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March 11, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:59
UNDEMOCRATIC DEMOCRATS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep44
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The undemocratic Democrats.
What's up with the Supreme Court?
And little Archie and the one-drop rule.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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.
There are two parallel movements of voter reform, one on the Republican side, one on the Democratic side.
On the Republican side, it's coming from the states, and particularly some of the swing states, like Georgia, where there was recently an election reform bill Which has a lot of provisions, but one of its key things is it limits mail-in ballots to certain specified criteria, and it repeals the kind of no-excuse absentee voting.
You can vote absentee, but you have to have a reason for it.
And the left is screaming about this.
And of course, on the left side, they're pushing H.R. 1, which has passed the House, is now making its way to the Senate, where we'll have a tougher time.
And what I find interesting about all this is that both sides are claiming the mantle of democracy.
In fact, both sides are accusing the other side of being undemocratic.
And you can see this in a lot of titles.
Here's an article in the American Prospect left-wing publication, H.R. 1, The Path to Democracy in America.
Here is something from the Brennan Center for Justice, another left-wing outfit.
The For the People Act, Democracy Reform.
And then, from the conservative side, an article here, this is from the National Review, HR1 is a partisan assault on American democracy.
And so it goes.
Both sides are saying that we are trying to get democracy right, except when you pay closer attention you notice a critical difference.
Obviously the two sides differ on the meaning of democracy here, or on the meaning of how democracy is best advanced.
From the Republican side, it's very clear what the Republicans are trying to do.
Authenticate every vote.
Or to put it somewhat differently, count only legal votes.
That's what the Republicans are doing.
Now, the Democrats are saying, in trying to do that, or supposedly trying to do that, you're going to suppress the vote.
You're going to prevent all kinds of...
What about the homeless guy?
This is what Bill Gates...
I'm sorry, Bill Ayers said to me recently...
What about the homeless guy who doesn't have an ID? You're gonna discourage that guy from voting if you have an ID requirement.
Now, the Democrats have a different principle, and they're very explicit about it in their own slogans.
Count every vote, or every vote counts.
Now, notice that they don't say count every valid vote, count every legal vote.
Their point is we just want to count votes, and they don't seem to be particularly attentive or concerned about whose votes they count.
In fact, if you look at what HR1 does, it seems to try to, well, expand the franchise in all kinds of suspect ways.
It forces states to implement mandatory voter registration.
It includes provisions for felons to vote.
It forces states to extend periods of early voting.
It mandates same-day voter registration.
It basically eliminates the checking requirements, saying that things like just basically swearing an oath that that is really you is sufficient.
It mandates free mailing of absentee ballots and so on and so on.
Now, let's look for a minute at this ID requirement because the simple truth of it is that we require an ID to do pretty much, well, all kinds of things in America.
You need an ID to buy alcohol or cigarettes.
You need an ID to rent a hotel room, purchase certain types of cold medicine, get a job, drive a car, take money out of a bank, get on an airplane, get married.
Imagine if someone were to say, you know, you go to the bank, they say, where's your ID? You go, oh no, that's racist.
You can't ask for an ID. That's going to suppress people, discourage people from going to the bank.
Give me the money. Or you try to get on the airplane.
Where's your ID? Oh no, that's racist.
You can't ask me for my ID. How are homeless people expected to fly?
Let me through. Or you show up for a doctor's appointment.
Where's your ID? Oh no, that's racist!
You can't make my medical care contingent upon me having an ID! Women and minorities will be disproportionately affected by this kind of a rule!
Now, the point I want to make is, if you said any of this, they would call in the psychiatrist.
You'd be carried out in a straitjacket.
So in every other area, it's perfectly legitimate to try to find out if the guy who shows up is indeed the guy.
And that's why there are these ID requirements.
How hard is it to get an ID? Not hard.
You don't have to have a car to get an ID. You can go into it in California.
I remember there are two IDs. There's a driver's license, but there's also a California ID. Which you can use to fly on an airplane or do any of the other things.
It's not hard. It's not unreasonable to expect people to get an ID. And it's kind of condescending to imply that blacks and Latinos, Asian Indians were like, what, too dumb to get an ID? We don't even know how to go about getting an ID. So the point I want to make here is this, that in the name of promoting democracy, what the left is trying to do is subvert democracy.
Why? For this simple reason.
In paying so little attention to authenticating votes, in just trying to count every vote, no matter what vote you count, what does that mean?
What that means is that every illegal vote, every invalid vote, cancels out a valid vote.
And that means that if you have a million illegal votes, you're canceling out a million valid votes.
In other words, illegal voting is a form of voter suppression.
This is a favorite term of the left, the right is engaging in voter suppression.
No. Illegal voting is a form of voter suppression.
