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April 28, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza

01:03:21

IRAN’S MAN IN AMERICA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 78

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	I think we know that Biden is China's man in America, but who's Iran's man in America?
	I'll tell you the answer.
	And how USA Today conspired with Stacey Abrams to put out a big lie.
	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.
	We all know that Joe Biden is sort of China's man in America.
	This is a guy who has enriched himself off of China, kind of through his family.
	It's the Biden mafia and the Biden bag men who have been collecting money, big amounts of money from China.
	And so while I wouldn't say perhaps that China owns Biden, Let's just say that China has some pretty massive leverage with Biden.
	But who is Iran's man in America?
	Well, I think the answer to that you probably know, John Kerry.
	John Kerry is the culprit here.
	Now, John Kerry is kind of known for being a kind of...
	Buffoon on the international stage.
	He makes doofus-like pronouncements that almost inevitably turn out to be untrue.
	They're refuted almost offhandedly, typically very quickly after they're uttered.
	Here is John Kerry with one of his classic formulations about how no peace is possible between any entities in the Middle East without the Palestinians.
	Listen to Mr.
	Doofus explain it himself.
	There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world.
	I want to make that very clear to all of you.
	I've heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, well, the Arab world's in a different place now.
	We just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we'll deal with the Palestinians.
	No, no, no, and no.
	What I love is the, not just the no, but the no.
	No. No.
	No. I mean, if you're going to be stupid, you may as well be stupid with emphasis.
	That way people can...
	You give people time to laugh at you when your quote is played back to you.
	And who exposed the foolishness of Kerry?
	Well, Trump. Trump basically makes three phone calls and suddenly these countries are all making...
	Israel is making a deal with...
	You know, with the United Arab Emirates and with other Gulf states and so on, and just flatly disproving the Kerry nonsense.
	But Kerry might be stupid, but he's also evil.
	This is, as you can guess, it's kind of a toxic combination.
	Stupidity is bad enough by itself.
	Evil is dangerous enough.
	So you put stupidity and evil together.
	It's... It's not a good mix, let's just say.
	Now, Kerry has been lately accused.
	Well, accused by who? Accused by his own buddy.
	He's buddies with the Iranian foreign minister, this guy named Mohammad Javad.
	Zarif. Now, one thing Kerry likes about this Zarif guy is he's not a typical mullah type.
	This Zarif guy kind of puts on a veneer of sophistication.
	He sort of comes across as a very westernized guy.
	He's the front man for the mullahs regime.
	So there are the mullahs and they're basically, you know, sitting around plotting jihad and, you know, getting the suicide bombers all properly dressed up and providing all kinds of, you know, mullah instruction, you know, Do not sneeze during intercourse.
	It is forbidden by the surahs and so on.
	So they're doing all this stuff, all this crazy mullah stuff.
	But their front man, Zarif, is sort of like, oh, well, you know, yes, John Kerry, let us explore some avenues together for how we can undermine Trump.
	And in fact, that's what Kerry has been doing all along.
	He struck up a friendship with this guy in the Trump years.
	And think about this. You've got a prominent figure in the opposition, by the way, a former presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, leading figure in pretty much every Democratic administration.
	He's conspiring with a jihadist foreign government that is a sworn enemy.
	It's kind of formulaic foreign policy is death to America.
	And here's Kerry buddying with this guy about how to undercut Trump.
	What this really suggests is that while Iran has a foreign policy, America's foreign policy is driven by its domestic policy.
	Iran has goals, and their goal is to weaken America, strengthen their position in the Middle East, try to become the leading player in the region.
	But Kerry has kind of a much more simple goal.
	It has really nothing to do with Iran.
	It has to do with undermining Trump.
	And to a larger degree, undermining the power of America in the region.
	This has been a kind of continuous thread since Obama, shrink and diminish American foreign policy.
	Now, most recently, this fellow, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif, gave an interview.
	In the Middle East itself, where he basically said, John Kerry has been divulging to me secret information involving 200 Israeli military operations in Syria.
	Wow. So, Kerry is evidently leaking stuff to our enemies that he is finding out from our allies.
	Think about that. Now, Kerry has issued a, after a little bit of a delay, issued a denial.
	He put out a tweet.
	I can tell you that the story and these allegations are unequivocally false.
	This never happened. Well, I don't know.
	If it didn't happen, why would the man that you've undoubtedly, you admittedly have been talking to for years, and you're still talking to him, say it did?
	What possibly could be his motive for doing this?
	I suspect it could be that Zarif accidentally blurted out something that he shouldn't have said.
	But in that case, his sin is not to say something that's false, but to say something that's true.
	Let's think and remember that pretty much the whole Biden team for renewing this Iran deal and dealing with Iran is the Obama crew.
	These are people like Wendy Sherman, Robert Malley, and Colin Call, but all under the leadership of Kerry.
	And Kerry, remember now, although he's the sort of climate czar, he sits on America's National Security Council.
	So he is part of our defense team.
	And think of how scary it is That we've got this guy with his fake pomposity and his bogus erudition.
	Let me tell you, no, no, no!
	But that's just kind of moronic proclamations.
	That's harmless in and of itself.
	That's just a reflection of Kerry, but much more insidious.
	Working with these foreign regimes, dangerous foreign regimes, that would blow us up if they could...
	But I'm sure Kerry thinks that his marvelous influence and his ability to eat a canopy while sitting with Zarif is going to discourage them from doing that.
