All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 25, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:03:33
MISS ME YET? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep34
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
What makes Trump tick?
Is math racist?
I get to the bottom of it.
And author J.D. Vance joins to talk about the Republican Party and the working class.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
I hope you'll subscribe.
Hit the subscribe button that's down there.
Also the notifications button, which will let you know when the podcast is posted each day.
And please share information about the podcast with other people.
I'm just trying to widen the audience and get the word to as many people as possible.
So this is one way you can really help me.
I appreciate it very much.
I'm really delighted that Mike Lindell of MyPillow is a sponsor of this podcast.
Mike has a plethora of incredible products.
And many of you know he's being sued.
He's under the gun. He's being canceled by all these retail stores.
And why? Because he's a Christian.
He's a patriot. He speaks out.
They're trying to cancel him.
Well, I'm on a mission to uncancel him.
And you can join me. You can help me.
How? By patronizing Mike Lindell and MyPillow.
Fortunately, he's got great products.
I want to talk about his new Giza Dream bed sheets.
They're made with this beautiful long staple cotton.
He guarantees they will be the most comfortable sheets you'll ever own.
The first night you sleep on the sheets, you'll never want to sleep on anything else, and I can testify that's true.
The Giza Dream sheets are available in a variety of colors, and like all of Mike's products, they come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 10-year warranty.
Right now, Mike is offering buy one, get one free.
By calling 800-876-0227 and use promo code Dinesh.
For a limited time, buy one, get one free.
call 800-876-0227 or just go to MyPillow.com, but make sure to use the promo code Dinesh.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I'm actually quite excited about the, you may say, comeback of Donald Trump.
He's going to be speaking on Sunday at CPAC.
I'm curious to see what he says and what projects he announces or undertakes.
And I've been thinking a little bit about why Trump drives the left so crazy.
I think it's not only that they hate him and they hate what he stands for, but they don't get him at all.
And they don't get him in part because he brings, I would call it, a different kind of brain to Washington.
Not so much the political type of brain or even the journalistic or the legal type of brain, but the entrepreneurial brain.
So, it might be worth thinking for a moment about what this entrepreneurial brain is, what it is that Trump as an entrepreneur stands for, what he does, how he built his brand and his business, because most of this would be utterly outside the world.
Of the typical CNN journalist, the typical lawyer who ran for Congress, these House impeachment manager types, you can pretty much predict their path in life and the stuff that they know, which, by the way, is not a lot.
But what is it that Trump knows?
What is it that he brings to the table?
I want to talk about Trump's very first deal, his first business venture, because it gives you an idea of how Trump's mind works.
The background, by the way, to this is that when we think about Karl Marx, the great prophetic critic of capitalism, according to Karl Marx, who kind of, he didn't invent the name capitalism, but he popularized the term, for Marx, a capitalist does only one thing.
He supplies capital.
And all the rest of it is done by the workers.
And this is really why Marx believes that the profits of a company should go 100% to the workers.
The capitalist deserves maybe some interest for the capital he put in, but nothing else.
Why? Because he does nothing else.
But this, I think, is completely wrong.
Marx himself, of course, never ran a business.
He was a lifelong leech.
He got most of his money from Engels, who actually inherited it from his family.
So the bottom line of it is most of the critiques of capitalism are written by people who don't know anything about capitalism and have never actually been part of it.
But here's Trump, and he was part of it from the beginning, but a lot of people think Trump kind of got his capitalism and got his business from his dad.
Not true. Fred Trump, his father, owned these rent-controlled apartments in Queens, and he didn't like Manhattan.
He didn't think Trump should go to Manhattan.
But Trump decides he wants to go to Manhattan.
He says, I'm now quoting him from his kind of his classic work right here, Trump, the Art of the Deal.
Kind of an insightful book.
And Trump talks about the fact that I was out to build something monumental, something worth a big effort.
And so he crosses the bridge into Manhattan against the advice of his dad, and he sees the Commodore Hotel, an old...
It's a historic but run-down hotel that can't seem to attract any business.
It's got homeless people lying in the hallways.
They charge 30 or 40 bucks a night.
It's a miserable cobweb-covered, moth-eaten place, you might say.
And Trump goes, but when I looked at it, I didn't look at the hotel so much as I looked at what was going on around it.
And now I'm quoting Trump. He goes, as I approached the hotel, something different caught my eye.
It was about 9 in the morning and there were thousands of well-dressed Connecticut and Westchester commuters flooding into the streets from Grand Central Terminal and the subway stations below.
They're walking right by the Commodore.
And so Trump sees, wait a minute, here is a potential customer base for this hotel, but they would never dream of walking to the Commodore because looking at it, it's a complete dump.
So Trump sends his opportunity.
He goes to meet the guys who owns the Commodore.
He, of course, invokes the Trump name.
We're in the real estate business, but he's only in his 20s.
And the guys go, who are you?
And Trump goes, listen, I want to buy your hotel.
And they go, where's the money?
And Trump doesn't have the money.
But Trump goes, how much are you selling it for?
Turns out they negotiate a price, I believe it's $10 million, and Trump says, listen, write it down on a piece of paper that you'll sell me this hotel for $10 million.
And so they're like, oh, okay, what do we care?
Let's see what this kid can do.
Probably not much.
But then Trump goes to his dad and he says, hey, look, I can buy the Commodore Hotel.
His dad goes, I'm not interested.
So Trump has to go to the banks.
He goes to the banks, and think about it, he's raising money To buy a hotel that he doesn't own.
He doesn't have the money to do it.
They haven't even agreed to sell it to him.
But they've established a price.
And so Trump is able, essentially by, it shows you that someone doesn't just have to come up with an idea.
You have to organize the business and make sure that the idea can be put into action.
And so Trump pulls it off.
He raises the money from the banks.
He's able to buy the hotel.
But once he buys the hotel, he faces risk.
This is something all entrepreneurs face.
A normal employee doesn't have risk.
If you work for Starbucks, they're going to pay you whether they have a good quarter or a bad quarter.
But an entrepreneur faces risk and is paid at the end.