Why? Because it cancels out, it blocks out, it invalidates.
The equivalent votes of people who are playing by the rules, who are able to authenticate their votes, are voting in a valid and legal manner.
The bottom line is that this Democratic Party, the party of crookery, the party that invented Tammany Hall and, by the way, voter suppression in the American South, this Democratic Party is actually the party that's trying to make our democratic process more undemocratic.
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What's up with the Supreme Court, this institution that conservatives have fought so hard over?
In a sense, you could almost say it has taken us 50 years to gain the decisive majority on the Supreme Court that we should have had, honestly, decades ago.
Think about this. Of the last 17 justices to the Supreme Court since 1970, guess how many have been nominated by Democrats?
Four. Four.
Problem is, Republicans have constantly nominated unreliable people.
People who have turned out to be massive disappointments, at least disappointments on key issues.
Going all the way back, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice Souter, Anthony Kennedy, the list goes on, I could name others.
The Democrats, by the way, look at the Supreme Court as part of their team.
They don't have constitutional mumbo-jumbo theories.
They look for people who will vote their way reliably, and by and large, they get them.
I think we can maybe take a page out of their book.
But I think what makes the present moment so frustrating and crushing and mystifying is that we appointed people, finally, under Trump.
People who seemed very reliable, solid conservatives.
And yet, on these voting cases, the election cases, well recently, just very recently, the SCOTUS unanimously rejects Trump lawsuit against Wisconsin Election Commission.
Now, the Trump people had alleged that the Wisconsin Election Commission had unilaterally rewritten the state law.
It clearly says in the Constitution that the state legislature will prescribe the laws by which these elections will be run.
So this is a flat-out violation, and yet the court is like, you know, we're not going to do it.
We're not going to hear it. And this was exactly mirrors the decision in Pennsylvania, where essentially the Pennsylvania courts, Democratic-run courts, by the way, decided, let's just extend the deadline to three days past Election Day in which we can count these mail-in ballots.
And this was, again, in flat contravention with what the Pennsylvania state legislature had mandated.
Once again, the Supreme Court goes, well, none of our business.
We're really not going to look at this, not even look at it.
Now, what is up with these guys?
Don't they see the importance of these issues, the importance of having fair elections in the country?
I think that, I have a theory about this, and it's nothing more than a hypothesis, but remember, even science operates by offering a hypothesis, and a hypothesis is valuable to the degree it can explain the data, explain the facts in front of us.
I don't think it's factual to say, oh well, Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett aren't really conservative.
I think they are. Or that they don't know what's at stake.
I think they do. However...
I think that they have made a decision, a calculated decision, and this would not be entirely surprising if they had even sort of gone into a certain type of a huddle, maybe a Zoom call, if you will, today.
And they basically say, look, if we take these cases, we are all going to be branded with the Trump brush, particularly those of us, Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who were appointed by Trump.
The left is going to say, and say with, I guess, some plausibility, Trump nominated these people to the court, so they're returning the favor.
So they might have decided, look, we have to sell Trump down the river.
In other words, we have to look the other way.
We have to be like Pontius Pilate, wash our hands off the matter.
Why? Not because we've sold out, not because we're wimps, but because we want to protect the credibility of the court.
We want to protect from anyone trying to pack the court.
And we want to actually steady ourselves for what we know are going to be a lot of bad decisions that are going to be coming down the pike from the legislature, restrictions in the name of COVID, restrictions in the name of cancel culture, but nevertheless, restrictions on basic civil liberties, First Amendment rights, rights to conscience, rights to assembly, perhaps Second Amendment rights.
And the court is the guardian of those rights.
I think that is, in fact, its primary function, to be the defender of the Bill of Rights.
And remember, the defender of the Bill of Rights against the majority, against the legislature.
And it could be, this is just my theory, that the court has decided that they need to, you may say, put on a cloak of credibility.
And the way to do that is, however reluctantly, to turn their eyes away from what happened in November.
And pay attention to their responsibilities in the days ahead.
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The Meghan Markle train wreck continues.
I see today that the palace has been issuing a couple of statements.
Prince William and Kate deny that they are the racists in question that apparently raised an issue about little Archie, Harry and Meghan's kid, being a, quote, person of color.
Which I guess throws suspicion now on poor Prince Charles.
Is he the great malefactor?
If any of this even happened at all, remember that neither Harry nor Meghan would identify the evildoer in this scheme.
But here's the relevant clip of Meghan Markle talking about little Archie.
Listen. In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time, So we have in tandem the conversation of he won't be given security, he's not going to be given a title, and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he's born.
What? What?
This is Oprah heightening the drama.
She's kind of a race artist, but she's, oh, what, what?
