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March 4, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:04:53
DECLINE IS A CHOICE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep39
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Governor Cuomo wants a predator pass from the left on the grounds that he's for women's rights.
What AOC doesn't know about the minimum wage is a lot.
And my defense of Dr.
Seuss. This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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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.
Nations, like people, sometimes grow old and senile and die.
In America, we see, well, we have a president who is well advanced in age.
I don't know if he's clinically senile, but he's clearly not all there.
And he's in obvious cognitive decline.
But that can happen also to a country.
Countries can go into decline.
Of course, the difference is that individuals decline inevitably in accordance with a kind of lifespan.
That doesn't necessarily happen to countries.
Countries can go for much longer.
They too, though, have a sort of lifespan.
But the lifespan can go from a few years to...
To centuries, in some cases millennia.
The Roman Empire lasted for almost 2,000 years.
And almost 1,000 years, I'm sorry to say, before it went down.
And so countries come up and countries go down.
Edward Gibbon, the great historian, in thinking about...
His great work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, writes this, That the idea of righting the decline and fall of the city first started to mine.
So here is Gibbon and he sees the ruins of Rome and he sees these, from his point of view, kind of illiterate, primitive monks singing superstitious hymns as he saw it.
And he goes, wow, the great Roman Empire is gone.
It's been replaced by, you may say, medieval Christianity, which from Gibbon's point of view was a deterioration But in any case, the old Rome was finished.
The Roman legions were gone, and all that was left was ruins.
And I say all this because it makes me think a little bit about America.
Will we look back at some point?
Can we look now and see signs of a civilization in ruins?
Let me think about this aloud by looking at some indices of decline.
Now, I should say that there are people, for example, who insist that America's not in decline, America's doing just fine.
One of those voices of sort of inveterate optimism, Warren Buffett.
Here's an article from The Independent in London.
Warren Buffett urges investors to bet on America.
And we have this kind of typical Buffettian goofballism.
Never bet against the United States of America.
Well... It hasn't been a good bet for about 70 years, starting with the aftermath of World War II, but that doesn't mean it won't be a good bet in the future.
Let's compare for a moment America with China.
I just want to highlight a few things.
First of all, and I'm not talking, by the way, about things that are happening like in the last few weeks under Biden.
I'm actually talking about some broader trends.
Trump tried, and to some degree was successful in reversing these trends, but I'm talking about somewhat trends that are a little more embedded in the last half century or so.
Number one, the United States has been growing at a fairly modest clip.
Two percent, in some cases that goes a little less, in some cases a little bit more.
But China's been growing at 6% to 8%.
China's even growing now in the aftermath of COVID when all the other countries are shrinking economically.
Number two, Chinese students are four years ahead of American students in math.
Now, math is the great engine of a technological economy.
It drives almost everything from communications technologies to building things to sending space shuttles out into orbit.
Math is the language of nature.
And the Chinese are really good at it, and they work really hard at it.
By the way, so do the Indians.
I remember in school, when I was falling third or fourth in my class, our class went not just by grade, but by rank.
I was third or fourth out of 50 students.
And I talked to my dad, and my dad goes, well, you don't study enough.
And I go, well, Dad, I study two hours a day after school.
He goes, yeah, but the kids who are doing better than you study four to five hours a day.
That's not counting school. It was kind of, I was like, what?
And I began to ramp it up myself.
Now, the point I want to make is that America can catch up in math, but we're not even trying.
We're having ridiculous debates driven by things like, is math racist?
Are there really, is 2 plus 2 objectively 4?
Are there other ways to get right answers?
In other words, we are concerned with equity.
We are concerned with the people and the groups falling to the bottom.
We're trying to modify the standards to conceal academic inferiority.
And we're doing all this while the other countries are encouraging their students and building on the success of their best students and pushing their civilizations forward.
Number three, this is a point made by Thomas Friedman, but it's worth thinking about.
He goes the fast train from Beijing to Shanghai.
is about four hours.
And that's a distance from New York to Chicago.
Now, if you go and take an Amtrak from New York to Chicago, it takes 13 hours.
So what this means is that the Chinese are investing heavily in communications, in speed.
They're also investing heavily in their cities.
Contrast this with American cities, which are kind of in ruins.
They've been ruined by the Democrats.
The Democrats have created these sort of dependent populations.
They've almost used, you may say, the American Indian model for these cities.
And they've brought these cities.
You walk around places like LA, you see all these homeless shelters, you see all this dirt everywhere.
American airports are now filthy.
And you only have to set foot in an airport like Seoul or even Mumbai.
The Mumbai airport used to be a primitive place.
You walk there now and it's much better than JFK. It's much cleaner.
It's more modern.
So this is an embarrassment to those of us who are Americans and concerned about America's place in the world.
The Chinese also have a powerful sense of national purpose.
Here's where we're going. Here's our plan to get there.