Besides, you never know how a new business is going to work.
There's not only what is called known risk, but unknown risk.
And Trump understands this.
So Trump has an idea. He looks at the hotel and he looks around it and he sees there's Grand Central Station, there's the Chrysler Building.
Right around him are all these monuments of New York.
And so Trump's idea is simple.
Why don't I put reflecting glass on the outside of my hotel, this new hotel, on all sides?
And by doing this, all the great monuments of New York will be reflected in my hotel.
My hotel will become instantly a kind of quintessential New York building.
Now, all the building zoning critics and the architectural critics are all, this does not go along with the neighborhood.
This is not a good idea.
Trump is advised by every not to do it.
But Trump, of course, has this natural genius for spectacle, for marketing, and that's the other element of being an entrepreneur.
You don't just come up with the idea.
You don't just raise the money.
You don't just take the risk.
You've got to also market the idea.
And so Trump puts up this reflective glass.
He creates this new thing.
But finally, How do you run a hotel?
Trump has never run a hotel.
He doesn't even know how to.
So what does he do? He makes a deal with the Hyatt Company and says basically, let's go in 50-50 on this.
I own the hotel, you run the hotel, but we'll share the profits.
And so Trump is able to sort of set this whole thing up.
So look how remote all of this is from Marx's ridiculous analysis.
Marx says the only thing that the capitalist supplies in a business is capital.
The truth of it is, in Trump's case, but also in the case of pretty much every entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs do not get, do not supply their own capital.
They get their capital from a bank or from a venture capital firm, in Trump's case, from an assortment of banks.
But the bottom line of it is the entrepreneur supplies other things that Marx doesn't even mention.
In fact, Marx doesn't seem to have any clue that entrepreneurs supply these things.
So let's say what they are first.
The idea for the business.
The employees don't come up with that.
They're the beneficiary of that.
But the entrepreneur does.
Trump did. Number two, the organization of the business.
That's the entrepreneur's job.
Three, the assumption of risk.
Pretty much all the risk that the entrepreneur takes.
And four, the idea of publicizing, marketing, building a customer base for the business.
So, at the end of the day, eventually the Hyatt Company bought out Trump.
But they bought him out for like $100 million.
So the truth of it is Trump was able to make this very early business for a young man in his 20s and early 30s a smashing success.
He's had his ups, he has had his downs.
But this is the entrepreneurial mind that is always seeing possibilities in the future, that sees things that other people don't see.
The economist Joseph Schumpeter, in discussing entrepreneurs, says that the entrepreneur is a man of vision.
He sees possibilities where other people don't.
And he's able to trod this kind of new path that is uniquely his own.
Trump is clearly an American original entrepreneur.
He has done things and built things and built a fortune that these other resentful house manager types, these little Lilliputians, they can't even imagine.
And so they hate him.
They hate him for the same reason that Iago hated Cassio.
Iago says of Cassio, he hath a natural beauty in his life that makes me ugly.
Trump makes them ugly, he makes them feel like failures, he makes them ridiculous, and out of a combination of revengefulness, resentment, and hatred, they are still, even now, trying to get him.
Want to belong to a senior organization you can trust?
That's AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens.
AMAC is the fastest growing conservative 50 plus organization in America.
Over 2 million people have joined and now carry the AMAC membership card.
AMAC was built by folks who feel the same way we do.
AMAC stands up for the values that have made America great—faith, family, and freedom.
They believe in the sanctity of our Constitution, including the First and Second Amendments.
They're fighting against the ever-expanding scope of the federal government.
They are pro-small business, secure borders, And join now.
The website again, dineshforamac.com.
I want to talk about the Southern District of New York, which is a kind of prosecutorial nerve center for the left.
Now, a prosecutorial nerve center wouldn't work by itself.
You also need compliant judges, left-wing judges, democratic judges, so that you can set up a whole system.
It's theoretically a judicial system, but as I'm about to show, it's really a political system.
It has very little to do with law or justice at all.
The basic idea here is to bring in a friendly judge Target a conservative opponent, go after that guy, and try to get a severe sentence, all cloaked and masked within the garb of justice.
I obviously know something about the Southern District of New York because I was prosecuted right there, so I know these characters and I know how they operate.
And the reason I'm interested in them now is because these are the guys who are pouring over Trump's tax returns.
The Supreme Court has cleared the way for them to get the tax returns.
Trump, of course, is very...
Angry about it. He also knows who these people are.
This is part of the reason that Trump decamped for Florida, because he recognized that this is a cesspool in New York, but the cesspool is going after him even though he's in Florida.
And it's very clear that what they are about is they're trying to find a crime.
They haven't found one.
So this is a fishing expedition to try to get Trump for something.
It started out, by the way, as an effort to try to get Trump on the Stormy Daniels business.
That, oh, Trump paid some hush money to Stormy Daniels.
Let's get to the bottom of that.
Then they realized there's nothing there.
Those cases went nowhere.
Then they were trying to figure out, did Trump make a payoff to Michael Cohen, his lawyer?
So that's how this all got started.
But now... Their idea is let's get him on whatever we can.
Let's look for potential bank fraud.
Let's look for any tax misrepresentations.
Let's look for any insurance misrepresentations.
So this is not a case where they have a particular criminal offense that they're looking at.
They're looking for an offense because they feel that there is enough political prejudice in New York and the judges are sufficiently in their pocket That they're going to be able to try to get him.
They ultimately won't be satisfied until they lock him up.
Now, because of my own experience, my own case, I know something about this.
And here's a little clip from one of my films, I think Hillary's America, in which you can see me standing before a judge.
Turn to your left. It all began when the Obama administration tried to shut me up.
United States versus Dinesh D'Souza.
Please be seated. Mr.
D'Souza willfully and knowingly violated campaign finance laws.
He gave money to a friend to help her with her campaign.
He did not tell her about it.
Someone who wants to corrupt a candidate wants them to know.
If it were not Mr.
D'Souza, we'd have a different conversation.
There is not a single case where someone like Mr.