Now, here's the point, and this is why this has become a little bit of a global comedy, because I've been sort of monitoring the reaction in other countries.
And the reaction is exactly what my grandfather would say if he saw pictures of little Archie.
He'd go, the little bugger is obviously white.
His mom is lighter than I am, or you, and his father is white, so what do you expect the kid to be?
So what I'm getting at is we're having a debate about a person of color who is manifestly not a person of color.
The reason this raises a serious issue, I wouldn't normally be wasting my time on this, is it raises the deep issue of what I'm going to call the one-drop rule.
It's not my term. This is a term embedded in American history, and it's embedded in the history of American racism.
The reason the rest of the world doesn't get it is in the rest of the world, if you're 1% or 5% or 10% black, you're not black.
You're mixed race or you're something else.
And that is the key point.
Now, the one-drop rule, which is the idea that if you have any black ancestry, you have a black great-grandfather, that still makes you black.
This is basically what Meghan Markle is foisting on poor Archie.
She's in a sense making him something and identifying him and designating him.
And the question I want to ask is if we want to get rid of racism, isn't the best way to do it to get rid of race?
And if we want to get rid of race, race as a matter of something that matters, isn't the way to do that to celebrate The emergence of mixed-race people who are neither this nor that, who can't be, who defy racial classification.
I just want to read one line about the one-drop rule before bringing in a mixed-race individual right here, my wife Debbie.
This is Thomas Dixon, the notorious racist in his book, The Leopard Spots.
He goes, one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro.
It kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lips, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions.
Under segregation, under the doctrine that sort of all blacks look alike, the idea was, let's throw them all into the same camp.
It doesn't matter if they're 90% black or 50% or even 1%.
So this notion of the one drop rule is a legacy, not a slavery, We're good to go.
Now, honey, you are a...
Well, you did your Ancestry.
Was it Ancestry.com?
Ancestry.com. It was the DNA kit that you spit into and then you send it off and you get...
I think mine was like six months later.
I think it's probably quicker now, but then it was like six months later.
And then you get this chart, which is very...
I always knew that I had a lot of mixed race and ethnicities and nationalities.
So let me explain.
So I consider myself Latina or Hispanic, but...
I have a very interesting mix of DNA. Well, let's pause for a second because Latina.
When people say Latino or Latina, they're actually not talking about a race, are they?
They're really talking about Spanish-speaking people.
Right. It's an ethnicity.
Right. So being Hispanic, you know, when you fill out a chart and it says white And then of Hispanic origin, that means that you are white race, but you are of Hispanic origin.
So then you check that off.
Well, you know, really, truly, I would have to check off a lot of boxes.
Right. So tell us about the main boxes.
What are your main elements of your ancestry?
Right. Well, before I get to that, I just want to clarify what my nationality is.
So I was born in Venezuela.
My father was Venezuelan, but he has Dominican blood because his ancestors were from the Dominican Republic.
They moved to Venezuela when he was very young.
And so anyway, so I have that on my father's side.
My mother has indigenous blood from Mexican-American parents whose mother had, you know, ethnicity from Spain or, you know, her ancestors were from Spain.
My grandfather's ancestors were Apache Indian.
And so I have About 12 to 13% indigenous blood because of my mother's side, the Mexican-American South Texas side.
And then I also discovered that I have about 10% black African.
So from Cameroon Congo, Western Bantu, Nigeria, and Senegal.
Now, all of that kind of by way of the Dominican Republic through your dad.
I believe that that's where it came from, that that was the lineage that where it came from.
So, when I saw this, I was just like intrigued.
I loved it.
I celebrate it because For me, it's not an issue, but rather an asset.
So, I love having mixed everything.
No, but what I'm saying is, for an ideology that wants to divide the world into oppressed and oppressors, right?
You would have to say, well, gee, I can't do that, right?
You defy that kind of racial simplification.
Well, in that case, I'm an oppressed and an oppressor.
Right. And so is Little Archie, right?
Yes. So what I'm getting at is, but see, I think the reason that we're doing this and the reason we're talking about this is because there's an attempt here to foist a racial identity on people.
See, if you didn't do that, the census couldn't have a race question, which is becoming more and more obsolete.
Right. And you couldn't have racial preferences.
They couldn't say to you, hey, I'm going to give you an advantage to go to college because you're this or because you're that, because the answer is no, I'm neither A nor B. I'm actually both of the above.
So what I'm getting at here is that I think this debate over Little Archie points to the racialization of our debate and the fact that, I mean, why can't Little Archie grow up into a world in which he's not forced to choose?
I wish it wasn't the case.
I wish these people would just stop.
Now, when you were in college, you told me that the LULAC, the Latino activists would come to...
Tell us about that. They were very annoyed at me because, first of all, they thought I was embarrassed to be Hispanic.
