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Feb. 15, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:47
THE GREAT DECEPTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep26
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The whole point of the impeachment charade is to prevent Trump from running again.
So why are the Democrats and the left so deathly afraid of him?
Plus, the Democrats' lies and their enablers.
And author Julie Kelly joins to talk about Never Trump.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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It's very obvious that the whole point of impeachment was to prevent Trump from being able to run again. And the Democrats went all in on this and so of course did their allies in the media. And the whole thing kind of imploded on them.
It was kind of like a magic show. I almost envision a magic show where the magician is this kind of malevolent guy, you know, yeah here's my first trick, here's my second trick. And every time he does his tricks there's a little kid in the audience who goes, I gotcha!
I know how you did that one.
Hey, listen, the money's still in your pocket.
Hey, listen, you know when you put the smoke, that's when you took the staircase in the middle of the stage.
Hey, you have an accomplice in the audience.
That's how you pulled off that one.
And the magician keeps getting angrier and angrier because he's busted every time by this annoying kid who catches him, you may say, in the act.
And that's what it was like.
The Trump lawyers were like, busted, busted, busted again.
You're fixing the tweets and changing the quotes and editing the audio and putting out brazen lies.
And so the whole thing became ridiculous.
Now... What was so wonderful is that the American people could see it.
They saw it for themselves, and the press had to show it.
So, just what I was hoping for, that the Trump attorneys would turn the tables, put the Democrats on trial, that's exactly what they did.
But, my point is this whole enterprise from the left was driven because of fear of Trump.
Fear of the return of Trump.
Fear that Trump, like the Terminator, would be, I'll be back!
Now, my question is, why are they so scared of him?
You'd think that they wouldn't be.
If they feel like, wow, you know, we beat him fair and square this time.
Gee, the guy is well into his 70s.
He's going to be in his very late 70s in 2024.
This guy is no threat at all.
But they evidently don't think that.
If they did, there would be no need for any of this, for this incredible effort.
So they're scared of him, and it's very instructive to think why.
Now, I think the answer to it is sort of two-fold.
The first is that Trump has figured out the way forward for the Republican Party.
And that is for the Republican Party to be the party of the middle and the working class.
Now, remember that Republicans have for decades kind of ignored the working class.
They've done it in the names of sort of two theories.
The neoconservative foreign policy theory that sends working people off to war.
Even though the people who send them off to war would never dream of going themselves.
They're happy to dispatch other people to go fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, faraway countries.
You come back with your legs blown off and without any arms, then we'll send some more to replace you if that happens.
Second, a libertarian theory that focuses on globalization and the wonders of free trade that is completely blind to the impact of that in decimating the working class at home and destroying whole communities.
So this was, in fact, the M.O., the defining feature of the Republican Party, and Trump went, no way.
We're not sending those kids off to fight, and we're going to protect their economic interests.
That's the real meaning of America First, that the jobs of Americans matter, and politicians should put some importance on that.
The second thing about Trump is that Trump figured out that he didn't have to be scared of the left and of the media.
Not only did he not have to be scared of them, he could fight back.
He could attack them straight on.
He's the first Republican president I've seen who looks the media in the face and ridicules them.
And they don't expect that.
They're deeply insulted. They're used to setting the parameters of the debate.
They're used to saying, hey, Republicans, you've got to march between these two walls.
You can't get outside the lines.
And Trump went, try me.
And so the left realized, you know what?
We've got to teach this guy a lesson.
We've got to reach into our grab bag and pick out our most deadly slingshots and fling them at him, and that will be the end of him.
We're going to use sex scandals against him, and the way to do it is very easy.
All we have to do is fish out a Stormy Daniels and go, hey, Mr.
Trump, here's Stormy Daniels.
And then we can go home and laugh, because the Republicans will do what they always do, which is surround one of their own guys and knife him.
The Republicans are the straight-laced party.
They have no tolerance for this, so we the left can recruit virtue itself on behalf of vice.
Except it didn't work in Trump's case.
Hey, Mr. Trump, we got something for you.
Yeah, what you got? Stormy Daniels.
Ha! What else you got?
And suddenly Trump, in a weird way by lowering the bar, could just kind of nimbly jump over it.
They couldn't get him. So then they decided, okay, well, we have one more kill shot that's even deadlier than that.
And that is the accusation of racism.
This is the accusation that can be counted to make every living Republican run for his life.
And it always works.
And we're going to use it on Trump.
And we're going to call him the greatest racist of all time.
He hates blacks. He hates Mexicans.
He wants to put immigrants in cages.
And they tried it relentlessly, unstoppably for four years.
