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March 1, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:03:27
TRUMP ACT 2 Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep36
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Why Trump drives them bonkers, the man is a human suppository.
My message to LeBron James, shut up and dribble.
And author Naomi Wolf comes on to talk about the fascism of the left.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
It's all about Trump.
And you know what? It's still all about Trump.
I was watching the CPAC speech, and really, the first thing I noticed was just how good Trump looked.
I mean, the guy looks like he's 10 years younger.
You know, Trump and Biden are approximately the same age, and if you just set them side by side, I mean, Biden looks like Trump's dad.
Ridiculous.
Now, the thing about Trump was that he said several important things that I want to highlight in this speech.
And at a certain point, I was feeling a sense of disappointment in the speech, and I'll tell you why.
But then Trump, being Trump, just sort of came through in a big way toward the end.
Now, let me start out with a very important theme He's not starting a new party.
He never was.
The whole notion of Trump starting a Patriot or MAGA party, this was essentially a divide and conquer strategy by the media and the left.
Putting out a false rumor.
Trump is not dumb enough to do that.
He knows it. He doesn't want to divide the conservative vote.
That's a very important development.
Trump is not going there.
I never thought he should, and I'm really glad he's not doing it.
Number two, the attack on the Supreme Court.
Totally warranted.
And I think for Trump, it is not just that they abdicated their responsibility, but I think he feels this sense of a betrayal.
Why? Because he appointed not RINOs, not moderates, but really tough conservatives to be on the court.
And these are the very guys who sort of turned on him.
And think of what we had to fight to get these guys through, particularly Kavanaugh.
So the Kavanaugh thing really hurts.
And I think Trump feels it, and he doesn't hesitate to say it.
Now, election integrity.
A very important theme.
This is the theme that is most on the minds of conservatives and Republicans.
We're sort of not allowed to talk about it, but we are thinking it.
And Trump is not only thinking it, but he is speaking out on it.
And he is, I think correctly, pointing Republicans toward the state legislatures.
These are, by the way, Republican-controlled legislatures in swing states.
That's where the problem needs to be fixed.
Now, in a way, I think Trump was a little slow to get there because after the election, it appeared like Trump was trying to do other things.
And in some ways, the whole January 6th thing was very confused because all these guys came to Washington to make a difference, to be heard.
But to do what?
There was really no chance that Mike Pence would unilaterally overturn the election result or even dispatch it back to the states at that point.
The time for action was definitely earlier.
I think Trump realizes this and he was communicating that that's where reform efforts need to focus.
Now, for a while there in the speech, I was a little disappointed because Trump was doing the kind of Republican boilerplate rhetoric, which was to the effect of, we must do this and we are against that and we're against cancel culture and we must fix this.
And the problem is that for those of us listening, we're like, yeah, we must do it, but how do we do it?
What are you actually, what is the pathway to achieving this result?
And It was a little bit the Lyndon Johnson question that LBJ apparently used to say when people would give him all these.
He would be like, and therefore what?
What is the way to do this?
And with Trump, there was a sense that we weren't getting that until Trump uncorks toward the end, I think, the biggest idea of his speech, and a very important one.
He says, if the federal government will not act...
To curb the censorship of big tech, Republican state legislatures should and must and can impose massive penalties and fines, criminal penalties if need be, so that if these big tech companies censor you, let's say in the state of Texas, Find them.
Issue warrants for their arrest.
Round these people up.
The state has authority over this and can do it.
Now, this notion of going after big tech in this way is not original with Trump.
In fact, to be honest, I believe it was the small countries of Poland and Hungary that have They've pioneered the way in this area.
Can you believe that these small countries, which have, however, experienced communism, they know the smell, the aroma of totalitarianism when they see it, and they are on it.
And so in Poland and Hungary, they have laws now moving toward final passage that impose severe penalties.
I mean, this is amazing.
They have an 11 million euro fine.
And here's the Polish Prime Minister, Morawiki.
He says, For those who oppose them.
And he goes, if it's legal to say it, you should be able to say it in Poland.
You should be able to say it in Hungary.
Now, in Florida, Ron DeSantis is on this.
And he has introduced legislation.
It's called the Transparency in Technology Act that would impose penalties on big tech companies.
Here's DeSantis. Today they come after someone who looks like me.
Tomorrow they come after someone who looks like you.
He calls them cartels.
And he basically says that if they try to censor someone in Florida running for office, massive fines, and all kinds of legal pathways for people to sue big tech.
And so DeSantis has been a pioneer here.
But Trump, by embracing this, is sort of taking this nationwide.
Now you may say, well, how can the states do this when there are Section 230 protections for these big tech companies?
No. These Section 230 protections apply to federal laws.
They are federal. We're good to go.
A reflexively anti-government.
Some people think, oh, you're a conservative, you can't, you should be for no government.
Nonsense. We are for government, but in its proper sphere.
We recognize the limits of government.
Government does a lot of things really badly.
You cannot expect government to keep a shrewd eye out for the profit motive, because there's no profit motive.
And therefore, from the DMV to the post office, and in fact, the defense department, these government agencies are run poorly.
We know that. But government does have certain proper functions.
And one of its functions, by the way, is to use its power to protect our basic civil liberties.
It does that in the area of civil rights.
Why can't it do it in the area of civil liberties?
So this, it seems to me, is a very promising, practical road that Trump is pointing to.