	No. But Kerry's agenda is also insidiously to try to do harm domestically to his political opponents inside America.
	I'm not really a super fan of the U.S. Post Office.
	I generally like to use UPS or FedEx.
	I'm not quarreling with the employees of the Post Office, who I'm sure are a hard-working bunch But recently, you know, I ordered a collection.
	I bought it on eBay.
	But it was a beautiful collection of Macaulay's History of England, kind of a classic work, many volumes.
	I spent $700 on it.
	And it never came.
	And the seller, unless he's pulling a massive scam on me, says, I mailed it.
	U.S. Post Office.
	Oops. Now, of course, one possibility is you've got, you know, some head of a local branch of the post office and he's like, man, Macaulay, this is unbelievable.
	I've got to read these works.
	And he's basically now in volume three.
	I'll get my seven volumes when he, six volumes when he finishes.
	But I don't think that's what's going on.
	Now, typically one tends to criticize the post office because they lack a profit motive.
	They are not motivated by the idea, let's make a good company, let's make our customers happy.
	They don't really have a reason to make their customers happy.
	They're a government agency and they function like they're no more as excited for you to buy a stamp as they are for someone to get there as the DMV is to renew your driver's license.
	They don't care. But I now realize that the incompetence of the post office may have a second cause.
	And that is a very surprising cause.
	The post office is spying on us.
	I'm not kidding. Here's an article in the Daily Mail, but I've seen it elsewhere as well.
	U.S. Postal Service is using its, quote, law enforcement arm.
	Did you know that the post office has a law enforcement arm?
	So the cops of the post office...
	Are covertly tracking American social media posts to flag, quote, inflammatory messages to send them to other intelligence agencies and government agencies.
	Let's digest this for a moment.
	There are people in the post office who are apparently spending their time chasing around, trolling, tracking people, Americans, on social media to see if they're doing things like planning a protest.
	In other words, protest, exercising your First Amendment right, organizing something, getting together, giving a speech, all of this is considered dangerous in 21st century America.
	And apparently the post office, without your permission, is tracking you.
	Then they get your name, they take your post, and they send it to like the FBI. Or they send it to other intelligence agencies, and it's like, check this guy out, check that guy out.
	So this, to me, is surprising and kind of scary.
	Apparently the post office has a surveillance program that's called ICOP. Internet Covert Operations Program.
	I'm very happy that this has come to light because this is one of those creepy things that goes on and no one really knows about it.
	And the post office is part of it.
	Apparently what they do is they look for protests.
	They then send information to the Department of Homeland Security.
	They have screenshotted posts of Americans from Facebook, from Parler, Telegram, other social media sites.
	And they put out a bulletin, an internal bulletin.
	This is how it came out. Somebody saw the bulletin.
	They went, what is this? They go, ICOP analysts are monitoring these social media channels for potential threats stemming from the scheduled protests and will disseminate intelligence updates as needed.
	Even the legal scholar Jeffrey Stone from the University of Chicago says he's very surprised to see this.
	He goes, quote, For examining the internet for these security issues.
	What he's getting at is that it's almost like everyone is getting into this surveillance spying act.
	We're becoming a surveillance state in which private entities and not just the appropriate government entities, but you may say inappropriate government entities, are also getting into this business.
	I think that the Senate Republicans need to pull up Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general, and ask him about this demand to know what exactly is going on.
	How is this fit within the mission or the charter of the post office?
	What does this have to do with delivering the mail?
	And, you know, a lot of these people, it seems to me, have not just a busybody streak, but a tyrannical streak.
	And it's the job of the checks and balances of our government, not only to expose this, which Thanks to the Daily Mail they have, but to stop it.
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	One of the most distinctive features of our time now is the way in which our elite institutions, one by one, have been corrupted, have been compromised, have been taken over, have now become instruments of lies and propaganda and bullying.
	All of this now seems rather pervasive.
	And it also seems that these institutions are sort of linking up with one another to create a single interconnected web.
	Let's just call it the elite web.
	Now, there's a very interesting article that I want to summarize.
	This is from The American Mind, which I believe is the publication of the Claremont Institute.
	It's written by Ted McAllister.
	And you can summarize it as it's about good elites and bad elites.
	And basically, McAllister begins by saying that we have a very bad elite.
	We have a corrupt elite that is currently governing America.
	Not everyone in the ruling group is corrupt, but a lot of them are.
	And enough of them are that they have been able to tilt institutions their way.
	Now, says Macalester, this is actually reminiscent of what happened in the period leading to the American Revolution.
	He says that there was an elite.
	It was an imperial elite of Great Britain.
	And very interestingly, he said that this elite is not the kind of old elite that had always ruled England going back to the early 17th century when the first settlers came to America.
	No. He says that a kind of new ruling class had emerged in the 1740s and 50s in Great Britain.
	And this was, you may say, a more authoritarian, a more arrogant class.
	By the way, a class not just representing the monarchy, but also in the British Parliament.
	And these were people who essentially said,''We don't think that these Americans have any case.'' We need to whip them into shape.
	We need to centralize power and make sure that we call all the shots.
	They don't deserve any rights or freedoms.
	So this was an imperial elite in Britain that decided that it was the boss and everybody else was the servant.
	Now, this was the, you may say, effort in America by this colonial elite in Britain to increase their power, to increase their control, to increase their level of repression.
	And that's what set off...
	Remember, the Americans had lived relatively contentedly under the British for quite a long time.