And guess what? Trump increased his share of the Black and Hispanic vote.
Trump had the big ha on them.
And they can't believe it.
They don't understand how Trump could do what no Republican has successfully done.
And so the danger for the left is not just Trump coming back, but Trump teaching a lesson to the Republican Party.
What if the Trump lesson is now picked up by Ron DeSantis in Florida?
And Ted Cruz in Texas.
And Josh Hawley in Missouri.
What if suddenly they realize, number one, we should be the champions of the working class.
Number two, we shouldn't be scared of the media.
Let's give as good as we get.
And number three, who cares if they throw the good old tired accusation of racism?
It's all a big... It's all nonsense.
And it's not going to hurt you if you don't let it.
What if these Republicans pick up that lesson?
This will be lethal for the left.
They know it. This is, by the way, why they're working so hard to put pressure on Hawley, pressure on Cruz, pressure on DeSantis, pressure on all Republicans to disavow Trump.
Because it is Trump that they fear, but even more what they fear is the Trump spirit, the Trump philosophy, which is the way forward and is, in fact, the path to success.
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The Nazi propagandist Goebbels once said that propaganda should never be judged by the standard of truth.
It doesn't matter if propaganda is true or false.
The only thing that matters is, does it work?
And Goebbels concluded, if it works, it's good propaganda.
And if it doesn't work, it's bad propaganda.
Well, by this Goebbels standard, one would have to say that the whole house manager case At the Senate trial for impeachment was bad propaganda.
Why? Because it didn't work.
It was exposed. It imploded.
It blew up in their faces.
And it did so as the Trump lawyers were able to bring out...
Hey, you altered this tweet.
Hey, you manufactured this one.
Hey, you changed the video right here.
Hey, you cut it off right before the context, which shows the exact opposite.
So, bam, bam, bam.
And you could just see the day's looks on the part of these Democrats.
Why? Because they're not used to being called out on it.
And they're not used to being called out on it, especially on the national stage.
This was the key.
Normally, the Democrats work kind of in cahoots with the media, and they can put out the most brazen lies.
Let's take a few from Biden himself.
Antifa is merely an idea.
Now, that's not true.
But how does Biden have the chutzpah to say it?
Because he knows that CNN will report it with a straight face.
He knows that fact-checkers will check him and conclude Biden is speaking the truth.
Antifa really is not a single group.
And since it's a coalition of groups, Biden is kind of right to call it just an idea.
Or here's Biden again.
My son's corruption has been discredited.
Allegations against my family have been disproven.
This is completely false.
They have not been disproven.
In fact, if anything, the opposite.
But again, there is an army of academicians...
Of media types, of influential organizations, of bogus fact-checking operations.
And the point is, all of these work in a coordinated fashion to reinforce and promulgate and defend the lies of the left and of the Democratic Party.
One of those lies, of course, is the idea that Trump claimed that there were, quote, fine people on both sides.
And this lie has been Trump now trumpeted ever since Charlottesville for almost four years.
So I want to begin by looking at it the way in which right in front of a national audience, in a manner that the media could not camouflage, they had to show the impeachment trial, Some of these big lies by the Democrats were debunked in a very straightforward way.
Let's begin with what Joaquin Castro said.
Essentially, he quoted Trump, direct quote, saying that, telling his supporters allegedly that they should, quote, fight to the death.
Now, Trump didn't say that, and Joaquin Castro was given a chance to correct himself, but he refused.
He insisted, yes, Trump did say it, fight to the death, and here is Trump's lawyer blowing Joaquin Castro out of the water.
Listen. He knew what he was doing.
He knew that the president didn't say that to his people.
What he said was, if it happened to the Dems, this is what they would do in his speech that day.
You know what he said?
He said, if this happened to the Democrats, if the election was stolen from the Democrats, all hell would break loose.
But, he said to his supporters, we are smarter, we are stronger, and we're going to do what they did all summer long.
So Trump here is attributing a view, fight to the death, to the Democrats and disavowing it for his own team, saying, we're not like that.
We don't fight like that.
But because it, quote, came out of his mouth...
Joaquin Castro goes, well, he said it.
He did say it. It came out of his mouth.
And of course, the media is like, oh yes, he said it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We heard him say it ourselves.
So this is the way.
It's important to realize that this happens all the time.
Here's the difference. You don't normally have a Trump lawyer on hand to bust him.
But now we see how this works.
We see how this game is played.
Impeachment, in that sense, highly instructive because it puts the lies on stage and exposes them.
Now let's turn to the Charlottesville lie.
Here is the clip attributed to Trump and in Trump's own words talking about very fine people.
It's introduced by Trump's lawyer.