And I'd like to see movement from Republican legislatures all over the place to start going after these big tech moguls.
The big tech moguls are powerful, but they're not as powerful as the law.
And the law needs to go after them.
What this really also means politically is that the Republican Party is now the party of free speech.
The Republican Party has long been the party of economic freedom.
But the left also used to defend civil liberties.
And so the civil liberties issue in the 1960s and all the way through the 20th century was the prerogative of the left, but not anymore.
The left has now become, and it's so creepy to see these media types cheering on censorship.
At the press conference with DeSantis, they were literally shrieking for censorship, attacking DeSantis for talking about the right to speak, the right to assemble basic civil liberties.
Well, You know what?
The GOP needs to embrace these issues.
We are the party not merely of economic freedom, but also of freedom of speech, also of freedom of religion, also of freedom of assembly.
We are the party of freedom, period.
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Author Naomi Wolf burst on the scene several years ago with a kind of captivating book called The Beauty Myth, which sort of took the culture by surprise.
She's been an eloquent voice for feminism, for sexual liberty.
Her latest book is called Outrages, Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love.
And she's also something of a political maverick.
I was really shocked and sort of taken aback to see her on Tucker Carlson recently, where she made some striking observations.
And I thought to myself, wow, it'd be really fun to explore these in a little more detail.
So, Naomi Wolf, thank you for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
Let's begin with the Tucker Carlson interview.
What struck me was the strong statements that you made about the fact that in the COVID era, We are, quote, moving into a coup situation.
You talked about a police state, and you implied, well, more than implied, you said that we are moving toward almost a stage of fascism in which the government has full authority over our lives and extinguishes our freedom.
What made you come to these startling conclusions that some would say reflect almost right-wing paranoia?
Well, first of all, thank you, Dinesh.
I've followed your work for many years, and it's exciting to be able to have this conversation.
I think it's important.
Forgive me, I'm having a little bit of an eye makeup issue while we're talking, so just ignore it if I'm tearing a little bit.
It's not emotions, it's mascara.
These are not new problems for me to be concerned with.
I wrote a book, and I don't think they're partisan at all.
And I think one of the problems we're facing now as a country is that they're seen as right-wing or left-wing, if they were.
It's a serious problem.
I wrote a book in 2008 called The End of America, Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, in which I identified issues at that time, steps taken by the Bush administration, That were very scary to me.
And I looked back at closing democracies, both on the left and the right in history.
And I saw that tyrants, whether they're on the left or on the right, they always take the same 10 steps.
And I spelled out these 10 steps in the book.
That happened to be the Bush administration.
I kept hammering these points during the Obama era.
I was one of like two or three progressives who were saying, wait a minute, there's a war on whistleblowers.
Wait a minute. You know, you're not allowed to drone your own people without charge or trial, without due process.
Obama kind of built on some of those 10 steps to fascism.
And now what we're seeing is, and I'm very sorry to say it, you know, Trump had his own war on But now what's happening is that in the wake of the pandemic, or I would say under the guise of the pandemic, which is real, a lot of bad actors,
including the government, including the Biden administration, but tech companies, it's not just the government, it's for-profit companies, are kind of aligning to bring us where we are, which I argue is now step 10.
We are now in a full-out, really scary fascist moment.
Now, I found it interesting because I went back and I pulled an essay that you wrote in The Guardian called Fascist America and Ten Easy Steps.
This was back in 2007, so it was probably almost a prelude to your book, which came out the next year.
And I found it very interesting to read back because it made me a little bit ashamed of myself.
At the time, I would defend these things like the Patriot Act, which I thought were a necessary response after 9-11.
But you talked about a lot of warning signs that were troubling.
Identifying internal enemies.
You talked about the fact that people were being demonized and a massive internal surveillance system was being...
Again, the pretext was to fight terrorism, the harassment of citizens, arbitrary detention and release, controlling of the press...
Dissent equals treason.
And so I almost wonder, looking back on it, I thought to myself, wow, you know, I would have been very dismissive had I read this article in 2007.
But reading it now, I'm actually on board with you in thinking that these were some very bad things that we allowed to happen in our country.
And they have opened the gates, paved the way for a lot of the tyrannical impulses that we see today.
So, in a way, I'd say you have been consistent all along, and people like me have had to re-examine some of our somewhat, I think, blind support of measures that could easily have been abused, but we didn't see it quite at the time.
Would you agree today that when I read that, you know, Governor Abbott is thinking of lifting restrictions now in Texas, of course, Ron DeSantis has been out front in Florida, when you look at people like Cuomo, when you look at people like, you know, Newsom in California, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, isn't it true that these tyrannical impulses now are coming predominantly from the left?
I mean, Dinesh, you know, yes, I will give you that, but I'm not gonna let you off that easily, respectfully.
You know, in 2008, I remember well that you were one of the people defending really unconstitutional movements.
Steps from the Bush administration always, and there's always a good reason, right?
Terrorism, Guantanamo, you know, the ticking time bomb.
I mean, I remember these arguments well.
We have to torture them, so we'll find out where the next dirty bomb is going to be released in Times Square.
And I remember, you know, kind of yelling at the TV screen at that time, because it was more a TV screen than a computer screen.
There is no such thing as...
Opening these gates of hell, basically, in terms of protecting the Constitution, and then managing what you release.
And I'm not putting it all at your feet, but it always seems like a good idea.
