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March 23, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:40
EXPLOITING THE POOR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep52
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Coming up, James O'Keefe of Project Veritas on the crisis at the border.
A champion of cancel culture gets canceled.
And the philosopher Schopenhauer on the moral case for pessimism.
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.
The media is now talking about a crisis at the border.
The media is now talking about a crisis at the border.
They're kind of finally acknowledging it is a crisis, but it's far more than a crisis.
A crisis is sort of something that happens to you.
It happens, you may say, from the outside.
But this is a crisis that has been engineered, invited, solicited, created by the Biden administration.
That's what the press isn't telling you.
And in fact, so callous are the people who have done this, that when asked about it, they literally laugh because they know that the media is covering for them, and they feel like they don't have to explain themselves.
Here's Kamala Harris, asked if she plans to go to the border, and listen to the tone of her response.
Listen. Do you have plans to visit the border?
Um, not today.
LAUGHTER This crackpot laugh that that woman has, but I think it shows her utter contempt.
And by the way, AOC, remember under Trump, AOC was marching down to the border with a bunch of sidekicks and they were staging photographs, fake tears.
Oh, look at all these kids in cages.
I mean, there was actually nothing on the other side of the fence, but this is AOC, who was sort of the master at this kind of political stagecraft.
But somehow, where's the thespian?
Where's the great actress now?
She's nowhere to be seen.
Why? Because it's the Biden administration, and so all these theatrics have been somehow put to the side, put on the shelf.
All the costumes, I guess, are back in the costume room awaiting the next political opportunity.
For me, as I think about all this, it's kind of a tragedy and exploitation and unfairness all around.
Not just to the migrants, but to others as well.
There are three groups of people here that are being exploited.
The first group, of course, is the migrants themselves.
I've been reading about the smuggling operations that are underway.
The cartels are just raking in the cash.
And so what you have is these desperate people.
And many of them are not even starting in Mexico.
They're starting further out.
And the cartels have got this system.
One of the smugglers is quoted in the Texas Tribune saying, the money is in the people.
So they don't make as much money now with drugs.
There's more money to be made on trafficking, you may say, humans and trafficking them across the border.
Many of these migrants have to borrow money at sort of loan shark rates, 5% per month, because they can't afford what they have to pay these smugglers, and of course a cut goes to the cartels.
So there's a massive network stretching all the way through South America, and they move these people along.
And they charge, apparently, a whole kind of slate of different types of rates.
Apparently, there's a kind of bargain basement rate.
That's $3,000.
And they will just sort of bring you toward the border and then leave you.
It's your job to cross. You're on your own at that point.
For $6,000, they will deposit a parent and a child.
Now, the child here is very strategic because, as one of these smugglers explains, he goes,"...I strongly recommend adults bring a child." Because when they bring a child, they are typically released by immigration authorities inside America to await a court date.
And you don't have to show up.
Basically, you're in.
The kid is sort of your almost, you may almost say, passport.
Because the kid plays to humanitarian, not sentiments, because the Biden administration doesn't have any.
But sort of tactical considerations.
And then there's a $10,000 VIP plan.
Which gets you brought right into Houston.
They take you across the border.
They navigate you the whole way.
They deposit you in the United States.
You're free and clear. So you've got this.
You can kind of almost look at this menu of prices and decide what you can afford.
The cartels even offer a measure of credit.
You can, at a high rate of interest, pay back by working illegally in the United States and use that money over a period of time to then pay these thugs back.
Now, there are all kinds of questions that surround all this.
You know, Nancy Pelosi and others say, oh, we're, you know, we shouldn't be too worried about all this.
We're attracting the best and brightest people from all over the world.
First of all, just looking at these people, that doesn't seem to be the case.
These are really more like refugees, desperate people facing horrible conditions, trying to get away.
This isn't necessarily the best and the brightest, but let's say it were.
Let's say they're the best and the brightest people from not just Mexico, but all of South America and perhaps other parts of the world are all coming to America.
My question is, why is this right for America to do?
I mean, we talk all the time about appropriation.
You know, it's cultural appropriation when you put on a Mexican outfit and wear a sombrero.
Well, why isn't it a far worse type of appropriation if we take the smartest people in all these other cultures and bring them to the United States?
We're ripping off the best talent in the world, and this is precisely the talent that is needed to help those countries get on their feet, go from being developing or poor countries to being developed countries.
So why is this sort of larceny on a grand scale somehow something the left never brings up?
Now, Yes, this is unfair to the migrants, but it's also unfair to other people who are waiting in line.
Here's a post from an Ethiopian man who's fleeing religious persecution.
I saw this Dan Crenshaw put it out on Twitter, but he goes, I'm an asylum seeker who's been in this country for nine years.