	Benjamin Franklin, for example, very interestingly, in the 1740s, he calls himself a Briton.
	B-R-I-T-O-N, a Briton.
	He was happy to identify himself as British, even living in America.
	Only after the American Revolution did he basically say, I'm now an American.
	Now, says Macalester in the article, a rival elite began to develop in America.
	Where did it develop?
	It developed in New England.
	It developed in New York.
	It developed in Virginia.
	It developed in the Carolinas.
	So, essentially, influential people in these areas, and by influential, what I mean is prosperous farmers, professional people, soldiers, people.
	Educated people, people of influence, pastors, all of these people began to come together and go, listen, we really don't like what that elite is doing.
	We need to organize a resistance to it.
	So, the important point here is that the American Revolution wasn't the people against the elite.
	It was, says McAllister, one elite against another.
	One elite in America said, enough is enough.
	Let's mobilize the people on our behalf against these bad elites that are trying to take control of us completely.
	And McAllister's point, which I don't think we should miss, is that that's kind of what we need today.
	What he's saying is that we've got a bad elite.
	We've got all these rotten people running our colleges, thoroughly corrupt.
	We've got rotten people running our media.
	We've got rotten people in Hollywood.
	People essentially who are amoral or worse.
	And we've got rotten people at various levels of government, including in agencies that we thought were somewhat insulated.
	They're rotten to the core too.
	At least rotten at the top level.
	That's what I mean by the core.
	Not every single guy, but the guys at the top.
	And I think the remedy is that there needs to be an organized resistance.
	Not just the people against the elites again, but just as in the time of the American Revolution, an organized movement.
	And this time we're not trying to have another revolution.
	We don't need another revolution.
	What we need is to protect the original revolution.
	We need to protect the original principles of the revolution that people like Washington and Madison fought on our behalf.
	Those principles are now endangered by...
	So the British endangered them by not letting these principles come into being in the first place.
	And the new elite, the leftist elite, the progressive elite, endangers them by now trying to thwart these principles and replace them with new forms of authoritarian control.
	We need a new elite, and by that I mean we need powerful people to establish themselves and organize themselves in academia, in media, in government, in the civic sector.
	Good people, good elites.
	To come together to overthrow the bad ones.
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	I've been waiting for all this super damaging, unbelievably juicy, scandalous, outrageous, can you believe this stuff to come out on Matt Getz?
	And I'm still waiting.
	I'm in suspense.
	It's evidently not happening.
	It was about three weeks ago now that we started seeing this kind of, I would call it a media blitzkrieg.
	And once again, there's a kind of discernible familiar pattern.
	A big article appears in a major newspaper quoting unnamed sources.
	And these unnamed sources supposedly in the government claim that Matt Getz, prominent Florida congressman Trumpster, Frankly, one of the few congressmen whose names anybody knows.
	By and large, these congressmen are like anonymous figures.
	Even their own constituents don't recognize them.
	But Getz is high visibility.
	And he's been outspoken in his defense of Trump and Trumpian principles.
	That's what actually makes him a threat.
	It's kind of a good marker.
	When people are attacked viciously, you know that they must be doing something right.
	And so here it was.
	Matt Getz is being investigated by the federal government for underage sex trafficking.
	Wow! Really?
	So not only is he apparently, allegedly, having sex with underage girls, but he's apparently trafficking them.
	Man. So we're waiting now for the evidence.
	We're waiting now for some details.
	Matt Getz, of course, emphatically denies this as it's total nonsense.
	Actually reveals that there was some kind of a blackmail scheme going on with his dad.
	Some guy, apparently, an ex-federal government deep state character, goes to Matt Getz's dad and says, listen, if you pay me like $20 million...
	I will get favorable publicity for Matt Getz.
	I mean, the whole thing is just downright nonsensical.
	How can this clown get favorable publicity?
	Who's going to pay $20 million to some kook?
	And on top of it, the guy goes, listen, Mr.
	Getz, I'll go find Bob Levinson, who's an American who has been in an Iranian prison.
	Although, here's the kicker.
	Bob Levinson is dead.
	His family believes that he is killed.
	He has been killed. Or he died in prison.
	So here is this shakedown artist who wants $20 million to find a man who no longer exists.
	the whole thing is just preposterous.
	Now, interestingly, as the weeks have passed and we wait for the goods on Matt Gaetz to supposedly hit on Matt Gaetz, and of course, there are other Democrats coming out, oh, it's time for Matt Gaetz to step down from the committee, it's time for Matt Gaetz to resign, all based upon these baseless allegations.
	And very interestingly, the stories have continued, but if you kind of track them, you now notice that the allegations, one by one, are sort of disappearing.
	In other words, this is kind of, you could almost call it defining deviancy now.
	First, Matt Getz is accused of sex trafficking.
	Then, nothing about sex trafficking.
	He's accused of having sex with underage girls.
	Really? Where are they?
	Where are these accusers?
	Name one. Turns out there are no accusers.
	Not one. So, all of this is basically salacious allegations made on the basis of unnamed sources.
	And interestingly, the articles have now shifted in which it's like Matt Goetz is still doing some horrible stuff.
	But the horrible stuff now is Matt Goetz had sex with girls at parties and he paid for his girlfriends to go on trips.
	Now, is Matt Ketz the first man in America to pay for the air tickets and food of a girlfriend on a trip?
	Really? Here's a downright...
	A creepy phenomenon.
	The article appears accusing Matt Getz with no sources in the newspapers.
