BUSTING THE DIGITAL CARTELS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 77
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Teddy Roosevelt busted up the old communications cartels a century ago.
We now need to do the same with digital cartels.
And we keep hearing about the crimes and sins of white people, but you notice no one ever talks about the accomplishments of white people, so I will.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I've been thinking a little bit about Trump.
Partly because of his absence from American political life right now.
Trump seems to be in a sort of, almost I'd call it president, in waiting mode.
He seems to be measuring, probably planning, a social media platform, a super PAC, a new way to redefine the Republican Party.
Who knows? There's an interesting line in Homer's Iliad.
He's talking about Achilles.
And Achilles, there's a long interval in the Iliad where it's all about Achilles, but he's offstage.
He won't participate in the fighting.
And Homer says that Achilles absent was Achilles still.
So even in his absence, Achilles continues to sort of define the action.
And that is sort of true of Trump.
Now, the question I've been thinking about is, and it's very customary, and I've done this too, think about Trump in relationship to Reagan.
But of course, they were different men.
Their situations are very different.
And I think a true analogy, a truer analogy for Trump is not so much Reagan, even though it's natural for us to do that because both these presidents kind of in our lifetime.
But you'd have to go a century back to Teddy Roosevelt.
And Trump in some ways, I think, is the new Teddy Roosevelt.
Now, I say this because in some ways they were even similar in their style.
Teddy Roosevelt was a brash guy.
He spoke his mind.
He used the presidency to make his case before the American people.
In fact, he invented this concept of the presidency as the bully pulpit.
Bully here not meaning that Teddy is a bully, but rather that he's able to use that platform.
To speak directly to the American people.
And of course, that's what Trump did.
Trump used his bully pulpit, a different bully pulpit.
Maybe social media was part of Trump's bully pulpit.
Now, number two, Teddy Roosevelt was...
A great defender of American nationalism.
Part of his platform was called The New Nationalism.
And Teddy Roosevelt defined, he wrote an important book.
This was really before he was president.
It was called The Winning of the West.
And he was talking about the westward expansion of America, which, by the way, he saw.
He was not blind to the cost of it.
And he recognized that Indian tribes had been overrun and treaties broken and so on.
But at the same time, he saw the settling of the American continent as a great triumph of progress and of civilization.
He didn't see a way in the end that those tribes could have stayed there forever, and that part of the American continent left, you may say, largely undeveloped.
So Teddy Roosevelt was all about, I wouldn't say making America great again, because Teddy Roosevelt saw America as great, but I would say establishing and affirming the greatness of America.
And again, there's a great similarity between T.R., Teddy Roosevelt, and We're good to go.
And Teddy Roosevelt fought against these special interests, as we now call them.
He didn't like this idea of buying and selling public office.
He didn't want politics to be the handing out of partisan prizes or the exchange of favors in return for votes.
This was actually customary in the Democratic Party.
So what's new?
And Teddy knew all about it, and he was totally opposed to it.
Now, interestingly, Teddy Roosevelt has the reputation, somewhat accurate, of being one of the early progressives.
And this, even for me, was a deterrent.
When I first learned about Teddy, I thought, well, you know, yeah, he was a tough guy.
He was an American nationalist.
He was an unbelievable polymath.
He would have sumo wrestlers come into the White House, and he would discuss Japanese culture with them, followed by a wrestling match.
So I loved the sort of personality of Teddy Roosevelt, but I thought, wow...
This progressivism has set America on such a bad road.
But then I realized as I looked more closely into it that Teddy's progressivism was completely different from, say, the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson.
For Woodrow Wilson, progressive Democratic president, progressivism involved things like supporting racial segregation, segregating the U.S. government, refounding or restoring the Ku Klux Klan.
So Wilson was just a horrible character and represented, you may say, progressive in its worst manifestations.
By the way, that is the line of progressivism that continues through FDR and LBJ to the present.
Teddy Roosevelt was a different kind of progressive.
Now, he was a conservationist, but he was a conservationist who also liked to shoot animals.
He was a conservationist who believed that we should protect nature.
Why? So we can shoot more animals.
So there'll be more of nature for us to enjoy.
So conservation wasn't this kind of...
Anti-human, you know, human beings don't belong on the planet, and the Earth would be better off if Homo sapiens was wiped off the face of it.
All this deep ecology nonsense we hear about today, Teddy Roosevelt would have none of it.
When he became president, Teddy Roosevelt realized that there were powerful concentrations of power that were occurring essentially through the Second Communications Revolution.
Now, the Second Communications Revolution gave us the telegraph, it gave us the railroads, it gave us also the automobile.
And so what happened is that Teddy Roosevelt led antitrust campaigns against these cartels.
He took on antitrust prosecutions of the railroad cartels, which, by the way, were completely used to making government payoffs, getting government subsidies.
So this wasn't just private enterprise, pure and simple.
Teddy Roosevelt knew that there was a kind of dirty alliance between these massive corporate interests.
And governmental interests.
And Roosevelt's capitalism, he was not, he had no qualms about fighting against these cartels.