Here's how we buy the minerals over here and extend our influence over there and dominate the China Sea and establish our hegemony in the Asian region.
And here's how we have footholds in Africa and in South America.
What is America even doing to advance its self-interest all over the world?
What are we doing to strengthen our allies, to check the power of our adversaries?
It seems nothing.
So the bottom line of it is, here we are as a country fighting with each other.
We've almost eliminated serious political debate in this country.
You've got these deep divisions in the country.
And there seems to be a lack of national purpose, a lack of knowing what we are about, what we care about.
And what we want to emphasize.
So, I think it was actually the Muslim writer, I have his book right here, the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun.
I notice this book kind of matches my shirt.
It may be a little hard to see. It's the Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun, written in the 14th century.
But Khaldun talks about the fact that countries are strong when they have...
He calls it asabiyah.
And what he means is a sense of purposeful unity.
He goes, that's what the Bedouins had.
That's what the Muslims had.
That's how the Muslims were able to establish five empires and conquer a good deal of the known world until that time.
He goes, when a country loses that spirit, that asabiyah, that sense of national unity and purpose, it begins to decay.
It begins to sort of lose...
Territory, but it also begins to lose its sense of itself.
Is that what's happening to America?
Is America in terminal decline?
And if so, what is the cause of that decline?
If we know the cause, we might be able to know the remedy.
When we come back, I'll explore who is causing America to decline, and whether decline is inevitable, or is it in fact our choice?
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Is America in terminal decline?
Countries... Live and countries die.
And we see from history that there were great countries, dominant countries, countries with a lot of influence and power and wealth, and they came to ruins.
The Carthaginians were once a force.
We can barely remember them today.
They were destroyed by the Romans in the Punic Wars.
Greece was overcome by Rome and Greek civilization never recovered.
By and large, countries tend to be destroyed by military defeat.
They get weak in some way and they are then invaded by another country and taken over and then sort of leveled to the ground.
And they might continue to exist, but their previous dominance is permanently gone.
Now, in America's case, that kind of defeat is unlikely, at least in the short to medium term.
Why? Because we spend a massive amount of money on defense.
In fact, more than the next ten nations put together.
No one is going to be able to take us over militarily.
And by the way, this has been true for quite a long time.
Even Hitler didn't really dream of taking over America.
So America is secure in that sense from external invasion.
We're not going to go down that way.
In fact, no one can come close to threatening us in that sense.
But, but, there is another way for countries to collapse, and that is from within.
Very interestingly, Abraham Lincoln, the young Abraham Lincoln, a long time ago, more than a century and a half ago now, predicted that if America ever came to an end, it would not be by external invasion, but, in his words, by suicide. Listen.
A century and a half ago, a young Abraham Lincoln issued a prophetic warning.
Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us with a blow?
Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with a bone apart for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio.
At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected?
I answer that if it ever reach us, it must spring up from amongst us, cannot come from abroad.
If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be the author and finisher of it.
As a nation of free men, we must live throughout all time or die by suicide.
Wow. Really makes you think, doesn't it?
And I think what is prophetic about Lincoln is, for today, Is that we now have an ideology in America that can be described as the ideology dedicated to America's decline.
And what I'm talking about is the ideology of Obama, of leftism, of what is now called progressivism, the Obama mantle now being taken up vigorously by Biden, but by the Democratic Party in general.
Now, I'm not saying the Democratic Party was always this way.
In no way would I suggest that even FDR or JFK or Truman were somehow trying to bring about American decline, not at all.
Even Jimmy Carter, who probably deserves the American Presidential Prize for the biggest nincompoop to occupy that office.
He was not trying to bring down America.
He was just a buffoon.
He tried to distance America from the Shah of Iran.
He got Khomeini. So he had one misstep after another.
He didn't really know how to respond to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
So Carter was a weakling.
It's kind of like a football team that has a lousy coach But let me offer a different possibility.
What if you have a football team that hires a coach and asks the coach to produce some wins, but the coach in his own mind thinks it's a good idea for his team to lose?
What if the coach thinks that America has unjustly, his team has been unjustly dominating the league, and what he needs to do is instead of leading his team to success, lead it to failure.
In fact, work from within to ensure that the things that have made America strong in the past are brought down, are taken down a notch, are weakened.
Look, if you look at what the Democrats are doing, and I realize this is very difficult for some people to grasp.
They always think that the Democrats are just making mistakes.
Throughout the Obama years, we heard things like, Obama doesn't really understand that confiscatory tax rates aren't going to make the economy stronger.
Yeah, he actually does understand.
Obama doesn't understand that if we take one military disorder, Bergdahl, and release five seasoned Taliban commanders, that's not going to be good for us.
He does understand.
That's why he's doing it.
Obama doesn't understand that he shouldn't make nuclear concessions to Medvedev and Putin.
Because that's going to weaken the United States.