I'm sick of the situation at the southern border, how these people cut the line, and I, along with people who have followed the legal process, never hear back from the authorities.
My case has been pending for over two years, and I'm still waiting for a meaningful update.
I'm sick of having to call and send letters and And I never hear anything.
By cutting the line, you're unfair to a lot of people who are in the line, who are waiting to be served.
They too are needy.
They too have a claim on America, or at least American consideration.
And finally, when the illegals come here and work, and work for lower wages, they undercut American workers who would otherwise be paid higher wages.
Now, why is it okay to do that?
These are American workers, by the way, in a time of COVID. When unemployment has gone up, normal jobs have been shut down.
These are people desperately looking to get back on their feet.
Some of them have accumulated debt.
You'd think a normal country, a country with an iota of decency, would prioritize its own people and say, let's at least first get these people back on their feet.
Instead, I see that in an effort to kind of cover up the border crisis, the Biden administration, this is a recent report, has just awarded $86 million to hotels.
All over Arizona and Texas, this was done through a group called Endeavors, to house the migrants.
And these, if you work out the average, they're paying like $300 a day to have the migrants now housed in hotels.
Why? So it doesn't look bad.
It doesn't look like they're all wrapped in foil.
They're sleeping in cages.
So in order to protect themselves, their own appearances, the Biden administration is using taxpayer money But what ordinary American can afford to spend $300 now in a hotel?
Not a whole lot of people.
Not a lot of these working class people who are hurt by illegal immigration.
The bottom line of it is there's a lot of cruelty here being perpetrated.
Cruelty against the migrants.
Cruelty against others who are waiting in line.
And cruelty against Americans who, after all, also deserve some consideration from their own government.
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the Biden administration has instructed ICE officials not to provide information to the press at a time when the press itself is trying to do some cover for the Biden crisis on the border. I'm really delighted that James O'Keefe of Project Veritas has been getting inside there. He's with his sources. He's been revealing photographs and showing the gruesome conditions
at the border. Let's begin with a little clip made by Project Veritas talking about what Listen. I'm on the ground in Donna, Texas.
If you want to take a look at this facility right here, to your left, that is the Border Patrol tent facility.
Stands right behind me.
Just a month ago, Customs and Border Patrol agents completed the construction of that facility.
It's a 165,000 square foot facility.
And we have never seen images inside this facility before.
They won't even allow the non-profit lawyers who conduct the actual oversight of these immigration detention centers to go inside.
Nobody has seen photos inside of this place.
Until now, Project Veritas has obtained never-before-seen photographs of what it actually looks like inside this facility.
Shocking images showing people wrapped up in what looks like metal foil, laying on the ground, their faces covered.
Why won't the administration be honest about this?
Why won't they show you these images?
So James, you've done it again, and I've got to commend you for the journalism that you're doing that we're not getting from the mainstream media.
Let me just start by asking you a little bit about how Project Veritas does it.
Now, in some cases, you rely on...
You know, sources at Facebook and places like that who sort of spill the beans about what's going on inside an organization.
But how about in this case, where you're getting inside a facility, apparently these are photos that the Biden administration does not want to get out, and yet you're getting them out.
So my first question is, what's your secret?
Ah, secrets.
Sources and methods, as they say, in journalism.
We have whistleblowers, Dinesh.
We have insiders, some of whom are willing to go on the record.
Some of whom are not.
In this case, in Texas, we were able to obtain these images, which we promoted and teased on Sunday over the weekend.
This is from a few days ago.
These are pods, unaccompanied juveniles, all male, aged between 6 and 17 years old.
And we learned through our informant, That working in the government, that these folks have, you know, there's sexual molestation, some of them have COVID, and these are shocking images, and I obtained them on Thursday of last week.
We promoted them on Sunday and then sort of got scooped a little bit by Axios, a Democratic congressman, toured the facility.
But the images that we have are probably the most shocking.
They almost look like baked potatoes.
These are people wrapped in these survival aluminum blankets on the floor in Donna, Texas.
So Dinesh, we get the information because people in the government I feel like they have no place else to go.
They certainly can't go to CNN, and they can't go to the media because they don't trust the media, and there's not many people for them to trust.
And every time I do one of these things, I have half a dozen more people come to me.
Even as I speak right now, as I'm sitting here doing this interview, I have people sending me an encrypted signal message, VeritasTipsAtProtonMail.com.
We send our undercover reporters to meet with those folks, in some cases, assist them.
They tell us where to go or how to get inside the place, and we do the photography ourselves.
ourselves.
In a sense, your opportunity comes from the fact that we don't have, I would say, a functioning media in this country, the kind of critical lens that the media is supposed to put on the government.