Well, this lie traveled around the world a few times, made its way into the Biden campaign talking points, and ended up on the Senate floor.
The Charlottesville lie.
Very fine people on both sides.
Except that isn't all he said.
And they knew it then, and they know it now.
Watch this. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
And right there, right there, boom, the Democrats cut the tape.
So they go, yep, there you go.
Trump said it. He claimed there were very fine people on both sides.
Ergo, Trump is saying that neo-Nazis and racists and white supremacists are very fine people.
And again, let's remember the professors who have affirmed this, the fact-checkers who have declared it to be true.
Remember, all of these people have had access to what Trump actually said, but kind of for the first time, again on a national stage, in front of the American people, Trump's lawyers played what Trump actually said.
Listen. George Washington was a slave owner.
Was George Washington a slave owner?
No. So will George Washington now lose his status?
Are we going to take down, excuse me, are we going to take down statues to George Washington?
How about Thomas Jefferson?
What do you think of Thomas Jefferson?
You like him? Okay, good.
Are we going to take down the statue?
Because he was a major slave owner.
Now, are we going to take down his statue?
So you know what? It's fine.
You're changing history.
You're changing culture.
And you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.
But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?
And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
Trump could hardly have been more clear.
There are many people who are in the protest who are not white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and some of them are very fine people.
So this is not the case where the Democrats and the left are committing an honest mistake.
This is a deliberate lie peddled in a coordinated way by some very malevolent people who know it's a lie.
They're knowingly lying to the American people and relying on their numbers the size of their media megaphone to get away with it.
In the 1960s, the political radical and activist Saul Alinsky was approached By a group of leftists.
This was on the verge of George H.W. Bush speaking at a UN meeting.
And the leftists told Alinsky, we're gonna show up at this Bush speech and we're going to equate Bush with the Ku Klux Klan.
And Alinsky very slyly gave them some advice.
He said, don't do that. Don't just say George Bush equals KKK. You show up dressed as the KKK. And every time George Bush begins to speak, you jump up and down and cheer wildly.
And this was the key point from Alinsky.
And the media will do the rest.
The media will make the connection between Bush and the Klan.
Now, Alinsky knew full well that the Klan was a military arm of the Democratic Party.
He knew that George H.W. Bush has nothing to do with the Klan.
He knew that Ku Klux Klan guys don't like somebody like George H.W. Bush.
He knew all that. But to him, it was irrelevant.
He was operating by the Goebbels standard.
Good propaganda is propaganda that works, and bad propaganda is propaganda that doesn't work.
No wonder Alinsky dedicated his book Rules for Radicals to Lucifer, because these are Luciferian strategies being used by very bad people to promulgate lies that they know are lies.
And Alinsky is gone, but his heirs live today on the left and in the Democratic Party.
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Gina Carano, the former MMA fighter and actress, has been uncanceled, I'm happy to say.
I want to congratulate Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire.
Why? Because they have helped to uncancel Gina Carano.
This is all very important because, well, here's the backstory.
Gina Carano was on Disney's show, The Mandalorian, and Disney decided, along with Lucasfilms, that they would respond to pressure from the left.
And cancel Gina Carano.
Why? Because of her social media tweets.
She was apparently seen as having made light of the whole trans issue.
She was seen also, she was accused of being anti-Semitic.
Now, that's a very serious charge and it's worth paying attention to for a moment.
Gina Carano wrote, Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors and even by children.
And then she goes on to say, how is that any different from hating someone for their political views?
Now, there is nothing anti-Semitic about this, and that isn't even just my view.
Even Jonathan Chait, who's a writer for New York Magazine, a reliable leftist, a progressive, Even he is a little taken aback by this, taken aback by the characterization of Gina Carano as anti-Semitic.
And he quotes Gina Carano, the quote I just gave, and he says, overheated comparisons to Nazi Germany are quite common, and more to the point, not anti-Semitic in italics.
There is no hint anywhere in this post of sympathy for Nazis or blame for their victims.
And Jonathan Chait goes on to say that Hollywood is now apparently returning to the days of its blacklist.
He says in the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood had a blacklist, and it was aimed at people who had suspected communist affiliations.
And he goes, now they're bringing it back.
And he goes, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blacklist policy from the emerging current treatment Jonathan Chait even goes on to fault the media.
He goes, they've been reporting this Gina Carano stuff as if she really was anti-Semitic.
They're just taking it as obvious and at face value, even though he goes, when you scrutinize what she said, there's no anti-Semitism there at all.
Now, Conservatives obviously are lucky to have a rare ally like Jonathan Chait on this issue because it is amazing how many liberals have forgotten about their commitment to free speech and to the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights has now essentially become verboten on the left.