It's going to ultimately reduce the power of our nuclear arsenal vis-a-vis theirs.
Yes, Obama always knew that.
That's why he was doing it.
He wanted to reduce our nuclear hegemony.
And look at the way, for example, right through our culture and through our curriculum, there's an effort to take all the things that have defined America, made it distinctive, in fact, made it attractive around the world, And bring those things down.
To make America, you may almost say, an unexceptional country.
And of course you remember Obama saying, we're not exceptional.
It's not just that he was claiming we're not exceptional.
He doesn't want us to be exceptional.
He wants to take American exceptionalism and the dominance of Western civilization over the last 500 years.
He thinks that ship of the world is wrong side up and he wants to flip it.
To move power away from America toward the non-Western countries.
This is part of Obama's anti-colonial dream.
And it drives the whole left these days.
So the bottom line of it is the left is the architect of American decline.
And under Biden, we're likely to see these forces of decline continue to push forward.
There may not be ways in which we can entirely stop them.
But what we need to do is resist them.
Why? Because ultimately we, the conservatives, the right, the Republican Party, we represent not just the best of America, but in a way America's will to live.
America's resistance to this kind of self-destructive, self-hating, misanthropic, suicidal impulse that Lincoln warned us about.
The impulse is now alive in America.
It is vigorous and powerful in our culture.
We need to fight it so that we can thrive and survive and prosper.
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Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York is in the middle of two separate scandals.
And, nevertheless, he insists that he is going to weather them.
He is going to hang in there.
He is not going to resign.
Now, the scandal that should have brought him down immediately, the bigger scandal, concerns the fact that he has been systematically dispatching COVID patients Contagious COVID carriers into nursing homes so that they have been spreading the disease and killing people.
And he did this over the objections of the nursing homes themselves.
And then, having done this horrific deed, he tried to cover it up.
He tried to hide the data, hide the body, so to speak, or at least the information about all these deaths.
And evidently, his stated motive was to dodge, to avoid federal...
Accountability. So, a horrible motive.
He was trying ultimately to avoid being held accountable for his actions, but also avoid giving political vindication to Trump.
Now, ordinarily, any governor in this kind of situation, where you actually have dead bodies all around you, should be forcibly carried out.
There should be demands for his resignation.
But it's part of a perverted situation that that has not been the case.
And in fact, there's a bigger scandal, which the media is actually covering, Of all these Me Too accusations against Cuomo.
And clearly the guy is a thug.
Clearly the guy treats women in a brutish way.
There have now been three separate accusations.
So let's think about this. Believe all women, we now have three women.
And by the way, unlike in the Kavanaugh case where you obviously had a political opponent, Blasey Ford, who wanted to bring Kavanaugh down.
She had objections to his positions on Roe v.
Wade. In this case, the people accusing Cuomo worked for him.
They knew him. They were on his side of the aisles, which renders the accusations more credible.
And Cuomo, kind of remarkably, in a recent press conference, basically goes, Oh, I'm really surprised you're bringing these three cases up.
There are actually hundreds of examples.
Listen. You can go find hundreds of pictures of me kissing people, men, women.
It is my usual and customary way of greeting.
You know that because you've watched me for, let's just say, more years than we care to remember.
By the way, it was my father's way of greeting people.
You're the governor of the state.
You want people to feel comfortable.
You want to reach out to them.
I do it...
I kiss and hug legislators.
I was at an event in Queens the other day.
I hugged the pastors.
Oh, man!
I'm Italiano!
You know, I do this all the time.
That's what we do in Italy. That's what my father did and his father before him.
So we've got this appeal to Italian cultural values.
And... I think what's so funny about all this is that you've got Cuomo basically saying, he's saying, listen, why are we singling out these three?
There are many other cases. This is a guy as slippery as Bill Clinton.
They have different styles, but they're sort of going about their business the same way and trying to get the same kind of immunity.
Now, here's an interesting interview in which Cuomo is asked about all this.
And what's interesting is he brings out a woman...
On his staff to come to his defense, and they make a very interesting argument for why they should get, you may almost call it a predator pass from the left, why they should be allowed to get away with some stuff, because after all, they're very sound on the issues.
Listen. Governor, have you yourself taken the sexual harassment training required by New York that all employers are to give to their employees?
And Melissa, as the highest ranking woman in state government right now, and someone who interacts with the governor on a daily basis, how do you feel about these allegations against him?
And what is your message to women who see you in your position and see these allegations against the governor?
Short answer is yes.
And I'll turn it over to Melissa.
Just keep in mind, there are hundreds and hundreds of people who work with Melissa.
We have more senior women in this administration than probably any administration in history.
So right there, boom.
You have, I would call it the demand for a predator pass.
Now, when Clinton was surrounded with scandals and accusations, he always said, but I am a strong champion of women's rights.
I am pro-choice.