In a sense, your opportunity comes from the fact that we don't have, I would say, a functioning media in this country, the kind of critical lens that the media is supposed to put on the government.
That's not happening now because we have a media that's kind of in league with the government, that kind of wants Biden to succeed, that wants to contrast the sort of wonders of Biden with the evils of Trump.
And of course, if they show the same kind of images, remember when the left was wailing about kids in cages, well, it looks like things haven't gotten much better for Biden.
And in fact, in some ways worse, because Biden virtually invited these people to come so that you have a volume of people surging across the border that obviously didn't occur in the Trump years.
Yeah, and it's also, I call it a symbiotic relationship between the media and the powers that be.
So yes, they do get information, of course they do, CNN does, but it's kind of sanctioned information.
It's almost like a press conference when they use their leaks.
They say, well, is this true, government official?
We do things that are unsanctioned.
We don't work with the top of the customs and Border Patrol.
We'll work with the rank and file.
We work with people who are on the ground, on the border.
They say, you've got to see this, James.
And there's this sort of symbiotic, you know, partnership between the CNNs and the Washington Post, you know, the people familiar with the matter.
That's almost like a counterintelligence operation run by the people in the government intentionally wanting to deceive the American people.
So that's what I don't believe in these anonymous sources.
We need to see the images.
We need to hear what's going on, Dinesh.
And you're right. They don't trust people.
These sources only trust Project Veritas in increasing fashion, so we have a huge responsibility.
And you will see in the next few days, we've already been sent more video, and we're going to be releasing that in the coming days ahead.
I mean, it seems that one of the things that we see so often in the media these days is, you know, an anonymous source told us this or a government source told us that.
Half the time you have to wonder if these sources are made up or if it's people with an agenda who is supplying information to the press.
The question, what I think is striking about what you do is...
You never rely on that.
You sometimes use sources, but the sources come on and talk about it.
Or you show pictures or you show video.
And so, unless the video can be shown to be somehow deceptively edited.
Now, with regard to this footage on the border and the pictures you've released, no one has claimed, am I right, that these pictures are somehow inauthentic or they're not real or they're bogus pictures or you staged them yourself?
What they might claim is that they have not been confirmed.
Like CNN would say, and say we haven't been able to independently confirm And it becomes this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy because they'll never be able to confirm them until the authorized government spokesperson confirms them, which is what we have to do.
Now, this is some breaking news as I sit here right now.
Customs and Border Patrol statement on processing center imagery.
Now they're going to start releasing images, the Customs and Border Patrol It has now released images and video today.
But those are only the images, Dinesh, that they want you to see and sanctioned images.
But I think that the media has become slave to their access, Dinesh.
They use these anonymous sources.
And what we often find is that when you actually look at what the so-called anonymous sources have told the journalists, it never matches up with what they report.
So you'll hear this, people familiar with the matter.
According to officials briefed on the matter, you know, Washington Post has learned.
But when you actually open up their so-called reporter notebooks and examine, for example, a transcript of what the source told them, it never matches up.
I don't know.
I don't know.
That contempt translates into sources working with us because they are so upset and frustrated about how things are being portrayed.
And that's, you know, it's obvious, but there's no one else really out there, so it's important for Project Veritas to work with these sources.
I mean, it seems a classic corroboration of what you're saying is when the Washington Post revealed that the transcript or the audio of the phone call that Trump had made to the Georgia Secretary of State's office was completely different from what the Washington Post reported about it two months ago.
Now, I know that you're in a case with the New York Times, and you just won an important decision.
So my last question is, can you just tell us briefly what is the significance of the victory, and what does it mean in terms of the information that you might now get access to about the inner workings at the New York Times?
Well, Dinesh, this is huge.
This is a historic victory.
And let me just add one more comment to your last question.
The media considers themselves credible by virtue of their own decree.
So we're credible.
You must believe us. And what I say is, no, no, no, no.
I trust, as Reagan said, trust but verify.
I don't believe that you just tell me something is true because you've told it to me.
I want to see this stuff ourselves.
So that's really what it comes down to.
This New York Times case, we have won in the New York Supreme Court.
Judge Wood has denied the New York Times motion to dismiss our lawsuit.
That's a big deal. In fact, this hasn't happened in this way since 1965.
Project Uritas versus New York Times, a defamation lawsuit.
The New York Times had called me disinformation and our video is, quote, deceptive.
They did this in late September regarding that Minnesota Somali cash for ballots video that we exposed.
And they said that I had used unnamed sources.
Our sources were all, you could see their faces.
So I said, enough of this.
I'm going to sue them for defamation.
I have to prove what's called actual malice.
That's a legal term. It means I have to prove they knew they were lying about me.
It's not enough that the New York Times lied.
Which they've already admitted they did in these motions.
No, no. I have to prove that they knew that they were lying.