And now the left is absolutely making the same mistake.
There's always an emergency, and the Brilliant, amazing thing about looking back in history is there was always an emergency.
There was the Kristallnacht, you know, I mean, sorry, there was the the the fire against the Reichstag fire, right?
Exactly. You know, there were emergency measures in Mussolini's Italy.
There were terrorists in, you know, in Chile when martial law was declared.
There's always an emergency.
And what I can also say is that as a former political consultant, I advised the Clinton campaign for reelection.
And I advised Gore 2000 directly.
The rationale for closing down freedoms is so tempting.
To leaders on the left or the right in a democracy, because let's face it, democracy is annoying.
It's difficult. It is much easier for leaders on the left or right to just have fewer, you know this, you know this better than most people, fewer people at the table, fewer stakeholders.
You can please them more easily and you can rationalize.
So, you know, as Rahm Emanuel said and, you know, quoting Churchill, I think, never waste a good crisis, never waste a good emergency.
Naomi Klein has made this argument as well.
Crises give people opportunities to exploit them.
I'm not saying this crisis isn't real.
I'm not saying the terrorism, you know, the terrorist crisis was real.
I was in, you know, New York living there during 9-11.
I smelled the smoke.
My kids were affected by it.
That is not the issue.
The issue is that Constitution has to be protected in times of emergency and times when there's nothing particularly going wrong.
Because, as you point out, the edifice has been constructed.
I mean, I promise I'll stop it.
In 2012, I sat in a courtroom in Lower Manhattan with almost no other journalists listening to Obama's lawyers argue that they had the right to detain journalists forever without charge of trial.
It was Chris Hedges at that point.
And, like, literally, where was CNN? Where was Fox?
Where was everyone? This was so momentous.
And so the National Defense Authorization Act is the law of the land now, and it allows any president, including President Biden or President Trump, if he comes back, You know, next time around or, you know, Kristi Noem or whoever it is to detain any American without charge or trial.
But we don't even need those powers now because the pandemic has allowed governors and boards of health to enact emergency measures, to crush businesses, to impose on people's physical bodies, making decisions about vaccination that should be personalized.
Decisions or family decisions for children.
To suppress assembly in New York State, I can't even gather with more than 10 people without risking a $15,000 fine.
My potluck on the 14th is going to be illegal if 11 people show up.
The emergency measures are all around us, and we are barely allowed to notice because lockdown helps us keep from noticing.
We're isolated from one another.
We're kept from going to a town hall and saying, What the heck?
We need our Constitution back.
Didn't really think these words would come out of my mouth talking to you, Naomi, but you are absolutely right, and we'll be right back after this word from American Truth Project.
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We're back with author Naomi Wolf, and we're talking about, well, I guess American fascism or paving the way to it.
Let me start by talking about one of the most lionized of the American fascists, if I may, which is Governor Cuomo in New York, someone who's been an apostle of lockdowns, someone who not only dispatched all these people forcibly to nursing homes and didn't want to take them, but then sent people to their deaths and then maybe I say, hid the bodies, or at least hid the data about the bodies.
He's now facing two, it seems, fairly credible accusations of sexual harassment.
Of course, the left had been big on the whole idea of believe women and believe victims during the...
I think it was Cuomo himself who tweeted this out during the Kavanaugh hearings.
What should happen right now to Governor Cuomo?
Well, I'm, again, a big believer in due process, so I actually...
Though a feminist and a sexual assault and harassment survivor, I never said just believe victims of any crime with that due process.
That's the beauty of the rule of law.
Everyone gets their day in court.
That said, as you noted, these are two women who are independently confirming what sounds like, you know, legally defined sexual harassment in the workplace.
And I've interviewed one of them, Lindsay Boylan, not about this, but she's a credible, thoughtful person.
And, you know, we'll see what happens as this plays out.
That is not the worst of it, though.
Like, it's very serious to sexually harass your subordinates, whether you're on the left or right.
Very serious. It is much more serious to hold 59 million people hostage in their homes and suspend the due process of the Constitution of the United States Every single day.
So I'm actually actively soliciting an attorney to sue Cuomo.
I'm also exploring a run for elected office in New York State specifically to, and I'm encouraging all citizens in their states that are still locked down to do this, to run for office, to run for state assembly, to run for governor, you know, because I'm looking as a political consultant, what are the levers of dislodging these people?
And really the only way is a political pushback, you know, short of recall, which we're seeing in California.
And if there was a recall mechanism, you know, I'll explore that as well.
But these people are tyrants and they have, you know, this is a coup.
Like on a state-by-state level, the founders probably didn't foresee a coup happening at a state level.
And it's one of the Complicated issues of states' rights.
You have to fight this coup in California, in New York State, in Massachusetts, state by state.
But as serious as these claims are, to me it is much more serious that Governor Cuomo has crushed businesses for no scientific reason.
There's no credible evidence that closing restaurants, closing bars, closing churches, closing synagogues Poses any kind of emergency.
And I've crunched the numbers in Columbia County where I live.
There is no emergency.
You know, every death is tragic, but there are 6.9 people dying every month with COVID in New York, in Columbia County.
Average age is 82.
It is way down on causes of death.
It's not as high as other respiratory diseases.
In Columbia County, there is no medical emergency.
My rights should be restored yesterday.
So he's got to go.