And I mention this because it seems to me that Trump's campaign against these digital cartels, and I'm going to say more about this in the next segment, Is a defining characteristic of what we need now, just as Teddy Roosevelt took on the railroad cartels and the old communications cartels, unafraid to use regulation to go after them.
Why? In order to make those services available to everybody.
In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt's peculiar type of progressivism belongs today on the right and not on the left.
It is continuous with the Trump agenda and going after these digital moguls, breaking them up, smashing them, forcing them to guarantee public access.
That is the challenge of the 21st century now.
What is the model for us today for busting up these digital cartels?
Well, the model is the model of a hundred years ago when, as a result of the second communications revolution, we're now living through, you may say, the third communications revolution.
Ours, of course, having produced the computer, the internet, And then all these social media platforms.
But a century or so ago, there was a recognition that the railroad companies had gotten kind of into bed with the government.
Some of them had become monopolies, at least over certain routes.
And they had become unbelievably arrogant.
And they were controlling the space in which people could move.
And so the question then became, for example, is a railroad company able to make its own rules and say, hey, listen, we're not going to let you on our railroad.
Sound familiar? We get exactly the same thing now with regard to digital platforms.
or consider the monopolies in the oil business that had become dominated by John D. Rockefeller and his family.
And so Standard Oil basically controlled the oil market.
It was able to set prices.
And now many people think, well, this is capitalism.
Actually, no.
Capitalism is defined not so much by the idea of monopoly, not at all.
In fact, capitalism is defined by competition, by the ability of new people to enter the market.
Now, we don't have that now.
Let's say you came up with a search engine tomorrow, and it was better than Google.
What would happen? The moment you tried to set it up, Google would launch a campaign to smash you.
To shut you down.
To buy you out if necessary.
But the point of Google is to wipe out its competition.
And it has the power to do that because it has such a great control over the advertising share of the market that it's able to put competitors out of business.
And so the recognition of this led to a sort of progressivism embodied by Teddy Roosevelt That I would say is pro-free market.
Pro-free market, why? Because the idea was to break up these monopolies, force them to grant public access.
They're not allowed to say, this is my total bridge, you don't get to cross, because, hey, I'm a private company, and there was no little Reason magazine or some libertarian kook around to go, it's a private company, not the government, let them do whatever they want.
No, they can't do whatever they want.
The idea here was, and this was the point of the Sherman Act, As well as the Clayton Act, two acts that were formed really ultimately to make monopolies conform to the rules of the marketplace, the rules of competition.
Teddy Roosevelt, by the way, sued 45 companies under the Sherman Act.
William Howard Taft, his successor, sued 75 companies.
So many of these railroads, which had been consolidated into giant systems, they were brought under regulatory control, and they were forced to be, you may almost call it common carriers, which means you can't refuse service.
If somebody buys a ticket, you're going to have to let them on the railroad.
The oil companies were broken up into a kind of scattering of what, you know, became Exxon.
Then now, of course, it's ExxonMobil, Amoco, Mobil Oil, Chevron.
All of that came out of the splintering of the original Standard Oil.
Now, obviously not all companies were broken up.
The Ford Motor Company, for example, kept producing better and better cars, the car which initially cost $3,000.
Henry Ford was able to bring the price down to $400.
So no antitrust suits against Ford.
Even though Ford dominated the market, at least the ordinary man consumer market, the fact is that Ford was, in a sense, providing better and better products, wider and wider access.
Now, not all these lawsuits were successful.
There was one against U.S. Steel that failed.
But nevertheless, in the course of that lawsuit, I believe it was Justice Douglas who made the point, this was in his dissenting opinion, where he really talked about concentrated power.
This is Justice William O. Douglas.
I just want to quote a line from him.
He goes,"...the problem is, quote, the power of a handful of men over our economy." And when I hear that, I think of Zuckerberg.
I think of the guy at Google.
I think of Jack Dorsey.
What gives a handful of these guys?
And by the way, these are not guys defined by the concept of normalcy.
You just have to look at them to realize.
One guy looks like a walking robot.
The other guy looks like he's come off a drug binge off the streets of San Francisco.
I mean, we're these absolute kooks.
Are deciding, well, you know, I don't think this guy deserves a platform.
He made some unfortunate comments about the election.
Kick him off. So this is where we are in America today.
The freest country in the world is being regulated by a handful full of these digital barons.
And the whole idea of the antitrust momentum is to shut these people down.
To kick him in the rear end.
To break their companies up.
To force them to guarantee access.
This is the imperative, legislative, cultural, and moral agenda that we face today.
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In some ways, I think of him as kind of a walking refutation of leftism and Marxism.
I sort of summed that up in a recent conversation with him.
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And you take all the risks.
So when somebody like an Ilhan Omar or an AOC, or going back to Mark, says all you do is supply the capital, what do you say?
That's the biggest fallacy in history.
So yeah, here's an entrepreneur who's under the gun and we need to support him.
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Call 800-876-0227 or go to my pillow What does this anti-racist indoctrination look like in practice?