And that's the reason I didn't want to join their club.
I didn't want to join LULAC or La Raza or whatever.
And I was like, listen, I know more Spanish than you do.
I am very much...
In that world. But I don't make it an issue.
And I'm in America.
I'm very happy to be an American.
I don't feel the need to be divisive and to tell people that Texas is really Mexico.
I'm not really into that.
And so they left me alone.
But, you know, honey, I really do wish that all this racial nonsense and, I mean, you know, The only way we're going to fight racism is to make it so that people are just people.
And we don't have to check boxes anymore.
And we're just accepted the way we are.
You know, interestingly, my view is that with gender, you have differences that are rooted in biology.
I'm not saying that there's no biological aspect to race.
There obviously is. But race is the painted face.
Race doesn't actually tell you what's on the inside.
And so I think ultimately we get closer to the end of racism, not when we have fewer people in the world like little Archie, But we have less racialization of the issue, fewer people who do the stuff that Meghan Markle is trying to do and benefit from.
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But we don't think about the ways in which political correctness can destroy the lives of people and destroy the lives of people who don't have power.
Political correctness poses as taking on the people in power, but often its casualties are simple people who are doing ordinary tasks, a cafeteria worker, a janitor, people like that who get their lives ruined because of entitled, spoiled brats Who play the race card for personal benefit.
A story that's come out about Smith College dramatizes this very clearly.
So, here's the story.
in the middle of 2018, a black student at Smith College.
This is a student from Africa named Oumou Kanute and she was eating lunch when according to her a janitor and a campus police officer approached her and demanded to know what she was doing there. She said that the officer was quote carrying a quote lethal weapon and that he caused her to have a near meltdown.
And that the janitor then reported her.
And she goes, all I did, this is the student writing on Facebook, all I did was be black.
It's outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College and my existence overall as a woman of color.
And you can just imagine how incendiary this kind of accusation is in a liberal campus with a left-wing college president, a woman named Kathleen McCartney, who's white.
So the whole college then goes berserk, and the president of the college goes into abject apologies.
She puts the janitor on leave.
She launches an investigation.
Of course, the story is picked up by the national media, which goes to town with it, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN. The ACLU jumps on board and takes the case, and the way they profile it, or the way that they headline it is, she is, quote, eating while black.
So this is a tailor-made narrative for the left.
Smith College then hires a law firm to investigate and what's interesting is the investigation takes two years and it finds out that virtually every statement that was made by this black kid, Umu Kunute, is false.
The incident was not as described and the people who were punished for it are not guilty.
So let's look at what actually happened.
What actually happened is it turns out That the student was eating in an area that had been expressly reserved by the college for a summer camp that was going on with little kids at the time.
So she was not supposed to be in that area.
And the cafeteria worker came up to her and just politely told her, hey, this area is off limits.
And then a janitor in the area who had been asked, who had been instructed specifically to report anyone in that area who didn't belong there, calls the cops.
Now, the janitor does not say anything about the student's color.
He doesn't say that she's black.
He evidently is 60 years old and has poor eyesight, so he thought it was a male, and in fact it's a female.
So later the student would say, he misgendered me!
No, he didn't misgender you.
He didn't see you very well.
In any event, this all comes out in the investigation.
The campus police officer who approached the student was not, in fact, armed.
In fact, Campus police officers on every campus, for the most part, are not armed.
He apparently apologized for bothering her.
He didn't threaten her in any way.
He was very polite to her.
And the reason we know this is that she, the student, actually turned her phone on and taped the incident.
So there's actually a recording of what the campus police officer said.
Now here's the point.
The point is that because of the avalanche of accusations in the national...
Can you imagine the impact of national media coverage on an ordinary guy who's a cafeteria?
These are people who make $35,000 to $40,000 a year, a lot less than the $78,000 it costs to go to Smith College.
So here you've got the Smith College faculty establishment, radical left-wingers.
You've got this idiot of a college president, Kathleen McCartney.
Now... Even after it was revealed that the whole incident was a hoax, what do they do?
You would think that they would then issue an apology to the people whose lives have been harmed.
No. No apology to the cafeteria worker.
No apology to the janitor.
These people, it's like they don't matter.
They don't care about them.
Why? Well, I guess it's because they're white.
Meanwhile, this college brat who's making these false accusations and ruining people's lives, she is worthy of all the most abject apologies.
And the ACLU is still not backed down.
They still demand Smith College needs to implement new rules and regulations to deal with all this.
So there's an old principle in economics.
When you subsidize something, you get more of it.
And that's universally true.
You subsidize homelessness, you're gonna get more homeless people.
You subsidize unemployment, you'll get more unemployed people.
And if you subsidize bogus racial hoaxes, you'll get more of them.