And the judge in New York said there's enough evidence here that seems to suggest that they actually did know.
It's an extraordinary thing.
And we are going to go through what's called discovery in a lawsuit.
That means... That I get to conduct depositions of the New York Times reporters.
Her name is Maggie Ashler.
The head of the New York Times is a guy named Dean Baquet.
I get to put them at a conference table and ask them questions under oath, on videotape, about what they knew and what they did.
And these quotes, I mean, these are extraordinary quotes, Dinesh, in this judge.
And I'm just going to read one quick one.
The facts show the presence of literally every hallmark of malice recognized by law, including, this is the judge talking about Project Veritas and the New York Times.
New York Times set it out with a preconceived narrative motivated by ill will and bias, failing to contact obvious sources of information, relying on biased and non-credible sources, violating journalistic standards, and refusing to retract.
Veritas alleges that it has far exceeded that standard by pleading overwhelmingly circumstantial evidence of actual malice.
This is a 16-page order by a New York Supreme Court judge, Dinesh.
We're making history, and more than that, we're going on offense.
It's time for people to start suing these institutions.
It's time for us to go on offense.
It's disgraceful, and this is that motion, and you're going to hear more about this in the coming days, because this is sort of breaking news here, Dinesh.
Well, James, I love the fact that you're taking the fight to them.
You're, in a sense, confirming what we all know to be true, which is that these are invidious people who have an invidious agenda.
So catching them in the act is creating legal certainty when there's already suspicion on the part of the public.
It's awesome. I want to congratulate you on all the great work you're doing.
Thank you, James, for coming on the podcast.
Thank you, Ganesh. We're good to go.
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We're seeing a disturbing pattern, and it's now a pattern.
Of countries that became prosperous through free market capitalism begin to throw away that prosperity by moving in the socialist direction.
On this podcast, Debbie and I talk about how that happened to Venezuela.
Venezuela is now in ruins because of socialism.
And we point to the warning signals for America if we move in that direction as we seem to be.
Well, there's now another telling example also from South America, and that is the nation of Chile.
Now, Chile used to be a very poor country going back to the middle of the last century.
In fact, it was an economic basket case like a lot of Latin America.
Poor, full of exploitation, run by these kind of cordillo dictators one after another.
Then what happened was, in the 1970s, a left-wing activist, Salvador Allende, came to power.
He was elected the president, and he decided, we're going to go full socialism.
And so he began to nationalize industry, collectivize the farmland, expropriate businesses, set prices for goods and services.
And of course, Chile began to go into a tailspin.
A poor country started becoming even poorer.
The government's deficit was ridiculously high.
They began to cut back on production.
There were strikes all over the country.
Inflation was absolutely catastrophic.
The workers in Chile called a general strike and a dictator.
This dictator was Pinochet, General Augusto Pinochet.
He came to power in a bloody coup.
Salvador Allende was overthrown, took his own life.
And Pinochet decided, I'm going to go in the opposite direction, not socialism, but capitalism.
Amazingly, Pinochet imported capitalist advice from America.
He invited Milton Friedman and a group of Friedmanites, somewhat colloquially called the Chicago Boys.
The Chicago Boys because they were, a lot of them, teaching at the University of Chicago.
And these guys went down to Chile and they said, okay, listen, we'll advise you, we'll basically fix your economy.
One of Pinochet's own ministers, a guy named Sergio de Castro, was the economics minister for Chile.
And he, full wholesale, took this advice.
Chile established a massive privatization agenda.
Chilean banks were sold off to private buyers.
International money was brought back in.
They established a whole private social security system where you had your own sort of savings account and your money was deposited into that.
And Chile began to take off. It began to boom economically.
It grew at an annual rate of about 7% between 1985 and 1997.
And suddenly neighboring countries like Peru and Ecuador, which had been sort of comparable to Chile, were left in the dust.
Chile began to go ahead of them.
Argentina, which was historically a far richer country than Chile, had income almost doubled out of Chile in the mid-1970s.
But by the end of the century, Chile was ahead of Argentina also.
Poverty in Chile dropped dramatically from almost 50% in the 1980s to basically 20%.
So this is dramatic gains for the working class, dramatic gains across the board.
Life expectancy in Chile went up by 15 years from 66 to 80.
Infant mortality fell.
So Chile was basically a success story and is a success story.
In fact, it's one of the very few countries in South America that became a developed country.
It was actually classified not as a developing but a developed country.
And then, very interestingly, starting in the early 21st century, we began to see unrest in Chile.
It began with all these student protests.
It then continued with activism in the media.
The emphasis was on the issue of inequality.
Sound familiar? What you began to see in Chile was the radicalization of the intelligentsia, the radicalization of the professoriate and of the media class.