Now, the Grace Church School is an exclusive private school in New York City.
And recently, a math teacher there, a fellow named Paul Rossi, I went to the head of school and this is a guy named George Davison and spoke to him about the ridiculous level of indoctrination that is going on at the Grace School.
A level of indoctrination that Rossi said is really harming the students.
One week out of the month is devoted to critical race theory.
The school has a 12-page guide for staff and students and parents.
It says things like, don't use terms like mom and dad.
Don't use terms like Merry Christmas.
They don't even like happy holidays.
So it's kind of like an effort to sort of regulate the way people talk and think.
There's certain topics of discussion that are out of bounds.
And so this Rossi guy who teaches math goes...
What is this doing to education?
Now, the remarkable thing is that when he spoke to the principal, George Davison, Davison admitted that this anti-racist education is pure indoctrination.
It's actually the demonization of white kids who are falsely accused.
of being racist.
Now, interestingly, Rossi taped this conversation and we get to listen to the head of school, George Davison, speak in his own voice about what they're doing.
He is willing to admit it and it's fascinating to hear.
Listen. Let me ask you something, George, because I think there's something very different About having a single experience where you make sense of it, right?
And having a teacher, an authority figure, talk to you endlessly every year telling you that because you have whiteness, you are associated with evils, all these different evils.
These are moral evils.
It's not the same as taking like a physical thing because it doesn't affect your moral value.
That's the problem.
The fact is that I'm agreeing with you that there has been a demonization that we need to get our hands around in the way in which people are doing this understanding.
So you agree that we're demonizing kids?
We're demonizing white people for being born.
And are some of our students white people?
What? Are some of our students white people?
Yes. Okay, so we're demonizing white kids.
Why don't you just say it? We are using language that makes them feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible for.
Wow. Wow.
So here is a principal who is knowingly, knowingly demonizing his own students, not for horrible things they've done, But for horrible things, they have not done.
And he knows it, and he's still doing it.
Now, this is a kind of interesting moment of recognition.
One might hope it would be a moment of self-reflection for this guy.
But no. What is the outcome of this incident?
They fired the math teacher.
This guy, Paul Rossi, has been relieved of his duties.
He's been pushed to the sidelines.
And, remarkably, this guy George Davison, in an email to Rossi, denies making these statements.
In fact, he says, I'm not quoting him, he goes, You misquoted me and attributed to me things that I never said, nor would ever say.
Your actions were unprofessional.
Now, little did this guy know that Rossi taped him.
So, the truth of it is, we've heard what he said.
He wasn't misrepresented.
Rossi quoted him accurately.
And so, the sad thing here, and here's Rossi at the concluding, he goes, you know...
He goes, I suspect that the reason you, meaning George Davidson, have not shared these concerns with the broader race community is because you know exactly what happens to people who do.
It is what's happening to me right now.
So this guy, George Davidson...
He's a moral coward. He's what T.S. Eliot called a hollow man, a man who doesn't have the courage of his convictions, a man who's not a true leader because he's not willing to say to his community, listen, back off, guys.
We're doing education here.
We're not doing anti-racist indoctrination.
All our kids are going to be treated with respect.
No. So this is an example of the kind of disgrace that now runs our institutions.
of higher learning, in this case an exclusive private school, but the same could be said of many of our colleges and universities.
This is the scandal of anti-racist indoctrination as it plays itself out.
The bad guys know they're doing it, and they do it anyway.
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One of the persistent themes of our culture today is the sins and crimes of white people.
White people did slavery.
Now, of course, white people weren't the only people who did slavery, which was a worldwide trade, but the focus is on the offenses of white people.
Colonialism and slavery and the displacement of the Indians and so on.
Now, it's customary for conservatives to go, well, these things weren't quite as extensive as you say, or to make a defense.
But the other side of the coin is the people who say that their lives were made worse because of what white people did...
Never consider how their lives have been made better because of what white people did.
And I want to take a moment, because this is like never done, so it's kind of up to me to do it, to spell out the achievements of white people, which if you subtracted the crimes of white people and you subtracted their achievements, the question is, where would you come out on that balance sheet?
In the last 500 years, white people have in fact dominated the world.
People have to go back almost to the ancient world to find anything really big that was done by another culture.
And, you know, people do say, well, you know, the Mayans developed a calendar and, you know, the Hindus invented the number zero.
Or the Chinese developed printing and the compass and gunpowder.
Well, gunpowder, I suppose, is somewhat ambiguous achievement.
Even the compass, the Chinese did invent it, but it was confined to the Chinese court.
It was only when printing came to the West that it revolutionized the whole society.
The Gutenberg Bible, the Reformation, is inconceivable without it.
When we go beyond these modest achievements of these other cultures, we find that almost all the great achievements of the last 500 years have been done by white people to such an extent that it makes the rest of us feel stupid.
We almost begin to think, how come we've accomplished so little?
All the greatest philosophers in the world, if you were to make a list of the top 20, are not only white, but also male.
I'm hard pressed to think of a single black or brown or oriental or even female philosopher of the first rank.