Why? Because, think of it, if you're a student from Somalia or Ghana, you normally can't have the college president coming, you know, to apologize to you, bowing to you, kissing your feet, and so, but you can if you make an accusation of racism.
Eating while black. So there's a tremendous incentive here for all these people to make their lives into a drama, to get the whole campus to kowtow to them, in some cases to become national celebrities, to pull the Jussie Smollett, to pull the Meghan Markle.
Racial fakery is now not the exception, it's the norm.
And this terrible incident at Smith College...
The people to feel sorry for here are the working class people whose lives have been harmed.
Harmed by this horrible individual, Umu Kanute, by this horrible college president, and by these horrible people at Smith College.
Almost 20 different retailers have canceled Mike Lindell of MyPillow.
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Listen. So I come back to Minnesota, and I put out a press release to them going, hey, I had a meeting with Donald Trump.
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Our college campuses, which are supposed to be forums for discussion, debate, and free speech, have now become the exact opposite.
There's a high degree of monitoring, surveillance, intellectual bullying, canceling, accusations, firings, all going on on campuses across the country.
It's an absolutely horrific situation.
It's really bringing down the reputation of the American campus.
Now, I want to cite a recent example that's not an extreme example.
It's actually kind of an ordinary example.
Lucas Morrell, professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, is having a Zoom debate with a historian at Northwestern, Leslie Harris.
They're debating the 1619 Project.
And it's a debate that goes back and forth about the strengths and weaknesses of the prah.
And as Morell puts it, these are two tenured professors speaking about something that they know about.
It's a perfectly civil dialogue.
But the moment it ends and the word gets out, a petition then begins with hundreds of signatures.
Which basically says that the idea that slavery is central to the founding of the United States should, quote, not be up for debate.
In other words, Morrell is wrong, Harris is right, there are certain topics we can't argue about.
And even though the records of the founding show that they paid some, but very little, attention to slavery, they're mainly talking about the big states and the small, nevertheless, this is not up for debate.
You can't debate it, or you're out of bounds.
Now, I often talk about the problems on the campus.
Well, the good news is that there's now a new organization called the Academic Freedom Alliance.
One of the pioneers in starting this is the Princeton scholar, Robert George, a Catholic conservative scholar.
But what's interesting about him is that George said that in founding this new group, the founders were very eager to make sure that they got a broad coalition of professors across the political spectrum.
In fact, an emphasis on centrist and liberal professors.
To join this organization and evidently they have.
They now have some 200 members and the point of this organization is to come together and defend academic freedom.
Defend mainly the academic freedom of professors who are terrorized across the political spectrum by the left.
And to defend also administrators, university employees, and even students who fall into the same situation.
Now, you might say, wait a minute, Dinesh, didn't you just say something about people on the left being terrorized also?
Yes. Here's the point.
It's a very telling quotation from one of the...
Progressives, who's part of this new free speech group.
And he says that progressives in academia are the most vulnerable of all.
They're more vulnerable than centrists and they're more vulnerable than conservatives.
Why? Because the woke people, the far left, knows that they are easy targets.
It's one thing to go after a conservative who's known to be a conservative, who's established, who has tenure, and he expects it.
In fact, to some degree, he doesn't even care.
He's probably been used to this for 20 years.
But if you're on the left and you somehow violate the party line, you say something like, well, slavery was important, but it was more important to the founding of the Democratic Party than it was to the founding of the United States.
Suddenly the left starts shrieking, let's get rid of this guy, he's supposed to be a leftist, he's actually a Benedict Arnold, and so on.
So interestingly, you've got prominent scholars across the spectrum.
When I looked at these names, I recognized most of them, and I was kind of startled.
I mean, you see some prominent conservatives, but here are some names.
Randall Kennedy, the African American legal scholar at Harvard.
Orlando Patterson, probably one of the greatest living sociologists from Jamaica.
I've taught at Harvard for many years.
Janet Haley, Cornel West, Brian Leiter, Dorian Abbott, Nadine Strossen, a very interesting name, New York Law School.
Nadine Strossen is the former president of the ACLU. So you've got prominent liberals...
Who say, and one of them is quoted in one of these articles, saying, We're absolutely terrified because we can never keep up with wokeness.
What's okay today is over the line tomorrow.
In other words, these leftists are so crazy that what they said was okay on Monday is not okay.
They keep changing their minds.
One moment, racism is something you can't change.
Oh no, I'm gay. That's the way I am.
Don't ask me if it's nature or nurture.
I can't do anything about it, Dinesh.
The next moment... Oh, we can choose our gender.
A man can choose to be a woman.
A woman can choose to be a man.
So the orthodoxy keeps changing.