D'Souza, who is a first-time offender, has gone to prison.
Yet, the government wants to send Mr.
D'Souza to a federal prison for two years.
The claim of selective prosecution is all half.
No cattle.
So, as a recipient of a presidential pardon and somebody who has gotten through all this and I have my rights back and my American dream back, I can look back and chuckle.
But I wasn't chuckling at the time.
Why? Not because I didn't want to be held accountable to law.
The fact of it is that I did exceed the campaign finance law.
But I did it without corrupt motive.
In fact, I didn't even tell the candidate, Wendy Long, that I was doing it.
I got two of my friends to give her $10,000 and I reimbursed them.
Now, here's the key, and here was the problem for the Southern District of New York.
No American in all this country's history has ever been prosecuted, let alone locked up, for doing what I did.
First time offense, small amount of money, no corruption.
So what did the Southern District of New York do?
They knew that they had a crooked judge, Richard Berman, and they realized, let's lie to him.
Let's basically falsify the record of what comparable cases have produced.
And he's going to be in on the lie.
He's going to know about it because he's not a fool, but he'll go along with it.
And so here I have a document, a very revealing document, In which the Southern District of New York, and I want to talk about what they, when they were presenting a sentencing memo to the judge, they were saying, this is what happened, but then we're going to tell you what really happened.
So they talk about the case of United States versus Mary Beth Feiss, and they go, Feiss made a $2,500 contribution to a presidential candidate's campaign committee, and the attorney then reimbursed her.
So it sounds a lot like my case, $2,500, small offense.
What they don't say is the following.
FISA's firm attempted to influence the campaign in an effort to appoint specific individuals to political office to oversee the firm's business and the awarding of government contracts.
Boom! Corruption. Right there.
That's what the campaign finance laws are for.
Not present in my case. Also, the total value of the fraud was over $800,000.
So this is The case, but it's deliberately left out of the Southern District of New York's memo to the judge.
I'm going to talk about a second case, and there are about 10 of these.
I'm only going to do two.
United States v. Christopher Tagani.
So they say, Christopher Tagani made straw donations, but here's what they don't say.
Tagani solicited employees of his family's liquor business.
To make over $200,000 in political contributions.
Why? Because he wanted to get favors from government entities for his business.
He also pleaded to two counts of tax fraud.
So what am I getting at here?
What I'm getting at here is that there is a system of organized lying.
These people are so brazen that they can literally conceal facts to the judge.
And the judge, even when the facts are pointed out, the judge acts like it's no big deal.
you'd think he would say, you know what, I'm being subjected to fraud by these prosecutors.
I'm gonna hold them in contempt.
I'm gonna hold them accountable.
But no, the reason he doesn't do that is he is part of the hit.
He knows it.
His job is to deliver a carcass to the left.
And so the Southern District of New York is not really about justice.
It's not really about law.
It's a thoroughly corrupt political operation and its attack on Trump should be seen for what it is.
It has nothing to do with, oh, you know, we are neutrally applying the law.
Trump is their target.
They've publicly announced it.
And they're going after it with the skill of a hunter pursuing a deer.
If you're thinking of replacing your carpets due to pet stains and odors, you must try Genesis 950.
The reviews are amazing.
This is one product that actually works.
With water, it breaks down the bonds of stains and odors so they are gone for good.
Its antibacterial component removes pet odors from carpet and padding.
It can be used in a carpet cleaning machine, and it's green so it's safe for your family and pets.
Genesis 950 is made in America.
One gallon of industrial strength Genesis 950 makes up to seven gallons of cleaner.
Genesis 950 is also great for bathrooms, floors, upholstery, and grease stains.
Debbie uses it to clean the entire kitchen and recently got ink on her pants and Genesis 950 took it right off.
Genesis 950 has great customer service.
Order one gallon direct at Genesis950.com to receive a free spray bottle, free shipping, and a $10 coupon code using the code Dinesh.
That's Genesis950.com.
Coupon only available for one gallon purchase.
Genesis 950.
It is much cheaper than replacing your carpets.
Is math racist?
Is there something inherently bigoted about numbers and theorems and mathematical rules and laws?
Is the teaching of math imbued with white supremacy?
Should we get away from, quote, white math and start teaching something that is now called, somewhat strangely, ethnomathematics?
Now, at the first glance, all of this seems like a little kooky.
Is this really going on, Dinesh?
Well, actually, it is.
I've been a little startled.
When I first saw indications of it, I kind of ignored them.
But then they began to pile up.
Here is an article.
Oregon promotes program focused on, quote, dismantling racism in mathematics.
This is the Oregon Department of Education.
There's a Rhode Island professor, Eric Loomis, who says, quote, science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist.
Because they are developed by racists who live in a racist society, whether they identify as racist or not.
So if racists do it, it makes the math itself racist.
And another tweet, the same guy, Loomis, goes, This is why I have so much contempt for those, including many liberals, who just, quote, want the data.
He goes, The data is racist!
The data is racist!
There's a website that is consulted by math teachers called EquitableMath.org.
And this has a bunch of fascinating stuff.
But it talks about the fact that math should not be taught as if there's one right answer.
It says come up with at least two answers that might solve the problem.
And even when you consult data, look at multiple ways to draw different conclusions from it.
The Bill Gates Foundation is putting money into this, unbelievably.
It's funding this notion that math is white supremacy.
And I've studied now with some depth an instruction manual called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.
I want to go through a few lines in here because it gives you a sense of how these people are thinking.
They start by identifying what is racist about math.
And I was really curious. I mean, let me back up for a second here.
The reason I'm so curious is I learned math as a brown-skinned student in India.
And the Indian students, by the way, run the spectrum from brown, my color, about Obama's color, to black.
So we've got students of color, all of us, with teachers of color, teaching us math.
And they made it very clear to us that in teaching us math, they weren't teaching us something that was Western.
Now this is, by the way, something that these ethno-mathematics dummies don't seem to know because they think that mathematics is some kind of a white man's game.
They don't realize, first of all, that mathematics was invented, well, some of it was invented in ancient Greece, but a lot of it was invented in India, and a lot of it was invented in China, and the Arabs had a big part to do with it.
