All Episodes
March 31, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:05:46
ILLEGALS FIRST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep58
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, putting illegals ahead of American citizens.
Investigative journalist Julie Kelly on the January 6th insurrection that wasn't.
And the moral case for capitalism.
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.
They say that we can figure out someone's priorities when we look at their actions.
Not just their words, but what they actually do.
It's a remarkable story out of San Diego where teachers who have refused to teach in the public schools The California schools, the public schools, have been closed for a year.
Now, who has done that?
It hasn't really been the teachers per se.
It's the teachers' unions.
They're one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful force on the left.
They have tied the governor and the powers that be in knots.
They have flatly refused.
So here you've got these teachers drawing paychecks, but they won't teach.
Well, it turns out that a bunch of them are going down to the San Diego Convention Center and providing free, in-person instruction to illegals, to migrant children.
Now, right here you can see what I think is a shocking distortion of priorities, because the message that is being sent quite blatantly, and I think perhaps even intentionally, is, hey, we don't care about these American kids.
The migrants come first.
We're going to give them priority.
We, the teachers who are being paid, let's think of who's paying these teachers.
They're being paid Through the property tax system of California.
So they're being paid not just by the parents, but they're also being paid by the citizens of California.
And yet, thumbing their nose at those citizens, the teachers are saying, we won't teach your children.
We're going to teach the Mexican kids and the Iranian kids.
Everybody else who sneaks over the board of their kids are going to take priority over...
Now, you know, teaching is thought of as an honorable profession and yet this is downright bizarre and I would say contemptuous behavior by these teachers because Look,
one would think that their primary responsibility, I don't think teachers take an oath, but their fiduciary responsibility, their moral responsibility, is to the children in their care, the children that they're being paid to teach.
And their view has been, oh no, it's too unsafe, you know, COVID so easily transmitted, we just can't possibly do this without 75 steps being in place to protect us.
Well, wait a minute. Are you trying to transmit COVID to all these migrant children?
What about all the dangers of COVID in that situation?
Suddenly you begin to see that the COVID thing is a big smokescreen.
Basically all these people and these unions have been extracting bushels of money.
Through the tax system and through all the various Biden bailouts and so on, they're taking all this money to do nothing.
To do absolutely nothing.
The time that they move into action and do something is to provide this in-person instruction to illegals.
This is not just the teacher's priority, but it's the priority of the left.
It's the priority of the Democratic Party.
Very revealingly, the press secretary, Jen Psaki, was asked about this and gave a very odd and interesting response.
Listen. I'd like to find out what the White House thinks about what's happening in San Diego, where some public school teachers are providing in-person instruction at the San Diego Convention Center to migrant children before their own public school students.
And these kids, of course, about 130,000 of them have been at home doing online learning for about a year now.
So what does the White House think about that?
Well, I know you guys have done a fair amount of reporting on this, so maybe you'll have more details.
As I understand it, San Diego public schools are opening in early April.
April 12th to hybrid learning.
Okay. And students will be back in the classroom.
And as I understand it, this is related part-time.
And certainly you know our objective from the White House, opening up five days a week, a majority of schools across the country.
And they're on spring break right now.
And this is related to volunteering or being paid.
I'm not even sure you'd have to ask the local school district during spring break for these migrant kids.
I mean, what a squid-like cloud of obfuscation and diversion.
Let's analyze what Jen Psaki is saying.
She's saying, first of all, no big deal.
It's not a big deal at all.
Why? Because even though the schools have been shut for a year, they're scheduled to open in April 9th or April 12th.
So that's the first thing.
Number two, the California kids are on spring break now anyway.
So, the teachers are doing nothing.
They probably got a bunch of free time on their hands.
They're being paid. So, why not do a little field trip down to the convention center and teach these migrant kids?
What's the big deal about that?
And third, The San Diego kids are going to have instruction.
Now, admittedly, not full-time instruction, only part-time instruction.
A lot of school is apparently still going to continue online.
But this is all salvaged by James Psaki by saying it is our objective.
So we're not actually doing it.
But we plan to do it.
We aspire to do it.
We hope to do it.
One fine day, we might actually do it.
Provide full-time, five-day-a-week instruction.
But it doesn't bother her in the slightest that the teachers, instead of focusing single-mindedly on that, how to open the schools, how to provide that instruction, these guys are sauntering down to teach the illegals.
I think here you see, I mean, to me, if this happened in any other country, I can only imagine the scandal.
I mean, I'm just trying to envision a group of Pakistani families I mean, the parental uproar would be so...
First of all, these teachers would have to run for their lives.
But even if they didn't do that, the parents would make such a political hullabaloo that the government would instantly step in, put a stop to this kind of nonsensical practice.
Essentially, the policy would be really simple.
India first!
Is it that hard to figure out that a country owes its primary duties to its own citizens and its own children?
Well, apparently that's news to the Biden administration, perhaps in a desire to take the opposite stance from Trump.
Their policy seems to be not American children first, but American children last.
Not America first, but America last.
What I love about Mike Lindell at MyPillow is this guy is a fighter.
He's fighting back in the Dominion case.
He's fighting back by creating his own social media platform.
I can hardly wait to join.
And he also makes incredible products.
We can support him by buying his stuff, which is great stuff.
I sleep better when I have the right pillow and the right sheets and the right pajamas.
I love wearing Mike Lindell's pajamas.
Well, not his pajamas. The MyPillow pajamas, and they go very well with Mike's Giza Dream Sheets.
The team at MyPillow is grateful for you.
They have an amazing offer.
Buy one, get one free on the incredible sheet sets.
Mike Lindell has come out with the world's most comfortable bedsheets.
He found the best cotton in the world in a region where the Sahara Desert, the Nile River, and the Mediterranean Sea come together to create the ideal weather conditions for growing cotton.
His new Geezer Dream bedsheets are made with this long staple cotton.
Mike guarantees, and I guarantee, they'll be the most comfortable sheets you'll ever own.