And they began to cultivate a generation of students, of young people, who were beneficiaries of capitalism but were educated to hate it.
Very interestingly, one of the leading figures in Chile, one of the student activists who later became involved in the parliament, a guy named Camila Vallejo at the University of Chile, he joins the Communist Party.
His sidekick, a guy named Giorgio Jackson, founds a party called Revolución Democratica.
And these are guys who are influenced by new types of economic thinking, left-wing economic thinking, where they think that even the prosperity of Chile is bad.
They say things like, we don't want to become slaves to consumerism.
We don't want to buy the type of high-quality fashion goods that are ultimately artificial.
They don't respond to real needs.
This is just a kind of taste that is cultivated in people by advertising.
So they talk about the idea of, quote, false scarcity.
False scarcity means you've got all this abundance in the country, but the people who have less have less only because other people have more.
So the scarcity isn't due to some law of nature.
It's because the people who have more have, in a sense, created false needs and false wants.
Anyway, the bottom line of it is there's been a political upheaval in Chile.
We've seen a series of left-wing governments.
There's now been a recent plebiscite to write a new constitution, removing a lot of the pro-free market ideas from the old.
Constitution of Chile, and Chile is starting to move dramatically in a socialist direction.
Now, left-wing publications from The Guardian and elsewhere around the world are celebrating this is a triumph of democracy in Chile.
Same as in the United States, you begin to hear that efforts to undermine the economy, expropriate people's wealth, take away, drive businesses away, all of this is justified as participatory democracy.
But the important point to realize that in Chile, and this is also true in Venezuela, it's not as if the people automatically decided with one voice, we want to go in a different direction.
No. This popular consent does not organically exist.
It's manufactured by the left.
And it's prosecuted through elitism, through the students, through the artists, through the intellectuals, through the media class, through the entertainment industry.
So the radicalization of the culture precedes the radicalization of politics.
And all of this, I think, which is, I think, something we recognize.
We hear it about Chile and we go, oh, whoa, this all sounds disturbingly familiar.
And so the Chilean story may be the American story at some point.
We're beginning to see that Chile under capitalism was a success story.
Chile under socialism is now beginning to lose its advantages, slip on the international scale, become poor.
It might return to the destitution from which it came.
And isn't there a lesson here for us in America?
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm not a regular reader of Teen Vogue.
As you might guess.
But there's a very interesting story involving Teen Vogue.
By the way, a left-wing publication that's been radicalized over the years because it hires these young left-wing editors.
And Teen Vogue picked a new editor, very left-wing.
Her name is Alexi McCammond.
And she was all set to take the helm of this magazine.
By the way, this is a reporter, a young woman who used to work at Axios.
So there's the left-wing kind of cultivation of these activists.
And right before she took the helm, it was revealed that years earlier, she had been making a lot of anti-Asian American statements.
Very demeaning, very insulting.
Now, of course, she had tactically and strategically deleted all these statements.
She was obviously sorry that she said those things, but it didn't really work.
There was an uproar at Teen Vogue.
A couple of the advertisers objected.
One advertiser threatened, in fact, paused its funding, and Teen Vogue decided to give Alexi McCammond the boot.
Now, this has created a very interesting reaction among conservatives because, of course, there are the usual kind of establishment conservative types who are like, oh, we have to deplore cancel culture strikes again.
This is awful. And so the classic expression here, well, here's Joe Concha in The Hill, forcing black Teen Vogue editor to resign over Teen Tweets' cancel culture at its worst.
And Concha's argument, which has some merit, is basically that, look, this woman said some stupid stuff.
Yeah, she shouldn't have said it, but it was a long time ago.
She does seem to have learned from her experience, and so we should cut her a break.
And in National Review, Charles Cook takes pretty much the same stance.
He says, you know, we should deplore the firing of Alexei McCammond.
He goes, the people who canceled her are Conde Nast's chief people officer, a dude named Stan Duncan, and also the chief diversity officer, some woman named Yashika Olden.
So, Charles Cook's argument is that we should stand on principle.
Cancel culture is bad when they do it to us, and it's also bad when they do it to the left.
And by taking this, as he calls it, principle stance, we proclaim ourselves to be ethically consistent and, I would say, morally wonderful people.
But this is actually not my position.
When I heard about Alexi McCammon's firing, I began to smile.
Why? Because I think it's really good that cancel culture cancels one of the cancelers.
You can be absolutely positive that Alexi McCammon would cheer the canceling of you or me.
You'd be sure that she would be in the forefront of any kind of piranha operation to destroy other people's lives.
Now, ideally with cancel culture, the way you teach the canceler as a lesson is you turn around and cancel them.
But interestingly, conservatives don't generally have the power to do that.
We don't have. We can't fire them.