Just to take, for example, who invented the number zero?
Answer, the Indians.
The Indians came up with the number zero.
It was developed in ancient India.
Now, the Arab traders who came to the Indian subcontinent Figured out this new numerical system that they brought to Europe, that they got from India.
And because the Europeans didn't know where it came from, they called it Arabic numerals.
Arabic numerals were much more efficient.
They eventually replaced Roman numerals.
So, I'm giving you a sense here of how math is a worldwide phenomenon developed in different cultures to solve problems.
Why? Because the language of nature is written in mathematics.
And so, people who are curious about the world are always trying to figure out what is that language.
Now, here we come back to this manual about dismantling racism in math education.
And let's look to see, I was really curious, what are they talking about?
What kind of math do they want to dismantle?
You know, what do they mean when there are multiple answers to the same question?
Light all around the world, and in fact all in the universe, travels at the same speed.
186 miles, 1000 miles per second in a vacuum.
That's the speed of light. It's known as speed C. That is the correct answer.
There is no other answer.
Now if you pass light through a different medium, light can travel at different speeds, but this is a mathematical fact.
Or look at geometry.
What is the shortest distance that you can make between two points?
According to Euclid, it is a straight line.
You can connect the two points other ways, but the distance will be longer.
Now of course, Euclid's answer depends on an assumption, which is that you're talking about a flat plane.
Obviously, if you're talking about a globe, the shortest distance between two points is a curved line.
That's why airplanes, for example, flying from America to Europe Take this curved path, because on a globe, that is the shortest distance.
But again, that is the correct answer.
That is objectively true.
That is the way to do it.
There's no shorter way to do it.
Bottom line of it is, all of this nonsense about ethnomathematics is a dodge.
They talk here about, here's a sign of white supremacy.
Math is taught in a linear fashion, and skills are taught sequentially.
Well, how else can you learn math?
You've got to learn one thing on top of another.
First, you have to learn basic numbers, then you have to learn equations, then you get to more complex equations.
This notion of cumulative knowledge and building on previous knowledge, this is the way to teach math.
This is how it's taught all over the world.
Now, when we come back, I'm going to dive into this a little bit more in depth because something very nefarious is going on.
It's one thing for the left to say, well, you know, we think that the way that history is taught is a white fantasy, all this nonsense about the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, so we want to replace the white fantasy with the black fantasy.
We can argue about that one.
But the idea that the simple laws of mathematics are similarly a tool of white supremacy, this seems downright deranged.
And we need to figure out not just what is going on, but why it's going on.
Cybercrime is up 75% and by far the most serious cybercrime to worry about is home title theft.
The job of the criminals is easier than you think.
The title documents to our homes are now online.
The thief finds your home's title and forges your signature on a quitclaim deed stating you sold your home to him.
Then he takes out loans on your home and leaves you in debt.
You won't know until late payment or eviction notices arrive.
Insurance doesn't cover you and neither do common identity theft programs.
That's why I protect my home with Home Title Lock.
The instant Home Title Lock detects someone tampering with my home's title, they help shut it down.
Go to hometitlelock.com and register your address to see if you're already a victim.
Then use code RADIO to receive 30 free days of protection.
That's code RADIO at hometitlelock.com, hometitlelock.com.
We're talking about this crazy attack on mathematics.
The closest thing that we have, by the way, in knowledge to objectivity, the idea that there is a correct answer, the idea that there's cumulative knowledge.
And let's remember that our, not just American society, not just Western society, the whole civilization of the world depends upon people getting their sums right.
If we don't apply the theory of relativity correctly, our television sets would be fuzzy.
Our phones wouldn't work.
The GPS would conk out.
If you don't get your sums right, then airplanes crash and space shuttles explode in the air.
So the language of nature is written in the language of mathematics, but you have to get that language right in order to make things that work.
And that's the simple fact of the matter.
Now, given that, why wouldn't you teach that?
The beauty of the discovery of mathematics, the power of mathematics to not only solve puzzles, but the very strange correspondence of mathematical puzzles with the world.
I mean, think about it. There's no normal reason why the puzzles of mathematics, the descriptions that we make, you may say, in our head, should correspond with the world we live in.
The two could be totally different, but they aren't.
And that's why mathematics is not only true, it is extremely useful.
It is actually indispensable.
The attack on mathematics is ultimately ignoring all that.
Now, some of the rhetoric, and I've been reading these articles.
There's an article here. This is a scholarly paper, supposedly, in the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education by Dan Batty and Louis Leyva.
It's called, A Framework for Understanding Whiteness in Mathematics Education.
Normally, this is the kind of scholarly paper that could be more usefully deployed as toilet paper.
But what's interesting is that here's the Atlantic Monthly jumping on this paper and writing a whole article about it.
How does race affect a student's math education?
A new paper examines the ways whiteness reproduces racial advantages.
And... Some of the paper, when you start reading it, it starts off with the usual kind of academic boilerplate.
Kind of fun to read because it's so stupid.
This lack of attention to whiteness leaves it invisible and neutral in documenting mathematics as a racialized space.
So mathematics is evidently a racialized space.
This would be, by the way, huge news to the Indians and the Chinese who are all doing math as we speak.
And do not see it as a racialized space because it's not.
Now, the vast majority of this paper is not even about math because I was kind of curious.
You know, we can all posit a math problem.
2x minus 10 equals 40.
What is x? 2x minus 10 equals 40.
Let's add 10 to both sides.
2x is 50. x is 25.
That's the correct answer. There is no other answer.
That is the correct answer as long as we are applying normal algebra.
There's no ethno-mathematical solution to this.
So I think that these scholars know this, and so they need a lot of gobbledygook, a lot of mumbo-jumbo to get around it.
So we have stuff like whiteness in law, sociology, history, and education.
That's half the paper. We may as well jump over all that because that is irrelevant to our topic.
And then when we get to our topic, we hear things like, you know, we need to have greater attention to the history of math.
In other words, instead of teaching math, let's teach math history.