I fight. So, the basic idea here is these are people who have disgusting personal habits, but they claim that they deserve immunity for these personal habits because they are, quote, on the right side of the issue.
And the left, of course, has been very willing to hand out these predator passes.
It's kind of like, yeah, you get two, you get three.
It seems to me that the number of passes that are handed out depends on political expediency.
So actually, Cuomo would get more passes if he was up for election and running, and all the feminists would pretend not to notice.
In fact, some of them would even rush to his defense.
They'd become enablers, kind of like Hillary.
Reminds me of something that Edmund Burke once wrote in the Reflections on the Revolution of France.
He's talking about the French revolutionaries.
And he goes, lacking habits of decent behavior.
They prefer moral opinions instead.
In other words, these people are sickos.
They're absolutely revolting in their personal lives.
They treat other people badly.
But they claim to love mankind.
I love mankind, even though I hate Tom, Dick, and Harry.
And that's how Clinton is in Cuomo.
They are for women?
Although they treat individual women very badly.
And I just wish that we had a single standard on this issue that was reasonable and fair.
And if there was, that this guy, this thug, should be held on all fronts accountable for his behavior.
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RockAuto.com Economics major and bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made an important pronouncement on the minimum wage.
Now, the minimum wage, the left has been pushing for this.
And they wanted it to be part of the COVID relief package.
But the parliamentarian in the Senate plucked it out, in part because there really wasn't majority support for it.
Even on the Democratic side, there were some defectors.
So AOC is on the warpath about this.
And of course, she's eager to display her incredible knowledge, not just of economic conditions in America, but also abroad.
I'm going to read her tweet.
It's utterly embarrassing, says AOC, that this is even up for debate.
She goes, override the parliamentarian and raise the wage!
McDonald's workers in Denmark have paid $22 an hour, plus six weeks paid vacation.
$15 an hour is a deep compromise, a big one, considering the phase-in.
So, the minimum wage would phase in.
Now, first of all, what's kind of comical about this is that AOC is appealing to the Scandinavian model.
Hey, look at Scandinavia.
Look at Denmark. They've got a minimum wage of $22 an hour, which is not true.
Denmark's minimum wage is in fact zero.
They have no minimum wage.
Scandinavian countries don't have minimum wage.
By the way, neither do they have inheritance taxes, neither do they have wealth taxes with one exception.
By and large, they don't try to put a millstone around the neck of their economy.
They don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
AOC doesn't seem to know that.
Now, Scandinavians do have collective bargaining agreements between unions and certain industries and employers, and those can set wages, but there's no state-mandated or federally mandated minimum wage.
That's point number one.
Let's also remember that Scandinavian countries, which do have a big welfare state, impose very high taxes on people, not just the rich, but also the middle class and also the poor.
So let's say, for example, let's take this McDonald's worker in AOC's own example, who makes $22 an hour.
Guess how much that worker, making about $45,000 a year, would pay to the government in taxes?
The answer? Almost half.
Almost half. And what that means is that your minimum wage is in fact not $22 an hour, but when you simply factor the tax hit, it's down to $11 an hour.
So, AOC is hiding the ball here.
She's talking to you about what you get, but she's not talking about what the government, which gives with one hand and takes away, takes away with the other.
It's kind of silly when we talk about minimum wages.
I mean, why do we have minimum wages at all?
A wage is an agreement between an employer and an employee to work for a price that the employer can afford to pay and the worker is willing to take.
Now, the point is that if either side declines the transaction, nobody's worse off.
If you are offered a job and you decide, I don't want it.
I'm going to go somewhere else. You're not exploiting your employer by saying, no, why?
For the simple reason that he's no worse off than he was before.
Conversely, if the employer offers you a job for, let's just say, $8 an hour, $10 an hour, you go, nah, I think I can do better elsewhere.
The answer is, he's not exploiting you.
Why? Because you're no worse off than you were before.
So this is the fundamental economic logic behind allowing wages to be set by consent, by the mutual agreement of the two parties who are involved.
What does AOC have to do with this transaction?
Absolutely nothing.
There is a grain of truth in what the left is saying on this minimum wage issue.
What they're basically saying is that you've got these large corporations that are making huge profits, and these corporations can afford to pay a higher wage.
Now, the whole point to realize here is that the reason for this is because of the left itself.
It's because of COVID. It's because the government...
Forcibly shut down, locked down, and in many cases destroyed small businesses and gave subsidies, benefits, exemptions to large businesses.
That's why companies like Target, which were doing miserably, were actually, in some cases, these companies were heading to bankruptcy, but they were bailed out, in effect, by the federal government.
So let's put the blame squarely where it belongs.
I don't believe in using bad government remedies to solve problems that the government itself has created, but the bottom line of it is if you're going to have a minimum wage and if Republicans are not really in a position to stop it, it should be limited to these big corporations that have gotten these subsidies or have gotten these exemptions.