Now, do you think, Naomi, that you use words like tyranny, do you think that Americans don't recognize tyranny when they see it?
Because they think of tyranny as like a guy with a Stalin mustache and a Cossack jacket.
And then when they look at a suave guy like Gavin Newsom, or Gretchen Whitmer, who looks like sort of soccer mom, or even Cuomo, who looks like he's, you know, it's a happy-go-lucky Italian-eating linguine...
Sipping, you know, so they don't think of that guy as being a tyrant and yet when you look at their actions, when they're essentially, you know, preventing basic human contact, forcing you to wear a sort of Sharia mask on your face, I mean, they do not hesitate to squelch your ordinary ability to exercise freedom in everyday life.
And I think you're trying to sound the alarm to say, guys, look at what has happened to you.
My wife was making the point, Debbie, that, you know, even today if you walk in a grocery store and just look around for a while, People are zombified.
They don't smile at each other.
They all just walk around like they're in The Walking Dead.
And this is what government control does to people.
Exactly. And again, it's not just government control.
Some of these bad actors are tech companies.
Some of these bad actors are pharma companies.
I mean, there's an alignment of a few...
There's a huge transfer of power going on, you know, by crushing the middle class, sole proprietors, small businesses, small landlords like me, right?
You know, a single mom whose only steady income for many years is a little piece of property I held.
In New York State, Cuomo suspended evictions for six months.
That may sound really compassionate, but what it does is it drives out all those immigrants, all those single moms, all those small business owners who have struggled to get that one piece of rental property.
There was one day in January when big developers swooped in and scooped them all up at a fire sale because small men and women can no longer hold on.
You're seeing that with 100,000 restaurants closing.
You're seeing it, you know, massive transfer of wealth crushing small businesses and all that.
But tech companies are up 27%.
Amazon is up 27%.
Bloomberg, you know, way up.
So this is, you know, bad actors who are not just the government are jumping on this train.
I think people are aware.
It's more than you think.
It's definitely more on the right than on the left.
Interestingly, I think people with military experience are more alert to what a tyranny looks like, even though, as you're right, in America, it doesn't look like Black shirts goose-stepping, and I made that point at the end of America.
In America, fascism is going to come gently and slowly and imperceptibly.
It's coming pretty fast. But if you just, you know, look in your feed, like, there are scenes of fascism.
I mean, the fact that, and this is around the world, in Ireland, the police are hunting down and brutalizing peaceful Ireland, you know, peaceful protesters who are trying to get their freedoms back.
In Canada, people are writing to me saying, Their kids are forced to not talk in school when they're eating lunch and eat facing a wall.
I talked to a teacher in Massachusetts who's distraught because, you know, they're losing kids, you know, they're falling through the cracks and children are like zombies in school.
As you say, this is child abuse.
I mean, I saw an ad for Walgreens with a mask on a baby.
This is child abuse.
There's no medical evidence for it.
So I am getting hundreds of emails from people across the political spectrum saying, I recognize this.
I'm terrified. What do we do?
But here's where you and I have a task, Dinesh, Mr.
D'Souza, if I may. And the task is our country is so divided, more than any time ever.
And we're getting different news streams.
And this is even more dangerous because we can't assemble and talk to each other.
So, at this moment, the only thing that can save us is for left and right to come together and for us to, you know, really rise up peacefully against these restrictions on assembly, gather in our town halls, gather in the streets, gather in our churches and synagogues and mosques and talk to each other and join forces because I do think people are terrified and witnessing this,
you know, some more than others. But people, and it's a class thing, working people know that their, you know, their livelihoods are being crushed.
People in public school know that their children are being turned into tiny zombies and traumatized.
So I do think an alarm needs to be sounded, but it has to be across the political divide and inclusive.
Naomi, if I may, that was a passionate cry out for freedom.
I mean, not just civic freedom, civil liberties, and economic freedom.
Not the protection necessarily of the big business, but the protection of small entrepreneurs and people trying to make a living.
Hey, Naomi, thanks for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Mr.
D'Souza. I really appreciate it as well.
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LeBron James is in the news again and there was a recent video of him talking about his political activism.
Now the video was a response to Zlatan Ibramovic, AC Milan striker.
A former LA Galaxy star criticizing James for this kind of relentless political activism.
And basically what the guy said is, listen, just do what you do best because this political stuff doesn't make you look good.
And so here is a clip of LeBron striking back and justifying why he spent so much time talking about politics, particularly racial politics.
Listen. I never shut up about things that's wrong.
I preach about my people and I preach about, you know, equality, social injustice, racism, you know, systematic voting, voter suppression, things that go on in our community because I was a part of my community at one point and seeing the things that was going on.
You know, what's going on still because I have a group of 300 plus kids at my school that's going through the same thing and they need a voice.
And I'm their voice.
I'm their voice and I use my platform to continue to shed light on everything that may be going on not only in my community but around the you know this country and around the world so you know if There's no reason well now I don't see no reason, but there's no way I will ever just stick to sports because I understand how You know how this platform and how powerful my voice is well, I Don't deny that the guy has a right to speak
We all do. Nor do I deny that he has a big platform.
Of course he does. But the question is, is this a good use of his platform?
We're living in this age where essentially we have seen a politicization across the board.
Sports has become politicized.
The movies have become politicized.
And you've got these actors and you've got these athletes all pontificating about issues.
Now, here's the problem.