And someone refers rather idiotically to Newton's discovery of gravity based upon the idea that an apple fell on his head.
Now, first of all, this is a little bit of a kind of a myth and a piece of nonsense.
Newton didn't discover gravity by an apple falling on his head.
I mean, think about it. If that were the case, a caveman would have discovered gravity thousands of years before Newton.
What Newton discovered is that the apple that falls on your head...
Is operating by the same law as the movement of the moon in the sky.
Newton was watching the moon and it occurred to him, an apple falls to the ground.
What if the moon...
is falling toward the earth.
In other words, there is a force that is pulling the moon toward the earth so that the apple and the moon are both being acted upon by the same force and that is what Newton called it was Newton's discovery that the apple, that the motion of the apple was not singular but was connected to this larger force.
That's how Newton discovered gravity.
Now, all of this, I think, has a very nefarious root, and I'm going to have to pick up this thread early next week to talk more about it, because I think what the left is trying to do is they're trying to explain why young African Americans do poorly in math.
This whole rigmarole, this whole attack on math is based on the fact that Asian Americans and whites seem to do the best in math, Hispanics in the middle, and African Americans worst of all.
And since it's really hard to explain why that's the case, socioeconomics doesn't seem to explain it.
Even when you correct for socioeconomics, those patterns still hold.
The simple thing is, let's blame the math.
Let's call the math racist.
And so this is a diversion, a changing of the topic, a refusal to face the problem where it is.
And the problem is really simple.
How do we have better schools?
How do we raise the test scores of all students so that they can reach their full potential?
This whole expedition of the left ultimately is not only destructive to math, it's destructive to the life opportunities and prospects of young African-American students who are not helped but hurt by all this nonsense.
A lot of the reason that they want to cancel Mike Lindell is simply because of his association with Trump.
And in this short clip, Mike talks about meeting Trump and what he learned about Trump.
And I think part of what makes me chuckle about the video is you see that Mike himself is a lot like Trump.
Listen. I'm going to have this amazing addiction platform to help addicts and this foundation.
And then he told me, he goes, yeah, I want to stop the drugs from pouring in.
You found him to be a normal guy.
It was amazing.
It was like talking to my best friend.
It was just so down to earth.
And I went to leave and there was employees there.
Well, I started asking employees because I couldn't believe what I just experienced.
And they're all going, oh, he's the best leader, the best boss.
And every one of them had a personal thing about him that he had gone out of his way to help them.
So the left is displacing a lot of its hatred of Trump onto Mike Lindell, and that's part of the reason for this campaign to cancel him.
Well, it's our job to uncancel him, so let's just do it.
I want to talk to you now about MyPillow, how it's changed Debbie's sleeping habits.
When she started sleeping on Mike's pillows, She began sleeping through the night.
Even though she's going through that change of life, she's tried other stuff, other pillows.
Nothing worked until she discovered MyPillow.
She also has one of Mike's body pillows.
And the cool thing is that these pillows don't go flat.
You can wash and dry them as often as you want.
And they maintain their shape.
They're made in the USA. For a limited time, Mike Lindell is offering his premium MyPillows for the lowest price ever.
You can get the queen size premium MyPillow for $29.98.
It's normally $69.98.
So that's $40. Off the price.
Kings are only $5 more.
All the MyPillow products come with a 10-year warranty and a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use the promo code Dinesh.
By the way, it's not just the pillows.
You get deep discounts up to 60% or more on all the MyPillow products, including the Geezer Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, and MyPillow towel sets.
Call 800-876-0227 or just go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use the promo code Dinesh.
Hey guys, I've really been looking forward to this.
A conversation with J.D. Vance, the author of a terrific book, Hillbilly Elegy, that came out, well, I guess a couple of years ago now.
I read the book and was fascinated by it.
And then Debbie and I watched the Netflix movie based on the book, also called The Hillbilly Elegy, made by director Ron Howard.
And the movie is pretty good, but the book is just downright outstanding.
And I'm actually holding it right here in my hand, Hillbilly Elegy.
The power of the book, I think, is that it's a memoir that draws you into JD's life Interesting in itself, but JD is a little bit like Rousseau.
His life resonates with larger themes, and you feel like you're learning a lot about the working class, climbing out of poverty, fighting family dysfunctionality, all issues that America is wrestling with right now.
So, JD, really welcome to the podcast.
I'm thrilled to have you.
I want to begin with a moment in your book, Hillbilly Elegy, where you are at a cocktail party at Yale Law School, and somebody comes up to you and offers you wine, and they say red or white, and I believe you reply white, and then they start talking about, well, would you rather have Chablis or Chardonnay, and you're like...
Are these people screwing with me?
In other words, I really had to laugh out loud because you were an outsider to that culture.
You didn't know that there were eight different types of white wine.
And so talk about that experience.
Tell me what happened and how did you feel at that moment?
What was really going on?
Yeah, well, as you know, Dinesh, in some of these environments, it's not just a sort of social test.
It's actually a social test pretending to be a professional test, right?
You have to sort of fit in with these people if you want to get a job.
And what I was thinking to myself is, oh, my God, I have no idea how to conduct myself in this environment.
So they're not going to hire me, right?
That was really what was going through my mind is how can I not embarrass myself so I can get the job done here and actually make sure I have gainful employment afterwards.
And I think it just revealed something that's sort of really important about the different cultures that we find ourselves in.
And if you come from a background like mine, I think you sort of know instinctively that a lot of what's going on and what you might call elite culture is really, you know, it's not about It's not about ability.
It's not about smarts.
It's not about credentials.
It's really about the sort of social test of fitting in.
And I kind of got a crash course at that when I went to Yale Law School.
And it's really still something I think about today because there is just something, you know, it's kind of funny on the one hand.
But on the other hand, I think a lot of folks realize that there's sort of this whole different world behind the veil that unless you know how to conduct yourself in that world, people are going to judge you.
They're going to look down on you and so forth.
J.D., the year was 1979, and I walk out of my dorm at Dartmouth.
I'm a new student, and I believe it might have been convocation.