The first night you sleep on them, you'll never want to sleep on anything else.
The Geezer Dream Sheets are available in a variety of colors.
Like all of Mike's products, 60-day money-back guarantee, 10-year warranty.
So right now, you can buy one, get one free by calling 800-876-0227 and use promo code Dinesh.
For a limited time, buy one, get one free, 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use promo code D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
We are living at a time where we don't have a media in the normal sense, at least not a critical media applying a lens to power.
Fortunately, we have a handful of people, and I can literally count them on one hand.
I'd probably put Cheryl Atkinson in this category, maybe some of the video journalists like James O'Keefe of Project Veritas, maybe also the journalist Andy Ngoe, But I think, in my view, the top of the line, the incomparable Julie Kelly has been doing unbelievable work, particularly on a huge story.
This is the story of January 6th, which is turning out to be a story not of insurrection or riot or terrorism, but of A Biden administration frame-up, an attempt to frame and destroy the lives of Trumpsters to send a chilling message to the country that this kind of political protest or dissent is going to be met with maximum force.
So, welcome Julie Kelly.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Let me begin with the disjunction of kind of what we saw on January 6th, because all of this was on video, and what was said about it.
It's almost as if we were asked not to believe our eyes, because as I was watching it on TV, I basically saw, I mean, it's perhaps an exaggeration to call it a walkthrough.
through, but I've seen this on college campuses innumerable times. A bunch of rowdy people storming through the hallways, yelling, you know, shouting, some of them with signs. You know, there's element of comedy. You have people picking up Nancy Pelosi's desk, you've got the guy in horns and animal skins. But I also notice the cops are chatting with these guys. There's no effort to say, you know, this is an emergency, this is an occupation.
Get out of here right away. Your life isn't dating.
None of that. So you had this carnival atmosphere.
This is what we saw, right?
No attempt to overthrow the government, set the Capitol on fire.
None of that. And then suddenly a description of it in the media and in the government that did not match this at all.
And in fact, I think what was particularly brilliant on the part of the left was Was to then militarize the Capitol, put up, you know, fences, barbed wire, guns, military troops for weeks.
As if to say, you know, domestic terrorism is now our number one threat and the domestic terrorism is coming from Trump supporters.
So, can you say a word about how the Biden administration, with the help of the media...
Created this narrative because it's such brazen lying, but from a distance, I kind of have to admire the chutzpah and ingenuity of it because it was prosecuted with full force.
So say a word about that.
So, you're right.
You almost have to admire the Democrats, the left, and the media, because they always seize on the narrative first.
You know, I'm working on all of these articles, and thank you for what a great compliment, a group of investigative journalists.
But look, I was going back...
The insurrection narrative started that day.
It's almost like they were prepared for it because you had statements issued immediately that day from George W. Bush, from Barack Obama, obviously Republicans and Democrats who were saying this from the floor after they returned.
So to have that word already permeate As the event actually is going on, or later that day, you knew that somebody was sort of shaping this even before the events actually happened.
So you had the word insurrection that was then ingrained, and that was the only description of what happened that day.
The next day, Nancy Pelosi gave a press conference and referred to it as an armed insurrection, which, of course, I was looking into all the charging documents.
That's not the case either.
There were no firearms.
Possessed that day or found that day.
But that is how this whole thing went down.
And then you started the prosecutions.
They actually started detaining and arresting people around January 10th.
On January 12th, you had the acting US Attorney Michael Sherwin, who oversaw the first two months of the investigation.
He took to the podium.
He was using all this hyperbolic rhetoric and he basically admitted that they would be starting with misdemeanors because a lot of these charges we'll talk about later were misdemeanors, building them into sedition cases against American citizens.
So they set this bar very high really early on.
And of course, that has propelled top Biden administration officials to also seize on that word, that narrative, the description of the investigation.
And build that into also our intelligence community, our defense department, homeland security, etc.
So you have Merrick Garland comparing January 6th to the Oklahoma City bombing.
You've got the Homeland Security Secretary also talking about this as a massive crisis.
I guess Sherwin at some point even said that he was, even implied that he was using this as a shock and awe To try to send a message that this kind of conduct is seditious, I think is the word that he used.
Now, let's look at an example of this so-called sedition, the so-called zip tie guy.
I'm getting this right out of one of your articles.
And by the way, Julie's articles appear on the website American Greatness, which is a fantastic website.
So, find them there.
Talk about the zip tie guy and what they said about him.
So the zip tie guy and his mother were one of the first people who were investigated by the FBI. When they found out they were under investigation, they turned themselves into law enforcement.
But prosecutors said that they might be the first Americans to face sedition charges only for the reason their son and mother That they planned to go to D.C. together from Tennessee and they actually went there.
They spent less about 15 minutes.
They were obviously photographed in the Senate gallery.
We were originally told that he brought the zip ties in.
He was going to use the flex cuffs to drag out lawmakers and drag out Mike Pence.
Of course, then we find out that the zip ties were already there, left by Capitol Police, which is another interesting angle.
Why did they just leave stockpiles of zip ties all over the place?
Almost like it was staged, which it probably was.
So anyway, they have been charged with four nonviolent crimes, one of which is the obstruction of an official proceeding charge, which we'll talk about in a bit.
But their case, they were transported from D.C. to Washington, D.C., where they've been held in jail for For almost two months until a DC appellate court last week really smacked the judge and the prosecutors, not providing enough evidence that would justify their pretrial detention, which dozens of nonviolent defenders have been incarcerated pending trial.
And so the government immediately revoked their motion to keep them in jail.
And then that kind of had a cascading effect.
Let me talk, Julie, briefly about one other case before we go to a break.
And that is, this is the case of Joshua Bustle and Jessica Bustle.
They're from Bristol, Virginia, husband and wife.
They went to the Capitol and they went in the Capitol.
But Jessica's description on social media, which is apparently what got her arrested, you get an idea of what they did and what the mood was like, and it actually corresponds to what we saw.