But it's one thing even for conservatives to complain about this stuff.
And it's another whole thing to do something about it.
The good thing about what Ben Shapiro is doing and Daily Wire is doing is they've partnered with Gina Carano and said, hey, listen, guys, let's make a film together.
Gina Carano has an idea for a movie in which she would star, and they're going to start working on making this happen.
And here's Gina Carano. She goes, I cried out and my prayer was answered.
I love this.
To take someone who they're trying to destroy your career and give them a sense of hope.
As many of you know, I have tried in my career over the last, really, eight years now, not just to criticize Michael Moore films, but to make my own documentaries better, more intelligent, more successful than his, and have an impact.
Last year, Debbie and I released our first feature film called Infidel, which got very good reviews and tremendous audience acclaim.
And is now available on DVD. We have three to four film projects already in the works right now.
So this is the solution.
The solution ultimately is not just to be a culture critic.
But to create culture.
To create, you may say, alternative culture.
That's what the left did.
When they didn't like the culture that was here, traditional culture, they created bohemian and alternative culture that became the mainstream culture.
And if we want to now see more movies with traditional themes and traditional heroes celebrating patriotism and heroism, we better start making some culture of our own.
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I want to talk more broadly about the conundrum, the problem, the crisis of being a conservative in a liberal society.
And I don't just mean in a society that happens to be liberal, but a society that employs a crushing leftism That is trying to choke you, to force you into submission, to make your life miserable, to destroy you if you don't conform.
What do you do in such a situation?
Now, interestingly, this kind of a situation has been the norm on the American campus for some decades now.
When I was a student, William F. Buckley came to speak at Dartmouth, and he spoke on the exact topic of what do you do if you're a conservative in a thoroughly and oppressively liberal culture?
Buckley's point was that you can't be a conservative in the normal sense because conservatives typically conserve.
But what are you going to conserve?
Liberalism? Intolerance?
The effort to choke your voice and shut you up?
Are you going to conserve that?
Those institutions? No, says Buckley.
You have to stop being a conservative, and he doesn't mean stop being a philosophical conservative, but stop being a temperamental conservative.
Recognize the urgency of your situation.
Recognize that you are in a form of, you are under the subjugation of very bad institutions, and your job is basically to become a kind of gorilla, not gorilla, but gorilla, and undermine those assumptions.
Make trouble for those people.
Make their lives miserable.
Fight back. And create to the degree you can.
You can't do much of this on campus, but create institutions of your own.
Now, this situation that Buckley described in the 80s on campus is now the situation facing our whole culture.
We have a toxic, vicious form of leftism that is trying to force us into submission.
It will be content with nothing less.
It wants us to live in its world, and it's not going to give us any other choice.
But we do have a choice.
And our choice is really simple.
It is to stop being conservative.
Stop conserving that nonsense.
And basically, you may say secede.
I don't mean secede from the country.
I mean secede within the country.
Create our own institutions.
This secession of the American mind, as to a large degree, already occurred.
And if we are not going to submit to them, by which I mean subject to their ideological indoctrination, going back to not just college, but high school and even middle school and elementary school, if we don't want to be polluted by their toxic culture that makes right into wrong and wrong into right, that corrupts our values, if we are not going to submit to that, We better learn to make our own America.
Now, what does that actually mean?
I think in the end it means create our own institutions.
But it doesn't just mean our own movies.
That's part of it. We talked about Gina Carano and making conservative films.
Not niche conservative films, but mainstream films that exhibit conservative values.
That's where we need to go. That's what our movie, Infidel, is.
But we also need conservative media.
Not just media that has a kind of niche audience or niche reach.
Not even necessarily a kind of all-day political news station.
We need channels that are lifestyle channels that stretch across the country that reach 30, 50, 70 million people that pipe their way into every American home so that we have our megaphones to compete with the megaphones of the other side.
And I think long-term, we need also to build our own universities.
And this may seem kind of crazy.
What are you talking about building 300 campuses to compete with the campuses that have now been overrun by the left?
No. I don't think we need 300 campuses.
We actually need one world-class online university that has for its faculty the 100 or 200 leading scholars and best teachers in the world.
Of history and political science and literature and philosophy and mathematics and astrophysics.
And the beauty of this is that if you can deliver online a high-quality education comparable to a Stanford, comparable to an Oxford or Harvard, and do it for a tiny fraction of the cost, In other words, not $60,000 a year or even $30,000 a year, but $5,000 a year, you would suddenly and immediately have the largest probably educational institution in the world.
You would not only be a force in American higher education, but global higher education.
Someone needs to do this.