I'm wearing a shirt and a sweater, and I look over the Dartmouth green, and I literally see 1,000 students in navy blue blazers.
And a kind of sense of shock course through me, and I was like, Who sent out the memo on the navy blue blazer?
And for guys like you and me, our backgrounds couldn't be more different.
Mine from Mumbai, India.
Yours from Appalachia.
But we were both outsiders in this very elite environment.
And it's almost like it took us a little while to get our bearings.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And, you know, there was a time when I felt a little resentful or regretful about that fact.
I sort of felt like an outsider and I didn't really like the fact that the sort of these people didn't really, you know, share much in common with me.
You know, I've gotten to the point now where it was Justice Clarence Thomas, actually, who once said in public remarks that sort of coming from outside of that world made him appreciate how special the world he came from was.
And it always kept them grounded.
I think there is something to be said that when you sort of come from that world, if you always feel comfortable, and if you always feel entitled to those things, then you don't really appreciate, you know, sort of how lucky you are to be able to have, you know, some of the opportunities that you've been able to have.
On the one hand, I wish folks at places like Yale Law School were more open to people like me and backgrounds like mine.
But I also am sort of glad that I never really fully assimilated into that culture.
I'm glad I was able to stay grounded.
That's very interesting. I want to talk about what you think.
You said how lucky you are.
And I want you to identify what you think were the lucky elements that enabled you to break out of.
There are not a whole lot of guys.
There are not a whole lot of poor white guys from Appalachia who end up where you did.
A success story, not just through education, but through your work in finance.
What I want to ask is, how did you make it out of there?
When you look back at your life, what do you think are the things?
Because you talk about the fact, when you describe the family and kind of cultural dysfunction going on in your life, it seems like, wow, there were so many strikes against you.
Your mom was a drug addict, and so the kind of family dysfunction that makes it difficult to study, some of that was also in the movie.
When you look back on your life, what would you say are the two or three things that...
What paved the way for you to climb out of a circumstance that not a whole lot of people get out of?
Yeah, I point to a few things.
I think, you know, first and most important is my grandma.
I think that the common story from folks who come from tough backgrounds and end up able to do something with themselves, the pretty common story is they had at least one person they could really depend on.
And for me, that was my grandma.
And so there was definitely a lot of dysfunction in our family.
There was also a lot of love and a lot of loyalty.
And I think That gave me the sense of groundedness, gave me the confidence to actually pursue my dreams.
And so I think my grandma gets a ton of credit.
You know, I called her Mamaw, so folks who have read the book will recognize that character, I'm sure.
The second thing I'd point to is the United States Marine Corps.
I enlisted in the Marine Corps when I was 19 years old.
It was 2003, right after September the 11th, right after we'd invaded Iraq.
I believe I enlisted in April of 03, and we invaded Iraq in March of 03.
But the Marine Corps really gave me this community of people who really believed in themselves and believed that they could accomplish something together.
And I think just being immersed in that culture was really powerful for me.
It really set a positive example.
And then the final thing is I have to point to my wife.
I met her. I've never felt quite alone in it.
So I think it's really complicated.
There are probably a million different things that really made the difference for me, but those three definitely stand out.
I didn't serve in the Marines myself, but I am a product of a 12-year Jesuit education.
These are the old-style Jesuits.
And it is said of the Marines as of the Jesuits that their strategy is very simple.
They take someone...
They undermine your self-esteem.
So the very opposite of what we often hear, we have to boost everybody's self-esteem, make them feel unbelievably good about themselves.
But with the Marines, as with the Jesuits, the idea is we first help people to understand what fools they are, how little they know, how much they need to improve, how far they are from the standards that are truly expected.
And once your self-esteem has been appropriately crushed and undermined, It is then reconstructed on a firmer foundation.
Would you agree with that assessment of what the Marines are about?
Because that was totally my experience of Jesuit education.
Yeah, I definitely do.
And I think that one of the things you hear in this sort of modern self-esteem-focused psychobabble that's often missing is one of the things that builds self-esteem is actually going through tough experiences, being shown That even in the face of adversity, you can survive things, you can thrive in tough environments.
And that's what the Marine Corps did.
It really does break you down and then build you back up.
But in breaking you down, it gives you some self-confidence to recognize that, you know, actually, I can take what life throws at me.
And I wish that more kids, frankly, had that experience.
Real adversity is what ultimately builds self-esteem.
And unfortunately, too many American kids in the 21st century just don't have real adversity.
I quite agree. Hey guys, we're going to take a short break for a word from Eggert Watches when we come back more with author J.D. Vance.
If you know the D'Souzas, we're very selective with our partnerships, and Eggert Watches is a company we are excited about.
The CEO, Elon, is an immigrant entrepreneur, American success story.
His company creates exceptional products, but Elon also cares about American values and has his own voice.
Debbie and I recently watched some of his powerful videos on the Eggert website.
You need to check them out. What is Freedom?
is the first short film.
Elon put his company on the line to take a stance against censorship.
It's not the first time he's done it.
Elon was awarded the Fox Patriot Award after he stood up for the police releasing a film during the defund the police movement called Speak Truth.
Eggert has also made a video celebrating men called What is a Man in response to Gillette Corporation painting the picture of toxic masculinity in American culture.
Again, all the videos are on the Eggert website.
And most important, Eggert makes great watches.
Debbie and I are both wearing one today.
You can kind of check mine out right here.
Look how cool it is.
The craftsmanship, the uniqueness, it's something to marvel at.
These watches feel a lot more expensive than they are.
Elon has given us the 15% off to share with you using the promo code Dinesh at checkout.
Now you have two reasons to visit egardwatches.com.
E-G-A-R-D, egardwatches.com.
Come for the watches, stay for the conservative films.
Hey, I'm back with author J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy.
J.D., I want to ask you about a remarkable book, I think, that's sort of a companion scholarly work to your book.
It's called The Dignity of Working Men by the Harvard sociologist Michelle Lamont.
And she makes the point, based on the study of the working class, not just the white working class, but the black and Latino working class as well, that these are people who don't resonate with multiculturalism or self-actualization.