When we finally decided to head over to the Capitol, we were let in.
We were let in! Like, literally, my husband and I just walked right in.
And then she goes, the cops were nice.
We were talking with them inside of the Capitol.
There were no guns, weapons, no violence.
So, what I mean is, this is the kind of activity which is nothing more than crowd sensibility, right?
A crowd is moving this direction.
You're sort of carried by it.
You walk in. No one stops you.
Everyone's chatting with you.
That's the atmosphere.
And then suddenly, you're arrested.
You're locked up. You're denied bail.
You're treated like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
And so this false narrative, I think, has embedded itself.
The left is almost trying to make January 6th into a kind of icon of American history.
And when we come back, I want to ask Julie about how this case or cases slowly began to fall apart.
You know Candace Owens, a friend of mine, someone I respect, and she's one of the most powerful voices for faith, family, and freedom.
Well, Candace has joined the powerful lineup at The Daily Wire, launching a new show where talk show meets late night.
She'll continue to call out leftist lies and the corruption of the media and big tech.
Join Candace each week as she welcomes powerful voices to talk about the important issues, break down what's actually happening in our country, and trust me, you're going to laugh a lot, too.
Candice is unfiltered and uncancellable, even as she says all the things others on the right wing are afraid to say.
Her full show is available to Daily Wire members only.
Use code Dinesh and get 25% off your Daily Wire membership now.
I'm back with investigative journalist Julie Kelly of American Greatness.
Julie, I mean, I'm familiar with my kind of own campaign finance case about how the government will often try to add on charges, very often a re-description of what you did or even what you call enhancement charges in your writing to take minor offenses, misdemeanors, and make them into felonies.
In the January 6th What was the government's pretext, because I think that's the right word for it, to try to get these people locked up for years and years?
So a very common charge that you will find that I have found added to mostly misdemeanor cases is called obstruction of an official proceeding.
There's also a charge for obstruction of Congress.
Over 135 people now have been charged with this felony, which is punishable by up to 20 years in jail.
It was part of a 2002 law intended for white collar criminals, not political protesters.
But yet prosecutors are using this as an enhancement charge.
I don't know if it's for negotiating a This is a plea deal or this is hopefully what they're trying to build sedition cases on.
But the idea is that these people, for a very short amount of time, are frustrated or interfered in Congress's certification of the Electoral College results that day, and therefore they committed this felony.
But that has huge cascading, huge consequences for other political protesters.
And actually the Politico article brought that up yesterday.
Let me quote from that.
Politico says that, wait a minute.
What if an anti-war protester disrupts a CIA confirmation hearing?
What if gun control protesters shout in the middle of the State of the Union address?
That's an official proceeding.
You mentioned in your article the left's disruption of the Kavanaugh proceedings.
They interfered with an ongoing process.
As far as I can see, there were no charges that carried penalties of 20 years.
So this is a bogus enhancement, as you say, used as a legal bludgeon Now, one other thing that disturbed me a great deal is to see that USA Today, in the last couple of days, has been running its own investigative campaign to prevent defendants of January 6th, indigents who are facing the loss of their freedom, the destruction of their life and their family.
They're trying to raise money for their defense.
And USA Today is calling PayPal and Stripe and basically even sending a dollar to these guys via Stripe Hey, wait a minute, they're getting money through Stripe.
You know, putting pressure on these platforms to prevent American citizens from getting the means to defend themselves.
I mean, what do you make of this, to me, brown-shirt journalism on the part of USA Today to prevent people from their basic right to try to mobilize their own defense?
It was just outrageous.
And even more so, this was an intern, allegedly, for USA Today.
So when she got criticism for what she's doing, just trying to shut off the availability for these defendants.
Keep in mind, too, Dinesh, a lot of these people, roughly 20% are veterans.
Almost every single oath keeper who now faces a conspiracy charge is a veteran.
These people are not wealthy.
They're far from it.
Their businesses have been destroyed.
In one indictment against an oath keeper, you had prosecutors mocking her that she had lost her cherished firearms and her livelihood and was gonna be forced to live with her parents.
She's a 40 year old veteran of the Afghanistan war.
You have her own government mocking her.
And now you have interns at the USA Today trying to prevent these people from raising money.
And also Dinesh, some of them can't even get access to public defenders because the DC judicial system is so overwhelmed by more than 300 cases related to the Capitol probe.
Let's talk about, I mean, generally, we have so much bad news to talk about these days, but I think one piece of good news, at least developing good news, is that some of these judges, appellate judges in one case, but also an Obama judge in another case, Are now realizing that the prosecution's description of these crimes and the kind of incendiary language, but also the implication that they were trying to take over the government, assassinate people, this was actually all bogus.
And that the actual offenses, even in cases where you find incriminating texts where people say, I'm going to storm the Capitol, the guy doesn't even show up.
Or the guy says, you know, I'm going to take over this or that, but he doesn't even go in the Capitol.
So when the judges look at what these people actually did, there seems to be a building awareness that Let's even take the hard case of the Oath Keepers, because in that case, the government tried to show they were conspiring beforehand, they had a plan, they were organized, some of them wore military outfits.
Talk a little bit about the case against the Oath Keepers and how even that, even the case against the head of the Oath Keepers is starting to look a little more brittle than they tried to make it out to be.
It definitely is. So these are 10 members of the Oath Keepers who have been described as a militia organization.
They're domestic violent extremists.
They've been described as.
They're really nothing actually, Dinesh, it makes me sad to be honest, reading some of these, the lives of some of these people. They are veterans in the case of the Oath Keepers who are really understandably disillusioned and frustrated with their own government.
They're really kind of sad. They deserve some compassion, really more than what they're getting.
And so they've, the government has charged 10 of them with conspiracy. None of them possessed a None of them assaulted a police officer.
They didn't even leave so much as a mark in the Capitol building.
They did nothing except go in in militia uniforms in a stack.
You saw Michael Sherwin describe this as this was some kind of...