Now, small businesses are in a completely different situation.
Many of them cannot afford a $15 minimum wage.
In fact, in many cases, the young people who work for these companies are teenagers.
They're people who are working while they're in college.
So there's no reason that there shouldn't be a minimum wage exemption for these young people.
Why? Because they don't have the same kinds of responsibilities as adults who are supporting families and households and so on.
Bottom line, what AOC knows about the minimum wage Is not a lot.
By and large, minimum wages are a very bad idea.
This minimum wage is already known and predicted to significantly increase unemployment at a time when this is already a problem in our country.
The free market, not government control, is the road back to prosperity.
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I'm trying to figure out what to make of the cancellation, at least of six books, of Dr.
Seuss. Dr.
Seuss, the hugely popular, world famous We're good to go.
But suddenly, Dr. Seuss is sort of out.
And he's out in the sense that school districts are, we're not going to teach Dr.
Seuss, or at least not teach these designated books.
Even the Dr. Seuss organization is like, we're going to stop publishing these books.
Pretty surprising. Even they are getting behind canceling their own guy.
Now, interestingly, Biden and Jen Psaki was asked about this.
Joe Biden did not mention Dr.
Seuss when he was talking about Read Across America Day.
And Jen Psaki tried to dodge the issue.
Oh, talk to the Department of Education.
They'll tell you what's really going on.
What I find surprising is Amazon has stopped offering these books.
So here we have... Cancellation at a different level.
It's one thing to say we're not going to officially use these books.
We're not going to include them in the curriculum.
But when you say we're not going to sell them at all, I mean, Amazon, by the way, sells all kinds of books, including Mein Kampf.
So what is it about Dr.
Seuss that makes him even more invidious?
What makes all this cancel culture so strange is that it's sort of, it's Orwellian in the sense that only yesterday, all the stuff was okay.
So, it's okay on Monday, and then it's banned on Tuesday, and maybe it'll be unbanned on Wednesday, but we're all supposed to kind of move in lockstep.
With whatever the current moment demands.
Now, just to get an idea of Dr.
Seuss, not so long ago you had President Obama talking to young people about how great Dr.
Seuss was, and moreover, how Dr.
Seuss's books are a model for learning about tolerance.
Listen. Pretty much all the stuff you need to know is in Dr.
Seuss's books. Wow, so Obama isn't just saying that there's some good stuff we can learn from...
He's literally saying everything you need to know is in Dr.
Seuss. And here is Michelle Obama.
Also, featuring Dr.
Seuss in her reading to young people.
Listen. I'm excited, too.
You know who saw this book this morning before he got on a helicopter?
The President. We love Dr.
Seuss in our house. They love Dr.
Seuss. Well, what are they saying now?
Have they jumped on the new bandwagon?
What was okay yesterday is no longer okay today.
The six books that are now banned, by the way, Debbie went on to try to order them and she noticed that it's very hard to do it.
Amazon isn't really letting you do it at all.
And if you try to find it elsewhere, these books are like $900.
In fact, amazingly, no, I guess not amazingly, Dr.
Seuss's other books, and I've actually ordered a collection which we just got.
This is the beginner book collection by Dr.
Seuss. It's really cool.
These, I guess, are the unbanned books.
We've got Green Eggs and Ham, Fox and Socks.
One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, a couple of others.
But six books are now essentially off the list.
And, you know, if it were just about Dr.
Seuss, I would say that how important is this really?
But you get the sense that this is part of a...
A big cultural revolution that is going on in America.
It's almost like the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966, if my memory serves right.
Mao wants to purge all of Chinese culture, rewrite the history, edit all the books.
In fact, amusingly, Mao had his own Little Red Book and he demanded that all Chinese people, all Chinese citizens have a copy of Mao's poems and his Little Red Book on them at all times.
I have to admit, as an author, there's a little bit of this that's sort of attractive to me if someone were to say.
In fact, I would like everyone who watches this podcast to have one copy of my book with them at all times.
I'm kidding. The point I want to make here is that we seem to be in a cultural revolution that wants to remake our society from the ground up, and this Dr.
Seuss business is only part of a larger project to do that.
And if it is allowed to go forward, where does it stop?
Who's next? Shakespeare?
Conrad? Mark Twain?
Mark Twain has already been under attack because, you know, the N-word isn't Huckleberry Finn.
So there is no ending point to all this and I think the left's Determination is that they're going to keep going because one side of this is going to come out the winner and they're determined that it's going to be them.
They have, they believe, the cultural power to pull it off and their message to the rest of us is basically, just try and stop me.
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We're back and going a little bit more in depth on Dr.
Seuss. And the reason I'm taking this seriously is because the leftists, they put a lot of energy into all this.
They have committees that review Dr.
Seuss's work. I downloaded An article called, The Cat is Out of the Bag, Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr.
Seuss's Children's Books.
It's by two Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stevens.