She goes, all of this is just gobbledygook to them.
Why? Here's why.
She goes... Because these are people who have very hard lives.
They work often at menial labor.
It's a struggle to get by.
It's a struggle to put a roof over their head, to put braces on their kids' teeth.
And as a result, they develop an ethic of responsibility.
This is her term.
In which they derive a sense of moral self-satisfaction from getting it through the day.
Because they know it's not easy.
They know it requires not only individual effort, but community.
And Consequently, they also develop a little bit of a contempt for people who try to cut around the rules, beat the system, scam the system.
So they are very down on what they consider lazy, irresponsible, shiftless people.
So there's a kind of, I think she's saying a native working class conservatism.
And I don't think Michelle Lamont's entirely happy about it, but she's honest enough to describe it.
Absolutely. That's a really great question, Danesh. You know, one of the things that frustrated me about some of the response to the book was, you know, how can you believe in personal responsibility?
How can you believe that you have to sort of take control of your life and still believe that there can be disadvantages in people's life?
And I just, my natural response is, you just talk to any of the people that I grew up around and they can hold two thoughts in their head.
They can recognize that sometimes life is unfair.
There are real disadvantages out there.
But you've got to play the hand that you were dealt.
You've got to work hard and you've got to expect something of yourself because the very worst thing to do with a bad hand is to play it very poorly.
And so people are very, I think, self-conscious about the people in their community who are doing the right things and the people in their community who are doing the wrong things.
The other thing I'd say is that you made the point about identity politics or the way that people react to sort of constantly being categorized in these different groupings.
And I think that that's one way in which the Republican Party has a real opportunity.
President Trump, I think, definitely used this to his advantage as he should have.
And I think future Republicans have the same opportunity to say...
People aren't really into being categorized by which identity group they belong to.
They're really into old-fashioned virtues like hard work, family loyalty, devotion, faith.
If you can talk about those things and make those things easier to think about and to achieve, I think you're going to appeal to a much broader coalition of working-class voters.
Like you said, not just white folks, black folks, Latino folks, and so on down the line.
One of the things that I found in my own life was the fact that when I came to America, I thought to myself, there are certain established rules of success.
Now, some of these rules are a little bit arbitrary.
So, for example, if you have to take an SAT to get into college, the truth of it is you need to have a good vocabulary and you need to know some basic math.
Right? Now, conceivably they could have had a test that was in American history, in which case I would have failed right out for the simple reason that I studied Indian history and British history in India.
But I never thought to myself, listen, I've got to figure out a way to adapt the test to me.
I thought, how do I adapt myself to the cultural requirements of success?
I think as we look around America at all these different ethnic tribes, some are more successful than others, but all the successful ones are using the same ladder, the same cultural path, if you will.
They're characterized by frugality, self-discipline, hard work, an emphasis on economic creativity, and all of these things, it would seem, would be the kind of things that should be taught in And so that groups can learn from each other.
Hey, look, the Koreans are doing this.
It's really working for them.
The Jamaicans have these rotating credit associations to generate capital even if they don't qualify for traditional banking loans.
I'm amazed that there's so much focus in American education on victimization.
In other words, kind of why I'm a failure as opposed to how I can be a success.
Yeah, I think that's totally right.
And, you know, I think you see this a lot, especially in...
You know, people, for example, don't focus on what's working so well in the black community, for example.
They don't talk about the black church.
They don't talk about the really positive role that that social capital and neighborhood development can play.
It's all about what's wrong.
It's all about the ways that groups are falling behind.
It's all about the ways in which America is evil.
For not enabling every group to sort of achieve in the same equal way.
And I totally agree with you.
I think different groups are doing different things very well.
And we should highlight what's working well.
Try to teach it to others as opposed to tear down certain institutions or certain groups for succeeding.
And that to me, like you said, is just a fundamental American trait.
It's not that things aren't ever unfair.
It's that you've got to deal with the unfairness.
You've got to work through it. You've got to power through it.
And you've got to find some way to succeed for yourself and your family anyway.
That basic old-fashioned grit is, I think, something that basically every American has really at their core.
And in some ways, I sort of see identity politics and this constant victimization effort as an effort to tear down that really core American grit and self-determination that, again, I think pretty much every group has in some shape or form.
Do you think that the Republican Party should be a working class party?
I do. I do. I think it should be.
And I think it's frankly inevitable because if you look at where Wall Street is going, if you look at where big tech and big corporations are going, they are naturally gravitating towards the Democratic Party.
There's sort of this absurd thing going on where I think Democrats still think of themselves as the party of the working class, but they're getting 80% of the donations from Wall Street.
They're getting more than that from big tech and some of the big corporations in our country.
And I think what is ultimately happening Is that the working class is naturally gravitating towards Republicans because Republicans are sort of the one political constituency in the country that doesn't actively hate the working class.
And so really, to me, the question for Republicans in the future is you're inheriting these groups of voters in some ways because you've done very smart things.
In some ways, because the left has done very dumb things.
And we've got to figure out, I think, what to do with them, how to build on that coalition, and how to really turn our public policy in a way that serves those people, as opposed to the people who may have voted Republican 40 years ago.
J.D., this has been absolutely fascinating.
I hope we can have you back.
Thanks for joining the podcast, and look forward to having you on again.
Thanks, Dinesh. Today we are in a battle for truth.
I'd like to recommend an insightful book to you called Reflections on the Existence of God by 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 is now a bestseller on Amazon.
Former White House aide Wallace Henley says, I've taught apologetics for many years.
Of all the books, an apologetic Simmons is the best I've ever read.
If you want to challenge yourself, I encourage you right now to get your copy of Reflections on the Existence of God by Richard Simmons III. Visit reflectionsdinesh.com to learn more about the book and get exclusive access to the first chapter for free.
Go to reflectionsdinesh.com now.
That's reflectionsdinesh.com.
In Washington state...
They are now canceling Ben Franklin.
Yes, Ben Franklin. Now, could it be because Ben Franklin owned slaves?