Let's turn to the field of science.
All the great discoveries.
Let's start with the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler.
Newton. Gravity.
All the way through to, I mean, if it wasn't for Newton, we couldn't put satellites into orbit.
We couldn't put a man on the moon.
The space voyager, the voyagers around Jupiter, none of that would be going on.
That's all due to what Newton accomplished.
Then we turn to Einstein.
The theory of relativity, both the special theory and the general theory.
Without relativity, our TVs wouldn't work properly, the microwave ovens wouldn't work properly, the GPS wouldn't work properly.
And then the whole Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution that transformed life before people used to have like one shirt.
Now suddenly, look at your closet.
How many shirts do you have in there?
Well, you've got to thank the people who invented the sewing machine, and then later the spinning jenny, and then the train, and then the railroads.
And what about the telephone?
Marconi? William Graham Bell.
And then what about elevators?
Can you imagine life without elevators and the transformational effect of elevators, which have essentially enabled cities?
You can't live on top of somebody at high levels and you can't have skyscrapers without elevators.
What about refrigerators, microwave ovens, laser surgery, LASIK? What about William Harvey and his discoveries of the circulation of the blood?
What about the great cathedrals from the Cathedral of Chartres and Notre Dame and the Sistine Chapel and St.
Peter's? What about all the great ships that were built, first by the Venetians and then by the Spanish when we subsidized Columbus, that enabled the circumnavigation of the world?
That's how Vasco da Gama went across the Cape of Good Hope.
What about the banking industry and insurance and credit and stock exchanges and all the elaborate procedures of commercial enterprise described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations?
This is, in fact, the collective accomplishment of white people.
What about central air conditioning and central heat?
Can you imagine life in the United States without those two things?
I mean, yeah, before that, people had fireplaces and fans.
And, of course, the royalty and other cultures would have people with a fan, you know, fanning you all day.
All of that made unnecessary.
What about quantum physics?
The heroes of quantum physics, I look at them, they're all white.
Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born, Max Planck.
What about the internet? What about the iPhone and Steve Jobs?
I mean... If we're going to tack up the negative side of the balance sheet, we need to begin to look at the positive side.
Now, I'm not saying, I mean, look, 500 years from now, it could be different.
500 years from now, the Chinese could be on top of the world.
And it may be that in the next 500 years, the Chinese come up with the most important things.
But all I'm saying is that for the past 500 years, essentially what we call civilization has been the accomplishment of whites.
And not really anyone else.
Debbie and I were in Hawaii a few years ago.
We've been there now several times.
I mean, it's the aloha mentality.
The luau, I don't think, has basically been changed for centuries.
It's aloha, this, and mahalo, that, and that's pretty much it.
That's Hawaiian culture in a nutshell.
So that's not the kind of culture that gets you to the moon.
That's not the kind of culture that produces the kind of creativity and innovation that we all not only live with, but have come to expect.
Now, you could say that if it wasn't for colonialism, it wasn't for slavery, you know, Dinesh, all the other cultures would have definitely come up with all this stuff.
But, you know, you know that's not true.
So stop lying. Why?
Because the truth of it is it's the internal developments inside of the West that The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution.
It was those things that produced this explosion of creativity that the rest of the world is now ape-like copying.
The rest of the world is now essentially miniaturizing and following.
They're using the Western model.
They're following what can loosely be called Western philosophy and Western science.
And the list goes on. Nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, supercomputing.
I mean, I'm only getting started.
And the point I want to make here is that this racial demonization, that's really why I'm doing it.
I wouldn't do it otherwise. I'm doing it because I'm so sick of this demonization based on race that I'm going to go, hey, you want to make a balance sheet?
Let's make a real balance sheet.
You want to talk about the evils and sins of the horrible white people?
Well, let's talk about how they've made our lives better, how we depend upon it.
And deep down, for all our public vilification and nonsense, deep down...
We kind of know that this civilization, this America, this West that we're all a part of, and now the whole world is part of it, because you've got elevators everywhere, and you've got LASIK going on everywhere, and you have supercomputing everywhere.
This is, in that sense, the world that was built by whites.
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Absolutely no sense of fiscal responsibility.
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For some time now, I've been following on social media the inspired rants of Christian Walker.
Now, Christian Walker is a young, conservative activist.
He's the son of the legendary football player, Herschel Walker.
But he's also quite a figure in his own right.
He speaks in a very flamboyant and outrageous, but also intelligent way about what's going on in our culture.
I thought it'd be fun to have him on the podcast.
Christian, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
Great to have you.
Let me start by asking you, you know, through your dad and through your growing up years, you have had direct exposure to former President Trump.
And of course, this is perhaps the most, I would say, maybe the most maligned man of all time.
We hear these accusations flying left and right about him.
And I thought we might begin by just asking you to give a little bit, maybe from personal recollection, your kind of close up impression of Trump.
So my parents have known Mr.
Trump since they were 19 years old, who's the owner of my dad's first football team.
My parents spent time at his estate.