	The FBI goes to one of Matt Getz's aides.
	This is a disabled veteran, Nate Nelson, who worked in Getz's office.
	And the FBI demands, say, oh yeah, we saw the article.
	The FBI is operating on the basis of anonymous newspaper tips.
	And so this is how the left kind of coordinates things.
	They orchestrate something, no supporting evidence.
	The FBI certainly jumps into the picture, obediently following what the left is doing.
	And... And all of this is really creepy.
	I mean, think about what Charlie Chester, the CNN technical director, told Project Veritas.
	He didn't know he was talking to Project Veritas, so he was spilling the beans, speaking honestly.
	I'm going to quote him. They go, so it would be great for the Democratic Party to get him out.
	Think of it. This is CNN, one of their top people, admitting that they are basically an arm of the Democratic Party.
	It's great for the Democratic Party to get him out, so it's CNN's job to help.
	So we're going to keep running these stories to keep hurting him and make it so that it can't be buried and just like settled outside court, just unlike, you know, if we keep pushing that, it's helping us.
	Now, very tellingly, there's an article just out, and this kind of is how the controversy, as I say, keeps getting minimized, although they're trying to keep it going.
	It's kind of like announcing, you know, that there was a massive blaze that burned all of California, but no one can see the fire.
	So now it's a blaze in, like, you know, San Diego County, and no one can see that either.
	So it's like two unnamed sources tell us there's a fire still burning somewhere, even though no one knows where it is.
	Well, the latest one is here.
	I'm laughing at this because it's in the Huffington Post.
	And it basically says, the allegation now is, quote, Getz showed nude photos of women to colleagues on the House floor.
	Goetz has apparently been, hey, take a look at this one.
	That's one of my girlfriends right there.
	Or I don't think it's claiming it's showed nude photos of Goetz himself.
	And so the Huffington Post goes, evidently the House colleagues have not complained or anything.
	And so what the Huffington Post does is they interview Goetz.
	Two HR, human resources officers, what if Getz had done that while working in the private sector?
	So now they're working on a hypothesis.
	And of course, these HR people, they go, what if he had allegedly shared nude photos in a regular workplace?
	And this one guy goes, well, usually one incident on his own is not considered a hostile work environment, but if he did it repeatedly...
	This is all gets did.
	Hey, check out this one compared to the one I showed you yesterday.
	I got some new ones to show you tomorrow.
	So if it's a repeated pattern, it could be an HR violation.
	So we're listening to all this nonsensical conversation, all based on a hypothesis.
	And, you know, I don't know.
	I mean, I don't really have a position on this swapping of nude photos.
	I mean, I guess for me, it's like it depends on who the nude photo is of.
	Oh. I mean, I don't want to see Jerry Nadler's nude photo.
	I think I'm a firm no on Liz Cheney.
	Well, I mean, Chuck Schumer?
	I wouldn't mind, but only because I have a theory about Chuck Schumer, which I think could be verified if I were to see a nude photo.
	Look, bottom line of it, all of this is hot air.
	Hot air that was intended hit on Matt Getz.
	You know, it's to the credit of Matt Getz that he hasn't wavered.
	He's shown that kind of Trumpian aplomb.
	And the Trumpian aplomb is not just, you know, firm denial.
	It's a little bit of a, who cares, whoop-dee-doo.
	Go for it, guys, because you got nothing.
	And so even though Republicans are held to higher standards than Democrats, and Democrats can get away with it and Republicans can't, Matt Getz's point is, you got nothing there.
	You don't have the goods on me.
	Keep trying, morons.
	But I'm staying in office.
	I'm not going anywhere.
	And in a sense, my profile is bigger than ever.
	Reagan once said that one of the defining features of government is its sense of irresponsibility, and under the Biden administration, it is much worse than usual.
	I'm really worried about this regime we have in Washington, no sense of fiscal or monetary responsibility.
	So if and when things get crazy, as I expect them to, We're good to go.
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	I want to tell you about a remarkable story involving Stacey Abrams, USA Today, and the fact-checkers, notably PolitiFact.
	Because I want to show how, in our corrupt era, facts are literally manufactured.
	And what I mean by that is that facts are created out of non-facts.
	And history to the degree we can talk about the past as history is altered.
	In very deceitful ways, but it can't be altered by any one of these actors working by themselves.
	It has to be altered through a sort of institutional collaboration.
	I was on Fox News last night talking about this, but I want to spell it out here in a little more slow-motion detail.
	So let's follow the story as it happened.
	Stacey Abrams wrote an article in USA Today, an op-ed, in which she offered pretty strong support For the idea of a boycott of her state of Georgia.
	The idea is that to encourage corporations to boycott Georgia over Georgia's voter integrity law.
	And Stacey Abrams, as we know, doesn't like these integrity laws.
	She likes them watered down.
	She wants it to be really easy to vote because shenanigans aren't very easily caught when that happens.
	So she wrote this op-ed basically saying, and I want to...
	I want to quote from the op-ed a little bit.
	She says, She says, events hosted by Major League Baseball, world-class soccer, college sports, and dozens of Hollywood films hang in the balance.
	And she says, activists are urging Georgians to swear off of hometown products to express outrage.
	And she goes, until we hear clear, unequivocal statements that show Georgia-based companies get what's at stake, I can't argue with an individual's choice to opt for their competition." She goes on to say, I have no doubt that voters of color, particularly black voters, are willing to endure the hardship of boycotts.
	So, although there are some qualifications in there, it's a pro-boycott op-ed.
