audiovisual equipment.
He's outside the rally.
And so you look at Trump and Trump's violent rhetoric reminds me of the time that Sally Clemson gave me a violent look and told me, get away, you freak!
Or think about the time, for example, Trump's incendiary tweets remind me of the time that Roberto Rivera tripped me in seventh grade.
What you're dealing with here are social misfits who have grown up, but they're still social misfits.
And here's the irony. The social misfits are running social media.
They're controlling our social lives.
And if you listen to their testimony, their conversation, these are people ultimately living in a different zone.
They don't relate to other people all that well even now.
And all this tyranny, all this censorship, all this desire for maniacal control comes out of nothing more than the fact that these people were treated badly when they were younger and they're determined to strike back.
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Kelly Shackelford has devoted his life to fighting for religious freedom.
Religious freedom that is part of the First Amendment.
And Kelly Shackelford's group is called First Liberty because religious freedom is our first liberty.
Welcome, Kelly Shackelford.
Thanks for joining the podcast.
Is religious liberty in good shape or in bad shape these days?
Very, very complex question.
My quick answer is, I think in the short term, we're going to see fights against religious freedom like we've never seen.
I feel like long term, we've started to shift that is really positive that I think is going to be a long term, very good thing for the country, but very few people can see that if they're not Sort of living in this arena like I have for 30 years.
And a part of that's because of the good judges and justices we put on the courts in the last four years and how they're beginning to take us back to the Constitution.
Let's start with that. There was an important Supreme Court case affecting COVID restrictions in California, restrictions applied to churches.
Now, these churches were under some coronavirus limits, 25% attendance and so on.
But nevertheless, the court basically ruled in favor of religious liberty.
And then there was a kind of a petulant dissent from Justice Kagan, which I want to get to.
But let's start with the court's decision.
What did the court say?
And how did this decision come out?
Well, what the court really said is that California essentially had a ban on in-person worship, and it wasn't a ban that applied to other people in similar situations.
So, I mean, it's really odd, Dinesh.
We have a... When it comes to Sunday worship or Saturday worship, depending upon your faith, but a worship service, there are three fundamental First Amendment rights involved there.
The freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, free exercise of religion.
I mean, you can't get more core in the constitutional protections.
And yet, these states, many say, especially California, treat it like not only is it not an elevated protection, but they treat it like it's lesser than, you know, the marijuana dispensary or the liquor store or, you know, you name it.
And they literally banned this across the state of California.
And I think many people have heard about many of the churches that are undergoing massive fines and other things for simply, you know, in a safe way in many places across the state, having a service.
And so the Supreme Court overruled that and said, this is, by the way, it's in an emergency posture.
This is not like a normal case where it kind of weaves through, goes through the courts, gets up there.
There's briefing.
There's oral argument.
There's lots of interaction and thoughts.
This is disfavored.
The court only does this maybe one out of a thousand times because they like to have fuller time in briefing.
So when they do this, this means something extreme has happened, and they ruled in favor of the churches there.
They didn't decide everything.
They said that, look, there's some factual elements we need to look at with regard to the ban on singing and some other things, but they said this ban on churches is unconstitutional.
Now, Justice Kagan made a dissent which can be translated to, the court is not listening to the science.
I just want to read you a couple of sentences.
Justices of this court are not scientists, nor do we know much about public health policy.
And then she goes, she says, this foray into armchair epidemiology cannot end well.
And she says that the court's decision means that, quote, science-based policy is now yielding to judicial edict.
Now, I'm sort of amused by this idea that science itself speaks, and we can somehow listen to the science.
It seems to me that science can make certain factual propositions.
Let's just say, for example, here's the probability of transmission if 10 people are in a room, and presumably that applies to whether it's a...
It's a casino or whether it's a restaurant or whether it's a church.
If you're in a room at a certain proximity, the virus doesn't discriminate, so to speak.
So this idea that she's assuming that from the fact of science, one can draw certain policy values that are doing nothing more than marching to scientific orders.
I mean, isn't this kind of an idiotic understanding of science itself, let alone bad judicial reasoning?
Yes, it's actually, if you want to try to use science, I think she's going to end up on the bad side of that argument because, I mean, look at what the science, I mean, again, what shows you it's not the science is they banned worship.
What if it's one person leading worship behind a huge plexiglass?
That's banned.