My mom crashed his motorcycle.
They took the kids to Disney World.
So we have a long time Standing relationship with the Trumps.
And we've always known them to be nothing less than kind.
I mean, he's the kindest man.
He's hardworking. He cares about his family.
All the things that people who know and love him say about him.
And so I don't believe that any of those things changed when he became the president.
I think what changed was what the media wanted to paint him out to be and what everyone's agenda surrounding him was.
He is hardworking, he cares about the country, he loves his family, and he's overall a great man.
And for his shortcomings, or what people consider to be his shortcomings, I consider them to be pros.
I like that he is very straight up with his speech.
I like that he doesn't beat around the bush.
Those are qualities that I like in someone, and I think our country really needed that.
He has never been anything less than kind to me, and I love him a lot.
And the whole business about him being a racist, which of course has been kind of the core of the attack on him, in your experience, totally 100% bogus?
If he's racist, then I don't know why he loves my dad so much.
He's very dark and definitely black.
Christian, let's talk about the Derek Chauvin case, because what happened there was gruesome.
We've all seen the videotape.
But you tweeted out that, hey, number one, it doesn't look like this guy, guilty or not, got a fair trial.
And you say it was even, for you, a little reminiscent of the OJ verdict, where a verdict is driven a little bit more by a mob mentality.
Obviously, we're talking about two different cases.
In OJ's case, a black man was accused of the crime.
In the Derek Chauvin case, a white cop is accused of a crime against a black man.
But you saw a little bit of a similarity in the two cases.
Speak about that for a moment. Absolute deja vu from the OJ case.
And I will just go ahead and say that, you know, a lot of people on the jury in the OJ case, I think more than not, were black.
And half the jury on the Derek Chauvin case was black too.
And I was just watching a clip from the Oprah show when she was watching.
They were finding out whether OJ was going to be guilty or not guilty in real time live with her studio audience.
And when they announce that OJ isn't guilty, it's like 10 Black people in the audience jump up and start celebrating and it just It looked like, to me, it was more of a skin color celebration than whether he was guilty or not guilty.
And that's very much how this one felt.
BLM was celebrating across the country when this man didn't even get a fair trial.
How are we supposed to have a fair trial when the jury is being intimidated by BLM outside of the courthouse, when the President of the United States is intimidating them and pressuring them to convict their children?
This wasn't a fair trial.
This was an intimidation trial.
So yes, the two cases were really reminiscent of each other, and I just think we've progressed far enough in the country and passed skin color politics to be able to give people fair trials and not make everything about skin color.
But to the left, the Democrats, and to certain groups of people in the country, it seems as though they believe that we haven't progressed.
Let's turn to Makia Bryant for a moment.
I do want to draw the broader lesson, but I'd like to focus on particulars first.
You say, I'm quoting you now, Makia Bryant was committing black-on-black crime.
The police who handled the situation is a black savior for saving the other girl's life.
Now, I want to contrast the way you see it, which is basically a white cop showing up and coming to the rescue of a black victim, and Makia Bryant, the perpetrator, With the sort of, let's call it the LeBron James understanding, which is obviously not exclusive to him.
He starts with the white cop as the bad guy.
And since the white cop's the bad guy, Makia Bryant must be the real victim.
And as for the other girl, who remains, I suppose, nameless, she is like pushed off the stage.
So this becomes a parable for LeBron James of bad white cop Good black victim.
How does a guy like LeBron, who's not an unintelligent guy, how does he get it so upside down or so twisted, if you will, so that he comes up with a narrative that doesn't actually resemble the facts?
What's your reading about how that happens?
It's very in line with the typical leftist view of Blacks.
We should just let Blacks kill each other in the streets.
We should just let Blacks abort their babies at ridiculous numbers and not care.
As long as it's Blacks killing Blacks, who cares?
At the end of the day, a Black person was going to die.
If the cop hadn't showed up or had he shot.
And had he not shot Micaiah Bryant, then the murderer, because it would have been Micaiah Bryant murdering another Black life, would have been the one to keep her life and an innocent victim would have lost their life.
He shot Micaiah Bryant because she was acting Like a criminal, she was acting like a murderer, and he wanted to save an innocent Black life.
So the cop is nothing less than a Black savior to me.
I think, you know, if someone was stabbing me if a Black person cornered me in the street and was about to stab me, I would want the cop to take care of me, take him out.
I'm sure I went home safe that day and not just refrain from shooting the guy because he's black.
I don't think, you know, black people should be treated with kid gloves and treated like children.
You should be treated like everybody else.
If it was two white people and a white guy was going to stab another white guy and the cops shot him, everyone would be celebrating, oh, I mean, he took out a murderer.
This is ridiculous and it's ridiculous.
We have to break everything down to skin color.
And part of what you're saying is if Makia Bryan had gone ahead and stabbed the other black girl, it would not even be a news story because, after all, one black kid stabbing another black kid is not exactly front page news in America.
Never, never. It's only when a white cop or a white person kills a black person.
Just last week, a three-year-old was shot at his birthday party in Miami, barely made any news because it was a black shooter.