And the point is, not that it keeps changing, but that they keep bullying people for not being up to date with these changes.
Well, a lot of people, I think in the country in general, but certainly in academia, are sick of it.
They don't want to live like this.
They don't want these bullies peering over their shoulder.
And so they recognize that political correctness has reached a whole new level since I wrote a liberal education 30 years ago.
They've started an organization which I hope is going to be powerful.
It's going to have a legal team.
It's going to work with universities cooperatively at first, but menacingly if necessary, to guarantee the free speech essential to university debate and a liberal education.
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Ryan Woods, who is a log cabin Republican from Utah, is also known as Lady MAGA USA. And he is a performer.
He, in fact, performs as a drag queen.
However, he also has been working for Delta Airlines.
Now, that came to a sad end when Delta Airlines fired him as a flight attendant under circumstances that I, for one, find a little disturbing.
So I asked Ryan to come on the show.
Welcome, Ryan.
Thanks for joining the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
Now, you told Debbie, my wife, that you had to get up a little early to get dressed up.
How early did you get up and what did you have to do?
Oh, goodness. Well, thank you so much for having me here, Dinesh.
It's an honor to be here.
I sort of prefer the term drag artist as opposed to drag queen because drag queens are doing bad things out there like teaching children to twerk in libraries.
So I keep it clean and I keep it uplifting.
So I got up at 5 a.m.
Well, let me just tell you, I had to brush out these wigs.
I'm wearing three different wigs.
I had to, you know, get the costume ready.
I had to glue down my eyebrows because you can't do the...
The illusion without gluing down your real eyebrows.
So it is it is a long process, but it was absolutely worth it to be here with you today.
And I try to I try to enjoy the process.
I just like listen to Disney music and take it one step at a time.
But today I didn't have really enough time to get ready.
So I went with just a little bit of mascara and some Vaseline on my lips.
I wanted to look natural.
Sounds good. Sounds good.
Well, I see you've got a lot of Trump paraphernalia behind you.
And evidently what happened is that Delta Airlines, which seems to have had no problem with you being a drag artist per se, but right after January 6th, they began evidently an investigation of you.
An investigation that was, well...
Let's start with January 6th.
You were apparently in the DC area in January 6th, but you didn't go to the rally and you certainly didn't storm the Capitol.
What were you doing in DC or in the DC area?
Well, I've been to DC a number of times for the big rallies and at this rally, I was about five miles away from the Capitol.
I didn't even find out what actually happened until after dark because I had sort of put my phone away and I was at the Unity Bridge, the famous kind of Trump Unity Bridge, and I was performing and having fun and hanging out with my Vietnamese for Trump friends and taking pictures.
So I was nowhere near the Capitol and I've never done anything dangerous.
So it was really strange after almost two years of being an activist, Lady Maga USA, that on January 7th, the day after what happened at the Capitol, I'm suddenly under investigation.
And they showed me images of me at rallies back in November with some patriots open carrying their firearms and pictures of me with guns because I am an ardent Second Amendment supporter and a constitutionalist.
So it was just very strange that all of a sudden, on January 7th, it was an issue.
Then they suspended me for 60 days while they continued their investigation, and then they ultimately fired me on February 23rd.
And their only explanation so far has been, for reasons we discussed on January 7th.
So I was fired for being a drag queen Trump supporter and we are specifically targeted because gay people like me are not allowed to step away from the rainbow plantation and the radical LGBTQ agenda.
So they don't police everybody's social media equally.
And obviously I was singled out and targeted.
And they made an example out of me to, you know, you better not support Trump.
You better not take pictures with guns.
You better just fall in line and support Black Lives Matter because Delta gave us Black Lives Matter pins.
To wear above our wings.
They fly the Black Lives Matter flag.
So obviously I disagree with the radical Black Lives Matter riots and all of that, but they didn't say a word about any of those riots, but they certainly had a lot to say about January 6th.
No, interestingly, well, two things strike me.
One is the fact that, you know, it's one thing if you had been posting all this violent imagery with guns and so on in the wake of January 6th, because then it would, of course, fit the so-called insurrection narrative.
But what you're saying is that they plucked photos that you had posted prior to all that, in which you were talking just about the Second Amendment, you know, your legal right to have a firearm and And use that in the aftermath of the January 6th to make it look like you were some sort of a violent guy.
I also find it really striking that you were fired not due to homophobia, you might say, on the part of Delta, but I would call it Trumpophobia, right?
Or conservatophobia, that they have a bigotry, a bias, I agree with that.
I know I was targeted for being an outspoken Trump supporter but I wouldn't go so far as to say that I wasn't targeted because I am a gay drag queen Because I am controversial.
Because I step away from the radical LGBT movement and I'm outspoken.