They don't work for us. So we're in a very weak position vis-a-vis the left in which they can cancel us.
They can throw us off this and that.
They can fire us on occasion.
But it's harder for us to fire them.
So what is our best hope?
Our best hope is that they fire in such a random manner that the bullets are, you may say, flying in all kinds of directions and sure, occasionally one of us takes a bullet in the arm, but occasionally one of them takes a bullet in the head.
In other words, what I'm getting at is that they get destroyed by the storm that they have created because the beauty of that is Is once that happens, then people on the liberal side, on the left, are going to say, oh, I could be next!
I might be the next wildebeest who gets eaten by this lion called cancel culture.
And since we can't cultivate that fear in them, we're almost relying on them to inculcate the fear on their own side.
So I think that when one of the potential cancelers, a type of Alexei McCammon type, gets a taste of their own medicine...
Far from us, you know, riding our moral high horse and saying, well, it's important for us to stay on principle.
What we should do is recognize that as a practical matter, the way for cancel culture to stop is for the cancelers themselves to start getting canceled.
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It seems that at sports games, this business of taking a knee in protest or objection to the national anthem, and I guess the American founding, this continues.
I'm scrolling through social media.
I see the Georgetown team.
This is the entire team taking a knee during the recent national anthem, and the game was against the Colorado Buffaloes.
I'm happy to report that the Colorado Buffaloes thrashed the Georgetown Hoyas, 96 to 73.
Serves you right.
But, you know, when I think about this taking a knee and this kind of objection to the American founding, the founders were a bunch of racists and so on, we have to realize that the paraphernalia of American patriotism, by which I mean The sanctity surrounding the national anthem, the reverence for the American flag, Memorial Day, all of this.
These patriotic rituals and symbols, even the Statue of Liberty and the feeling toward it, All of this stuff came later.
It was after the American founding.
In fact, much of it was in the period following the Civil War.
It was Abraham Lincoln who called on the American people to develop what he called, very specifically, a kind of religious reverence toward the principles of the founding, not the practices of the founders so much as the ideals of the founding, specifically the ideal of the Declaration of Independence that we are all created equal.
Interestingly, at the time of the founding and even subsequently, America wasn't even seen as a nation per se.
Certainly going back earlier, Ben Franklin, many times in the 1740s, he called himself a Brit, a Briton.
He didn't even see himself as American.
He was a colonial subject as far as he was concerned.
And then even after American independence, Americans talked about the country as a confederation of states.
Interestingly, even on the union side, you look at Daniel Webster and he spoke about America as a union of states.
He used the term the union, but the term that he didn't use was the nation, the American nation.
The American nation really came together at the end of the Civil War.
And it was then that we began to see celebrations that focused on American patriotism.
A National Day of Thanksgiving was first proclaimed by President Lincoln in 1863.
Memorial Day was created immediately after the Civil War.
And so this whole practice of displaying the national flag on public buildings, in concert halls, at sports stadiums, reciting the pledge, singing the national anthem, all of this became a symbol of American unity.
In the post-Civil War period, and the reason I mention this is because these Georgetown protesters, they think they're dissing the founding, but they're really dissing the man who freed the slaves.
They're actually dissing the Civil War.
They're dissing the reunification of America, the creation, in a sense for the first time, of a single nation dedicated to the principle of equality.
In a sense, they're dissing things that they don't even understand.
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I want to talk in these next couple of segments about pessimism.
Pessimism. I guess after the election of 2020, there are many of us who have been in a little bit of a funk, a pessimistic frame of mind, because we warned before the election that things would not turn out well if Biden and Harris came to office, as they have.
And things aren't turning out all that well, so there is a kind of rational basis for political pessimism.
Now, we think of pessimism as a feeling, a temperament.
We think of ourselves as naturally optimistic or pessimistic.
I think of myself, for example, as having in general an optimistic disposition, but I see this almost as something congenital, something inherited.
I want to talk about the philosopher Schopenhauer and one of the world's greatest thinkers.
By the way, someone I think is a philosopher who is generally underrated.
But Schopenhauer was the great philosopher of pessimism.
There's in fact a book Titled Schopenhauer, a philosopher of pessimism.
And what made Schopenhauer's pessimism, not a political pessimism by the way, but a pessimism about life itself, what made him so interesting is that he brought a philosophical intelligence to bear on pessimism.
In other words, he was not only, this is the way I am pessimistic, but this is the way you should be.
Pessimism is in fact a rational response to the misery and horrors of the world.
So for Schopenhauer, pessimism is something that is a conclusion that you draw from life itself.
And I think if you said the lesson of Schopenhauer, I guess for us, is that if you're feeling really bad these days, not just about politics, about life, it's probably a sign that you're a very intelligent person.