People who are good in one field are rarely all that knowledgeable about other fields.
And so when you use your fame in one sphere to try to get people to follow you in another, it's in a sense a kind of stolen authority.
I mean, I wouldn't go to somebody who is, let's say, the world's greatest realtor.
Admittedly, an expert in that field and say, listen, you know, would you help me take out my appendix?
Why? Because realtors don't know a whole lot about the appendix.
True, they may have a certain prominence in one area, but it doesn't make them an expert in every other area.
I remember growing up in India, my uncle, he would watch these cricket matches, and he was, you know, he thought he was the world's expert on cricket.
He kept saying things like, how could you make such an elementary mistake?
Oh man, you missed that, you fool!
And I'm thinking to myself, you don't know anything about cricket.
You're a chemical engineer.
But here you are, admittedly only in your living room, purporting to be this kind of authority on a subject that you know nothing about.
These people are professionals.
Not to say you don't have a right to your opinion, it's just that your opinion is super dumb.
And this is the case across the board.
You've got these figures in one area, even Bill Gates, talking to us about vaccines.
I mean, you're a guy who's good with coding, he's good with computers, no one denies it.
But when did he get his medical degree?
When has he suddenly become doctor?
Maybe it's his physical resemblance to Fauci.
Hey, I look like Fauci, maybe I can speak with the same kind of moral authority.
Nonsense. The other problem, I think, is that when you think about specifically these sports figures and these actors, Many of them don't have any real education at all.
I mean, LeBron James basically finished high school and stopped.
And that's... He's the norm.
I'm not talking about him particularly.
Most of these actors, they kind of finish the 10th grade or the 12th grade, and then they go to...
If they go to film school at all, they just go into Hollywood as an apprentice, and they move up the ranks.
And then suddenly, they're talking about...
The minimum wage is way too low.
I mean, should we really be consulting people like Sean Penn...
And, you know, Mike Tyson.
I mean, Mike Tyson.
Oh, I make $40 million for a fight.
Why shouldn't the minimum wage be $700?
The guy has no idea how the world normally operates.
These people live in rarefied environments.
And they have no sense of what public policy entails.
And yet, there they are, letting us know what they think.
Now, LeBron makes an interesting point.
He appeals to them. I'm at school.
I'm getting information. I live on the street.
I've got a lot of experience.
But my question is, what is that actual experience?
Is LeBron really having the normal black experience of racism?
Consider the following scene.
Here's LeBron. Sir?
Police cars. LeBron is like, oh, oh, I'm driving while black.
The officer comes up. Hello, Mr.
James. Hey, why did you stop me?
You know, you have white privilege, you know?
And the guy goes, Mr.
James, I'm really sorry to ask, but my kid is a huge fan.
Do you mind signing an autograph for me?
Oh, yeah. Okay, fine.
Sure. Here you go. Bottom line I'm trying to get at here is that LeBron, if anything, gets the devotional treatment.
Everywhere he goes, he's a rock star.
Everywhere he goes, people fawn over him.
So this idea that he's somehow underprivileged and that some white cop or white social worker making $50,000 a year is oppressing him, this is just downright ludicrous.
It's a falsification of experience itself.
So my bottom line message is, hey LeBron, you know what?
You're really good at what you do.
Do that! I'm not going to say shut up and dribble, literally, because you have every right to speak on other issues.
But you might want to think about what it is you actually know, what actual experience, what actual knowledge, besides, of course, talking to eight kids and reflecting what they think, what actual knowledge are you bringing to these issues?
I think if you thought about that, your messages might be what you should be doing, more inspirational, more motivational for the kids, and perhaps a little more unifying for our society as well.
It's always fun for me to talk to Mike Lindell of MyPillow because this guy is literally always brimming with ideas, brimming with enthusiasm.
He's almost a quintessential capitalist.
Here's a little clip of Mike Lindell talking about how he funds his own business.
Listen. Mike, there's a long tradition that goes back to Marx that talks about the entrepreneur as someone who supplies capital.
That's where we get the name capitalist, but doesn't really do a whole lot else.
And I want to test this theory by talking to a real entrepreneur.
So let me start by asking you, do you supply the capital for your business?
Yes, absolutely. So you started with your own money?
I started with my own money. And you've funded yourself all the way through?
All the way through. So there's Mike, being Mike.
And the good thing is, as a capitalist, he makes terrific products.
I want to talk to you about how his products have changed Debbie's sleeping habits.
When she started sleeping on Mike's pillow, suddenly she began sleeping through the night.
Because of the sort of change of life, she's been trying all kinds of pillows.
Nothing has worked. We're good to go.
And all Mike's pillows come with a 10-year warranty and a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Go to MyPillow.com and use the promo code Dinesh.
Now, Mike is offering up to 66% off on all kinds of products, not just the pillows, the Geezer Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, the dog bed, the MyPillow towel sets.
So call 800-876-0227 or just go to MyPillow.com.
Don't forget to use promo code Dinesh.
Last week I talked on the podcast about this bizarre attack from the left on, yes, the discipline of mathematics.
I mentioned the bizarre term ethnomathematics and I refer to an Oregon curriculum which talks about dismantling racism in mathematics.
We covered such bizarre ideas.
It says, White supremacy culture shows up in the math classroom when you have a focus on getting the, quote, right answer.
The basic idea, of course, is that there's no right answer or there are multiple right answers.