There's no science for banning that.
Yet, you can have people in the hair stylist, you can have plenty of people, you can have crowds in the train station.
These are examples that Justice Gorsuch mentioned.
There's no rationale for this different treatment.
They have a whole category for how they treat worship that's different and it's clearly discriminatory.
So even if you believe the science decides, you would look at this and go, this is not science.
If you wanted to try to use science, you might say, we're going to have certain requirements for everybody in every context about social distancing, about masking, about these things.
That's not what these are.
These are, you can, you know, we're favoring these places, but not these places.
You know, I'll tell you, Dinesh, probably the best example of this, of how this is not anything about what the, quote, science says, is look at what's happening with the schools.
We had a case go all the way up to the Supreme Court here just recently where, in Kentucky, they allowed the gambling parlors to be open, the movie theaters were open, you know, the marijuana dispensaries were open, but the Christian kids were not allowed to go to their school.
And yet the CDC said the safest place for kids to be is at a school because the transmission rate is so low.
Absolutely. When we come back, I want to ask you about Justice Alito's speech that touches right on these points.
We'll be back right after a word from MyPillow.
Mike Lindell and MyPillow are really under the gun with retailers dropping them all over the country.
Here's a list of stores that have dropped MyPillow.
Dollar General, Shop HQ, Mattress Firm, Kohl's, Kroger, BJ's, Wayfair, Bed Bath& Beyond, The Shopping Channel, HEB, Affirm, Finger Hut, Kinney Drugs, Colony Brands, Bluestream, Coburns, Chewy.com, JCP. This is outrageous.
My pillow is a great product.
And what the heck? Why would you shut a guy down and prevent him from selling his sheets and robes and towels and pillows?
Because you don't agree with what he has to say?
Because he's a Christian?
Because he's a patriot? What the heck?
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Welcome back, Kelly Shackelford.
Justice Alito was all over this in a recent speech that he gave to the Federalist Society.
I just want to read a couple of lines that he uses in that speech.
He says, And he counts in this religious liberty.
And he says, it's an indisputable statement of fact.
We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive, and prolonged as those experienced now.
And he goes, think of all the events that would otherwise be protected by free speech.
Live speeches, conferences, lectures, meetings, worship services, churches now closed on Easter Sunday, synagogues closed...
Even the constitutional right to a speedy trial.
So what he seems to be saying is that this epidemic has become a rationale and perhaps a pretext for suppressing basic enumerated constitutional rights.
You used a phrase earlier, you talked about elevated protection.
And isn't it a fact that the founders in the Bill of Rights identified certain rights and said, these rights deserve special protection.
Therefore, Congress shall make no law, meaning the government can't restrict them.
Explain the concept, if you will, of elevated protection and say a word, if you will, about whether you agree with Alito.
I thought Justice Alito did a great service to the country.
I mean, what was going on was unprecedented.
If you'll remember at the time, we were seeing pictures on TV of a father being handcuffed for throwing a baseball with his children in a park.
A guy coming off a beach on a surfboard.
There was nobody there being arrested.
And people wondered, has the Constitution been suspended?
And we actually filed the first lawsuit during the pandemic.
And one, really a landmark decision.
It was a situation where the mayor was banning a church service, but this church service was in their cars.
People were driving up for Easter so they could be together, yet be safe.
And that was going to be a crime.
And so we got a great decision, but it's sort of reinstituted from this federal judge, Judge Walker, that the Constitution is still in place.
And these are our most fundamental rights.
And fundamental rights, Dinesh, are the rights that we give the highest level of protection to.
Things like free speech, free exercise of religion.
And I would point out to people, sometimes people, they think about religious freedom and they don't get it.
They think, well, I'm not religious.
It doesn't help me.
Or maybe even if they are religious, they think this is just so I can say something.
It's much broader than that.
The founders called this our first freedom because they understood if you lose this freedom, you'll lose all your freedoms.
And the reason, best way I can explain that to people is the one thing that a totalitarian regime will not allow are people who hold an allegiance to one higher than the government.
So the first flashpoint is almost always religious freedom.
So when COVID gives this extra power to all these people who've never had it, mayors, governors, It's fascinating that the first flashpoint all across the country has been religious freedom.
And they're treating this really fundamental right, really three fundamental rights, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, like it's a lesser right.
Like the essential rights are the grocery store and the marijuana dispensary and the liquor store and you name it.