	But, then the Major League Baseball pulls out of Georgia.
	They take their business to Colorado, which, by the way, has even stricter voter laws.
	And by the way, Colorado is a largely, almost, I wouldn't say an all-white state, but a heavily white, predominantly white state, And so you're taking business away from black businesses in Atlanta and the surrounding areas and you're giving it.
	So Stacey Abrams was taking heat because there was a huge cost.
	I don't know if it was $100 million or $100 billion.
	$100 million of business.
	I'm transported away from Georgia.
	So suddenly Stacey Abrams has, you may say, second thoughts.
	Now an honest person would say, you know what, I was probably a little bit impetuous in calling for these boycotts.
	I don't really want to hurt my home state, but Stacey Abrams doesn't do any of that.
	Here's what she does. Consider the chutzpah of this.
	She goes, how about if I call USA Today and demand that they redo my op-ed?
	How about if I take my new position, which is I'm not for the boycott, but instead of doing another op-ed with second thoughts, which I then have to reconcile with my earlier op-ed, how about if I correct my earlier op-ed to now say something quite different?
	Unbelievably, USA Today agrees to this.
	And the new op-ed, with, by the way, no appending explanation, no editors, they stealth edited the original op-ed.
	And here's some of the new text.
	Instead of a boycott, I urge other events and productions to do business in Georgia and speak out against our law and similar proposals in other states.
	Suddenly, Stacey Abrams is now, quote, against the boycott.
	And she adds all this other stuff.
	All this kind of Republican bashing, you might say, is now in the Stacey Abrams revised op-ed.
	I'm going to read a couple of lines.
	Here she goes. This was not in the original op-ed.
	This is in version 2.
	So here's Stacey Abrams.
	She has position A. Boycott.
	She then decides to do position B. No boycott.
	She rewrites the op-ed with the help of USA Today, and it is stealth edited to make it sound like this was the original op-ed.
	And then, this is the kicker, fact-checking sites like PolitiFact put out messages.
	Is it true that Stacey Abrams changed her position on boycotts?
	Now, in fact, it is true.
	In fact, the two versions of the op-ed are prima facie evidence of it.
	But what PolitiFact does, which is actually perhaps as deceitful as anything USA Today does, PolitiFact uses the revised op-ed, the changed op-ed, to pretend like Stacey Abrams never had a different position in the first place.
	So PolitiFact now uses the revised version to fact-check conservatives arguing, hey, Stacey Abrams, you flipped on this, you changed your mind.
	And PolitiFak goes, no, she didn't.
	Take a look at the op-ed, the stealth-edited op-ed.
	So what I'm getting at here, and the story I think is now clear, is that you've got three separate actors, all, in a sense, equally corrupt.
	One of them, not honest enough, this is Stacey Abrams to say I changed my mind, a second USA Today, supposedly a newspaper with some decency, nevertheless allowing a politician to change their mind and not explain themselves but re-edit their old op-ed to make it look like it was something different than it was?
	And third, the fact-checking fakery, which is ultimately promulgating a lie, but by pointing to this stealth-edited op-ed as its, quote, evidence, when they should have known, if they bothered to really do any fact-checking, they'd notice that there were two versions of this op-ed, version A, version B. They would have been the ones to blow the whistle on Stacey Abrams instead of becoming a collaborator, an enabler of her lies.
	Pet stains and odors, not good.
	If you're thinking of replacing your carpets due to pet stains and odors, you must try Genesis 950.
	The reviews are amazing.
	This is one product that we've tried.
	It actually works. Now, with water, it breaks down the bonds of stains and odors so they are gone for good.
	Its antibacterial component removes pet odors from carpet and padding.
	It can be used in a carpet cleaning machine, and it's green, so it's safe for your family and pets.
	Genesis 950 is made in America.
	One gallon of industrial strength.
	Genesis 950 makes up to seven gallons of cleaner.
	But Genesis 950 is also great for bathrooms, floors, upholstery, and grease stains.
	Debbie uses it to clean the kitchen and recently got ink on her pants, and Genesis 950, wow, took it right off.
	Genesis 950 has great customer service.
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	I can't say I've ever been sort of a superfan of the Oscars.
	I may have watched one or two over the years, or really parts of them, because...
	The Oscars, typically it's like a two-hour event.
	And the first hour is devoted to, you know, unbelievable minutia.
	Best supporting actress of a supporting actress of a supporting actress.
	Best foreign film made in the latitude of this.
	And all kinds of stuff where it's like...
	And then the speeches... Oh, I want to thank my agent.
	And I want to thank my mother.
	Without her, I would not exist.
	Of course, my father may have had something to do with it also.
	So, I mean, we have to listen to this stuff.
	Now, admittedly, it's all surrounded with all this glitter and all these people with their hair sticking out.
	And, you know, I'm wearing this designer.
	I mean, it's a certain kind of posing.
	And you have to remember that most of these people didn't finish high school.
	I mean... Or they dropped out of college to go to film school.
	So these are hollow people.
	They're really all about the show.
	And so I say to myself, this is a little bit of a sorry spectacle of humanity.
	Just the fact that these people are wearing jewels and so on.
	And by the way, often not theirs.
	They're given these jewels by companies to wear.
	So the Oscars to me has always been a little bit of a pathetic event.
	My curiosity is like, who won best movie?
	Oh, should I see that movie?
	Yeah, maybe. So that's kind of my interest.
	It's about a five-minute interest in a two-hour event.