I talked about how silly this is, but I didn't really get into why we're hearing this kind of nonsense.
Now, The problem is a little deepened by the fact that I see this week articles in which elite public schools that have advanced programs for academically strong students are now under pressure to dismantle those programs.
In San Francisco, for example, the competitive Lowell High School It is no longer using a merit-based admissions program.
It's now moving to a random lottery.
Boom. Suddenly, the selectivity is gone.
Suddenly, it is essentially a gambling casino to get in.
Here I read in Daily Wire, also in the WGBH, Boston public schools are suspending advanced learning classes.
Now, the interesting question is why?
We hear that there are, quote, a lot of inequities Inequities in the program?
Is the program discriminatory in any way?
No, the program is merit-based.
You can get in based upon your demonstrated ability.
But here's what happened. Once they looked at the students in the selective program, they discovered that 70% of the students were white and Asian.
And even though a majority of students in the public school system are Hispanic and black.
So the problem here is not anything to do with the merit system.
It is the result that the merit system is producing.
And apparently they expect that all racial groups should fan out into the advanced program at roughly their portion in the general population.
And since that's not happening, one of the school committee members, this is Lorna Rivera, this is just not acceptable.
Again, it's the result that's not acceptable.
She has no quarrel with the process itself.
So I kind of want to get to the root of what's going on here.
Why does it seem That merit itself, mathematics itself, have somehow become a racist concept.
Well, the answer is actually really simple.
And that is that merit has become a racist concept because merit doesn't produce the racially equitable results that the left now demands.
So they reason their way backward.
The result is not proportional representation.
Therefore, the test must be biased.
Therefore, well, for many years it was the problem is with the test.
I remember when I wrote my book, The End of Racism, there was a lot of attacks on the SAT. Oh, the SAT is culturally biased.
You know, that's because it asks questions about things like golf and a regatta on the verbal section of the test.
And so what I said in The End of Racism was, okay, well, why don't we put aside the verbal section?
Let's look only at the math section.
In the math section, you notice, and this mirrors the verbal section, it's the same result, that whites and Asian Americans seem to come out on the top, Hispanics fall in the middle, African Americans the last fall at the bottom.
And the crushing point is that this was not a feature limited to the SAT. If it was just one test, you could say, oh, the fault is with the test.
But, of course, in American society, we administer a wide battery of tests for all kinds of things.
There's the SAT, of course, to get into college.
There's the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the NAEP. There's the Armed Forces Qualification Test.
There's the Teacher Competency Test.
There's the Firefighter's Test, the Police Sergeant's Test.
There's, of course, the Law School Admissions Test.
There's the test you take to get into business school.
Now, here's the point. Whichever test you administer, you pick the test.
If you pick a hundred randomly selected whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, and you have them take these tests, I can tell you in advance the result.
The result is Asian Americans and whites on the top, Hispanics in the middle, African Americans at the bottom.
Why is this?
This is the point, that the left is so terrified because I think privately some of them believe that these tests are providing a confirmation of black inferiority.
They have a racist suspicion, and so to fight the suspicion, they blame the test.
They blame the fact that math is racist.
Of course, really what these leftists should be doing is blaming themselves.
You know why? Because they run terrible public schools.
They have been the cause of the breakdown of the black family in the inner city.
And you may say to me, and many people do say this when I speak on camera, oh, Dinesh, the black family broke down due to slavery.
Nonsense. Long after slavery ended, when W.E.B. Du Bois wrote his study of the black family, this was around 1905, 30 years after slavery, the illegitimacy rate for African Americans in this country was 25%.
It's now over 70%.
So this great increase occurred, by the way, not even between 1905.
It occurred basically from the 1960s to now, the era of the welfare state, the era of, I would call it, the democratic plantation.
It's the left that destroyed the black family.
So the bottom line of it is, when you destroy a family, you destroy the infrastructure for study habits, for homework.
And then when you run terrible public schools, you have very poor instruction.
So students are not able to achieve their potential.
The problem for black and Hispanic students isn't math tests.
The problem for Black and Hispanic students isn't the discriminatory structures.
No, the problem for Blacks and Hispanics are the democratic policies that have arrested them, that have been a millstone around their neck, that have dragged down their economic performance, that have made them uncompetitive in America.
So if you want to get rid of anything, don't get rid of math, get rid of Democrats.
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The latest victim of cancel culture?
Dr. Seuss.
Yes, that Dr.
Seuss. Mr. Green Eggs and Ham himself.
Now, I happen to know a little something about Dr.
Seuss. One of my thesis advisors at Dartmouth, Don Pease, wrote a book on Dr.
Seuss. His real name was Ted Geisel.
And he's actually a Dartmouth graduate.
And he, of course, became a legend for his children's books.
And, of course, I'm going to now read a few lines from Green Eggs and Ham.
I do not like them, Sam, I am.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
Would you like them here or there?
I would not like them here or there.
I would not like them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them, Sam, I am.
Now... This is very melodious, nonsensical, but also memorable, and kind of weirdly interesting stuff.
And Dr. Seuss, of course, became the sort of enchanting master of this type of prose and verse.
Now, a Virginia school system has canceled Dr.
Seuss, citing, quote, racial undertones in his writings.
And so my curiosity was piqued.
I'm like, really? I didn't know about this.