As if this was like an operation in Afghanistan, where the troops are sort of moving in a kind of formation.
But as you say, I mean, if my wife and I are going through a crowd, I kind of hold on to her, we move in a stack...
So that we don't get separated, right?
Big deal. It's just silly.
It's silly and it's so demeaning to these people who did absolutely nothing.
And so they are really trying to put this case together and say that they are a threat to society.
Well, you saw Judge Maida, he's released at least three or four of them from pretrial detention.
The government also, and it's very important for people to know this, have used the idea that because these people think the election was stolen, that Joe Biden was illegitimately elected, that they pose a threat to the community, that they will not follow US law because they don't think that the president is legitimate, so therefore they don't think the laws of the United States government are.
It's really such overreach.
It's infuriated to read through these documents, what prosecutors are saying, and what judges are going along with.
Judge Mehta has gone along with some of this too, but I think taking a closer look at these at least Oath Keepers cases, so he has released some of them, thankfully.
I mean, Julie, let's just explore the absurdity of this because it looks to me like if...
There were lots of people in 2016 on the left who thought that that election was...
That Trump was illegitimate as the president.
Nobody said that as a consequence of just holding that belief, these people now have to be permanently locked up.
They can't be trusted because they clearly have no respect for the Constitution or any other laws at all.
So it looks like again and again and again...
A discriminatory standard is being applied in this case, which would not apply generally.
And that to me is the essence of the violation of fairness and the violation of law.
You're not applying it in an equitable way.
You're not at all.
And you also had Michael Sherwin bragging in that 60 Minutes interview, which he's in trouble for.
He's under internal investigation.
He bragged that they arrested about 100 people before January 20th to send, as you mentioned, and he used those words, shock and awe display to intimidate Americans from coming to Washington, D.C. to protest Joe Biden's inauguration.
Of course, that happens at every inauguration.
You had hundreds of people arrested during Trump's 2017 inauguration.
Of course, they were all released.
There's actually a lawsuit from the protesters against Washington, D.C. for how those cases were handled.
So we'll see how that goes. But yes, that is exactly what has been happening.
Michael Sherwin admitted this is a partisan crusade against people We'll be back and talk more to Julie Kelly about the role of the GOP, the role of Trump, and what might actually be the way in which these January 6 defendants get a modicum of justice.
Your credit card company found suspicious charges on your card?
That's simple identity theft.
It's annoying, but they cover it.
The type of fraud you really need to worry about is home title theft, a devastating crime that takes you off your home's title.
And you're not covered by insurance or most identity theft programs.
That's why you need home title lock.
Here's how easy it is for cyber criminals to get you.
The title documents to our homes are now online.
The thief forges your signature on a quitclaim deed stating you just sold your home and he's the new owner.
Then he borrows money using your home's equity and leaves you in debt.
You won't know until late payment or eviction notices arrive.
The instant Home Title Lock detects someone tampering with your home's title, they help shut it down.
Let's get you protected.
Go to hometitlelock.com and register your address to see if you're already a victim.
And enter RADIO for 30 free days of protection.
That's promo code RADIO at hometitlelock.com.
I'm back with Julie Kelly of American Greatness, who's been covering the January 6th cases.
Julie, you know, the FBI has been with single-minded determination hunting down the people who went to not just the Capitol, but just Washington, D.C. I see posters on social media.
Have you seen this guy? Have you seen this girl?
You see some kid who's like 18 years old.
Now, I never saw this with Antifa.
I never saw this with BLM. And my question about it is, what is happening with our FBI? We've had these mass shootings, the one in Boulder, for example.
The FBI knew about that guy.
No action. And then when we go back, we have the Ford Hood shooter, the Boston Marathon shooter.
We have the Pulse nightclub shooter.
In case after case after case, The FBI is aware of the danger posed by these people, takes no action whatsoever, and then in this case, absurdly trivial by comparison, these Keystone cops spring into action, and they're like, you know, they suddenly become the untouchables, whereas in the past, they've allowed horrific things to happen, and this is supposed to be our top investigative agency.
I almost think that we need to shut the whole place down.
I totally agree with you.
I mean, the whole Justice Department and especially the FBI is by far the most corrupt institution in the United States right now.
They should completely be shut down.
All they exist to do right now is target, prosecute, and destroy the lives of their political opponents.
We saw this since 2016.
Think about all the things that Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, the top officials in the FBI missed while they were fixated on what Donald Trump or Carter Page or Mike Flynn were doing.
And so this is just an acceleration of that.
When we covered those issues and we said, if this can happen to Donald Trump or Mike Flynn or anyone else, it's going to happen to regular American citizens.
And sure enough, here we are four years later.
That's exactly what's happening.
And so, yes, what is the FBI doing?
You have Christopher Wray talking about domestic violent extremists being the biggest threat.
And lo and behold, a few weeks later, what happens in Boulder?
We are really in a dangerous position.
And the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland, to the extent that he's really in control of the DOJ, are moving this forward very rapidly.
Julia, let's talk about the GOP, because I was talking to one of the January 6th defendants, a guy I happened to know, and he was telling me, he was describing sitting in a cell, in fact, in solitary confinement for the first couple of days, and he goes, you know, it just occurred to me, he goes, I put my life on the line, you know, and he goes...
Where's Rona McDaniel?
He goes, where's the GOP? He goes, I know all these people.
None of them would contact me.
He goes, where's Trump? In fact, he even felt a sense of frustration about Trump because I think he felt like I did it for him.
And it here means nothing more.
This is a guy, by the way, who did not even go in the Capitol.
But he's facing all these charges.
So what I want to get at is not only did the GOP not help for the most part, but some prominent Republican senators use words like terrorism to describe unarmed protesters who went into the Capitol to have their voices heard about what the heck is going on in the United States.
How can a party abandon its own zealous supporters like this and expect to be viable?
They can't. And in fact, Dinesh, I've been asking on Twitter for weeks, almost two months, where the GOP, as I wrote an article about this last week, a Republican Party leadership who cannot defend their own rank and file is not just a weak party, it is a dead party.