I actually know how to do it.
The problem is accreditation.
Right now, you need accreditation in order for people to transfer credits, to graduate and take their degrees and go on to graduate school and so on.
So accreditation, which is to say government control, is the hitch, which means that this idea to take off, to be successful, needs to be deployed through an existing accredited institution.
But if we can find such an institution, then we know a way, I know a way, to build an educational platform that would be truly transformative and that would rock higher education to the core.
I'm not saying that Harvard and Yale would go away tomorrow, but what I am saying is suddenly you have something new, kind of like looking at an iPhone and suddenly all the old phones are obsolete.
We need to build our version of the academic iPhone.
Now, I'm laying all this out because it's all continuous with a way of thinking.
A way of thinking that says, let's not get into silly parlor games.
I'm thinking of this sort of National Review cocktail conversation at Paoni's restaurant about should we oppose digital media and call for government regulation or are these private companies that we should allow to do whatever they want?
I mean, these guys are engaging in sort of fireplace conversation when we're facing a free speech crisis and a crisis of our institutions.
And what I'm saying is instead of this intellectual tubanism, let's get about the serious work of thinking about coordinating, organizing, and building rival institutions so that we have our own America, a livable America inside America.
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I am just a big fan of the writer and now author Julie Kelly.
She writes for a web magazine called American Greatness that is literally one of my favorite magazines, not just for short articles, but deep think pieces that really talk about the phenomenon of conservatism and Trump and the way forward for the Republican Party.
Julie is also the author of an important new book, Disloyal Opposition.
It's a well-researched book that goes into the phenomenon that we call Never Trump.
Welcome, Julie Kelly.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Let me start by asking you this whole impeachment circus.
The left drove it with great passion, and it seems to me that they had a goal here, not just to prevent Trump from running again, but the broader goal of driving a wedge between the Trumpsters, you may say, the MAGA crowd on the one hand, and traditional Republicans on the other.
Do you agree with that analysis?
And if so, do you think that the left is making some progress in this area?
I definitely do, and thank you so much for having me on.
I've been a big fan of yours since I first read The Liberal Education, so this is kind of surreal.
So thank you so much. But yes, they definitely do want to separate the MAGA people from the establishment Republicans, which, as you know, is mostly driven by the neocon side of the Republican Party.
And so we saw this play out a little bit, the vote for impeachment With Liz Cheney endorsing it and her harsh criticism of the president.
But I don't think that it's going to work, Dineshyn.
You probably don't either.
And I do think impeachment also serves another purpose, a bigger purpose, which is to try to bury any investigations, either federal or at the state level, Into what happened in the 2020 election.
This is really to criminalize any skepticism or doubt about what happened in that election.
You also see DOJ using that to levy harsher charges against people who were at the Capitol January 6th.
So this has a lot of moving parts to it.
But to your point, yes.
The old Beltway bipartisan crowd of Republicans, they want to get rid of the MAGA people, have Trump stay in Mar-a-Lago and keep his mouth shut and just go back to, you know, like it's 1995 again.
You wrote an article about the guy who is the head of the group Cowboys for Trump and the fact that he is being held without bail.
And I think the reason given by the judge was, well, he doesn't accept the results of the election, so he rejects the authority of our judicial process, and therefore I can't trust him by letting him out, almost as if to say that skepticism about election results is a kind of That's exactly right.
As you said, he wasn't even in the Capitol.
It was a minor trespassing charge, but he was held without bail for a few weeks.
Finally, the chief judge in Washington, D.C. let him out, but not before giving him a good tongue lashing.
You know, all of these people now are presumed guilty before they even go to trial.
But he was held for a few weeks.
And all these people have been arrested, hunted down by FBI agents across the country.
And yes, criminalizing.
I mean, they they asked him, do you believe that Joe Biden was legitimately elected?
And he said, no, this is an FBI interview that was used by the judge to deem him a flight risk and refuse him bail.
And right now, there are at least two dozen people charged with insurrection who are being held without bail.
Meanwhile, of course, as we know, tens of thousands of criminals who ransacked our country for months on end last year, gotten away with it, not only gotten away, but were are can are cheered as heroes.
So yes, this is really the impeachment is one end.
But what our Justice Department is doing to people who are at involved on January 6th is also just as terrifying.
I mean, what I found very poignant about your article is you use the phrase political prisoners.
We have political prisoners in America today.
And so we're so accustomed to talking about, oh, there's Navalny in Russia.
Oh, there's somebody being held in Myanmar against their will.
And this kind of American sense that it doesn't happen here.
And I think what you're chillingly saying is that it does.