A seven-year-old was shot in that McDonald's drive-thru, and the only reason why we know about that is because of social media.
It's out of control.
The mainstream media does not report on blacks killing blacks.
Now, you say, I'm black, I've never been shot by a cop because I follow the law.
It seems to me that the law-abiding black community is sort of sidelined in this debate.
In fact, if you look at the people who've been made heroes, I just think of Nancy Pelosi, you know, Thank you, George Floyd, for dying at the right moment.
I mean, literally, George Floyd, not exactly the best embodiment of the African American community, suddenly becomes the new incarnation of Martin Luther King.
So, does it disturb you a little bit the way in which you have this kind of lionization, or, you know, these people are made into heroes, when there are real heroes around, but no one seems to have any interest in them?
Well, for some reason, the left and the Democrats think that all blacks are criminals.
And my question I'm always asking is, what about the law-abiding black citizens?
I don't break the law.
I listen to cops.
I haven't been shot dead or had a knee on my neck because I don't break the law.
And if I get pulled over or whatever, I listen to instructions from the police officers.
I would like them ensuring that my neighborhood is safe and that my life is safe and not uplifting criminals and making it seem as though we're all criminals.
We should defy law and order.
We should take the police away.
No, I really like police.
I like police keeping my neighborhood safe.
Let me ask you in conclusion, Christian.
You're a young activist.
You're all over TikTok. You're all over Instagram.
What inspired you to go beyond just having the views you do to sort of creating, I would call it, a certain kind of conservative chic?
And part of it is that you do it by being fearless.
You don't hold back.
You hit hard. And it seems to me in that sense you're a voice of the new conservatism that we need now.
But talk a little bit because there are a lot of conservatives who don't like to ruffle feathers and they like to sort of, you know, they don't like the limelight and they're a little scared of the left.
Where did you learn the fearlessness that you bring to the way you engage the public debate?
I think there hasn't, or there's been things that haven't been said that really need to be said.
And I also think that for a long time, conservatism has been a bit buttoned up and stuffy.
And I love it buttoned up and stuffy.
And I think we need that.
But in order to touch the culture and in order to, you know, attract a younger generation and get them interested into conservatism, we need to make it a little bit more fun.
That's one thing that the left is really good at.
They're very colorful. They're very out there.
They're very Kind of obnoxious.
And it does attract the younger generation, hence why college kids and below college kids are, you know, identify as liberals or as leftists.
So I kind of have taken that on as my role, making conservatism a little bit more fun and saying things that need to be said that a lot of people feel scared to say because they're scared of being called a racist.
I just say it. I also think that my identity, you know, just being black kind of is a bit of a shield.
And so I'd like to use that to further the conservative movement and our principles.
Awesome. Hey, Christian, thanks for coming on the podcast.
This was great. I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
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One of the approaches of the initially Obama and now Biden administration is to do what it can to help America's enemies.
And to undermine America's allies.
Now, again, like I said yesterday, this may seem like a little bit of a shocking statement for a country to do for its leadership to actually enhance its adversaries or the country's adversaries and to try to pull the rug out from under the allies.
But when you look at what the Biden administration is doing, it is doing that.
Now, who are America's allies?
Well, two of our allies.
One is Israel. And I want to talk perhaps tomorrow about what the Biden administration has been doing with Israel, particularly through its envoy, John Kerry.
But the other is India.
India is a very important ally for the United States, partly because India helps to balance in Asia the growing power of China.
And the Indians are very pro-American.
And when COVID first came out, the Indians rushed to America's defense because America was having an explosion of cases.
And the Indians said, we will do what we can.
To help. Now, India is having a surge of COVID, a very bad one.
Some of these new variants.
And the Indian hospitals are overtaxed.
And the Indians are begging for vaccines.
They have vaccines, but not enough.
Now, other countries are rushing to India's help.
Singapore, Australia, and so on are sending, even Russia.
But the United States so far has been, you may say, unhelpful.
The United States is, by the way, sitting on 20 million stock-boiled AstraZeneca vaccines, which are probably not going to be used in the United States.
Why? Because we use the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna.
And, of course, the Johnson& Johnson.
So there's no shortage of vaccines in America.
A substantial portion of people have already gotten vaccinated.
Some people don't want to be vaccinated, but people who want to can be.
So you'd think that the Biden administration, in order to reciprocate a favor to India and to show, to strengthen that alliance, would be rushing to provide these AstraZeneca vaccines.
But no, here's a statement by the State Department spokesman Ned Price.
Very telling. He goes, it is of course not only in our interest to see Americans vaccinated, it is in the interest of the rest of the world to see Americans vaccinated.
Now, this is a downright bizarre statement.
First of all, it's not in the interest of the world to see Americans vaccinated.
And second of all, this almost appears like a cartoon version of Trump's America First policy.
Namely, we only care about our own people.
The Indians can go take care of themselves.
This kind of statement, which has quite honestly not only shocked India, it's emboldened the left in India because what the left in India says is that why is India being so pro-American?