And I have begged...
Leading senators, people who usually speak out on these kind of abuses.
Where are you? Why aren't you speaking to this?
Donald Trump didn't say a word for the past two months.
He finally said something offhandedly in an interview to Laura Ingraham.
Where is he trying to raise money, legal defense funds for these people?
I mean, they've been completely hung out to dry.
And it's just another example, you know this, Dinesh, of just this weak party who cannot see what's coming, leadership who is happy to capitulate to the left and go along with their narrative at the same time.
So this party is an absolute disaster, and I wish that Trump and his people would start speaking out more every day on what's happening to these people.
What a sickening contrast with the way the left protects its own.
Look at the way—I mean, they'll protect people who are violent criminals, and they rush to their defense because they feel that these people are ideologically useful, these people in our team.
Look at the way that they've raised bail money for Antifa, bail money for BLM terrorists.
These are people actually setting fire to churches and attacking cops, and the Democrats are like, you know what?
So what? These people are on our team.
We're going to go to bat for them.
So there really is a contrast of, you may say, commitment on the two sides.
Well, you're doing amazing work in bringing all of this to light.
American Greatness is the website to look for your work and read in depth about these cases, which we've only touched on the surface.
Julie, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks so much for exposing this.
It really needs to get out there.
So thank you. Do you think our nation's economy is going to be insulated from Biden's planned massive tax increases?
Think again. There's only one way to protect your savings.
Do what over 10,000 other smart investors have and convert a portion of your retirement accounts into gold and silver with Birch Gold.
When inflation hits, and it will, gold and silver are your safe haven.
And Birch Gold Group is the company I trust to help you convert an IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by gold and silver through Through April 30th on qualifying purchases, when you buy physical gold or silver or open a precious metals IRA with Birch Gold, they will send you a free home safe.
Text Dinesh to 484848 for your free information kit on precious metals IRA or to speak with a Birch Gold representative today.
With 10,000 customers, an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless 5-star reviews, they can help you too.
Text Dinesh to 484848 for your free safe with qualifying purchase.
We're living at a time in which socialism has moved into the mainstream of American politics and the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, well not socialist, not explicitly socialist, nevertheless is beginning to speak the socialist language, a language that by the way traces its roots earlier to the Obama administration.
And so for example, under Obama, the phrase that was made famous was the idea of the fair share.
And Obama was always in this kind of stern way, we need to have people pay their fair share.
Now, never once did Obama ever explain how he computed that fair share.
What moral calculus, what economic calculus goes into deciding what is right for people to pay?
Today, the top income tax rate in this country is approximately 39% when you add state taxes and local taxes and other types of taxes.
By and large, the rich guy in this country is paying about half of his income in taxes.
Why isn't that fair? Who says it isn't?
Should he pay 70, 80, 90?
Who decides and why?
On what basis? Obama mysteriously never clarified.
And part of this, I think, is not just a debate about taxes, but I think a broader anxiety that the socialist wing of the left has been fanning in our country, which is over the rewards of capitalism itself.
Capitalism allocates rewards, but does it do so fairly?
It was, I think, Bill de Blasio several months ago who said, there's a lot of money available in New York and in America.
It's just in the wrong hands.
And here you can see de Blasio's getting at this key question.
Of whether or not the rewards obtained by capitalism, by free markets, are in fact just.
So I want to address this question kind of head on and do it with the help of a wonderful author and book.
This is Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher.
The book, kind of a classic, came out now several decades ago.
Here it is. Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
And the beauty of this book is it's not just an argument about taxes or it's not kind of boilerplate rhetoric about capitalism.
It gets to the very root core principles of what it is that entrepreneurs do and why they deserve, if they do deserve, the rewards they get.
And Nozick presents a kind of thought experiment, which I think is very illuminating, and that is he imagines a kind of elementary society, a society with just a limited number, let's say 100 people, that's it.
And he says, in this society, assume any original state of distribution of goods.
Let's just say, for example, let's take the socialist starting point, which is, let's say everybody has exactly the same, everyone in this community has $10.
And that's it. They have the same.
Now, says Nozick, try to imagine one guy, and Nozick uses the example of Wilt Chamberlain, but we could use LeBron James or Shaquille O'Neal, anyone like that, or even an author, J.D. Rowling.
Let's just say that J.D. Rowling decides to write a book.
Harry Potter. And she says, Okay, guys, I've written a book.
And if anybody wants my book, I will provide it to you.
I will sell it to you for $2.
So out of your 10, if you're willing to part with 2, you can have my book.
And a certain number of people, let's say 30, decide to, they go, yeah, that sounds great.
We want the book. We're happy to part with $2.
So what happens now?
Suddenly we have inequality because J.D. Rowling has how much?
She has $2 from 30 people.
That's $60 plus her own original 10.
So she now has $70.
She is rich.
She's now the 1%.
What about everybody else?
Well, 70 people still have their original 10.
They're not worse off. And 30 people now have 8 because they've parted with 2, but they did it voluntarily.
And Nozick's point is really simple.
We now have inequality, which we didn't have before.
We now have a rich person, J.D. Rowling, who's sitting on 7 times as much cash as the rest of them.
But Nozick goes, who's been wronged?
Where's the social injustice?
Why is it the case that we now have to confiscate something from J.D. Rowling when this is a transaction freely entered into by parties who would not have done it if they didn't think it was to their benefit?
Now, it's true that many people didn't get to read J.D. Rowling's book, but that's because they didn't want to pay.
They're no worse off than they were before.
They still have their $10. The ones that gave up the money did it cheerfully.
They were happy to get the book.
For them, J.D. Rowling's book is worth more than $2.
That's why they were happy to give up $2 for it.
So what Nozick is getting at is that not only is he saying that when you have voluntary transactions, even if it creates inequality, the result is fair because the people doing it Gave it up freely.
But he's also making a deeper point, which I want to read.
He says this.