Now... Let me turn for a moment to Nikki Haley because she recently made a kind of, I think, a little surprising disavowal of Trump.
Surprising in part because it was timed, it seems, almost to convince GOP senators to vote for an impeachment conviction.
Do you think that this is opportunism on Nikki Haley's part?
What do you think she's trying to achieve?
And if it's opportunism...
Is it stupid opportunism?
Because essentially Nikki Haley has killed her chances to be the nominee in 2024.
I totally agree with you there.
She made some comments right after January 6th along those lines, but what she said last week, really speaking out so harshly against the president, I don't know.
She's definitely trying to carve out her platform for Her niche for 2024, I think it's a failing one.
I think she will follow in the footsteps of other people like Jeb Bush who thought that this kind of You know, go along, get along.
I'm going to regurgitate the narrative of the left or the Democratic Party because I'm going to look like I'm a uniter.
And I'm the real thing.
I'm the opposite of, say, Donald Trump.
But this base, even if Trump doesn't run or doesn't continue to stay involved, what we've learned and what we've seen over the past four or five years is not going to go away.
And I think a test will not just be loyalty to Donald Trump, but loyalty to the agenda that he created and the political approach that he tried to implement.
That's going to be even more important, I think, than policy moving forward.
When we come back in just a minute, we're going to be talking to Julie Kelly about NeverTrump and the Lincoln Project.
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We're back with author and writer Julie Kelly, author of the great book, Disloyal Opposition, which basically takes you into the sordid world of Never Trump.
And at the center of the sordid world is a group called the Lincoln Project.
Now, I find this name itself personally offensive because I can only imagine what Abraham Lincoln would think of these shysters.
I mean, this is a group of people who are doing their best To pry people loose from the Republican Party in the name of Lincoln.
Try to imagine that. They're using the name of the founder of the Republican Party to alienate people from the Republican Party.
And they're doing it for sex and they're doing it for money.
Wow! Julie, this Lincoln project has now been embroiled in sex scandal and scandals involving pedophilia and grooming underage boys and all kinds of nasty stuff.
I don't necessarily want to go into all that.
But what I want to get to is, don't you find it, let's just call it ironic, at the starting gate?
These are people who have been accusing Donald Trump of lacking moral character.
That's exactly right.
There are a lot of ironies between what the Lincoln Project principles are doing and the projection that they've put on not just Donald Trump, but Republican lawmakers who support him, Donald Trump's own family, and of course his supporters.
I don't mince words when I specifically talk about the Lincoln Project people.
These are vile people.
They're political losers.
They're washed up has-beens who someone put together and seeded this organization with almost $100 million, mostly from, almost all from Democratic donors, top donors.
In fact, the biggest contributor to the Lincoln Project is the Senate Majority PAC, the Democratic PAC.
And so it'd be interesting to see if the contributors catch any heat for what they've done.
But you're right. They have been vicious in their approach to Donald Trump.
And here they are. You know, now they're fleeing the sinking ship of the Lincoln Project.
I believe there's only one or two principals left.
Steve Schmidt just announced his departure from the outlet over the weekend.
But look, these are people who deserve everything that's coming to them.
And hopefully, this organization will be disbanded.
Their contributors will dry up.
But also, we need to make sure that we don't have to see their faces anymore.
On CNN or MSNBC or read their garbage in the Washington Post or their really insidious cable videos that they put together.
So it just could not be happening to a more deserving group of people who are poisoning our political system.
They are toxic individuals.
Everything about the Lincoln Project is everything that's wrong about American politics right now.
Now, would it be fair to say, I've been trying to think about these characters, and you describe them as losers.
Now, I think that being losers in what they do, they're supposed to be political consultants, they were supposed to help Republicans get elected, right?
People like John McCain fail.
So, what they figured out is, listen, what about if we find a new kind of customer?
A Democrat. What if we sell ourselves as Republicans who are willing to bash our own side?
Surely that's going to have some monetary value for the left and also political value.
So CNN, MSNBC love having on these so-called Republicans bashing the Republican president.
All these guys, and they're not alone.
I mean, if I think, for example, of a former colleague of mine, Bill Kristol, at the American Enterprise Institute, I mean, my take on Bill is he's the untalented son of two very talented parents.
Bill's never written an important book.
He's a pontificator.
But there was no market for his tiresome pontification, so he realized, wow, listen, how about if I go to Democrats and I become your favorite Republican to bash other Republicans?
So these guys were cunning in finding a customer on the other side of the aisle and essentially turning, you may call it, Benedict Arnoldism into a profession.
That's a great way to put it.
That's exactly what they did.