	But... A lot of Americans have enjoyed the Oscars over the years.
	I guess they're more immersed in some of this popular culture than I am, and maybe they have a great curiosity.
	I wonder which is the best foreign film of, you know, 1997.
	But the Oscars have been slipping badly, to my great delight.
	Nobody's watching. This is fantastic.
	Let me give you some numbers. Very telling.
	Oscar viewership, 2014.
	43 million.
	2015, 37 million.
	2016, 34 million.
	2017, 32 million.
	Well, I'll fast forward. 2020, 23 million.
	This year, 2021, 9.8 million.
	Basically, viewership has kind of collapsed.
	The floor has dropped.
	And people, I think, just are not caring anymore.
	They no more care about the Oscars than they care about, you know, the NBA. A lot of Americans are essentially exiting these institutions.
	And by the way, for their life, I think this is a really good thing.
	Now, the...
	I have a slight stake in this.
	I mean, not only have I never won an Oscar, I don't want to win an Oscar.
	I don't want to be part of that crowd.
	Part of what's made me invulnerable to Hollywood is not being part of their community.
	I just don't care.
	Now, they've given me, like, six Razzies, which I guess is an institution parasitic on the Oscar.
	The Oscar's for, like, the best movie.
	The Razzie's supposedly for the worst movie.
	So I get a Razzie for, like, Hillary's America.
	Why? Because Trump won.
	So they're mad. Let's give Dinesh a Razzie.
	That'll show him. You know, or let's give Dinesh the worst actor Razzies.
	The worst actor in the world.
	Now, I can't be the worst actor because I'm playing myself.
	I am kind of the world's expert at playing one Dinesh J. D'Souza.
	So I should be getting the best actor award for the role I was selected to play.
	No one is bad. No one could do it better.
	I think it's fair to say.
	I mean, you could try, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio playing me, you know, be interesting to think about.
	But he's still going to come in a narrow second to me.
	No matter how good his performance.
	Interestingly now, Trump issues a statement, very Trumpian.
	Trump has been sort of a little quiet these days, but heavily felt the need to weigh in on the Oscars.
	And I'm going to talk about his writing.
	What used to be called the Academy Awards and is now called the Oscars, a far less important and elegant name.
	So Trump has an issue with calling it the Oscars.
	He has had the lowest television ratings in recorded history.
	Even lower than last year, which set another record low.
	And then he goes back and says basically, don't be so politically correct and boring.
	He's right on the money right there.
	Those are the two killers of the Oscars.
	A, boring, and B, politically correct.
	In fact, they had Ricky Gervais, the comedian, a year or two ago when, of course, he scandalized them by basically calling them a bunch of useless losers who know nothing about politics but pontificate about it.
	Why? Because, you know, they played a scene in the movie.
	And so Ricky Gervais wasn't invited this year.
	The one guy who could have saved the Oscars, they decided not to have him.
	And so Trump goes, bring back a great host.
	Ricky Gervais would do it, but they're not about to do that.
	And then finally he goes, these television people spend all their time thinking about how to promote the Democrat Party.
	Well, that's kind of true.
	So the bottom line of it is you have, I think in the Oscars, a dying institution.
	But Hollywood itself, it seems to me, is a dying institution.
	They just don't know how to make a good movie anymore.
	Yeah, they rely on a lot of technological flim-flam, but you just have to take their recent movies.
	And I don't just mean the movies from the last five years.
	Even take a movie like Titanic.
	Now, you might actually like Titanic, but if you like Titanic, there's something very wrong with your sense of taste.
	Titanic stinks. Yeah, it's a good song.
	I know, Celine Dion, you know, goes on.
	You know, I know all that.
	But Titanic, if you compare it, I mean, take any old disaster movie.
	Take The Poseidon Adventure and compare it to Titanic.
	If you discount slightly for the technological differences, which are obviously to be expected, one is a movie that has a story, a plot, interesting characters, a sense of the gravity of life and what's at stake.
	And the other does not.
	So the point about Hollywood is that they just don't know how to make a movie.
	And if you're in the movie business and you don't know how to make a movie, you really shouldn't be in the movie business.
	It doesn't matter what your politics are or who you voted for.
	Everyone should have the right to express themselves freely.
	The fact that there are some subjects we can't talk about is very alarming.
	Sadly, these big tech monopolies have opted for silencing tactics and censorship.
	Now, to fight back against big tech's control of the Internet, I use ExpressVPN.
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	I want to talk in this segment about literature, about Daniel Defoe and his novel...
	Robinson Crusoe. Now, a few weeks ago, I spoke about Defoe and his work, which was called a Journal of the Plague Year.
	And he described a plague that had occurred in London, actually occurred when he was a small boy.
	And he gave a very vivid account of it.
	And I was kind of comparing that moment to the COVID era in which we have a different kind of plague in 2020 and now 2021.
	Of course, Defoe is most famous for Robinson Crusoe.
	And Robinson Crusoe has attracted a lot of attention over the years, not just as a work of literature.
	It's kind of a riveting work of literature.
	I read it in college as an English major for that reason.
	But it's also been a book that has been of considerable interest to economists.
	And that's what I want to talk about today.
	Kind of the economist's reading of Robinson Crusoe.
	And you can kind of see why the economists would find this fascinating.
	Because economists are all about scarcity.
	They're all about trade and exchange.
	And here you've got sort of the quintessential man on an island by himself.
	He has to fend for himself.