He says, What he's getting at is that even if you start with a socialist premise, everybody has 10.
If you allow people to act freely, they will act in ways that create inequality.
And so if you want to get back to socialism, to the original ten, you have to constantly subvert the effects of the free actions of citizens.
And basically what Nozick is getting at is you get the busybody state.
You get the interfering state.
You get the state that is not helping in any way because there's no help that's needed.
What the state is doing is actively trying to disrupt and control and undo the free transactions of free citizens.
And this is the essence of what it means to move toward as we are moving toward a socialist society.
There's a new movie out I want you to see.
It's really funny. It's called Church People.
It's a comedy that will leave you laughing out loud while ultimately reminding you of the true meaning of the gospel.
Here's a clip. Listen.
I told you if we broke attendance records, I'd get the church logo tattooed on my arm.
Yeah, remember back when we first started?
All we did was preach the gospel.
Ooh, Superman works.
I like Superman. Guy, what do you think?
What happened to you? Me?
Your dad is the one with the gimmicks.
The power of the Holy Spirit propels us!
I just went to church to get back to the gospel.
The problem is you're trying to get your message across.
The gospel? Right, right, right.
And ain't nobody listening to that. Yeah, Debbie and I saw it.
We really enjoyed it. Watch church people at SalemNow.com.
That's S-A-L-E-M, SalemNow.com.
Use my promo code Dinesh at checkout for a special discount.
The Biden administration is getting ready to unfurl more massive spending programs on a whole range of fronts.
Infrastructure programs, entitlement programs, with of course accompanying tax increases that are targeted at corporations, targeted at people who save money, targeted at the so-called Rich or the upper income brackets.
This is a systematic sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
And we can see the political benefit of it to Democrats.
They get to play, you may say, Santa Claus in exchange for your vote.
So these aren't really presents.
And of course, I think we also know that the stuff that they offer isn't really free.
There's no such thing as free college because colleges involve buildings and heating costs and infrastructure and technology and even online education.
You still have to pay professors.
So the bottom line of it is this stuff isn't free.
Healthcare isn't free.
Someone has to pay. And the question is, where is that cost being laid?
Who ends up paying it?
Now, how can this kind of confiscatory approach, let's take it from this guy and give it to that guy, so it's free to him.
How do you justify this?
Well, the left's argument is we justify it through an appeal to democracy.
This is, of course, the left's big word on all kinds of fronts.
They want to reform voting laws.
We're promoting democracy, Dinesh!
And they also want to move us in the direction of socialism on the pretext of democracy.
Here's Michael Moore.
To me, socialism means everyone has a seat at the table and everyone gets a slice of the pie.
The socialist writer Irving Howe, we believe that the democracy that more or less prevails in political life should be extended into economic life.
So this is what the socialists and the progressives believe, is that there's no harm.
In democratically, through the democratic system, through elected representatives, confiscating resources from some people and giving it to others.
Because what is that but rather the democratic process taking control over the economy.
So the idea here is very simple.
And that is that democratic socialism or progressivism gets its moral sanction from the idea of democracy, from the consent of the people.
Now, this rhetoric is so highfalutin and highblown that we have to pause for a moment because I feel like, oh wow, I'm part of the people.
I'm going to be in control of the healthcare system.
But then I think to myself, really?
What control does the ordinary British citizen have over the British national health?
They have national healthcare. What say does the ordinary guy have over that?
None. In America, the post office is a public institution.
What say do you or I have over the way in which the post office is run?
Zero. Or any other public institution for that matter.
The simple truth of it is the DMV, the post office, they're run according to bureaucratic dictates.
The ordinary citizen has no say.
In fact, has less say than they would, let's say, if they made a complaint at the Apple Store or some other private institution.
Now, Let's talk a little bit about capitalism and democracy because it turns out that in democracy, people vote.
In the political system, people vote.
But in the capitalist system, they vote more directly, more often.
There's more participatory democracy.
So let me explain what I mean by that.
In the political system, we vote.
But when do we vote?
We vote periodically, occasionally, every two years at the midterm, every four years on election day or around election day.
And that's it. That's the only say that you or I have as citizens.
That's the only time we vote.
All the other decisions...
Tax increases, whether or not to build a wall, open the border.
These decisions are made by other people on our behalf, to be sure.
So we elect the people who make those decisions.
It's representative democracy.
But notice the indirect involvement, the occasional involvement, and also the minimal incremental influence that you already have.
Why? Because we're one of 100 million voters.
That's all the say we have in the democracy.
Now, let's contrast this with capitalism and with the way that you or I have a say in the market.
Turns out that the market is not based upon representative democracy.
It's based on direct democracy.
Why? Because in the market you vote directly.
You vote with your ballot as a dollar bill.
And you may say, well, that's the influence of money, Dinesh.
Well, the truth of it is, when you vote in politics, your vote costs you nothing.
But when you vote with your dollar bills, this is your hard-earned money.
It represents the value of your own stored labor.
You're going to be more reluctant to part with it.
And yet, you vote, as I say, directly.
You don't elect some other guy to go to the Apple Store.
You go to the Apple Store.
You buy online. You put your money, you get the product directly.
So what I'm getting at is, in the market, citizens are voting...
Through ballots, you may say, constantly, incessantly, daily, in fact, many times a day.
And the beauty of it is it is a much bigger electorate than in politics.
Think about it. In politics, you have to be a certain age to vote.
Obviously, noncitizens can't vote.
Even if you're a legal resident of America, you have a green card, you can't vote.
But, interestingly, in the market, you can.
Why? Because if you have a green card, you can certainly go to Walmart and buy stuff.
You're voting with your pocketbook in the market constantly.
So the point I'm trying to make here is that capitalism is, as a practical matter, far more democratic.
It engages popular participation far more than the political process.
So what democratic socialism promises you, hey, we're going to get the people involved.
The people are going to have a say over what products are made and how the market is run.
The truth of it is, the people already have a say.
They have more say.