They saw that there was going to be this shtick where you could go on cable network news or even the Sunday shows and pretend that you represented a big swath of the Republican Party who was disgruntled and disappointed in Donald Trump, which of course we know was not reality.
So one of the chapters in my book is called Useful Idiots.
That's exactly what they have been and continue to be.
Bill Kristol also, look, he's raked in tens of millions of dollars from left-wing interests, including the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, who has donated millions and millions of dollars to all of his Never Trump outlets.
He's not a Republican or a conservative.
He's in with the other billionaires like Tom Steyer and George Soros, who We want to open up our borders.
We want to open up our elections, similar to what we had in 2020.
There's nothing conservative about the funders.
So it's this whole mirage that they're giving off.
They're total frauds.
And so it'll be curious to see if there's any more blowback to the other Never Trumpers after the Lincoln Project.
I mean, it would be great for Bill Kristol's group to be exposed to.
Not the sketchy personal behavior, but certainly All of their funding and the idea that there's nothing conservative or Republican left about any of them.
Yeah, it's difficult for me to see Bill Kristol engaging in sketchy sexual behavior.
He's kind of too dull for that.
But in any event, the point being here that, Julie, you were on this from the beginning.
You were early on to these guys.
You've been sounding the alarm, and now you've been stunningly vindicated.
And I think for you, it must be almost a delightful sight to see this kind of camp of villains imploding in this kind of marvelous way.
It really is. I mean, I would hate to say, you know, you're a decent person.
You don't want to be gratified at others' problems.
But look, these are people who are very toxic.
They've been vicious to the president and his family and now his followers.
And supporters. And so they really deserve what's coming.
And I appreciate your saying that.
I have been tracking them. But Dinesh, you probably feel this way too.
We feel betrayed by what these people have done.
I mean, you've known Bill Kristol for a long time.
Bill Kristol is one of the reasons I got involved in politics in the 90s.
I mean, I was a huge fan of his.
So we feel betrayed by all of them.
We feel betrayed by the McCain people, now by Mitt Romney.
And now the Cheney family as well.
We defended them, donated to them, voted for them, backed them up when they were called war criminals.
And now here they are.
This is not just undermining the president, but also trying to discredit, you know, 75 at least million American rank and file Republicans.
It's really a disgrace what they've all done.
Absolutely. Julie Kelly, thank you for joining me on the podcast.
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It's time for the mailbox, and I want to begin with a very interesting question from Bill, who I'm not sure I'm qualified to do this, but he wants my thoughts on the significance of Valentine's Day.
I think Debbie would probably be more qualified than me on this one.
I see her kind of chuckling in the background.
She's looking at me as like, oh, I wonder what you're going to say about this one.
Well, let me just say that, you know, Valentine's Day is...
Well, first of all, it's not something that is celebrated in India.
Now, when I say that, you might say, well, yeah, that's because India is not...
A Christian country and they don't know who Valentine is.
I don't think most Americans do either.
But the point is it's actually not about that.
The reason that there's no Valentine's Day in Thailand or in China or in India is because, and this is where I'm going with this, the very idea of romantic love and a day that celebrates it This idea is a Western idea.
And this may seem like a startling thing to say because, you know, what are you saying, Dinesh, that only Western people have this feeling of romantic attraction for the For the opposite sex, or in some cases, the same.
And my point is, no, I'm not saying that, but what I am saying is that the cultural importance that is given to romantic love, the idea, for example, that romantic love is the necessary prerequisite, say, for marriage, that you shouldn't marry if you don't have it.
This is a Western idea.
And it is a Western idea that, in fact, didn't even exist in the West in ancient times.
It didn't exist in ancient Greece and Rome.
In fact, the romantic feeling is acknowledged.
It's called eros by the Greeks.
But the Greeks treat eros as a troubling...
And a dangerous idea.
You see this, for example, in Ovid, who has a book called The Art of Love.
And you think, oh wow, this is sort of the Kama Sutra for the Greeks and so on.
No, Ovid treats love as something that you have to watch and be kind of on your guard against.
And this is really the universal view.
Interestingly, my sister got married many years ago now, and it was a form of arranged marriage.
Not the extreme form of arranged marriage where my sister shows up, you know, on the wedding day, she's never seen her husband-to-be.
Not that. But rather a kind of judicious arrangement in which my family plays a role.
My family kind of scopes out eligible young men who are in our community of the same socioeconomic and religious background.
Then sort of, you may say, bachelors from those households are invited to our house to dinner with like suspicious regularity.
And what I'm getting at is my sister has Joyce.
But the choice is among this group.
And my sister knows this, by the way.
This is a kind of known arrangement my sister chooses.
She's happily married.