The Indians are there when America needs India, but when India needs America, the Americans are nowhere to be found.
So this is the kind of thing that actually damages an alliance, causes people who are your friends to begin to lose trust in you.
And yet, this is what the Biden administration is doing.
Now, at the last minute, the Biden people are like, well, you know, Biden goes, I've made a phone call to the Prime Minister of India.
I've assured him that we're going to do what we can.
So In response to criticism, the Biden administration has sort of belatedly kind of gotten itself off the couch.
And you may say Biden has sort of finally, you can't say sprung into action because Biden doesn't spring into anything.
But he's at least made a phone call to make a gesture of help.
The bottom line of it is that this policy of...
of helping your enemies and undercutting your friends is going to be in the end, if it continues, and if we keep administrations that do it, it might be a fulfillment of Obama and Biden's goal, but it will most certainly be the ruin of America.
It doesn't really matter what your politics are or who you voted for.
I think we can agree everyone should have the right to express themselves freely.
And the fact that there are some subjects we can't talk about is downright scary.
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I want to do a fun segment and talk a little bit about movies.
I told Debbie I'm going to try to make a list of the 20 greatest movies of all time.
I'm just going to put the list out there, and I'm going to invite people, and I invite you, to send me your thoughts, your...
Either list or candidate for the greatest movies of all time, a movie that's really had a transforming effect on you.
And, you know, movies have that ability to do that.
It's one of the reasons I got into making movies myself, both documentaries and feature films, is I realized that movies speak to the head and the heart.
They can change you from the inside just in 90 minutes.
You come out a little different than you were before, and movies, if they're really good, can be unforgettable.
I can recite lines from movies I saw years ago because I remember the context so clearly.
The other thing about movies is that they make us, in a way, more intelligent than we are.
And what I mean by that is you can put someone who's generally kind of not known for saying things that are interesting or insightful or even figuring out real life problems, but you put them in a movie and it's a whodunit or it's a complex movie which has people who are putting on a mask or putting on a front and people can see through character and discover, oh, that's what that, no, that guy who's maybe the suspect but he didn't really do it and I think it's this guy and they can make connections and they do all that
because they're in a dark room watching in a concentrated way for an hour and a half.
So, for me, it's kind of fun to make my kind of great movies list.
But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about how to watch a movie.
Because I don't watch movies kind of in the normal way.
I try to watch movies in a way that helps me understand what is going on at a level that is a little, you may say, deeper than the script itself.
And movies often communicate those things.
They're in the movie. They just are not on the surface of the movie, and you have to sort of excavate them out.
I want to talk briefly today about one film, just to give an example of how I try to watch movies and think about them.
Talk about the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Let me ask, why am I picking a Western movie?
I really can't. Like, I try to get Debbie to watch Western sometimes.
I try to get her to watch this movie.
She's like, nah, I'd rather not do it.
Maybe another time.
We're now married five years and the other time has yet to arrive.
I'm not sure if it ever will.
But The Man Who Short Liberty Valance is about Jimmy Stewart.
Who is a senator. His name is Rand Stoddard.
And he is sort of the hero, the good guy, the big man.
And he became senator and became famous because he shot this criminal, Liberty Valance, who's kind of the bad guy, the outlaw, in a kind of, you know, in a shootout.
And there's another guy, this kind of rough old cowboy, his name is Tom Donovan, played by John Wayne.
And while Stoddard, Jimmy Stewart, is now in Washington, he's the big senator, this Donovan guy is a kind of, a little bit of a drunk, and he's past his prime, and he's hanging out in the old town, it's called Shinbone, an old frontier town, and he hasn't really amounted to much.
And Jimmy Stewart is married to this beautiful, elegant woman, And they go back to Shinbone, accompanied by a retinue of press.
And the movie then flashes back and tells the story of who shot Liberty Valance.
And as the story goes, although Jimmy Stewart, who was kind of this slick-talking lawyer, he has the reputation for having shot Liberty Valance.
And in fact, the two of them were at one point.
Liberty Valance had beaten up Jimmy Stewart.
And finally, Jimmy Stewart had a chance to get even.
And even though he wasn't really a practice gunslinger like the outlaw, Liberty Valance, somehow Jimmy Stewart happened to fire a lucky shot and kill him.
Except as the movie unfolds, we realize he didn't.
No, this lawyer is not going to be able to shoot a hardened criminal dead in one shot.
The Jimmy Stewart shot misfired.
But another man standing in the back, in the dark, in the wings, and this is John Wayne, Tom Donovan, who is an old gunslinger himself, he shot Liberty Valance from the side, even though all the credit went to Jimmy Stewart.
Now, what's interesting about all this is that the Old West...
Was a lawless society.
But being a lawless society doesn't mean it wasn't based upon a certain type of a code.
So what is the code?
Well, the code is really the code of the duel.
It's the code of honor.
It's the idea that even though you are in a lawless society, everybody is supposed to follow certain types of rules.
So, for example, you can have a duel.
In which two people have guns or swords, but it's not a duel if you come up to someone in the night and stab them while they're sleeping.