	And he has to provide for himself.
	And whatever he needs, he can't really buy or sell.
	He's just got to sort of do it.
	And so does Robinson Crusoe, the first question that kind of jumps to mind, is Robinson Crusoe, in a sense, an economic actor at all?
	Does he have to make the normal types of economic choices that most people make?
	Some economists have given a sort of, you almost call it a romantic portrait of Robinson Crusoe.
	One writer, actually, kind of in his own time, Richard Steele, basically said that Robinson Crusoe's story is a memorable example, that he is happiest who confines his wants to natural necessities.
	And that he who goes further in his desires increases his wants in proportion to his acquisition.
	So this is kind of, I'd call it the Gandhian point of view.
	You're happiest if you use and have only what you absolutely need.
	And if you want more, you'll find that even though you get more, your wants kind of gallop ahead of what you have.
	And so you're on a kind of treadmill of perpetual discontent.
	Now, as I said a moment ago, a lot of economists think of Robinson Crusoe as sort of just by himself on this island, fending for himself.
	It was the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard who wrote an essay years ago in which he said, That doesn't mean he isn't making economic choices.
	Why? Because he still has to decide between A or B. He has to decide, for example, am I going to spend the day kind of walking along the coastline and looking for a ship?
	Or should I be digging into the ground to find berries?
	Or should I look for animals and try to see if there's something I can hunt?
	So, in other words, the fact that he's by himself...
	Doesn't mean that he isn't making economic choices in terms of dealing with the scarcities of nature that are all around him.
	There isn't just food falling from the trees, a manna from heaven, and Sir Robinson Crusoe can just devote his life to contemplation.
	He has to survive. He has to provide for his wants and needs.
	Now, this notion, and this has been a common notion with economists, that sort of Robinson Crusoe is a creature who's sort of removed from civilization, and he's a creature who is, in a sense, fending for himself out of nature itself.
	But the economists who do this, by and large, aren't really reading Robinson Crusoe.
	I have my copy right here, Robinson Crusoe.
	And when I dive into it, I realize that when Robinson Crusoe were shipwrecked, the ship is still out there in the ocean.
	Crusoe makes a raft and he goes to the ship, not once or twice.
	I think he goes like 11 times.
	And he's able to load his raft with all kinds of merchandise.
	I mean, here's just a sample passage where he's talking about, he goes...
	He goes, Now, Crusoe himself sort of gives vent to this kind of, I'm a creature of nature, when he goes...
	I smile to myself at the sight of this money.
	What art thou good for?
	Thou art no worth to me.
	So basically Crusoe's going, this money is useless.
	What am I going to do with it on the island?
	I can't buy anything.
	But what does Crusoe do?
	He keeps the money.
	He keeps the money. Why?
	Because he considers the possibility that he may not be all his life on this island.
	And if he ever gets off and is back in the world, the money would be some use to him.
	And in fact, that turns out to be the case.
	So the point I'm trying to make here is that with Crusoe going to the ship multiple times...
	It turns out he ends up with a whole bunch of stuff on the island that is the product of civilization.
	He ends up with all kinds of goods that he now has that make it impossible to say that he's fending for himself.
	He's not the isolated individual.
	Take something as simple as a scissors.
	Could Crusoe have made a scissors on his own?
	No. The scissors required a scissors factory.
	It required a whole infrastructure of civilization to do.
	And so the point to make here is that Crusoe, even though he's thought of as the natural, isolated individual...
	He brought with him from the outset the accoutrements, at least a number of the accoutrements of civilization.
	And not only that, he brought with him the knowledge of how to make and build things.
	Even the things that Crusoe builds, eventually he's able to build a sort of...
	he's able to build...
	You know, working constructions, both for the sea and for the land, but these involve know-how that Crusoe didn't just think of for the first time.
	He knew how to do it because he had seen people put things together, assemble them, work with wood, and so on.
	Now, Karl Marx had a considerable interest in Robinson Crusoe, and what Marx does is he basically uses Crusoe to make the point That Crusoe is an isolated individual making only what he needs.
	And for Marx, Marx calls that use value.
	Crusoe is making stuff to use.
	And Marx contrasts what he calls use value with exchange value.
	Exchange value is things that you make even though you don't need them.
	But the reason you make them is you want to swap them for something else.
	You're like, I'm going to make extra shoes.
	I only need two pairs or three pairs.
	But I'll make a hundred pairs because that way I can give this guy shoes and get money.
	I can then use the money to get something else.
	So Marx is trying to drill down to the basis of an economy.
	And he wants to celebrate the idea of Crusoe.
	Marx doesn't attack him.
	He talks about Crusoe as one guy...
	Making what he needs.
	And then Marx says, now imagine if we socialize this idea.
	Imagine if we take Crusoe and let's say multiply him by a million.
	And now we have a million people, like Crusoe, not each individually making what he or she needs, But all of them together making what they all need.
	So they're not catering to frivolous wants.
	They're not trying to make extra to swap and sell.
	They're not trying to, quote, get rich.
	They are collaborating together.
	And for Marx, that's communism.
	That, for Marx, is actually utopia.
	Marx presents this not as some horrific dystopia, but this is Marx's ideal.
	A million Robinsons Crusoes, not each on a separate island, but collaborating together to make a better society.
	Of course, Crusoe's world is changed toward the end of the novel or the second part of the novel dramatically when another guy shows up.
	This guy is Friday.
	And what's very interesting about this is that Friday at the beginning is treated by Crusoe almost as a slave.