And yet treating our most fundamental rights like there's something less.
So that's not our system.
And we're in a real dangerous time.
And that's why Justice Alito spoke up.
We have to speak up.
We have to stand up or we will lose the freedoms, the system of freedoms that we all have.
Kelly Shackelford, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
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Cancel culture is not only vicious, it's also dumb.
Its latest victim is the actress Gina Carano, who was a star on the show The Mandalorian.
Very popular. And now Disney, Disney Films, Lucasfilm, which is a division, has canceled Gina Carano.
And they've supposedly done it because of her offensive presence on social media.
Yes. Even Gina Carano's agent, United Talent Artists, has dropped her.
So this is cancel culture at its worst.
Now, let's look at their reasons for doing this.
Evidently, the smoking gun was something that Gina Carano tweeted about Jews.
Now, I agree, this is a sensitive topic, but let's look at what Gina Carano actually says.
She says, Jews were beaten in the streets not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors, even by children.
She's talking about the way in which the viciousness of Nazi society spread beyond the cops to ordinary citizens.
And then she goes on to say, How is that any different from hating someone today?
For their political views.
So she's making an analogy between not the Holocaust, but early Nazism, this kind of atmosphere of bullying and intolerance on the streets, and what's happening in America now based upon not religion.
In fact, the Jews weren't even hated for religion per se.
Even secular Jews were targeted.
They were hated because of their views and who they were and their presence in German society.
And Carano is drawing an analogy to political discrimination.
So? Is this outside the bounds of discourse?
Of course not. But it apparently is for Disney.
It is for Lucasfilm. Here is Gina Carano's second offense.
She posted a meme that's kind of making fun of, you may call it, the mask Nazis.
And in the screenshot, she's wearing multiple masks.
She's talking about the CDC's mask requirements.
And she basically makes a quip, in effect, saying, since they're going to put all these multiple masks on us, how about if they blindfold us also so we don't know what the heck is even going on?
Now, again... What?
This is somehow outside the bounds?
This is not permitted? You can't say this in America today?
What? This is utterly ludicrous.
Ludicrous. Satire, being able to challenge existing orthodoxies, government policies.
This is what free speech is all about.
This is the essence of it.
Finally, Gina Carano, in an apparent...
Quip directed at people who use all these exotic and multiple pronouns for themselves, you know, they, those, them.
She apparently parodied that on her own profile by saying, Bebop Boop.
That's it. And that caused a bit of an upro.
Oh, why is she making fun of the trans people?
Gina Carano at that point had a talk with her co-star.
A guy named Pedro Pascal, and she deleted that.
She went, okay, well, he's kind of convinced me I shouldn't do that, so she took it off.
So, here is a woman who has acted perfectly properly, has done literally nothing wrong, and she is lost or losing her career over it.
This is where we are in America today.
Now, I think this just emphasizes a point that my wife Debbie made yesterday, I believe, on the show, saying it really shows that conservatives, free thinkers, patriots, people who don't want to be beholden to this suffocating, disgusting, tyrannical...
We need to create our own institutions, our own schools and our own platforms and our own servers and our own movies.
And so in that sense, you can almost see that Gina Carano has defected to our side of the table.
She's now part of our team.
Why? And she's a talented actress, which we need.
So we need to get about the business, not just of talking about, but building these institutions.
It seems to me this is the collective project in which Conservative money, conservative creative artists, conservative educators need to start working on building these institutions.
I'll be featuring people who do that on this podcast.
I think you know I myself have been doing it in the realms of education and movies and documentaries and media in the best way that I know how.
Bottom line, Gina Carano, you're better than they are.
This is a strike that they've launched against you.
But I hope, I pray, and I hope that our team, our side, can be a part of making your career in the long term bigger than ever.
Today we're in a battle for truth and I'd like to recommend an insightful book to you called Reflections on the Existence of God by bestselling author Richard Simmons III. He writes on topics like life, death, sex, truth.
Reflections on the Existence of God is a collection of short essays that tackles the biggest question of all.
Does God exist?
The book is well researched, easy to read, and now a bestseller on Amazon.
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I want to talk about America's political and cultural elite.
The very people that Trump would often target in his rallies and the people who purport to be the ruling class, you might say, the opinion-forming class of America.
Now, there are some people who think that elites are inherently bad.