Now, what was Schopenhauer's reason for justifying this pessimistic attitude?
I'll read a couple of lines from Schopenhauer, which give you a sense not only about how he thinks, but the clarity of his prose and how he forces you to kind of think about things in a new light.
He goes, the pleasure of the world outweighs the pain, it is said, said Schopenhauer.
And then he goes... If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
In other words, Schopenhauer is saying is the one that is the eater is getting some pleasure out of this.
I guess this is his dinner.
But look at that compared to the agonizing pain of the animal being eaten.
Which is greater? The small measure of pleasure of the eater or the huge suffering of the eatee, you might say.
So Schopenhauer's point is, and this is going on throughout nature, throughout the animal kingdom, it is for Schopenhauer a sign that life itself is more pain than pleasure.
Schopenhauer would often say that on his birthday, instead of having a birthday celebration, he'd basically have a birthday sort of morning.
Why? One more horrible year of life.
The safest way to not be miserable, says Schopenhauer, is not to expect to be very happy.
And he says that the greatest wisdom is to recognize that your life itself is a big mistake.
It is something that it would have been better for it not to have existed at all.
To disown and disclaim it is the highest form of wisdom.
Schopenhauer gives the example of a human being who thinks of himself, any of us, as being kind of happy.
And he goes, now imagine a small thing that bothers you, like you have an itch in your back or on your foot.
He goes, that little itch, however minor...
Will annoy you, will exasperate you, will take all your attention, will subtract away all your other happiness, all your prosperity, your secure condition in life is gone.
And until you remove that itch, you are discontented.
And what that tells you is our discontents, not our happiness.
Tends to preoccupy us.
And then at the end of the life, says Schopenhauer, we are weak, we are sickly, we are bent over, we are deformed with age, we've suffered disease.
And he goes, and we should welcome death because it is a relief from all these sufferings.
But he goes, but no, such is the perverted nature of man, that even when you're in this miserable, deformed, bent over, sickly condition, you want to keep on living.
So basically Schopenhauer's point is that we're living in perpetual denial of the miserableness of our condition.
We're constantly telling us, I must be happy.
Oh yeah, I'm doing okay. I'm actually doing fine.
When the reality of life is that the sum total of pains and sufferings and discontents is far greater than our pleasures.
And being aware of this helps us to frame an attitude that is more rational, more conducive to living through life, such as it is, than the delusional, sleepwalking attitude in which most people go through their lousy existence.
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rockauto.com The philosopher Schopenhauer was the great philosopher of pessimism.
But even if we don't share his pessimism, as I temperamentally don't, I think we can learn a lot from the insights that he derives in making his pessimistic case.
So for example, Schopenhauer talks about the fact that we are constantly in life discontent.
He goes, we rarely focus on what we have.
We tend to monomaniacally focus on what we lack.
But he goes, but the net effect of that is that we don't derive the satisfaction even from things that do bring us contentment or pleasure.
Instead, we focus on the things that we don't have and this perpetual engine of discontent, that becomes our defining characteristic as we kind of move suddenly through life.
Schopenhauer says that there are times in life when we're happy, but he goes, very often when we're happy, we don't notice.
He goes, it's only later, when typically we're older and frankly more miserable, that we think back, oh man, when I was 21 and I was on my first date, or I was really happy then, when I gathered together with a bunch of friends, we went to dinner, but at the time...
You didn't enjoy it so much.
At the time, the happiness was fleeting, was perhaps not even evident to you.
But it's only in recollection that you go, oh, that was a time when I was really happy.
So the happiness only emerges, you may say, in the rearview mirror, says Schopenhauer.
But in general, Schopenhauer says life proves for many of us, many people, most people, to be a total disappointment.
Here's kind of a crushing line by Schopenhauer.
He goes, if two men who are friends in their youth meet again when they are old after being separated for a lifetime, the chief feeling they will have at the side of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole.
Because their thoughts would be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn promising so much and then performed so little.
So this is Schopenhauer talking about life as a disappointment.
Now I'm thinking about all of this not because I want to just make you feel bad but because I'm connecting it to the issue of political pessimism.
George Will, the columnist, who has now kind of gone a little bit off the deep end, he's been in a never-Trump mood for years now, and he's not the old George Will.
But the old George Will once said that he was a pessimist.
And he goes, a pessimist is kind of the right way to be.
He goes, because most of the time, I'm right.
Things don't turn out that well.
I think my wife Debbie, who shares this disposition, is kind of chuckling knowingly in the background.
But Will's point is that usually you're right when you're a pessimist.
And when you're wrong, you're happy to be wrong.
So you're pleasantly surprised that things didn't turn out so bad after all.