	Now remember, Crusoe did save his life.
	And Friday basically is a willing slave because he, according to Crusoe, he sets my foot on his head.
	This, it seems, was in token of swearing to be my slave forever.
	Very interestingly, Murray Rothbard, analyzing this episode, talks about the fact that essentially Crusoe now has a choice.
	He's got this other guy and he can either conquer him and make him a slave or he can trade with him as a friend or as an associate, as a separate being with his own wants and his own needs.
	And Friday makes X and Crusoe makes Y and maybe they do an exchange.
	So you see the rudiments of human civilization.
	Very interestingly, as the novel progresses, Crusoe does come to see Friday as a friend.
	He doesn't treat him as a slave.
	And they part in the end as friends.
	Now, Crusoe comes back To England.
	And we don't know what happens to that friendship.
	Does it continue? Does it end?
	We don't know. But we do see this interesting transition from a subordinate relationship, which is the way it began, to a relationship of mutual friendship and association.
	So we see in Robinson Crusoe, and economists find this interesting, the movement away from a conquest ethic.
	I get somebody else's stuff by forcibly taking it.
	To now, I have a fellow worker who is making stuff.
	We either do it together and share the proceeds or he does X and I do Y and we engage in a certain form of barter or exchange.
	I think for me, what's interesting in looking at all these economic analyses, it shows the richness of how you can read a novel.
	Obviously, our Robinson Crusoe has been read in a spiritual way.
	It's been read as a sort of description of the state of nature in a philosophical sense.
	But here we have the kind of economist reading of Robinson Crusoe, a testament in the end to why these works endure, why they have power through the generations.
	Because even through specialized disciplines like economics and two centuries later, They still speak to us.
	I was kind of joking with Debbie the other day.
	I said, if you keep ordering MyPillow towels, our entire house will be full of towels.
	At the very least, let's clean out all our old towels.
	We don't really use them anymore.
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	We actually want towels to dry us.
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	Guys, I hope you're enjoying this podcast.
	I realize that I am being suppressed on Facebook and I think also on YouTube.
	And sometimes even when you click on the notifications, it won't notify you.
	You have to search for the podcast.
	By the way, the podcast is available, audio, Apple, Spotify, Google.
	And on video, YouTube, and also Rumble.
	If you don't have a Rumble account, follow me there.
	Subscribe to my channel there.
	And help me get the word out.
	Because there are people who are trying to constrict and block that from happening.
	Sometimes you have to search for me.
	If you go on YouTube, you may have to click on the icon of my face, and then it will pop up at the podcast.
	But people have told me, even on YouTube, YouTube is a little hard to find.
	Anyway, time for our audio question.
	Let's go to the question for today.
	Listen. Dinesh, you committed no crime.
	Nonetheless, we're punished for a crime.
	And that crime is being a free thinker and being able to express yourself in a country that's supposed to embrace freedom of speech.
	How did you overcome the adversity of the punishment that was given to you for no reason?
	And what benefits did you obtain from it?
	I think that You raise sort of two questions.
	One is, how did I deal with this adversity?
	Perhaps most significantly, some of the elements of it were comic.
	My sort of psychiatric examination I took with a grain of amusement.
	And you fill out these idiotic questionnaires.
	A rolling stone gathers no moss.
	What does this mean to you?
	And I'm like, well, what does it mean to you?
	Foolishness, really. And...
	The most serious aspect of my penalty was overnight confinement and sleeping in a dormitory for eight months with basically a bunch of hardened thugs.
	I dealt with that basically by, in a weird way, detaching myself from it or, to put it differently, treating myself as an observer in a strange anthropological environment where I should just keep my eyes open and learn a lot.
	And I did. I have a little bit of a serene disposition.
	I think I get this from my mom.
	I was never really afraid.
	In fact, at that time, I was courting Debbie.
	We weren't married yet, and she was like, Dinesh, you know, I don't know, you may not want to drive your nice car over there because, you know, thugs and...
	Really? Are you sure you want to keep your Rolex on?
	It's very dangerous.
	And I'm like, no, I'm actually going to maintain a certain normalcy.
	Nothing is going to happen to me.
	And in fact, nothing did.
	The people I was most scared of, not the thugs.
	The thugs running the facility, the U.S. government.
	In other words, what I was really worried about was that they would plant drugs in my locker.
	They add the combination to my locker, and then what would I do?
	No, they aren't mine.
	Perhaps the thing I learned most was the gangsterization of the U.S. government and of American politics.
	It totally dispelled my old civics book idea of American politics.
	Oh, American politics is a debate between two sides that both share a certain commitment to the country but have different ideals.
	One wants to stress liberty, the other wants to stress justice.
	No, it's not like that.
	You've got very bad people who use the system and are not above planting evidence, are not above going around the rules.
	They view people like me not as dissidents, not even as political opponents, but as dangerous enemies to be neutralized.
	So, in a way, the benefit of it for me was it opened my eyes to the true state of American politics.
	When many other Republicans and conservatives, including some of our own congressmen and senators, are sort of still sitting around the table, Why is the left acting the way it does?
	Don't they realize that they're behaving in an authoritarian way?
	They're authoritarians.
	They're behaving pretty much the way that a viper behaves.
	It behaves like a viper because that's what it is.
	It's a snake. And recognizing that it is a snake is the beginning of political wisdom.
	So part of being in incarceration and so on, however unfair, is it opened my eyes to the true state of things.

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