This article is like 40 pages long.
It's got 100 or so footnotes.
It's very in-depth.
So the left is working this.
And working this, I think, through a certain type of sleight of hand.
Now, Dr. Seuss, of course, lived a long life, much of the 20th century.
Of course, he lived through different phases in American culture.
He wasn't also just a writer of children's books.
He was also a cartoonist for adults in magazines.
He was also kind of a propagandist for the U.S. government in World War II. There was a lot of government-encouraged anti-Nazi propaganda and anti-Japanese propaganda.
And by the way, it's really interesting because these guys, these scholars in this paper, they pick out all the anti-Japanese.
Oh, he's using stereotypes!
Oh, he's speaking so negatively about the Japanese!
Of course, they don't say one word about speaking negatively about the Germans or speaking negatively about the Nazis.
It's okay to attack the Nazis, guys, because they, after all, were white!
So part of what I'm getting at is all of this is kind of ruthlessly stripped out of context.
Now, yes, if you look at some of these statements by Seuss in his background, they are incriminating.
They're kind of damning. But it's also important to remember the context for them, which is wartime propaganda.
And also a second factor, which is to say, where is the racism in the children's books themselves?
In fact, what's interesting is that most people knew none of this about Dr.
Seuss. They only know about it now because of the left Flushing it out, bringing it to public attention.
Now, when they turn to the books themselves, I notice that their expose completely loses its theme.
They have to rely on things like this.
Of the 2,240 characters, there are 45 characters of color representing 2% of the total number of human characters.
So what? This is like saying when I read Jane Austen, I notice that the vast majority of characters are white and male characters are outnumbered by female.
The point is this is Jane Austen's book.
She's welcome to cast it any which way.
So there's a certain kind of obtuseness to all this.
14 people are identified by stereotypical East Asian characteristics.
Most startling is the invisibility and absence of women and girls of color.
So what you have here is this attempt to impose these external standards on Dr.
Seuss's work, as if to say that Dr.
Seuss should be some sort of a textbook design committee in which, wait, where's the Asian American woman that's shown in the photograph?
The attacks on the books for things like, they call it, exotification and stereotypes.
And this is what they mean. They go, this is seen in books like On Beyond Zebra, where there is a man on a camel wearing an oversized turban and a long mustache.
Wow. This is supposed to be ethnically insensitive.
Why? Because...
Persian people and Indian people don't wear turbans.
They do because they don't have long mustaches.
Many of them do. So let's remember that if you're criticizing someone for stereotypes, cartoonists and children's illustrators work with stereotypes.
Stereotypes is the raw material in which they function.
What you have here is an attempt to impose the lens of critical race studies onto Dr.
Seuss. That's the bigger picture of what's going on here.
And what the left wants to achieve is the imposition of this external critical race studies lens.
I mean, they're actually very honest and explicit about it.
They lay out all their different sort of criteria that they use in order to look at these things.
They call it their theoretical framework.
They look for things like, they call it dominance.
Which characters are dominant and what color are they?
Number two, who's controlling the, quote, master narrative?
Who is, quote, exotified?
Who is caricatured?
Who is silent? So, the idea here is to...
Bring this interpretive inventory.
And by the way, what's interesting about it is that the racial lens is supplied by the critical race people themselves.
They don't even like it when you're colorblind.
One of their arguments against one of the books is that this book teaches people, this work of Dr.
Seuss teaches people not to see color, to see people for who they are.
And their point is, this is very destructive.
You cannot ask minority children not to see color.
So, there is a deep agenda here, and it's an agenda to racialize American life and to use this kind of racial lens.
Essentially, white people bad, everybody else good, but black's the most wonderful of all.
This is nothing more than an inversion of the old racist categories.
These people are just as racist.
The only difference is they are swapping out who's on top and who's on the bottom.
The current victim is Dr.
Seuss. But my question is, how far does this cultural revolution go?
My question is, who's next?
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Many of you know that my wife Debbie is from Venezuela and we often talk about Venezuela as a kind of laboratory of the failure of socialism.
We talk about the starving people in Venezuela, how a once prosperous country has been reduced to ruin.
But what we don't talk about often enough, and I want to talk about now in this segment, is the issue of Venezuela as a security threat to the United States.
Venezuela as a kind of playground for powerful foreign countries.
China, Russia, Iran.
What's their agenda in Venezuela and what do we as Americans have to watch out for and to fear?
I'm really happy to welcome Joseph Humeyer, who's a global security expert.
He's a former Marine.
He's a specialist on international terrorism.
He's testified before the US Congress.
He's also participated in important terrorism trials in South America.
Hey, Joseph, welcome to the program.
Thanks for joining the podcast.
Let me start by asking you, you've got little Venezuela, a relatively small country.
It's a couple of thousand miles from the United States.
But you've got all these powerful countries from China to Russia to Iran that are meddling actively in Venezuela.