I'm actually not one of those people.
I think we need elites.
Conservatism needs elites.
Republicans need elites.
By that, I just mean we need constitutional lawyers and competent professionals and people who are very good at what they do, creative people, but we need elites that are ultimately helping the public, helping the common good, helping to serve society rather than serve themselves at the expense of society.
But somehow we've got in America today a self-serving elite that's not only milking the country for its own good, but it's an elite that's not an intellectual elite.
It's a super dumb elite.
These are people who are fake.
Members of the elite, they somehow got in the club through the back door, you might say.
And I'm trying to figure out what's happened to our ruling class.
Now, there's a really interesting article by Michael Lind in Tablet Magazine.
Michael Lind, someone I've known for my DC days, very smart guy, now a professor at UT Austin.
And Michael Lind makes the point that we have gone from having regional elites, which is to say powerful local communities, In Raleigh and Richmond and San Diego to now a kind of national ruling class.
And this national ruling class, he says, is defined not even so much by entrepreneurship.
Many times it's not some guy who owns, you know, a big pest control business or seven Denny's.
No, it's professionals who work in media or they work in the arts.
These are people, according to Lind, who got their certificates by going to the best schools.
They've got If you will, the Ivy League pedigree, or they went to Swarthmore or Oberlin or Berkeley.
Education is the passport, supposedly, into the new elite.
But then Michael Lind adds this.
The new kind of criterion to be in leaders is not just that you have to go to these schools, but you also have to be woke.
You have to be enlightened from the progressive point of view.
This is, for example, what would keep me clearly out of this elite.
I'm not woke, so I don't really belong, even if I have the other credentials.
But who does belong?
Well, this is where it gets really interesting because you've got all these people who are in this elite.
Dr. Jill Biden, you know, community college instructor.
Michelle Obama, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, all these people who talk the most abject rubbish, semi-illiterate in many cases, and yet they're the elite.
What happened? Well, I think the answer is that wokeness Substituted for ability in giving these people a way in.
It's very clear affirmative action has provided a pathway for some of them.
In other cases they just parade their left-wing credentials and that substitutes for intelligence or intelligent thought.
A really good example of this came recently from Andrea Mitchell herself.
She put out a tweet scorning Ted Cruz.
Now, Ted Cruz had compared the impeachment hearing to Shakespeare and Shakespeare's phrase from Macbeth, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
That's Ted Cruz. And here is Andrea Mitchell.
Notice her tone. Senator Cruz says impeachment trial is like Shakespeare full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
No, that's Faulkner.
That's Faulkner.
No, Andrea.
Twit alert. It's Shakespeare.
I quote now from Macbeth.
Out, out, brief candle.
This is life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
So where does Andrea Mitchell get the idea that it's Faulkner?
Well, Faulkner wrote a book called The Sound and the Fury in which he got the name, the title, from Shakespeare.
But poor Andrea Mitchell doesn't know that.
Now, what makes this even funnier is that Andrea Mitchell...
Um... Went to the University of Pennsylvania.
She went to an Ivy League school.
And she majored in English.
So she has to give some explanation.
I mean, this is such an embarrassment to Penn.
I mean, Penn is the bottom rung of the Ivy League.
Some people don't even think it's an Ivy League school.
They think it's a state school. And we usually let them.
But nevertheless, here's Andrea Mitchell.
She has to explain herself.
And so she knows that she did something really stupid.
So she goes, I clearly studied too much American literature and not enough Macbeth.
Not enough Macbeth.
Bottom line of it is she studied no Macbeth.
She knows nothing about it.
These are among the most famous lines in the play.
There are many people who've never read Macbeth, but they know, they can recognize these lines from Shakespeare.
So here you have someone who obviously, an Englishman, and this reminds me of AOC. AOC was an economics major.
I learned some valuable lessons from Milton Keynes.
I mean, what are the people in the Boston Economics Department thinking?
This is what they produce. Higher education, take a bow.
You got to take the credit or perhaps the blame for people like AOC and Andrea Mitchell.
The bottom line is that many of these people are complete frauds.
Several years ago, Alan Wolf, who's the dean at Boston College, wrote a vicious review of my book called The Enemy at Home, a book that deals with radical Islam.
And he's like, oh, this guy goes, Dinesh doesn't know the first thing about Islam!