I remember a lecture at the Heritage Foundation that Midge Dechter, the great neoconservative, Norman Putthortz's wife, Midge Dechter, prominent writer and own right, gave a talk on why conservatives are happy.
And her argument was counterintuitive.
She said the reason conservatives are happy is because they have a pessimistic view of human nature.
They're happy because they expect things to go badly.
And when things go sort of okay, not bad bad, the conservative is like, wow, hmm, hmm, things didn't turn out all that bad after all, huh.
So conservatives, as a result, have a generally sort of cheery disposition, ironically a cheerfulness bred by the pessimism that is its natural moral foundation.
But Midge Dechter's point is that the leftist is the opposite.
When you see all these privileged kids screaming, Oh, the world is horrible!
My life is horrible!
And so on. These are people who are operating with the opposite assumption.
They're operating with the utopian assumption.
Everybody in America should have exactly the same opportunities.
If somebody comes in from a wealthy family and their parents read to them, that's grossly unfair!
We need a social campaign to remove...
So the result is that the leftist, because...
The leftist has this kind of utopian assumption both about human nature and about the way things ought to be.
They are always raging against society and blaming society for flaws.
Now, the flaws are really there, but the flaws are as much in themselves.
But they don't see that because they're on this kind of crusade and their activism becomes a distraction from the fact that, morally speaking, these are people...
Who never look in the mirror.
Who never look at their own flaws and try to correct those.
In correcting society's flaws, they're trying to, even in their own mind, deflect attention away from their own shortcomings.
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It's time for our questions.
Hey, by the way, you can send them in to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
I prefer audio or even video questions.
Here's one from Noah. Hello, Dinesh.
This is Noah from Lancaster, California.
I'm wondering what you think about right-wing populism or protectionism, which seems to be against trade deals abroad and telling people or businesses where they should or should not buy or sell their goods and services.
In my view, this is going away from the free market principles the right is normally in favor of.
I know it's good politics to promise jobs or bring jobs back to America, but in my opinion, these jobs largely never left, but have been declining due to increases in technology and efficiency.
The best way for the worker to protect themselves is by education and increasing skills and qualifications, and I think this should be the focus and would raise all ships.
In my view, all this populist protectionism ends up doing is propping up globally uncompetitive and politically well-connected industries.
The only exception I can see would be for national security.
What are your thoughts?
So this is a very intelligent question, and I agree with pretty much everything that Noah says here, which is that trade is good for both parties.
And it's good almost by definition for the simple reason that if trade were not good for one party or the other party, they wouldn't do it.
For this reason, I believe that trade, both inside the country and global trade, has on the balance been very good for us and very good for the world.
The problem is this, in that if you're a president, you're, let's say, Trump, and you now face a phenomenon not...
Of technology making certain professions obsolete.
Not, for example, of let's say the fact that we can now book our travel online and that makes we don't need travel agents as much as we used to.
Not that kind of situation.
Not even the kind of situation where something can be made cheaper abroad, where it might make sense to buy it, where you can get it in the most efficient way.
Not even that, but a third situation, which your question doesn't raise, and that's this.
What if you have two countries?
Let's just take, for example, America and Japan.
And it's very easy for the Japanese to sell cars in America.
We have an open market.
We have free trade, you might say.
But it's very difficult for American car companies to sell in Japan.
We're not looking for any kind of unfair advantage.
We're just looking to be able to compete with With the Japanese companies in their own country.
But they won't let us because they put heavy tariffs on American cars to protect their own market.
So the question for Trump is not an economic but a political question.
And that is, how do I bring down those barriers?
Now, one strategy to do that, and it's a bit of a risky strategy I grant, is to say to the Japanese, listen, I'm going to threaten to put tariffs on your cars.
Why? Because you're putting tariffs on our cars.
However, my goal is not to have a trade war, not at all.
On the contrary, my goal is to pressure you to take your tariffs down.
In other words, you have the irony that what you call protectionism is actually not protectionism at all, but is a political pressure tactic aimed at producing more free trade.
Because I think you would agree, Noah, that if the Japanese can sell freely in the American market and the Americans can sell freely in the Japanese market, everybody's better off.
If only the Japanese can sell in our market, but we can't sell in theirs, there's going to be less free trade than you and I both think desirable.
So the bottom line of it is, and this also kind of mirrors the argument about the arms race, the way to get the Soviets to reduce their nuclear arsenal, Paradoxically, is to threaten to draw them into an expensive arms race that they can't win.
And when they look at that, they go, yeah, this is not really working out for us.
It makes sense for us to draw down our nuclear arsenal.
It worked in the case of nuclear weapons.
Obviously, the analogy isn't perfect.
But the bottom line of it is that sometimes, not protectionism, but the threat of protectionism can be a mechanism to produce more and not less.
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