So the fact that I was singled out like this and treated so unfairly does have something to do with the fact that I'm an LGBT gay drag queen Trump supporter.
I don't think they police your average, you know, housewife who put on a MAGA hat.
I was specifically targeted because people like me are not allowed to leave the Democrat narrative and stand for freedom.
Oh, that's interesting. So what you're saying actually is that being gay does have something to do with it.
It's sort of like being an African-American who's a conservative.
The idea is that, you know, you're black.
You're not supposed to behave this way.
You need to be, you know, you need to march in lockstep with the left-wing leadership.
And you're saying something very analogous exists in the LGBTQ community.
And so you were a victim both of, you may say, Trump hatred, But also this idea that you're a dissident LGBTQ guy and therefore you've got to be taught a lesson.
Absolutely. The LGBTQ movement in general and the Democrats consider someone like me very dangerous.
And that's one of the reasons I do dress up so flamboyantly is to defy their narrative that just because you're a theatrical person who likes to dress up or just because you happen to be gay doesn't mean you support communism and socialism and radicalism and Black Lives Matter rioting and all of the rest that the LGBTQ You know, community in general in mainstream LGBT movement has embraced.
They've gone completely radical and the radicals have taken over the entire LGBT movement.
They're pushing transgenderism on children.
They're teaching kids to twerk in libraries.
Pride parades are often debaucherous and inappropriate.
So I just stepped away and said, enough is enough.
I'm an American first.
I love my country. And just because I happen to be gay and I love to dress up has nothing to do with my identity as a patriot, a God-fearing constitutionalist American.
Ryan Woods, hey, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Really appreciate it.
It's an honor. And if anybody wants to follow what I do, they can just go to LadyMagaUSA.com.
There's links to all of my social media.
And they can also help me out because I'm unemployed and I'm hoping to get back on my feet and continue my activism in a big way.
Absolutely. Thanks again, Ryan.
Good to have you. Thank you so much.
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We live in an age of conformity, an age in which people by and large march in lockstep.
But what's ironic is that this age of conformity occurs in a time when people think that they are being radical individualists.
They are speaking out.
They are the resistance.
They're challenging power.
They are taking, you might say, the road not taken, to use the title of the very famous Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken.
I recently found online a very cool recording of the poem, which is Frost reading his own poem.
And I want to play that and interpret the poem because I want to show that it has the meaning exact opposite to what people take it to be.
It's actually an indictment of the people who think they are taken or have taken the road not taken.
Listen. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveller, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth, then took the other as just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted wear.
Though as for that, the passing there had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step, had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day, yet knowing how a way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.
So there is Frost.
And the superficial reading of the poem zooms in on the last line.
I took the road less traveled by.
That has made all the difference.
Yeah, that's me. I'm the greatest, you know.
Everybody else takes the common road.
I took the unusual road.
Everybody else wants to go to corporate, the corporate world.
I decided to become a poet.
Now, what's interesting with this poem is that when you go back and read it or listen to it carefully, you realize that it's saying something quite different.
Let's go back to a couple of lines.
Where the traveler is looking down the roads, and he says, first of all, that when he looks down one road, and then he looks down the other, and it is, quote, just as fair.
In other words, it's just as appealing as the other one.
And then three lines later, though as for that, the passing there had worn them really about the same.
In other words, when you're looking at the footprints, the The two roads look identical.
There's not a whole lot to tell one from the other.
And then the poet says a little bit later that ages and ages from now, in other words, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, the roads are not the same.
And the one that he took, he ended up taking, made all the difference.
I think what Frost is trying to tell us is that life is about choices.
And choices are very difficult.
Why? Because often when you come to a fork in the road, hey, should I go into the corporate world, let's just say, or become a poet?
Hey, should I do this or should I do that?
Hey, I should marry this girl or should I not?
As you think about these choices, at the time, it is in fact impossible to say how they will come out.
In fact, the roads are about the same.
It's only with the benefit of hindsight.
It's only later, when you look back, that you go, wow, was I lucky to have made that choice.
Wow, that turned out to be fantastic.
I'm really glad I did that.
Or, oh wow, all my miseries today are because I took that road.
Who knew when I took it that it would lead down this pathway?
So, the philosopher Hegel said many years ago that the owl of Minerva flies by night.
And what this means is that history is known only through the rearview mirror.
Hegel said that if you were living in the French Revolution or you're living in...
People who lived in the Middle Ages didn't know they lived in the Middle Ages.
It's only later that we look back and we go, oh, let's divide history into the ancient world and the Middle Ages and the modern era.
That's our classification.
That's not how those people saw it then.
And just as it is with history, so it is with individuals.
If you look at our own life, Our life involves difficult choices, the consequences of which are not apparent at the time.