Let me investigate. And it seems that the Loudoun County Public Schools is dropping their celebration of Dr.
Seuss because... And this is kind of how this all works.
Learning for Justice, a left-wing education advocacy group, was mounting a pressure campaign.
Learning for Justice... It's a kind of adjunct of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
A, by the way, a once respectable civil rights organization that has now become basically a kind of lynch mob.
What these people do is they use the credibility of going after racism to tag all kinds of people with bigotry and try to destroy their careers.
This is a very nasty operation that has completely belied its origins and I think become a malevolent force in American life.
But what's interesting is they don't say anything about Dr.
Seuss being a racist. They refer to another report by this Learning for Justice group.
And so I go to the Learning for Justice website to find out about Dr.
Seuss's alleged bigotry.
And there's hardly anything about it.
I read this of the 2,240 human characters in all his works.
There are 45 characters of color representing 2% of the total number of human characters.
Are you serious? They're basically saying that after doing a head count and a racial head count, they're the ones bringing this racial compass to Dr.
Seuss. And they're saying, we found a regrettable paucity, a real shortage of people of color reflected in his writings.
And this evidently is itself a problem.
Now, interestingly, the Southern Poverty Law Center and this Learning for Justice group used to use themselves a Dr.
Seuss story. To promote anti-racism.
And so what they do now is they go and re-read the story and they conclude, oh, you know what?
The story actually is not really anti-racist.
It contains subtle racism.
So I'm going to read their description of the alleged subtle racism.
They go, the solution to the story's conflict is that the plain-bellied sneetches and the star-bellied sneetches Simply get confused.
So you don't know who is the oppressed and who is the oppressor.
They go, this message of quote acceptance.
Obviously Dr. Seuss is promoting acceptance.
Accept differences. They go, this message of acceptance does not acknowledge structural power imbalances.
And instead of encouraging young readers to recognize and take action against injustice, the story promotes a race-neutral approach.
And there you go. Dr.
Seuss's crime is that he doesn't see color.
He's promoting nothing more than what Martin Luther King promoted when he talked about his dream of a country where we are not judged by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.
And this color blindness, this Martin Luther King doctrine itself, has now become part of the indictment against Dr.
Seuss. Bottom line, I'm not so worried about the racism of Dr.
Seuss, which from what I can figure out is virtually non-existent.
I'm more worried about this lynch mob mentality of this fraudulent group learning for justice, the equally fraudulent Southern Poverty Law Center.
These are the gangster operations of our time, pressuring the public schools and then, of course, the invertebrate school board members.
Oh, we're facing pressure.
Let's immediately act so we won't be accused of racism.
This ultimately is the recipe for cancel culture, for censorship, for the true intolerance of our society.
That's what we need to be fighting against.
Do you ever feel the urge to push back against the leftist media narrative of the cops being your enemy?
If you support American law enforcement, I want to share with you a special and stylish new way to show that you have the back of the police.
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He's designed a commemorative police watch that is just beautiful.
I noticed all kinds of special details like the engraving, the quote on the back.
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The prosecutor is at the Southern District of New York, the very venue of my own case a few years ago, are at it again.
I spoke last week about how they're trying to go after Trump.
They haven't even found that Trump has done anything wrong, but they want all this information.
Let's see your tax returns.
Let's see this. Let's see that.
Why? To see if we can get you for something.
That's been their operation.
And Trump issued a statement where he goes, this is the greatest political witch hunt in the history of our country.
So they're part of that.
And on balance, I think Trump is quite right.
Now, the latest move by the SDNY, the Southern District of New York, is to try to go after Steve Bannon, even after Bannon's pardon.
So, the offenses alleged against Bannon that he raised money for this Build the Wall project, he misused them, those are kind of irrelevant because Trump issued a pardon.
This was a federal case, and Trump has the right to pardon Bannon, and so he did.
Now, you would think that the prosecutors would say, okay, well, that's done.
We tried to go after Bannon, now we can't.
But no, they have asked a judge not to dismiss the indictment.
Now, they recognize, of course, that the punishment of Bannon has been canceled out by the pardon.
But what they want to do is they want to indict him...
And try to get a conviction anyway.
Even though they realize they can't punish him, they want to prove that he's guilty.
So rather than do the right thing, which in this case is to let the case go, they're trying to push forward with it.
And what I tried to say last week, and I'm going to continue today, is that these people are the real thugs.
They're the real thugs because they use the law as a weapon.
They're not a neutral police agency of government applying the law even-handedly.
But they apply the law selectively.
And that was really my protest in my own case.
Selective prosecution. Give me the same penalty as everyone else.
And of course, they were not about to do that.
Now, what's interesting about this is that not only do they apply the selective prosecution, but they openly and brazenly lie to the judge.
They pretend like there were other people who did the same thing.
But in fact, what they do is they conceal facts about those cases.
Here's a classic example.
They told my judge, in my case, that there was a guy...
There was a woman named Jenny Hu and also another guy named Pan, Oliver Pan.
And they say, well, these guys gave only $8,000.
And yet, they were sentenced to 10 months in prison.
So why don't you sentence Dinesh? He gave $20,000.
So in the same range, these guys gave even less, $8,000.
Now, here's what they did not tell the judge, that they excluded about the case.
Who, one of the defendants, was also convicted of attempted wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and making false statements.
So three separate convictions.
Pan was convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, attempt to commit wire fraud, and both of them were guilty of multiple felonies.