What do they want from Venezuela?
Why are they there at all?
Well, first of all, Dennis, thank you for having me on your program.
I think first we have to understand is Latin America has become kind of the lost region of foreign policy for the United States.
It's really become a backwater.
I think you could argue probably since the Reagan administration, we haven't had a serious strategy about Latin America.
So in that vacuum, as vacuums tend to do, it got occupied.
It got occupied first by Russia, the resurgence of Russia after this fall of the Soviet Union, then by China with the economic surgence of China and the commodity boom.
But also by Iran.
And the interesting part about Iran is Iran is less visible because the nature of how Iran operates globally is very covert.
And what these regimes want in Venezuela or Latin America writ large is they want to diminish that geographic disadvantage they have with the United States.
They see United States as their number one enemy in the world.
They see the United States as their number one obstacle to be able to impose an authoritarian hegemon in their regions.
But in order to accomplish that, they think that they have to be able to threaten the United States in our neighborhood the way they believe they're threatened in theirs.
Now, Venezuela is a source of tremendous wealth, mineral wealth, diamonds, oil.
Is part of the motive of these countries to get a hold of the wealth of Venezuela, or is it the strategic location of Venezuela that's critical here, or both?
No, I think it's both. I think they're not mutually exclusive.
And I think the location is really the primary because, I mean, it's really, you can't get much closer to the United States other than Mexico, I think, if you're pretty much right there.
So it allows them to have an offensive capability, literally 2,000 or 2,000 kilometers from Florida.
But to the other point, to the natural resources, Venezuela is an abundance of natural resources, not just oil, but also minerals.
It has a lot of gold. It has a lot of Colton family minerals.
And in Iran in particular, you know, we focus a lot on Iran's nuclear ambitions, but that's what Iran wants to be.
What Iran currently is, is a major missile power in the Middle East.
And the more that missile program grows, the more it has to eat.
A lot of that food, which are these minerals, comes from Latin America, comes from specifically Venezuela.
Throughout the period of the sanctions, particularly since the UN arms embargo of 2007, Iran turned more to Venezuela because it needed to be able to circumvent those sanctions to access these minerals to be able to feed its growing missile program.
Now, Venezuela has been a socialist country, first under Chavez and then under Maduro.
The Iranians are not socialist in that sense.
They've got an Islamic radical agenda which would seem to be kind of different from what a traditional socialist would want.
Is this a case where you've got two strange bedfellows who have simply a common enemy in the United States, and so they go, yeah, let's make friends with each other, or is there really some ideological unifying basis of Iran and Venezuela?
There is an ideological basis, but the old adage of the enemy of my enemy is my friend that applies in this case, and that enemy being primarily the Hugo Chavez was very anti-Semitic and actually imposed an anti-Semitic posture in Venezuela that actually, one of the reasons why a lot of the Jewish population left the country now, along with everybody else.
But I think the element of the ideological isn't so much socialism or Islamism, it's anti-West, an anti-Western ideology that unites the two.
And in many respects, I think that they look at themselves as different chapters of the same book.
Iran is the Middle East chapter, Venezuela is the Latin America chapter, but together they're looking to be able to take over the West, or at least topple the West in what is the international order.
One last point on that. It's interesting also how Iran sells themselves in Venezuela.
They don't sell themselves as just a theocratic Islamic revolution.
When Iran comes to Venezuela, they sell themselves as a social movement that was lifted up to protect its natural resources.
In the case of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, But when you sell it like that, in Venezuela there's a lot of ears.
It'll open up opportunities where you wouldn't think those opportunities exist.
So they look at themselves as a social movement that's protecting natural resources and that's the way they come into Latin America.
What I find really remarkable, I mean, Debbie has a lot of people in Venezuela who give her information.
She talks about the fact that the Iranians will send airplanes to the airport in Caracas and they have a kind of almost a separate designated terminal and you can see the Farsi markings on the airplanes.
She also talks about something that surprised me, which is that you've got...
So, the Iranians aren't some kind of foreign force having kind of meetings with the Maduro people.
They've actually infiltrated the regime itself.
No, Iran has been in Venezuela for a very long time.
I mean, you go back to 1960 and the founding of OPEC, but for the Iranian Revolution in 1979, three years later, by 1982, Iran already stood up its new embassy in Venezuela, in Caracas.
And ever since then, they've been active in that country.
They helped Hugo Chavez even before Hugo Chavez became president.
And once he became president, obviously he returned the favor and opened the doors.
Specifically on the Quds Force, I know a lot of us remember President Trump's counterterrorism operation that killed probably the world's leading terrorist, which is General Qasem Soleimani.
Well, nowhere in the Western Hemisphere did they mourn more the death of Qasem Soleimani than in Venezuela.
They held an army I'm in Venezuela called, in Spanish, Mi Tio Soleimani, which is my uncle Soleimani, that they're basically putting out throughout the public schools and the libraries inside Venezuela.