And it's only when we have the owl of Minerva, it's only when we have the rearview mirror, the benefit of hindsight, that we can look back at that fork and go, wow, that choice proved to be consequential because of how it turned out.
Now, there might be some people who go, oh, Dinesh, well, this is a very eccentric reading of the poem that you're giving me.
You know, most people don't read the poem that way.
Exactly. Most people don't take the road not taken.
I'm giving you the road not taken, which is to say a somewhat original interpretation of the poem, and then challenging me for doing this.
You're taking the common road.
It's time for our mailbox, and we have an interesting question from Jerry from Scotland.
Listen. Hi Dinesh, my name's Gerry Devenny.
I'm over in Scotland in the United Kingdom and a big fan of your show.
I really enjoy it every week.
I find it really insightful and funny too.
But I really enjoy it so please keep up the good work.
I have a question for you Dinesh.
I know you focus on American politics and I find that fascinating.
But over here in Scotland we've got one or two issues on the go just now and I just wondered if you had a view on any of that and if so, what might that be?
I appreciate your thoughts. Well, Jerry, you know, this was a little bit of an inspiration for me to do a little bit of digging.
A little bit on Scottish history, at least the brief overview that Scotland...
Well, Scotland is alongside England and for many hundreds of years Scotland was under the sway of the Romans.
And then starting in the Middle Ages, Scotland becomes...
Well, the English start treating it as a feudal territory.
And this sort of is just an adjunct, you may say, of England.
And that, of course, produces the Scottish revolts.
The hero of the movie Braveheart, William Wallace, who unfortunately ended up losing the final battle at Falkirk.
And then it was Robert the Bruce who led a successful battle against the English at Bannockburn.
And this is the romance of Scottish history.
Now, interestingly...
Scotland then kind of later in the early 18th century rejoined with England, became part of what we now call Great Britain.
Great Britain referring to England and Scotland and Ireland and Wales.
Scotland retained autonomy.
It controlled its own education system and its own legal and religious system.
But it was essentially governed by the British Parliament.
And the issue now, the big issue in Scotland is very simple.
Should the Scots gain independence from Britain?
Now, what's really ironic about this is that the Scots, Scotland, or at least the majority perhaps in Scotland, was actually quite happy when England was in the EU. The Scots feel that they have a certain emotional affinity, not just with England, but with all of Europe.
And so ironically, it's Brexit, it's the British...
Deciding, we're out of here.
We're out of the EU that has now partly strengthened the movement in Scotland for Scotland to get out of Great Britain.
There's a narrow majority, as far as I can decipher, of the Scots who want to get out.
It's not a decisive majority, but it is a clear majority.
And there seems to be, at least currently, a feud going on between Alex Salmond, who was the founder of the of the sort of Scottish Independence Party and the current First Minister and they're fighting over this and this might weaken the coalition for Scottish independence.
Now, two things are striking about it.
One is that there's a rise of Scottish nationalism and that's no surprise.
I mean, why would the Scots want to be ruled by the British Parliament?
Why wouldn't they want to rule themselves?
And some people, critical of all this, seem to think, you know, this nationalism is very dangerous.
It's right-wing.
You know, it's Trumpian.
You know, it fans the forces of racial.
And so I began to look into it.
And there's a very interesting article on NPR, the National Public Radio, in which they interview a bunch of Scots.
And it turns out that this is a very multiracial movement.
In fact, they interviewed this one guy who says basically that he is a Scottish Pakistani.
This is a guy who speaks Punjabi and Urdu.
You have another guy, Archie Emanuel, who calls himself an Afro-Scott.
And these are guys who moved to Scotland from England.
And they say that Scotland is far more hospitable to people from different countries than even England is.
So the bottom line of it is, I don't claim to have burrowed to the bottom of all this, but I don't think that nationalism by itself is either right-wing or left-wing.
I mean, think about it. There's a certain type of right-wing nationalism, I suppose, but a lot of the anti-colonial leaders from Gandhi to Mandela, who would hardly be called right-wing, were obviously also nationalists.
Nationalism is essentially a variant of patriotism.
And while it can take on a certain ugly or chauvinistic or bad quality, it doesn't necessarily have to do that.
And I see no indication that the Scottish independence movement is in fact a chauvinistic or racist movement in any way.
Bottom line, the Scots should do what they want, what is good for them.
I just read an article in the Brookings Institution publication talking about, well, what does this mean for the United States, which is allied with Britain?
If the Scots break off, they might become a pawn of China and Russia, blah, blah, blah.
I don't think so.
I think the Scots will retain an affinity with Europe and with the English-speaking world.
If there's one thing that brings the Scots together, they all speak English, even if they do it with a Scottish accent.
So the bottom line of it is, this is a great question.
Thanks for actually...
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