And in fact, when the left deplores all these people who have made all this money, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, and look, I don't like these guys' politics either.
But the point I'm trying to make is...
The reason they got so rich is because you and I made them rich.
The reason Steve Jobs became, his family became a billionaire, I know the late Steve Jobs, is because you and I stood in line to get the latest iPhone and the iPad and all the other products.
And we did this, again, exercising our popular participation in the market.
Bottom line, the left appeals to the idea of democracy.
We need democratic control of the market.
But the reason we don't need democratic control of the market is we already have it.
Capitalism, like democracy, is rooted in popular will and popular consent, and therefore capitalism, like democracy itself, is a form of social justice.
Let's talk about censorship on social media sites and what you can do about it.
The left wants to silence and remove any voices they don't agree with.
Twitter and Facebook were supposed to be open platforms.
I don't need their content moderators acting like the op-ed section of the New York Times.
So instead of letting social media sites revoke your right to free speech, how about revoking their right to your data?
Now you could just deactivate all your social media accounts, but that would be giving the left just what they want in the first place.
Instead, I use ExpressVPN.
Ever wondered how free to access sites like Facebook make all their money?
Well, by tracking your searches, video history, and everything you click on, and then selling your valuable data.
When you use ExpressVPN, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address.
That makes your activity more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers.
And ExpressVPN couldn't be easier to set up.
You just tap one button on your phone or computer and you're protected.
ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your data to protect you from hackers and internet bad guys.
It's finally time to say no to censorship and take back your online privacy at expressvpn.com slash dinesh.
By visiting my special link, you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN service for free.
Again, that's ExpressVPN.com slash Dinesh.
E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash Dinesh to protect your data today.
I always grimace and sometimes even chuckle when I see the left using the Nazi analogy, the Hitler comparison, not only because it is so preposterous, it's so hypocritical and wrongly applied, but nevertheless, we hear it all the time.
I was just watching Bill Maher and I see Senator Heidi Heitkamp using the Nazi analogy, this time to apply to Gina Carano.
Listen. I like this picture.
Who was the woman in the Mandalorian?
What did she do? She liked something?
She was a Nazi. Oh, that's different, right.
I'm thinking of somebody else. Well, she's not a Nazi.
She's a white.
She's involved in white supremacy.
She's called other people Nazis.
Right. She's the Nazi.
Okay, everyone's a Nazi now.
She does hang with white supremacists.
She's a Nazi! And then when pressed upon it, she says something completely different, which is that she hangs out with white supremacists.
Not even that she is a white supremacist, but she hangs out with white supremacists.
So where's the connection between being a Nazi, being a Nazi, and the proof of it is she hangs out with White supremacists.
First of all, there's a distinction here.
There are lots of people who are white supremacists.
In the South, you had white supremacists galore in the earlier part of the 20th century.
They weren't all Nazis.
So merely saying that she, quote, hangs out with white supremacists doesn't make her...
her, the kind of quality of discussion here.
And I'm also struck by the kind of glib confidence with which this senator, this ignoramus, can speak with authority as if she's a Nazi, as if she's just describing.
You know, she's an actress.
It's with that kind of blithe confidence.
So it's shameful enough when you are an idiot.
But to be an idiot and sort of proud of it?
Put yourself on public display like that?
What a scene. But this is not the only case.
I see also that the New York Post is reporting that the Pentagon's diversity chief under the Biden administration just resigned.
Well, he's reassigned.
Why? Because it turns out that they fished out a social media post in which he has Trump compared to Hitler.
He has Trump and Hitler both standing side by side.
And this is a scene, I believe, with Trump holding the Bible.
Now, Hitler's standing in a different context, but kind of in the same posture and holding a book.
And I think this guy's insinuating it's the same book.
Maybe he thinks Trump has a copy of Mein Kampf.
But the idea here is the equation of Trump to Hitler.
And I think... One of the things I want to explore here is the fact that here are these guys on the left.
This guy is the diversity chief of something.
And he doesn't seem to realize that the Nazis believed a lot of the things that he did.
If you look at the Nazi platform, the Nazi 25-point platform on which the Nazis campaigned, this is how they got elected.
Go read it up for yourself.
It's available online. It far more resembles the politics of Heidi Heitkamp than it does of Gina Carano.
It much more closely describes Biden or Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders than it does Trump.
Why? Because it's all about state control.
State control of education, state control of banks, state control of even religious institutions and so on.
Some people on the left say, well, Dinesh, we know that the Nazis were the National Socialist Party, but there are lots of organizations that purport to be, take names that don't mean anything.
So, for example, you have the People's Republic of Iran.
It takes the name of a People's Republic, but it's not really a republic.
Or the old German Democratic Republic, the GDR. It purported to be democratic, but it wasn't.
Now I grant that, but here's the key point, that in those cases you have totalitarian, tyrannical regimes claiming the mantle of democracy because they know that democracy in our modern world confers a certain element of moral legitimacy.
So they are purporting to be something that they're not.
Why? Because there's a gain to be had in doing that.
But here's the key difference.
The Nazis are supposedly, according to the left, right-wingers.
They're right-wingers.
They're far right-wingers.
And here's my question.
Why would far right-wingers, the Nazis, purport to be far left-wingers?
Socialists. Why would the Nazis take a name which doesn't just aspire to something, but actually describes them as the opposite of what they were, supposedly?
Can you give a single example of any political movement?
That does this? That mischaracterizes itself?
It would be almost as if the Nazis described themselves as Jews.
We're the Jews. We're running as the Jews.
Elect us as Jews. Of course, we're not really Jews.
When you elect us, we'll turn against the Jews, but we're going to pretend to be Jews while we're running.
This would be insane.
No one does this. The Nazis didn't do it either.
No one's done it. The simple fact of the matter is any political movement needs some description of itself that is recognizable to the people that it's trying to court.
And if the Nazis were anti-socialists, it makes no good sense to court socialists, who you plan to immediately turn on when you're elected.