So they have been very, very close to Iran.
And as you mentioned, Iran is embedded within some of the government institutions, not just the parliament, but also the defense ministry, the defense logistics agency, and many other elements, because what Venezuela did also for Iran was provide them documents.
So Venezuela was using their government service, their immigration services, Do you think part of the goal here is to work with Cuba to kind of spread the anti-Western socialist message throughout South America and in a sense checkmate the United States in its own backyard?
It is to checkmate the United States in our backyard, but even more so than just spreading the ideology, what I think they're really looking to do is to increase in its offensive military capabilities.
What Iran wants to do in the Panama Canal and in the Caribbean is the same thing that they're doing in the Straits of Hormuz and in the Gulf of Oman.
They want to be able to choke these economic choke points to be able to deter U.S. commerce and to be able to threaten and provoke the United States to be able to get more concessions for negotiations that they tried to initiate.
And so that's Iran's main goal.
Venezuela is their platform to do it, but it's not just in Venezuela.
It's pretty much all the way from Mexico down to Argentina.
So they've been there for a long time.
And like I mentioned before, this has been one of the blind spots for U.S. national security.
So this is something that could really turn out to be very bad for us if we don't correct it rapidly.
And I'm assuming at the end of the day, and this is my last question, that if Iran does get a hold of a nuclear weapon and full nuclear capacity, they're not going to hesitate in using Venezuela as a beachhead because it's much easier to get to the United States from Venezuela than it is from Tehran.
Yeah, I mean, we saw this back in the 60s, right, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that was only one foreign power that was occupying the island in that time of Havana in Cuba.
This time it's many foreign powers, China, Russia, Iran, who are working in concert with one another and could do a redux of that same situation.
I think the other point to this is also that the Colombian president, Ivan Duque, last August said something that was a bit alarming, but was very serious, and he said that according to his information, That the Maduro regime in Venezuela is looking to acquire missiles from Iran, meaning that they're looking to create missile capability in a country that doesn't have it.
We're talking about cruise missiles, potentially ballistic missiles, and that ups the ante for the level of threat that Iran could present on our side of the world in the Western Hemisphere.
Hey, Joseph, thanks for joining the podcast and giving a kind of wake-up call to our State Department and to the American people.
I appreciate it. Absolutely, Dennis.
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It's time for our mailbox, and we truly have, I would call it, an out-of-the-box question that has to do with digital manipulation.
Listen. Hi Dinesh, my name is Paul from Hawaii.
My question is regarding the subject of hacking and digital manipulation of data.
Most people just don't know what it is.
We get ideas on the subject from Hollywood ranging from the fantastic to just plain wrong.
I believe most people resist the idea that there could have been even the possibility of digital manipulation of the 2020 elections because from politicians to journalists to judges no one understands it on a practical level.
What do you think of the idea for a TV show in the same vein of a David Blaine or Magic for Humans, a man on the street who asks people for their permission and shows them how he can manipulate their devices, computers, cars, home security, etc. in real time with modern techniques?
It would be a chance to spread the awareness of digital dangers as well as be a fun hit show.
I would appreciate your thoughts.
God bless.
Bye.
Peace.
This is a really, to me, fascinating question.
On the surface, it seems to be a question that is motivated by the issue of election integrity, but it's actually raising the much broader point, which is that we are living in a digital world, and that world can be manipulated.
As a movie maker, Debbie and I were very well aware of how you can manipulate the celluloid world, the world of the movies.
We use something called CGI, computer-generated imagery, in which you can change a landscape.
And suddenly you have 300 zombies coming over the Himalayas.
And you have five guys that you show in a scene.
and then when you look at it, you've added all this computer imagery, and there are a hundred guys in the scene.
So there are all kinds of ways in which you can alter people's experience in a movie.
And this, of course, is just the magic, the technique of moviemaking.
Of course, we know from magic and illusions how you can create images that confuse people and make them focus on one thing so they miss another thing.
This is the key to what illusionists do.
But what we don't realize is that that world isn't just the world that we encounter when we step in a theater.
We're living in that world.
I mean, think of something as simple as Google.
You're looking for information on a topic, you Google it.
You don't realize that there is some agency, some group of people, some programming team that has decided what you will see When you do this search, you think of the search as producing just knowledge or information,
not realizing that that information is not only manipulable, but has been in fact manipulated and is being ranked and is being doled out to you according to somebody else's preferences of what you should see.
And in any case, I think this is something that's a very provocative idea and probably a terrific plot.
Just along the lines that you suggest.
So I just want to sort of endorse the creativity of your idea and to say that yes, we do need to educate people to ways in which the world, not just the artificial world of movies, but the actual world that we live in when we communicate with friends, when we try to speak out politically, when we try to search for information, those worlds are also manipulable and in many cases, manipulated.
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