So this is what the SDNY, the Southern District, withheld from the judge.
You'd think the judge would have called him on it when we pointed it out.
But no, he was actually perfectly okay with it, probably because they keep doing it.
He's probably familiar with this kind of hit-and-run operation, and in fact, to some degree, he's part of it.
Now, who else is part of it is the media.
Here's an interesting clip from Anderson Cooper.
His interview with me right after I got my presidential pardon, and obviously been fed by the Southern District of New York, he brings up a case called the Thompson case to show, hey, Dinesh, Look, these people are even-handedly applying the law.
They go after Democrats as well as Republicans.
Listen. In the court case, there were like 20 examples used of election violations that were mentioned in court.
In fact, the Obama Justice Department prosecuted a guy named Jeffrey Thompson, who was a Democrat donor connected to Hillary Clinton.
And there was a headline on GOP.com at the height of the campaign in August 2016 that said, Clinton's illegal straw donor gets sentenced.
Thompson got three months in prison for his crimes.
You actually, you could have gotten 10 to 16 months in prison.
You got no prison time at all.
So if this was some sort of conspiracy against you by the Obama administration and by a judge who was appointed by Clinton, although I think the judge was also confirmed by Republicans, why didn't you get any jail time?
So here is Anderson Cooper basically saying, we have two comparable cases, Dinesh, Jeffrey Thompson's case, and yours.
And yet, he got six months in prison.
You got eight months in overnight confinement, but you didn't get any prison time, almost implying that I got off even lighter than Thompson.
Well, here's what Anderson Cooper didn't say.
And here's what probably the SDNY, which was feeding him this information, forgot to mention to Anderson Cooper, because it's hard for me to believe that if he knew, he would think this was a useful comparison.
Here's Jeffrey Thompson's case.
I'm going to now read a couple of things about him.
Thompson was guilty of violating both federal and state laws.
He funneled $3.3 million in illegal contributions to a whole slew of Democratic candidates, 28 of them in all, including Obama and Hillary.
And why? With a view to gaining federal and local government contracts for his minority-owned accounting firm.
So you have a quid pro quo.
You have clear corruption.
He's trying to get something out of it.
For running this elaborate, corrupt scheme over many years, Thompson gets six months in prison, a $10,000 fine, and three years probation.
So here's why the Thompson case is not comparable to mine.
Vastly greater amounts of money, a web of criminal conspiracy, a quid pro quo, and a desire to get something in return.
In my case, none of these elements are present.
The funniest part of this Anderson Cooper interview was at the end.
He goes, oh, Dinesh, you know, you only got a pardon because some really powerful people, he's thinking here of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, let you off the hook.
Isn't that true, Dinesh?
And I was like, you know, actually, it is true, Anderson.
But you know what? The only reason I got on the hook in the first place is because of some very powerful people named Obama and Holder that went after me in a way that they would not have gone after anyone else.
So if it took some powerful people to put me on the hook, it's kind of nice that I had some powerful people to get me off the hook.
Take that, Anderson Cooper.
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It's time for our mailbox, and we have an interesting question about what can I do?
What can the ordinary guy do in fighting against all the abuses we see around us?
Listen. How can I make a difference?
How can I protest the establishment that pushes actions that go against everything that I believe in?
And really, probably 90% of the Republican Party members, please advise on what I can do, what we can do as viewers to protest these awful, hellacious actions that are going on right now.
This is a very important and practical question.
Sometimes we feel a frustration over things that we can't do.
Like, what can I do about digital censorship?
And it may be that right now there's not a lot you can do.
There are people who need to create and are creating alternative platforms.
Some of those platforms still have some glitches.
I've been actually vigorously posting now on Parler.
I noticed that there's a tremendous rise of action on Parler.
Now, Parler still has a few glitches and they'll get better.
They're essentially, they've made their Declaration of Independence from Amazon and from Google and from Apple, and that is a massive achievement.
So, number one, you can help get the word out.
Do it on social media.
And I encourage you to join platforms like Parler and like Rumble, which is, by the way, the best video platform out there, kind of a video alternative to YouTube.
We need to let our Republican legislators know how we feel.
This is critical. Don't worry too much about the other side right now.
Our destiny is very often in our own hands to a much greater degree than we realize.
For example, the voter fraud issue could have been dealt with by Republican legislators in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania and Arizona, but there was not enough, not only pressure on the Republicans to do it, but I would say protection for Republican state legislators who would no doubt come under withering attack for taking those kinds of actions.
So do what you can to shore up our side.
And on the cultural front, if you have creativity, try to think of ways in which we can make end runs around the left's domination of academia and the media and the entertainment world.
I'm very excited to feature on this podcast people who are creating new things, new ideas, new music, new comedy, all kinds of ways that break the barriers and shake the parameters of what the left has set up.
The bottom line of it is this is a time not for a despondent feeling of hopelessness, but active and creative ways of fighting back, not just politically, but in the cultural sphere as well.
So I want to encourage you.
Say you're more powerful than you realize.
You're in an era where you can be a little publisher.
People say, well, I only have, you know, 4,000 followers on Twitter and Parler.
That's okay. Many of them have 4,000 followers themselves.
And so there's a multiplying effect.
And so I'd encourage you, inform yourself and then turn yourself into an instrument of disseminating truth.
And that's a pretty good place to start.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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