The bottom line of it is that all the top Nazis, Goering, Goebbels, were committed socialists.
Goering often spoke about his socialist commitments, talked about how socialism is the core principle of the Nazi party, and Goebbels at one point discussed, he says, we're national socialists.
He goes, but which is more important, being a nationalist or being a socialist?
We're both, but if we had to choose.
And he goes, if we had to choose, we're socialists first.
Yes, we're patriotic socialists, we're nationalists.
We want our socialism to be for Germany and not for anyone else.
But if we had to choose which agenda to push first, the nationalism or the socialism, he goes, there's no question.
The socialism is the noun and the national is the adjective.
The national qualifies the type of socialism that we're promoting.
But first and foremost, we Nazis, says Goebbels, are socialists.
It's always fun for me to chat with Mike Lindell.
He always makes me chuckle because the guy is so creative, but he's also so brave.
Here's a small clip. Listen.
Now, you're kind of a household name, I think, for a simple reason.
And that is your all-over television.
Right. And your face, you.
Right. And so you're unusual, perhaps, in that you market your own product.
And so that tells me that there's a third thing you do.
You thought of the idea for it.
You organized it.
But you also sell it.
Hello, I'm Mike Lindell, inventor of MyPillow.
Thanks to your support, you've helped make MyPillow become one of the fastest-growing companies in America.
Mike is being canceled all over the place by these retailers, so I want to support him every way I can.
Now, we love to have Debbie and I do all of Mike Lindell's MyPillow products in our home, and we especially love his towels.
We're kind of particular about our towels.
We like towels that actually dry us.
What a concept! MyPillow towels are soft to the touch.
They don't have that kind of lotion-y feel.
Proprietary technology makes them highly absorbent.
Other towels feel good, but they really don't absorb.
Mike Lindell's towels are available in multiple sizes and styles.
They're machine-washable and durable, 10-year warranty, 60-day money-back guarantee for a limited time, two for one.
And free shipping on the six-piece sets.
Or you can save 30% on individual towel options with promo code Dinesh.
Call 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com but make sure to use promo code D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
It's time for our mailbox.
By the way, if you want to send in a question, I prefer audio or video questions.
They're more entertaining, more interesting on the podcast.
Send them to, just email them, questiondinesh at gmail.com.
And I'm looking forward to today's question.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
My question is about the switch of the black vote to Democrat in the 1930s.
You point to the economic benefits of the New Deal, but they voted in droves for the party that was violently oppressing them purely on the basis of their skin color.
What could possibly be more humiliating than that?
So my question is, do you think there are any other deeper, non-economic factors that can explain why they made the switch?
Thanks. Yeah, this question is...
In some ways, quite profound because it says this.
It says that the economic benefits of the New Deal were, after all, modest.
They were crumbs.
Why would people with dignity, who are being oppressed by the Democrats, let's remember the Democrats are the party of segregation.
They are the party of the Ku Klux Plan, of racial terrorism.
Why would you sign on with that party, with that history?
In fact, that's a party that's still doing it.
It's not as if this was, oh, we used to be the party of slavery.
They are, at the time, perpetuating segregation.
They are, at the time, stringing up African Americans on trees.
Why would you go to that team, even if you got some economic benefits out of it?
Well, the answer, it turns out, is a little complex.
And I'm drawing here on the work of the Stanford historian Joel Williamson in a wonderful book of his called The Crucible of Race, a book I cite in my own book, The End of Racism, which is my most detailed and scholarly examination of this subject.
But here's what Joel Williamson says.
He says, we often talk about the Democratic Party as doing this and that, but the Democratic Party was actually divided into two camps.
An extreme camp and what he calls a sort of moderate camp.
Now, Joel Williamson gives a weird name.
He calls them the radicals and the conservatives.
Conservatives, very misleading in this context.
But what he means is that the Democratic Party had radicals and the Ku Klux Klan would fall into this camp.
These are the terrorists who want to sort of kill blacks, get rid of them, string them up.
This is the radical racists, as Joel Williamson describes them.
But he says that was not, those weren't the only Democrats.
There was another group of Democrats.
This was sort of the Democratic establishment.
And the Democratic establishment agreed with the radicals about black inferiority.
But they wanted a mode, a kind of way, a modus vivendi, a way of living alongside blacks.
And so this is the group that actually pushed segregation.
And this is the group that went to blacks and said, listen, you may not like segregation, but segregation is a preferable alternative to getting burned and shot and killed.
So this way you can have your own schools and you can have your own barber shops and you can have your own world, an inferior world to be sure, but preferable to the horrific crimes that this other group wants to inflict upon you.
So the bottom line of it is, these were the guys.
The conservatives, or really you might say the other group of Democrats, these were the people who sold blacks on the New Deal programs.
They said, listen, we don't have much to offer you, but we have to offer you an education through the public schools, your own schools, segregated schools.
We can offer you drinking fountains, although they're segregated, and we can offer you some participation, although limited participation.
Remember, New Deal programs were themselves segregated, and blacks didn't qualify for some of them.
FDR cut blacks out of New Deal programs to appease the Southern Democrats' powerful forces in his own party.
So the bottom line of it is, why did blacks take this deal?
The Republican Party at this time, now we're moving into the 1930s, was very weak in the South.
It had been pushed, essentially, almost out of the South.
And so blacks were choosing, Joel Williamson says, between these two groups of Democrats.
You may almost call them the bad and the worse.
And what Joel Williamson is saying is that the reason blacks took the deal is because they chose the bad over the worse.
At a time when, of course, the depression hit blacks hard.
They were being hammered on all kinds of fronts.
This was not a good deal for them.
But they felt that at this point, the Republican Party could offer them little or no protection, little or more genuine enfranchisement.
They had been shut out of basically voting in the South.
And they thought that if we can vote for anybody, it's going to be for the least horrific group of Democrats who will be against us, but who will not put us, our lives and our liberties and our families in the same kind of danger as the radical Democrats who are our most extreme enemies.
Export Selection