And I'm like, really? So I invited Alan Wolfe to a debate on his own campus, and we had the debate, and in the cross-examination, I began to pose simple questions to Alan Wolfe.
I asked him, I said, well, you know, you say I don't know the first thing about Islam, so why don't you tell me which is the biggest Muslim democracy in the world today?
And he looks at me like, who?
Is this a quiz? I'm like, you know, yeah, it is a quiz.
You're the head of the Boise Religion Center on campus.
Which is the largest Muslim democracy in the world?
He goes, India?
I go, India? India's not a Muslim country at all.
India's a Hindu country.
Muslims are about 15%.
Try again. Pakistan?
I go, no, it's Indonesia.
And then I kept asking him questions like that.
Simple questions, basics about Islam.
I asked him at one point, Iran is today a Shia country, but it used to be Sunni.
When did Iran become Shia?
Well, the correct answer is during the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century.
But of course, he didn't know that. He was, Iran used to be Sunni.
And I'm like, this is the problem.
You're heading a religion center at a major university.
You don't know the first thing about Islam.
Now, at the end of this debate, I went to Boston College and I asked them to release the video of the debate.
And their public relations department refused because they realized that I had essentially made one of their leading lights, a supposed intellectual, into a complete fool.
And it's my experience on campus after campus that many of these people, some of them big names in academia, big names in media, are actually complete ignoramuses.
They don't know half, they don't know hardly anything on the topics on which they opine.
And like Andrea Mitchell, it isn't just that she doesn't know.
That would be okay.
It's okay not to know.
But it's one thing when you don't know and think you do and then strut and preen and have airs as if you're the one who's lecturing people who happen to know, like Ted Cruz.
That makes you more than a fool.
It makes you a national embarrassment.
I don't trust the mafia and neither do I trust the scoundrels who run big tech and neither should you.
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It's time for the mailbox, so let's go to a very interesting question.
Hey, Dinesh. My name is Matthew.
I'm a 24-year-old from Boston, Massachusetts.
So, I saw you post this thing today about Tom Brady being supposedly a racist for winning the Super Bowl during Black History Month, and I just got one question.
The Super Bowl for the past however long, 50 years, has always been during February, which is the Black History Month, basically forever.
Now they decide to call him a racist?
What about the other times he won?
Was he not a racist man?
Seriously, what does the left expect us to do during this month?
Just eat black beans and black olives?
Dress in black clothes?
Unreal, man. Anyway, keep up the good work, bro.
Thank you, Matthew, for that question.
You know, with Tom Brady, I love the way that this guy pays, you may say, no attention to the caterwauling left.
He just pays attention to the people that he respects and cares about.
And that's a pretty good rule for life, by the way.
You should pursue the esteem and respect of the people that you respect.
Don't play to the crowd.
You don't really have to.
Tom Brady doesn't.
Now, Black History Month.
Initially, I always thought it's kind of silly to have a month devoted to black history.
Black history is part of American history.
But look, I think it's fine to have Black History Month.
I think what's interesting is the one thing that is suppressed in Black History Month is that a lot of the heroes of black history...
Were Republicans.
Were, in fact, I don't just mean that they happened to be Republicans.
Being a Republican was the focus of their political activity.
Think of somebody like Harriet Tubman.
Harriet Tubman's on the $20 bill.
The one thing you never hear, Harriet Tubman, the woman who ran the Underground Railroad, very active as a Republican.
Frederick Douglass. Here's a quote from the runaway slave and abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass.
The Republican Party is the ship.
All else is the sea.
Pretty good quote for us to keep in mind today.
The Republican Party is the ship.
In other words, there's no way to fight for black liberation, and in fact for liberation in general, without doing it through the instrument, the political instrument, the Republican Party that can achieve those goals.
Again, you'll hear about Frederick Douglass, but his...
Remember, Frederick Douglass was a high official in the Republican Party.
He represented the party.
He was a diplomat on behalf of Republican administrations.
All of that is kind of kept, you may say, on the down low.
Ida B. Wells, the activist against lynching.
Another person who repudiates the Democrats and leans toward Republicans.
Another fact that is almost never mentioned.
Look her up on Wikipedia. You'll have a hard time finding that.
Bottom line, there's a glorious tradition of black heroes and heroines fighting for liberation, and the vast, vast majority of them were Republicans.
That's a little note to keep in mind during Black History Month.
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