She has kids. It's all gone well.
The system works.
But it's based upon the idea, and I would say this is the broad idea in non-Western culture, that romantic love is a mild form of insanity.
Here goes Debbie kind of guffawing in the background.
But the idea is this.
The idea is, look, people get possessed by a certain kind of temporary blindness.
And you can see this happening.
I mean, it happens in high schools all the time.
You know, suddenly you find some girl, she goes, you know...
I really like this guy, Steven.
I mean, Steven has amazing qualities.
He's the best looking guy that ever existed.
He's the most intelligent person in the universe.
Now, everybody else around this girl knows that Steven isn't that.
Steven's not the smart.
He's not even the brightest guy in the class.
Let alone on the planet.
You know, it's like, boy, you might need glasses if you think he's all that good looking.
So the point is that this particular person is invested with qualities that the rest of the world can see they manifestly do not possess.
So it must be a temporary deformity on the part of the observer to think all this nonsense.
If this is the universal view of romantic love, how did it develop in the West?
And here I actually want to recommend a very provocative and interesting book by the writer Denis de Rougemont.
It's called Love in the Western World, in which Denis de Rougemont makes a stunning kind of claim.
I find it stunning.
He basically argues that romantic love was invented In the chivalric era, in the Middle Ages, by the knights who suddenly began to write all these poems about their lady that they dreamed, so that an idealized version of romantic love now comes into the world.
In fact, it kind of comes out of nowhere.
And yet, says Denis de Rougemont, it becomes, ultimately, it occupies the dreams of the West.
Not necessarily the ordinary life of the West, but its aspirations, its dreams.
It produces a kind of discontent in which people feel all the time, I have to be, quote, in love.
I have to be possessed by this sense of romantic attachment all the time, all the time.
Now, Valentine's Day is a celebration of this unique and distinctive feeling.
But I think in the end, Dennis Derougeman is correct that love ultimately expresses itself in action.
What Derougeman says is basically that it's less important in a marriage.
The most important thing is to say, hey, listen, Debbie...
I am giving the one life that I have.
I'm willing to spend this time, which is the only time I have, with you for the rest of the time that I have on the earth.
And what could be a greater affirmation of love than that?
So, Derougeman's point is that professions of love are good, chocolate-covered strawberries are good, Mike Lindell's pillows are good, but at the end of the day, it is that lived life together, that simple alliance of your life to the life of another, that is ultimately the most romantic thing of all.
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I'm going to do a second question today, and this one is about the court.
Listen. Hey Dinesh, this is Beth Copeland and I have a question for you.
What is the best strategy for Republicans to take to keep the Democrats from stacking the Supreme Court when they control all three branches of government?
Well, let me say a couple of things about this.
First of all, the number of justices on the court, namely nine, this is not something that is fixed by the Constitution.
It was fixed by a law that is now more than a hundred years old.
130 or so years old, I believe, which now by law and convention establishes the number of justices at nine.
But the broader idea here isn't that there have to be nine justices.
We could actually have a discussion about having, let's just say, a court of 15.
But the whole point is to keep that court independent.
The independence of the judiciary, this is the key aspect of the constitutional architecture.
Why? Because the main job of the judge is to be a checker.
On the Congress. A check on the presidency.
Notice the Bill of Rights keeps placing limitations on the government.
Congress shall make no law, restricting freedom of speech, for example, or restricting freedom of religion.
And the court's job is to stand up to the other branches when they try to violate those rights.
Now, obviously court packing of any kind.
And certainly the court packing the Democrats have in mind is not just to expand the court with a view to keeping the court independent.
Rather, they want to destroy the independence of the judiciary.
And the truth of it is they can do it with a majority vote in the House and the Senate, which is then signed by the presidency.
This would be not unprecedented, but you can say breaking with the precedent of more than a century.
But it could be done. Probably if they put their mind to it, they might be able to pull it off.
Now, I don't know if they would get Kristin Sinema's vote.
I don't know if they would get Joe Manchin's vote.
Certainly the Republicans would be unified as a bloc in stopping them.
And I think that what would...
The wholesome fear that majorities should always keep in mind is that the things you do to the other side can be done to you.
So let's say, for example, that two years from now, the Republicans take both houses, which is not an outlandish possibility at all.
It is normal for the majority party, for the ruling party, to lose seats in quite a lot of them in the midterm election.
And then Republicans win the presidency in 2024.
The Republicans can unpack their court and repack it themselves.
So this is a dirty game at which two can play.
The bottom line of it is we would do everything we could now to prevent them from having the votes to do it.
And if they did it, we need to keep in mind that we need to do to them exactly what they are doing to us.
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