Well, it can't be because Ben Franklin didn't own any slaves.
In fact, Ben Franklin was one of the founders of the Philadelphia Abolition Society to get rid of slavery in the country.
Ben Franklin was an accomplished diplomat.
He was a scholar.
He was a scientist. He was a publisher.
And he was the inventor of all kinds of new, not just scientific, but civic projects.
He was a great man. By the way, I'm doing a series on the great men of the American founding for Prager University.
It's a series of five videos I'll be doing on Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Franklin.
In each case, I'm going to pick the big issue that This founder cared about and had an influence on.
And I'm going to detail why that's relevant today.
So I'm very excited about this project.
But one, of course, of my figures is Franklin.
And so I was kind of startled to see what could be the objection to Franklin.
It turns out there's really none.
What they want to do is close down this Franklin Park and replace it with a woman who was, quote, Washington State's first African-American state senator.
Now, I mean, I understand the desire to have self-esteem and all, but can't we build our self-esteem on people who have truly accomplished great things?
I mean, I'm Indian American, but why can't I be inspired by Franklin?
I mean, I don't mind going to Ben Franklin School.
I would rather have a school named after Ben Franklin than the, you know, first Indian American realtor in Atlanta.
First Indian American chef to serve chicken tikka masala at the Four Seasons.
Really? No, my self-esteem is not based on that.
It's based upon genuine accomplishment that I can identify with and be inspired by.
And Franklin was a genuinely good guy.
I want to just read a little section.
By the way, I recommend to you the autobiography of Ben Franklin.
A slim but fascinating book about this self-made man.
And Franklin is in Philadelphia and he notices, he says, in New York and Philadelphia, the printers, he's a printer, sold paper, almanacs, ballads, and a few common school books, but nobody had any books.
And he goes, so few were the readers at the time in Philadelphia and the majority of us so poor.
That no one had books to read.
The few people who had money would have to import their books from Europe.
And we're talking about standard books that you today would find lying around the place that you can walk into any library.
But you see, there were no libraries in Philadelphia.
There were no libraries in America.
Ben Franklin created a subscription library.
So what he did was he asked citizens, he goes, I propose to render the benefit from books more common, meaning more wide.
By commencing a public subscription library.
He got about 50 people.
He goes, mostly tradesmen.
Would put down 40 shillings apiece.
And he goes, on this little fund we began.
The books were imported.
The library was opened one day in the week for lending to the subscribers on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned.
You better give the book back.
The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns and provinces.
The libraries were augmented by donations.
Reading became fashionable, and our people having no public amusements to divert their attention from study became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observed by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.
So here is Franklin not only figuring out a way for himself to become a reader, but to spread habits of reading and knowledge in Philadelphia.
This is someone who has truly believed in the democratic idea that democracy works when you have an educated citizenry.
So why wouldn't somebody like this Be an inspiration to us today.
They should. And it is a mark of the poverty of our thinking, the inability to reach across the divide, the inability to see greatness wherever it comes from and to emulate it.
The attack on Franklin and his replacement by essentially a nobody is a mark of the mediocrity and intolerance of our age.
Do you think there's a coincidence between Biden signing all these executive orders in his first couple of weeks of office and the price of silver skyrocketing?
No. There's no coincidence.
Savvy investors know that precious metals are a hedge against inflation and government stupidity.
And Birch Gold Group is not only your headquarters for gold, but silver too.
If you want to purchase physical gold or silver drop shipped straight to your door, Or help converting an IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by gold and silver?
Birch Gold Group is your solution.
They are the premier precious metals IRA company in America with an A-plus Better Business Bureau rating, countless 5-star reviews, and thousands of satisfied customers.
And guess what? I'm one of them.
There's a tidal wave of inflation coming.
Gold and silver are your hedge.
Text Dinesh to 484848.
For your free information kit on a precious metals IRA or to speak with a Birch Gold representative today.
Time is running out, but you can protect your savings.
Text Dinesh to 484848.
It's time for our mailbox, and we go to a question about Trump and the future of the GOP. Listen.
Hi, Dinesh. In the way that the Democrats were pretty divided going into the last two elections, do you think the Republican Party will face that challenge in 2024?
Or do you think something else will happen?
Perhaps Trump may prevail again as a man against all odds via the grassroots again.
I appreciate your input and am so thankful for your podcast and fighting spirit.
Very good question. It is actually normal for a party that loses an election to go into a period of not only funk, but also division, because it's going to try to fight its way back to the majority, and it's going to try to figure out what is the best path.
And there will be competing interpretations of why we lost, what really happened, and how do we avoid those mistakes in the future?
How do we find a recipe for success?
Now, it seems clear to me that the heart of the GOP is with Trump, and that the new voters coming into the GOP, the Republican Party, are also attracted by Trump.
They're attracted not only by Trump's fighting spirit, but they're attracted by the way in which Trump frames...
His American nationalism, the idea that we're not defined by identity politics but we're defined as individuals, we're defined as members of a family, we're defined as patriots, our attachment is to some larger ideal than our race, our gender or sexual orientation.
Now, there is an establishment Republican Party that almost relishes being in the minority, sharing, you may say, in the swamp privileges for the minority, and that is uncomfortable with all these new MAGA types, all these working class people, all these new voters that they kind of don't know what to make of.
And so there's resistance to the Trump phenomenon, even though I would say it is now the clear majority within the party.
But that being said, we need a Republican Party that has room for Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and also room for Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney.
We don't actually want to kick those people out of the party.
I don't like the idea.
Let's tell them to go become Democrats.
Not necessarily. What we need to figure out a way is to increase not just our tolerance for them, but their tolerance for us.
Part of our resistance to them is that they seem to take a certain perverse pleasure in attacking Trump, in attacking what we stand for.
And so we're reacting against that.
But the bottom line of it is a party needs activists and it needs moderates.
It needs all kinds of people of different temperaments that fit within its tent.
The Republican Party can win by being a big tent and figuring out how to do that, how to overcome some of these divisions, how to find some common ground.
All of that is going to be very important going forward.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection