All Episodes
Feb. 26, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:44
UNITED STATES OF SOCIALISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep35
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
A very special episode devoted to a single topic, socialism.
What is socialism?
Who are the socialists?
How did socialism come to America?
What's the socialist agenda?
How do we beat socialism?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Hey, I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
I try to cover a variety of topics in a variety of ways.
I hope you're enjoying it.
Hey, listen, make sure you hit the subscribe button and also the notifications button so you'll be notified when these podcasts go up.
And please share the podcast with others so that they can enjoy it as much as you are.
For most of my life, I thought a pillow is a pillow is a pillow.
There's nothing special about a pillow.
That is until I discovered my pillow.
What Mike Lindell taught me is that a pillow, like a watch or a car or a phone, can be a work of art.
These pillows will not go flat.
You can wash and dry them as many times as you want and they maintain their shape.
My pillows are made in the USA. For a limited time, Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, is offering his premium MyPillows for the lowest price ever.
You can get the queen-size premium MyPillow for just $29.98.
It's normally $69.98.
So that's $40 off, and the King Pillows are only $5 more.
All these pillows come with a 10-year warranty and a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Go to MyPillow.com, but when you order, make sure to use promo code Dinesh.
You'll get deep discounts on all MyPillow products, not just the pillows, but the Geezer Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, the MyPillow towel sets.
Call 800-876-0227 or just go to MyPillow.com.
make sure to use 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.
This is a special podcast, a special episode focusing really on a single issue.
And socialism. Now, normally I don't get to do this in a podcast.
I do a sort of roving tour, a kind of tour d'horizon of issues that are going on day to day.
I try to give you a little bit of texture or depth on those issues, but I don't get a chance to do any kind of a real deep dive.
So every now and then I'd like to try to plunge below the surface, you might say, and look at a topic in greater depth.
Now socialism has suddenly, out of nowhere, come into the mainstream of American politics.
You may almost take the opening lines of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and say, a specter is haunting America, the specter of socialism.
And by socialism, I'm not just talking about the squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar.
I'm not even just talking about Bernie Sanders.
By themselves, that's a small camp.
I'm talking about the way in which those ideas, the socialist canon, if you will, has migrated right into the mainstream of the Democratic Party, so that the ideas of Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are now not easily distinguishable.
From the ideas of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.
So, how did this happen?
It's particularly startling when you think that socialism is the most discredited idea since slavery.
And in fact, not only that, but the great writers on socialism have always considered it to be a form of slavery.
Look at the title of Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom.
Hayek sees socialism moving us toward a kind of serfdom or quasi-slavery.
Look at Solzhenitsyn's books, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or the Gulag Archipelago, depicting socialism as establishing this kind of horrific regime of tyranny, slave labor camps stretching across multiple time zones.
And Orwell also sees the kinship between socialism and slavery.
Now, here's the remarkable thing.
Slavery is dead.
I mean, slavery in the old form is gone.
Now, I admit there's certain forms of slavery, sex trafficking and so on that go on, but there's no party of slavery in the world anymore.
There's no group of people, let alone in American politics, let alone a mainstream political party that says things like,''Well, slavery was an excellent idea!'' True, the implementation was poor here and there and everywhere, but this time we're really going to get slavery right.
Can you imagine the insanity of saying that?
And yet, that is exactly what people say about socialism.
They say that socialism might have failed, maybe it's even failing in many places around the world, but hey, we've got this idea for a new type of socialism that's really going to work.
So we're going to look at all that.
But let's start by looking a little bit at the historical record of socialism.
Because socialism in the last century was, you may almost say, the mainstream.
Socialism existed in more than 25 countries.
We know all about socialism in the Soviet bloc.
But we also had socialism...
In China, we had socialism all over Asia and countries like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea.
In South America, the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela.
In Africa, Angola, Ghana, Tanzania, Benin, Mali, Mozambique.
The list goes on. So socialism, you can't say it didn't have a trial run.
It did. We're good to go.
The Chinese under Mao killed 20 to 25 million.
Of course, the National Socialists, the Nazis, sometimes excluded from the list, but they shouldn't be.
They murdered not just Jews, but Poles, Russians, Eastern Europeans, so many others.
So Orwell's description of socialism, a boot stamping on a human face, is a pretty good summary of the socialist record.
Now, interestingly, socialism collapsed around the world not just because it was a political failure, not just because of tyranny.
It was also an economic failure.
And this is key. And interestingly, this is something that George Orwell missed.
If you were to look at Orwell's classics, Animal Farm, or 1984, you have the socialist state.
But the problem isn't an economic problem.
Orwell is focusing on the political failure of socialism, on the tyranny of socialism, but he never shows how socialism creates this totalitarianism.
And he always leaves open the possibility of some other type of socialism that might work.
That's not tyrannical.
But in the real world, socialism failed because it was an economic disaster.
That's why Gorbachev in the Soviet Union moved away with Glasnost and Perestroika, and then the whole system collapsed.
In China, the Chinese realize socialism doesn't really work, and so the Chinese still have communism, the communist political structure, but they move to a more capitalist, a state-run capitalist economic structure.
So socialism, and socialism, of course, has been a miserable failure all over South America, in Asia, countries like Zimbabwe, Cuba, or...
Venezuela today. The bottom line is that socialism has been a disaster everywhere, and this, of course, creates a huge mystery.
If something has failed again and again and again, I mean, if this is sort of like Elizabeth Taylor's eight marriages, you know, to get married after eight times is like someone said it's the triumph of hope over experience, and the same can be said over socialism.
It's failed 25 times.
It seems...
Borderline idiotic to think that there's some new form of socialism heretofore unimagined, and this time, guys, it's really gonna work.
I've been talking about ExpressVPN on my show for weeks.
Have you gotten a virtual private network yet?
Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you this.
There's never been a more important time to protect your digital rights.
That's why I and thousands of my listeners choose to secure our online data by using ExpressVPN.
Did you believe a VPN isn't for you because you can use the internet just fine without one?
Anytime you go online, your internet service provider can see every site you're visiting.
Are you confused about how it works?
ExpressVPN is an app for computers and smartphones that encrypts your network data and reroutes it through a secure server.
That means you can use the internet more anonymously without having your data tracked.
Do you think VPNs are too complex only for tech experts?
No. Take it from me, they're not.
With ExpressVPN, you launch the app and tap one button to protect yourself.
It's really that simple.
I trust ExpressVPN to protect my online data because they're rated number one by CNET and Wired, and they stand for my values.
Now is the time for you to take a stance.
Take back your privacy at expressvpn.com slash Dinesh and get three extra months free on a one-year package.
Again, that's expressvpn.com slash Dinesh.
To get three months for free, visit expressvpn.com slash Dinesh.
The emergence of socialism in the United States is an especially puzzling phenomenon when you think that there have actually been, you could almost call it controlled experiments, Looking at capitalism versus socialism to see which works and which doesn't work.
Now, normally it's difficult to have these experiments because if you're comparing two countries from different places and times, let's say you say, alright, let's try to compare the Plantagenet kings of England with the Tang Dynasty in China.
Well, wow, you're talking about two different countries, different people, different culture, different history.
Difficult to make that comparison.
The beauty about socialism and capitalism is that we've got countries where we can eliminate the kind of unnecessary variables.
So consider, for example, North versus South Korea.
Or consider East and West Germany.
The beauty of these examples is you're talking about pretty much the same people, the same culture, at the same time, with the only difference being that North Korea, socialist, South Korea, capitalist.
East Germany socialist, West Germany capitalist.
So this experiment was run for decades, and the results were really clear.
It was very obvious at reunification of Germany that East Germany was an economic basket case, a complete ruin.
West Germany was doing much, much better.
Even the poorest part of West Germany, which is Schwellswick-Holstein, two and a half times as wealthy as the richest East German region, Saxony.
Even now, there are massive transfers of income and wealth from West Germany to East Germany just to make up for this gross difference.
Turn to Korea. Again, you see in North Korea, complete disaster.
Every indicator of human welfare, terrible.
South Korea is doing much better.
South Koreans are obviously freer than North Koreans.
We know that. But they're also much more prosperous.
They are taller. They are healthier.
They live about 12 years longer.
Every year, thousands of North Koreans risk their lives trying to flee to South Korea.
So, what is it that the Socialists in America want?
Do they want this? Do they want tyranny?
Do they want economic ruin?
Well, they say they don't want that.
What does a guy like Bernie Sanders want?
Well, I think what he wants is America to produce more types like himself.
Socialist man. And it's interesting to compare socialist man with, say, capitalist man.
I actually make this comparison in my book, United States of Socialism.
For capitalist men, I use the example of Benjamin Franklin.
And Benjamin Franklin here is just kind of a stand-in for all the founders.
I mean, these are renaissance men.
Franklin himself, look at what he does.
I mean, he's a publisher. He edits and prints a newspaper.
He publishes an almanac, poor Richard's almanac.
He organizes a fire company.
He creates a defensive militia.
He establishes the American philosophical society.
He finances a hospital.
He founds a subscription library.
He's a scientist. He invents a new type of stove.
He performs experiments on electricity.
He promotes the paving and lighting of Philadelphia streets.
He's a founding member of the Philadelphia Abolition Society.
This is Franklin. Alone, he does all these things, and it's not just him.
George Washington is a farmer, he's a whiskey entrepreneur, he's a military leader, he's a statesman.
Thomas Jefferson, of course, has a variety of talents, from inventor to farmer to scientist to anthropologist to, of course, political drafter of the Declaration of Independence.
These are the founders. They are American types, and I think they intended the founding to perpetuate types like themselves.
But Socialist Man is a wholly different character.
And when we turn to Bernie Sanders, we're facing a guy who, for most of his life, did, you may say, absolutely nothing.
This is your classic American bum.
He goes into his 40s, and at that time, his main output...
Was to create an illegitimate child with a woman named Susan Campbell.
In his early life, basically, what Sanders did, he agitated for socialism and for sexual freedom.
He wrote some crazy articles, some rape fantasies, some absurd speculations about how, you know, basically, he talks about the manner in which you bring up your daughter with regard to sexual attitudes may very well determine whether or not she will develop breast cancer.
This is a quote by Bernie Sanders.
Whacked! And then he has these political speculations.
He was a journalist, but essentially virtually unpaid, writing for all kinds of rubbishy socialist magazines.
Here's his classic type of journalism.
The years come and go.
Suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50, slow death, fast death.
Then in all caps... Death!
This is Bernie.
Now, Bernie teamed up with a fellow socialist named Peter Diamondstone, and I'm quoting Diamondstone about the nature of their relationship.
When I was on the road, says Diamondstone, I would stop at his house, Bernie's house, and I'd sleep downstairs, and we'd yell at each other all night long, and sometime around 3 o'clock in the morning, we'd say, we gotta stop this.
Let's get some sleep.
Five minutes later, we'd be yelling at each other again.
This... This is the life of a socialist.
In 1971, Bernie Sanders showed up at a Vermont commune called Myrtle Farm, a kind of hippie outfit dedicated to self-sufficient living.
But Bernie didn't want to do any work.
They wanted to be self-sufficient.
They had to grow their own food.
They had to pave their own driveway.
Bernie refused to work. He just wanted to do socialist diatribes.
And recognizing this, the commune expelled him.
They threw him out for being a bum even among the bums.
So this is Sanders. He goes and lives with a friend of his for months.
The two of them essentially, quote, take extension cords and run down to the basement and plug them into the landlord's outlet.
They don't want to pay for their own electricity, so they're leeching off somebody else.
Finally, Bernie wins elective office.
That's a bonanza for him.
He becomes the mayor of Burlington.
Now he's a U.S. Senator.
He basically knows when he concedes to Hillary Clinton, benefits and favors come his way.
He now owns three homes and he's become a multi-millionaire.
He's become a multi-millionaire of the government.
So this is Socialist Man.
He starts out as a loser and a bum.
He's still a loser and a bum, but he now figures out how to trade his public office for cash.
Bernie used to denounce millionaires and billionaires.
You notice he now only denounces billionaires.
Why? Because this socialist man has himself become a millionaire.
If you know the D'Souza's, you know we're kind of selective about our partnerships, and Eggert Watches is a company that 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 he has his own voice.
Debbie and I recently watched some of the videos on Elon's website, 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 that.
Elon was awarded the Fox Patriot Award after he stood up for police, releasing a film during the whole defund the police movement called Speak Truth.
A third video celebrates men.
It's called What is a Man?
And that's a response to Gillette Corporation painting a picture of toxic masculinity in its own ad campaign.
Again, all these videos can be accessed on the Eggert website.
And most important, Eggert makes great watches.
Debbie and I are both wearing one today.
You just have to check them out.
The craftsmanship, the uniqueness is something to marvel at.
They feel a lot more expensive than they are.
Elon has given us a 15% discount, which we are passing on to you.
You just have to use promo code Dinesh at the checkout.
Now you have two reasons to visit.
It's What is the antithesis, the opposite of socialist man?
Well, the answer is it is the Franklin type.
It is the self-made man.
The self-made man is a sort of embodiment of the American ideal.
And I want to track this self-made man a little bit.
Here's a little scene from the movie Trump Card in which Abraham Lincoln is talking about what it is about America that enabled entrepreneurs, creators, and self-made men to arise.
Listen. In the 19th century, America went from being a poor agricultural society to being the leader of the Industrial Revolution and the richest country in the world.
Lincoln wanted to protect the America that was founded on free market principles, property rights, contracts, and trade.
He credited America's success to the political architecture of the founding.
Of the patent laws, he said, they added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things.
So Lincoln here is correctly diagnosing America as an entrepreneurial society.
He notes that the patent laws, which by the way are the only, it's the only right, the right to patents and copyrights, that is in the original Constitution.
This is before the Bill of Rights was added and of course enumerated a whole bunch of other rights.
So this is Lincoln, I think, interpreting the meaning of the American experiment.
And Lincoln wasn't alone in doing this.
So did someone that Lincoln respected enormously and someone who enormously respected Lincoln.
I'm thinking here of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
And here's Frederick Douglass in 1864 speaking to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
One of the white abolitionists had raised the question, after the Civil War, what should society, what should the white men do for the slaves?
And here is Douglass's answer.
What must be done for the slaves?
Do nothing with us.
Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.
Do nothing with us.
If the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall.
All I ask is give him a chance to stand on his own legs, let him alone.
If you will only untie him and give him a chance, I think he will live.
So here's Douglass celebrating the idea that people build their own lives, even groups, even oppressed groups.
Their destiny is in their own hands.
They have to be self-made men, and of course he would add today, women.
In Trump Card, we're talking to the Latino entrepreneur, Rick Figueroa.
And Rick Figueroa talks about how the values of the self-made man, he didn't learn them from the American Constitution, he didn't learn them from study of the founding documents, he didn't even learn them from Frederick Douglass.
He just learned them from his mom through ordinary instruction and experience, and ultimately he tried to convey those own values to his own son, and his son had to learn them from experience.
Listen. A Democrat would say...
But Rick, wouldn't you have felt better along the way if you had known, hey, I'll have my college paid for.
I'll have free healthcare.
Why would you rather not have driven in that lane?
My son, I tell him to go feed the cows.
And they always whine about feeding cows.
Dad's too cold. It's too hot.
I want to feed the cows. When he had his own cow, I never heard him complain one bit about it because it was his cow.
When something's given to you, you don't appreciate it.
I think you typically just take it for granted.
What we get from all this is that the American ideals are ideals of self-reliance, of being the architect of your own destiny, of being in the driver's seat of your own life.
Here's Douglass, who actually gave speeches on the self-made man, and he talks about how the self-made man can take justifiable pride because he is indebted, Douglass says, to himself, for himself.
Douglass says, he has made the road on which he has traveled.
He has built his own ladder.
And now, quote, there is genuine heroism in his struggle and something of sublimity and glory in his triumph.
Try to contrast this hardworking, industrious, creative, responsible individual.
American, with the Bernie Sanders type.
And you'll realize that if we move toward socialism, we're going to have fewer and fewer Ben Franklins, fewer and fewer Frederick Douglases, fewer and fewer Rick Figueroas, and sadly, more and more Bernie Sanders.
Do you think there's a coincidence between Biden signing all these executive orders right after his inauguration and the price of silver skyrocketing?
No. 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 also for silver.
If you want to purchase physical, 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.
How did socialism, the socialist mindset, come to America?
In the early 20th century, a sociologist named Werner Sombart published a book.
It was titled, Why There Is No Socialism in the United States.
In fact, Sombart raised it as a question.
Why is there no socialism in the United States?
And Sambard gave a striking answer.
He said essentially that, I'm quoting him now, all socialist utopias have come to grief on roast beef and apple pie.
So what he's saying is that America is too prosperous a country.
Capitalist man generates so much abundance, even for the working class, that socialism is not going to take an easy route in America.
But remarkably Sombart proved to be wrong and socialism at least gradually began to seep into America almost immediately after he wrote his book.
Now how did that happen?
Well the short answer is it happened not through open advocacy of socialism.
But on the back of a sister ideology called progressivism.
Progressivism is the ideology of the planner class.
The basic idea of progressivism is that we have to make progress.
We have to move away from the ideals of the American founding.
And moreover, instead of leaving things to the market, what the progressives saw as the anarchy of the market, we need a group of enlightened planners.
At the center of the state, who would use the state to orchestrate the operations of society.
All this may sound chillingly familiar.
It's a socialist mindset, but it's labeled progressivism.
And the classic progressive was Woodrow Wilson.
Now today, when we think of progressives, we'd say Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, LBJ, Obama.
So that's the progressive thread, but it begins with Wilson.
Henry Ford. Henry Ford, the maker of the Model T. In a sense, you could almost say the inventor of the mass market automobile.
A very interesting clash between the two men.
So here's Woodrow Wilson talking about the car.
And as a planner, you would think that Woodrow Wilson's job is to foresee where is society going?
What is the progressive vision of where America is headed?
And Wilson goes, I see these cars on the road.
He goes... Cars should not exist.
Cars should not exist.
This is Woodrow Wilson, dead serious.
He goes, the automobile is, quote, the picture of arrogance and wealth.
He goes that cars will be the downfall of America.
And it isn't just that Wilson is saying, I don't like cars.
He's saying no one should have a car.
Now, what is his reasoning?
Cars are a rich man's toy, he says.
They exist for ostentation and display.
They create class resentment.
He goes, who really needs a car when we have the horse and buggy?
Now, by the way, you won't find these quotes in the ordinary progressive biographies of Wilson because they conceal them.
They don't want you to realize what a dope this guy was.
He's supposed to be this grand intellectual.
Now, admittedly, Wilson makes a statement denouncing the car in 1906 when he was the president of Princeton.
The cars, and to some degree you'd have to admit that the cars at that time were rich men's toys.
They were crafted from custom order parts, some of them imported from Europe.
There were dozens of companies producing their own automobile and each type was different.
So cars at that time were not a whole lot faster than horses.
We have to grant that.
But the point is that Wilson lacked vision.
He was unable to see the future at all.
His argument against the car can be summarized as, I would call it the argument from personal incredulity.
And it goes sort of like this.
What is the point of a car?
Can I think of any good reason why anyone would want to own a car?
Here, sitting in my office at Princeton and twiddling my thumbs, I cannot.
Clearly, there is no good reason why anyone would want a car.
Therefore, cars should not exist.
That's the progressive mindset in a nutshell.
Now contrast this with Henry Ford.
I'm tempted to say that Henry Ford had a better understanding of what people wanted than Wilson that Ford, in other words, was recognizing consumer demand for cars and responding to it, but that's not true.
There was no consumer demand.
People didn't know about cars, so they didn't demand cars.
Basically, Ford had to envision the car and make it before people knew they wanted it.
That was the genius of Henry Ford.
Ford's genius was to imagine a society in which not only the rich guy, but the ordinary guy, everybody, could own and drive a car.
He could see the consumer demand which did not exist then, but which would come into existence as a result of what he did.
And so Ford didn't have a Princeton education.
He wasn't the president of Princeton.
He was a technical guy.
He was an observation and practice guy.
He said, machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer.
So he creates these amazing innovations.
He builds a car using interchangeable parts.
He had spotted the use of interchangeable parts In the assembly lines in Chicago, assembly lines were actually for butcher shops, for chopping up cattle.
And what Ford did was he took a car, which was at that time worth about $3,000, selling for about $3,000, and he sold his first cars for $1,000.
All in one color, black.
He says you can have it in any color as long as it's black.
And eventually Ford was able to drive the price of those cars down so at the end Ford's Model T by 1916 was selling for $400.
So what started out as a rich man's toy became the aspiration of every working family.
The car, think about it, the symbol of American convenience, the ordinary man's life, the symbol of freedom, of being able to leave the small town and go to the city, all of that was achieved not by the great planner, the progressive, the socialist-minded Woodrow Wilson.
It was achieved by the scrappy, inventive, creative, self-made man known as Henry Ford.
Mike Lindell, the inventor and CEO of MyPillow, makes all kinds of amazing products.
He's got an array of over a hundred products and he's offering deep discounts on all of them.
I want to focus now on the Giza Dream bed sheets, which really Debbie and I use all the time.
We use the normal sheets.
We also use the flannel sheets and they're just amazing.
They're made with this long staple cotton.
Mike guarantees they will be the most comfortable sheets you'll ever own, and I can testify that's true.
The first night you sleep on these sheets, you'll never want to sleep on anything else.
These Giza Dream bed sheets are available in a wide variety of colors, and like all Mike's products, they come with a 60-day money-back guarantee.
They also have a 10-year warranty.
So right now, you can buy one, get one free by calling 800-876-0227 and using the promo code Dinesh.
For a limited time, buy one, get one free.
Call 800-876-0227 or just go to MyPillow.com.
But don't forget to use promo code Dinesh.
It is well known that socialism has failed pretty much everywhere it has been tried.
But is there one striking exception to that rule?
The left today in America says, yes, there is an exception.
And of course, they all glom on to that exception.
The exception is Scandinavia.
I call it Sven socialism because every third Scandinavian guy is named Sven.
But the important point about Scandinavian socialism is it seems appealing because, after all, Scandinavia is not a bad place to live.
Sven may be a little bit of a weird guy.
He goes to work in a suit on a bicycle.
He carries a lady's handbag.
All his furniture is from Ikea.
You know, he likes to move around dancing to ABBA, you know, 50 years later.
But nevertheless, the point is, Norway is not that bad a place to live.
Neither is Sweden, neither is Denmark or Finland.
So... Sven socialism appears to be kind of working, a viable socialism.
That's why the left is like, always point, they can't point to Cuba.
They can't point to Venezuela.
They can't point to Mao in China or Stalin in Russia.
So it's Venezuela for them straight out.
Now... Here's the problem.
I think when you actually begin to look at Scandinavia, you realize that Scandinavian socialism, and you've got to put that, at least use the word in a qualified sense, is very different from what the left actually wants.
And we're going to see this in two notable respects.
The first thing to realize is that contrary to all the claims that Scandinavia is socialist, Scandinavia is not socialist in wealth creation.
It may be socialist to a degree in wealth distribution, and I'll come back to that.
But I want to say that in terms of generating wealth, in terms of producing a successful society, enlarging, you may say, the economic pie...
The Scandinavians are not socialist.
And here's the former Danish Prime Minister, Lok van Rasmussen.
Hans Lok Rasmussen confirming that point.
Listen. I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism.
Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear.
Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy.
Denmark is a market economy.
So what Rasmussen is getting at is the Scandinavians have a market economy.
And not only that, but they are more free market in many notable ways than the United States.
Their corporate taxes are about 20%, pretty much the same as in this country, although lower than if the left had its way as it wants to.
The Scandinavians have no minimum wage laws.
You can hire and fire people for any reason.
The Scandinavians have, with one exception, no wealth tax.
That means they don't tax wealth.
They don't have any inheritance tax, which means you can leave all your dough to your kids.
No Scandinavian country has the kind of Wall Street or financial transaction fees that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders want to impose on Wall Street.
Finland tried universal basic income, giving a fixed amount of income to everybody.
They tried that. They found it didn't work.
They got rid of it. Bottom line, the Scandinavians do not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
They realize that if you want to have redistribution, you need to have a turbocharged capitalist society that generates a big pie to distribute.
So that's the first point.
That the Scandinavians are not confiscatory about taxation or regulation.
They let the market work.
Now, it is true that the Scandinavians have a big welfare state.
But here's the key point.
The burden of that welfare state, the cost of it, is imposed across the full society.
In other words, the Scandinavians don't try to soak the rich.
Why? Because the rich guys also spend.
They're not going after a fellow Scandinavian.
They don't want to pull down the rich to bring up someone else.
And so you'll never see Scandinavians demonize their own successful entrepreneurs or even their own Equivalent of Wall Street.
They don't go after their own financiers, no.
Their idea is, look, if you want a welfare state, everybody has to pay for it.
And that means that the sort of high Scandinavian tax rates, which, by the way, go up to 60%, 65%, even 70%, but here's the point.
They kick in not just on the rich, but even on the middle class.
If you make $60,000 or $70,000 in places like Norway or Sweden, You're in the 50% tax rate.
You've got to take your paycheck and give half of it to the government right away.
Not only that, but the Scandinavians have something called the VAT tax, the value-added tax, which is a tax on consumption.
Now economists will tell you that any kind of consumption tax is regressive.
Regressive simply means it falls more heavily on the poor than on the middle class, and more heavily on the middle class than on the rich.
Why? Because the poor spend a greater proportion of their income on consumption.
So here's the bottom line. The Scandinavians don't soak the rich.
In fact, it's not inaccurate to say they soak the poor.
Probably it's most accurate to say they soak the whole society.
So imagine if Democrats in this country were to say, listen, we're going to have free health care, but you know what?
Everyone's going to have to pay half of their income in taxes.
And that includes not just the rich guy, but also the upper middle class guy and the middle class guy.
And we're going to have a consumption tax that's going to fall more heavily on the poor than on anyone else.
Of course, the American left doesn't want that.
They're running away from that.
Scandinavian socialism, they appeal to it in theory, but it holds no appeal for them in practice.
Cybercrime is up 75% and by far the most important cybercrime for you to worry about is home title theft.
The job of the criminals has become really easy.
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 that 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 And I think it's fair to say that their model is the Venezuelan model.
Venezuela, like America, a prosperous country, an oil-rich country, a country that had an opposition, a parliamentary system, democratic elections, and suddenly it seems that all that prosperity, all those civil liberties, all down the tubes.
Now, in Trump Card, you, Debbie, along with Gabby Franco, another Venezuelan dissident, outline a number of parallels between the left there and here.
We want to focus on a couple that are relevant to today, particularly relevant.
Now, the Biden administration has started going after fossil fuels.
They've already canceled contracts, stopped the Keystone Pipeline.
They're moving against fossil fuels, presumably in the name of climate change.
Is it fair to say that that was sort of pioneered by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela?
And second, isn't it interesting that all of this is not just an American phenomenon, it's kind of a global phenomenon?
Well, let me read you something from the Council on Foreign Relations, and this is the rise and fall of the petrostate.
So Venezuela, of course, is called the petrostate because their economy was mainly fossil fuels.
And it says,"...analysts anticipate that a global shift from fossil fuel energy to renewables like solar and wind will force petrostates to diversify their economies." So Venezuela tried to do this using hydro energy.
But when there were horrific droughts in Venezuela, it was very difficult to do because obviously there was no water.
And so there were rolling blackouts on a consistent basis.
People couldn't use their electricity because there was none, right?
So this is something that I don't even think that they realize that When they talk about diversifying their energy.
If you rely on water and you have no water, then it's a disaster.
And fossil fuels are always tried and true, right?
They always work. So unfortunately, I feel and fear But if we go that route, we're going to regret it.
And that is one of the things that the left loves to do, is the attack on fossil fuels.
I don't even understand why.
Now, with Hugo Chavez, I mean, obviously, Hugo Chavez didn't know if the earth is getting hotter or colder.
He didn't study any climate data.
What do you think, for someone like that, who obviously wanted to establish an iron grip On Venezuelan society, would you say that the climate change issue was a pretext, a kind of way to achieve things that he wouldn't otherwise be able to do?
It very well could be.
I mean, like I said, this is something that even the Council on Foreign Relations talks about.
And in fact, they talk about the fact that even Venezuela joined the Paris Agreement.
And it's a binding treaty that requires a state to make specific commitments to mitigate climate change.
So this is why they were so excited when Trump...
And Biden decided to do this again.
So I think it's a complete takeover of the world in a way that demonizes capitalism.
And I think that they do it through climate change.
Venezuela was one of those actors.
So they're warning about this apocalypse.
And in order to avert the apocalypse, an apocalypse that's evident to nobody.
In fact, the climate is pretty much the same as it was when you and I were five.
But nevertheless, to avert this predicted apocalypse, we're supposed to cede all this authority to government.
Very similar to COVID, right?
In other words, in both cases, a crisis, real or imagined, but a justification for much greater government control and squeezing the capitalist economy.
And targeting fossil fuels.
Exactly. That is exactly right.
Okay. Yeah. We talked about fossil fuels.
Let's turn to something else.
And that is the fact that I said in a recent interview, I was talking to John Solomon recently on his podcast.
I'm not sure that in America we are still living in a free country.
It seems like a startling thing for me, an immigrant, to say.
And I'm not saying we're the most unfree country in the world, but we always are used to being the most free country in the world.
And now if you look at countries, there are many countries much more free than we are, at least in terms of our simple, basic ability to say what we think.
Something that we all thought was, you know, I defend your right to say it even if I disagree with what you have to say.
This is America. I can have my point of view.
All those things have been rendered obsolete.
We're not living in that America anymore.
Now, did Venezuela pave the way even there?
Yes, absolutely.
So this woman, her name is Maria Corina Machado.
She was a very influential politician on the opposition, not the socialist, in Venezuela.
And she was ahead of the times when it came to fighting voter fraud in Venezuela.
She was such a hated woman by the socialists left in Venezuela.
They went after her.
They made up All kinds of excuses to go after her.
They even claimed that she was behind an assassination attempt on both Hugo Chavez and Maduro.
They just piled it on.
And about five years ago, they issued a decree that basically made it illegal for her to run again in any position in the government.
Why? Simply because she was a critic of the government and for no other reason.
I mean, isn't it interesting that now with Trump, they're trying, I mean, they can't do it with impeachment.
They want the 14th Amendment.
They want to pass a law. All kinds of ruses to prevent this man from putting himself in front of the voters.
Exactly. I mean, you'd think they'd be like, let's convince the voters that Trump is bad and they won't vote for him.
But that's not their approach. Right.
No, it's the same approach.
It's why give them an opportunity to run again?
They don't want any kind of resistance.
And so that is why they demonized her.
That is why they decided to bar her from public office.
And so it's a very, very close parallel.
And this is what they do to everyone that defames Nicolás Maduro.
In fact, in 2017, they passed a law.
It's called Venezuelan's Law Against Hate.
And basically, it criminalizes any action that incites Hatred, in their opinion, against a person or group.
But this simply is a way to stop you from saying anything about the left or about the socialist regime.
So this is not just applicable, obviously, to political candidates.
You're basically saying this is a hate crimes law for the whole society in which they can shut you up.
I mean, what I found fascinating about—we were talking a moment ago about this, and you were saying that, by and large, the way this hate crimes law is carried out is people inform on each other by monitoring social media posts.
They do. This is exactly what has been done now by the FBI to try to chase down everybody who went to D.C. for the rally with Trump.
Not just people who went to the Capitol, but people who just went to the mall outdoors.
To register their point of view.
All of the National Assembly is now socialist, right?
And so the election was widely considered a sham by the opposition.
And even the human rights groups and most Western democracies also believe that.
But it gave control of the Assembly to the socialist.
And that is basically the last part of the national government...
Their way of stopping any kind of opposition to the government.
And they suppress dissent by sending their colectivos to people's houses.
So if they find out that they are saying anything against the government, they send these colectivos, which is a group of thugs, criminal thugs, Kind of Venezuela's Antifa.
Venezuela's answer, yes, exactly.
They go and they intimidate them.
In some cases, they hurt them.
But they look through Facebook posts, they look through Twitter posts, anything like that, where they jail people with no due process.
They leave them in jail, and they stay there for a very long time.
You know, what I find interesting about all this is that the Venezuelans could, you know, they could basically say, we're a tyranny.
We're not going to have any elections anymore.
I find it interesting that these socialist states, they want to go through the process of having an election.
They want to make it seem legitimate.
and they also want a token opposition that is ineffective.
I say that because I think that's the goal of the Democrats here.
This is why they love Romney types.
They want graceful losers, people who put up a fake fight and then fall on their face.
And anyone who's really threatening, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, the left immediately goes after them because they're afraid that real opposition is not the opposition that they want.
Right, right. And so Venezuela uses the criminal justice system as a weapon.
And I'm afraid that like what happened to you will happen to all of us if we say or do anything that they don't like.
And I think you know what I'm...
So we're saying we all become potential criminals.
I mean, this is what it was in the Soviet Union, right?
I mean, Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for years for saying something against Stalin.
And so these foreign worlds that we always thought were remote, we study about them in school, foreign tyrannies, we never thought it would happen here.
No, but I think we may be soon living it.
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 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, support our military, and respect our veterans.
AMAC works hard to deliver real value to their customers and members, providing the best benefits, discounts, and services you can find in one place.
Debbie and I are lifetime members, and we're taking advantage of all their great discounts.
Go to amac.us, amac.us, and join now.
Once again, it is amac.us.
So far I've been talking about socialism mainly in the economic sense, but American socialism is peculiar in that it's not solely, maybe not even primarily, economic.
It has a whole other agenda.
In fact, if you listen to The Socialists today and you go to their conferences, You'll see that many of them care more about abortion than about the minimum wage.
They care more about the transgender bathroom than they do about universal basic income.
They have a sort of agenda of cultural Marxism.
And the striking thing about this agenda is that they don't want to really even persuade you about it.
They want to force you to conform to it.
So what they do is they try to set up a cultural monopoly, control, you may say, the cultural means of production from the academic establishment, not just in universities, but in schools, including elementary and secondary school.
They want to control the entertainment world, not just Hollywood, but Broadway and country music and the comedians.
And then they want to control the media.
And they have a very powerful leverage in all of these.
And their goal is to sort of beat us, wrestle us, pressure us, cajole us into submission.
In the movie Trump Card, I summarize or take as a symbol of all this a powerful scene in 1984 where the protagonist, Winston, is at the mercy of Big Brother.
Now, in 1984, Big Brother is the state.
But in our society now, Big Brother is the state working in coordination with digital media censorship, with people outing each other on social media, with the media acting as not a champion of free speech, as you might expect, but a champion of shutting people down.
The New York Times literally talks about places where people are having, quote, unfettered conversations, as if the only conversations we should have.
Are fettered conversations.
It's almost like they'll next want to shut down coffee shops because people are having unfettered conversations.
So watch this clip of Winston, who is being interrogated by an agent of the state, a big brother, who's trying to get him to admit that two plus two is five.
How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
Four. And if the state says this is not four, but five...
Then how many fingers? Four.
How many fingers?
Four! Four!
How many fingers?
How many fingers, Winston?
How many fingers, Winston?
Five! Five! Five! You're only saying that because you want the pain to stop.
I want to see five!
Are you trying to persuade me that you see five?
Or do you really want to see five?
I just need it! How many fingers am I holding up,
Winston? Five.
Now, Orwell, writing about this, he talks about how Winston finally breaks down and gives in and concedes and goes, yeah, two plus two is five.
And Orwell writes, their real weapon, meaning Big Brother's real weapon, was the murder Merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction, until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue.
This is literally how all conservatives feel in dealing with the left.
They twist everything we do.
When we do something good, they ignore it.
Dead silence about it.
We do something, any kind of peccadillo.
Ted Cruz goes to Cancun.
Let's all the media pile in on him.
Let's call for his resignation.
Demonstrations outside his house.
Let's intimidate him. Let's threaten him.
Let's beat him into submission.
Same thing with Michael Flynn, the FBI. Let's do interminable interviews.
You said this. You said that.
Earlier you said this.
Now this statement. Now that statement.
Hours and hours. And then they just find two statements that appear to contradict each other.
Could be just a lapse of memory.
Or you got so confused you didn't even know what you were saying.
And they go, there you go. Both statements can't simultaneously be true.
Indict him for lying to a federal officer.
This is Big Brother in its modern manifestation.
So the ultimate objective, I think, of the socialist left isn't just economic confiscation, isn't just to raid your pocketbook.
It's to terrify you into submission.
So all of us become Winston, cowering and whimpering at first and ultimately giving in, not only on the outside, but also on the inside.
Our ideals crushed, our dignity gone, finally embracing our abusers and oppressors and captors by saying in unison, I love Big Brother.
At this point, the left is content and our re-education is complete.
Today we're in a battle for truth and I'd like to recommend to you an insightful book.
Here it is. It's called Reflections on the Existence of God.
It's by best-selling author Richard Simmons III. He covers topics like life, death, sex, truth.
Reflections of 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 on apologetics, Simmons is the best I've ever read.
If you want to challenge yourself, I encourage you to read...
and 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.
Hey, I hope you've been enjoying this special on socialism.
The ideas in it come out of two of my books.
The first one is the latest book, United States of Socialism.
And as a contrast with socialism, the articulation of the self-made man of the American ideal, that comes from my book, America.
Imagine a world without her.
So I'd recommend those two books to learn more, to pick up sources for what I'm talking about, and to begin this deep dive, because this is what we're up against.
So we may as well understand it as we think about how to fight effectively against it.
It's time for The Mailbox.
We're going to stay on topic.
And here's a question about socialism.
Until recently, I've generally agreed with you that the Democrats have been moving towards identity socialism, but I'd like to challenge that.
The role of big corporations aggressively acting for the benefit of the new ruling class has been a surprise.
The direction appears to be a hybrid form of collectivism.
Other than the healthcare industry, I don't see much of a move to nationalize other industries.
Fascism allowed property ownership of the means of production, and As long as the property owner supported the ruling class, The only aspect of fascism missing is nationalism.
I think this form of collectivism uses the revolutionary approaches of the communists to tear down institutions, in this case, the Constitution.
I call this hybrid collectivism, revolutionary fascism, or you may prefer identity fascism.
But my question is, what should we be calling it?
How do you get a unified voice around this identity, and how do we stop it?
First of all, I gotta say, wow.
I love having listeners like you that force me to think, that modify my own thinking in important ways.
Now, obviously, I've been thinking a lot about fascism.
My book, The Big Lie, is all about the fascist and Nazi roots of the American left.
I think you are quite right, though, that simply to use the phrase identity socialism misses a dimension of modern socialism, which is fascistic.
And by fascistic we mean here, not concentration camps, not even anti-Semitism.
Well, we're talking about the alliance of the state with the corporate sector.
That's what Mussolini did in his fascist regime in Italy.
That's what the Nazis did in German.
They didn't nationalize all the German corporations.
They just imposed what they call a Gleitschaltung, the coordination making all the corporate sector march in lockstep, as well as all the cultural institutions.
So I think your phrase, which is very arresting, identity fascism, is in some ways a very good description of the type of socialism that we're dealing with.
Think of it, the fascists had street gangs, the brown shirts, the black shirts, who were working at the behest of a political party.
That's not a staple of all forms of socialism, but it is a staple of national socialism, of fascism.
Bottom line, I think you've captured an important dimension of how socialism shows itself in our time.
And it is identity socialism.
It's also fascism.
And a pretty good term for all that is indeed identity fascism.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
Export Selection