That's a violation of the code.
So here you have this code and it's the code of...
Lawlessness, you can stand across with and have a draw in which each guy goes for his gun and the guy who's faster at the draw and better shot wins and the other guy lies dead on the ground.
But to follow the code is to follow that rule.
Now, interestingly... Jimmy Stewart, who gets all the credit, and in fact takes all the credit for shooting Liberty Valance, but didn't, is violating that code.
Why? Because his whole career is based upon this spectacular event that didn't actually occur.
And Jimmy Stewart not only gets the senatorial prize, he also gets the girl.
You can tell that the woman, his wife, was initially...
In love with Tom Donovan.
She liked the John Wayne guy, but the John Wayne guy was kind of rough.
And he was not very good at articulating his feelings.
He wasn't a feelings type of guy.
He comes up to the girl at one point and he gives her this kind of shriveled flower.
It's called a cactus rose.
And then when she tells Jimmy Stewart about it, he goes, well, yeah, but have you seen a real rose?
So somehow this smooth-talking Jimmy Stewart is able to kind of get the girl.
Tom Donovan gets nothing.
But very interestingly, Tom Donovan, John Wayne, he also violated the code.
Why? Because he shot Liberty Valance sort of from the alley.
Liberty Valance didn't even see him, didn't even know that he was part of this duel.
The only guy who kept the code, amazingly, was Liberty Valance.
Liberty Valance, in a sense, although an outlaw, respected the basic idea that this may be the law of the jungle, but even the law of the jungle has certain rules.
And he, to the very end, lived by those rules.
There's a lot more to say about this film.
I'm not going to get into all of it.
But part of what I wanted to say about movies is we think about movies as ways that reflect a story right back onto us.
So we're able to understand through them, not only character in a better way, but also understand the issues of our own time in a clearer light.
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Hey, it's time for our mailbox, and let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hey, Dinesh.
My name's Ford.
Thank you so much for taking my question.
I was wondering what your opinion was on the notion of, quote, sick until proven healthy.
I feel that this is what we have been seeing in America due to the coronavirus outbreak, and I think at this point, it's not justified.
This would be a different question at the beginning of the pandemic, but I'm asking it now.
What do you think? Thank you for all that you do.
Keep up the good work. God bless.
So, Ford, here's my thought about your question.
I think you're asking it because, I mean, a very resonant phrase, you know, you're presumed sick until you can prove you're healthy.
And I think what you mean is that we're in a kind of time when you're supposed to produce your proof of vaccination, which is to say proof that you're not sick.
Otherwise, you can't do this or you can't do that.
And the question you're asking is, not only why are they doing that, but why now?
Think about it. We don't actually require such proof in any other context.
We don't go around saying, hey, listen, I want to make sure that you don't have diabetes.
Or, you know, I want to make sure that you've taken care of that erectile dysfunction problem that I hear you've been having.
You don't say this. You don't demand proof that people have attended to their own...
COVID attended to their own ailments.
The flu is contagious, but the flu is not as contagious as COVID, and it is perhaps not as lethal.
I know there might be people who dispute that, but I think in general, we don't have the same death count, not even close, for the flu.
But you made a very interesting statement.
You said, this is not a question I would have asked at the beginning of the pandemic.
I'm asking it now.
And I think your question is reflecting what a lot of people feel, including me, which is, I would call it, COVID fatigue.
Here's proof of COVID fatigue.
Debbie just showed me this. This is from the New York Times.
Millions are skipping their second dose of the COVID vaccine.
Wow! Apparently 5 million people have taken their first dose and they're like, you know what?
I'm good. I'm done.
I'm not going to take the next one.
And apparently the CDC is a little worried that more people might go for this, might just basically take one dose, say, listen, I got 80% protection, yeah, I could get to 90, but big deal.
So what's happening here is that, you know, I think what's happening is people are getting a little disgusted because the scales keep shifting, the bar keeps moving, they keep telling you that when they said before that you just need to do this, you just need to get vaccinated.
And now suddenly...
They're saying, and Fauci is saying, you know, being vaccinated is not enough.
Yeah, yeah. Maybe you can go to an outdoor cookout, but, you know, you should be really careful before you go to an indoor facility, unless everybody in there has also been vaccinated.
So this, I would call it escalation of the demands.
It's bad for any negotiation, and this is not limited to COVID. It's not even limited to health.
It's kind of like if you're trying to make a deal with someone, and you're about to shake hands, and they go, and another thing!
And you're like, okay, what?
And you're like, okay, fine. And another thing!
Oh, and just one more thing!
One final, you know, you're like, you know what?
I'm out of here. I don't want to be part of this deal.
So I think this is what's happening, that the health authorities who have already, by and large, shown their ideological hand and that they can be used as pawns of politics, they are the ones who have, you may say, corrupted the health strategy of dealing with COVID-19.
And for this reason, many people, me included, feel this desire to say, well, listen, we've done what you asked.
We've done all we can.
And if you're going to ask us to do anything more, we're just not going to.
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