All Episodes
Previous Next
May 3, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:28
ABOLISH THE FBI Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 81
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I'm not for defunding the police, but I am for abolishing the FBI, and I'll tell you why.
Do the police trace their history to the slave patrols of the Old South?
I'll explain. This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
America needs this voice.
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.
For a long time, the FBI has stood as this kind of neutral police agency of government administering the laws, going after the bad guys.
Many of us got our early impression of the FBI from the movie The Untouchables, where Elliot Ness leads this group of intrepid FBI agents chasing down the mafia.
And this is, you could call it, the romance of the FBI. But unfortunately, it contrasts very grimly with the reality of today's FBI, which is a corrupted agency, corrupted at the top, and since the instructions percolate down from the top, corrupted through and through.
I'm not saying every ordinary FBI agent is bad.
I'm saying that the top brass is very bad.
Now... I want to illustrate this point by giving two set of contrasts that highlight what's happened to the FBI. Look, for example, at the way the FBI treats, on the one hand, the January 6th protesters, with, on the other hand, the Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters.
Now, let's start with January 6th.
The FBI is on a sort of relentless manhunt to chase everybody down.
Every grandma, every teenager, they're putting out photos all over social media.
Let's get this guy there.
And in some cases, they're talking about people who didn't do anything.
They didn't even go in the Capitol.
They were just in D.C., but nevertheless, they were caught in some sort of video.
So the FBI is relentless.
In pursuing these people.
It takes great jubilation when they grab one of them and they send the SWAT teams, they send the drawn guns, dawn raids.
This is their MO. Interestingly, with the Antifa guys, there was video available.
These are people taking over buildings, burning churches, confronting people.
Much more violence occurring over many, many months.
Yet the FBI is like, what can we do?
How can we find these people?
They're masked after all.
So the FBI suddenly goes limp, goes, you know, sort of see no evil.
And they, so the contrast is just glaring.
It's obvious. And then look at the treatment afforded people once they're arrested.
The January 6th guys immediately locked up.
They're put in solitary confinement.
They're virtually being tortured.
Whereas the Antifa guys catch and release.
We catch them. They're out the next day.
They catch them again. They're out the next day.
So it's not just the hunting them down.
It's the way they're treated once they are apprehended.
That makes all this really clear and really disgusting.
Now, the second contrast I want to highlight is the contrast between the way that the FBI has treated, for example, Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer, with the way that they have, let's say, not treated Governor Andrew Cuomo.
So let's look at those two cases.
In the Giuliani case, the FBI... He does a dawn raid on Giuliani because they claim that they're looking for proof that he failed to register as a foreign agent.
First of all, is it necessary to do a dawn raid for that?
You're not looking for drugs in the house.
He's not holding someone captive.
Giuliani said through a statement that he had offered to sit down.
Both with the FBI and the Justice Department and show that he has not violated any laws.
But I think this is a scare tactic.
This is an intimidation tactic.
So see what the FBI does when they're turned into an instrument of this kind of a hit.
Now, Giuliani himself had offered to give the FBI, the Hunter Biden, information.
And here we're talking about copious evidence, emails and texts, and it's all there, thousands of them.
And what did they show?
The exact same crime that they were trying to get Giuliani on, failing to register as a foreign agent.
Well, Hunter Biden clearly was involved in making deals with foreign governments.
He didn't register as a foreign agent.
The proof is right there.
But the FBI couldn't have been less interested.
Oh, no. Why are you wasting our time?
We don't need to even see it.
They didn't even want to look at it.
So, here we see that Giuliani is the target.
Trump is the target. That's really all they're interested in.
Now, Giuliani also revealed that the FBI and the DOJ have been secretly tapping his iCloud, his emails.
His communications with Trump.
Let's remember, Giuliani is Trump's lawyer.
There's attorney-client privilege.
So here's the FBI blatantly violating the law.
And this is during the time when Giuliani was advising Trump on impeachment.
So in the middle of an important case, here's the government basically gaining access, secret access, without letting Giuliani know they have been doing this.
Now, let's turn to...
Let's turn to Cuomo. And here, what's interesting is what the FBI has not done.
Here, it's the case of the dog that hasn't barked.
Why? Because not only is Cuomo, not only is he facing innumerable charges of sexual harassment.
I mean, these are credible charges.
Why? Because they're not coming from Christine Blasey Ford.
Oh, I remember Andrew Cuomo when he was 15 years old.
None of that. These are cases recent.
Multiple people, they're Democrats, they work for Cuomo, they're on his team, they agree with him on policy, but they deplore his conduct.
So these are credible accusations, multiple, and yet the New York AG, the Attorney General is like, well, we'll investigate.
We'll basically pretend to investigate and pretend to make a report.
And so that's what's happening there.
But the FBI, again, could easily jump right in, demand, interview all the witnesses.
No, they're not doing any of it.
And then you have all the people who are dead because of Cuomo's actions.
So now I want to remind you that the Trump administration had sent a major Navy ship, the USS Comfort, to New York.
And they told Cuomo, listen, you can send patients from all your hospitals over here, and that will clear space for coronavirus patients.
No, Cuomo didn't want to be seen like he was obliged to the Trump administration.
So he sent the ship away.
No thank you. Instead, he orders nursing homes to take the coronavirus, the COVID patients.
Obviously, COVID spreads contagiously.
Obviously, a whole bunch of people die, thousands of them.
And then Cuomo decides to cover it up.
So he instructs his own staff, don't tell anybody about this, don't tell the Trump administration.
Don't tell state legislators in New York.
There was a report prepared for a medical journal.
The report was suppressed.
There was data compiled.
Cuomo told his people, don't give out this data.
So you can almost say, not only did his actions result in killing people, but then Cuomo himself, by the way, while he's peddling a book, a book that highlights his leadership in the COVID era, At this very time, he decides to, you may say, hide the bodies.
Hide the data showing how many people died and where and when.
And all of this has now come out.
And again, this would seem to be a flagrant violation of office.
And it's resulted in deaths.
It's resulted in people dying who wouldn't otherwise die.
You'd think this would be a matter, at the very least, for FBI investigation.
But the FBI is dead silent.
I say enough is enough.
This is, for me, enough indication that this agency is not an agency of justice.
Now, justice, the key point about justice is that it needs to be neutrally administered.
That's why we use the phrase equal justice under the law, because the law needs to treat people equally.
It needs to give people the same kind of scrutiny, the same kind of penalty for the same kind of crimes.
The FBI is really more like a hit operation.
Go Go get that guy.
Go get that guy. And manipulate the laws, twist them, and see if you can get the guy either by framing him or if you can't get him by framing.
Get him on something. It almost becomes an investigation in search of a crime in Giuliani's case.
I say enough is enough.
I'm not saying we don't need a federal agency.
I'm saying basically reconstruct it from the ground up with a better, more wholesome, more neutral, genuine, authentic Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Does the modern police force trace itself in a straight line to the slave patrols of the antebellum South?
This idea is being put out by champions of the defund the police to give the idea that the modern police are just a kind of resurrection or continuation of the slave patrols in the 19th century.
And recently, there was a viral video on social media.
This involved a professor at Cypress College haranguing a student on this point, saying, yes, this is all well known.
Now, where was this professor getting it from?
Well... She was getting this idea from people like Nicole Hannah-Jones, the author of the 1619 Project.
Here's a clip of Nicole Hannah-Jones putting out what you could call the original fabrication.
Listen. Certain parts of the country, modern policing has direct lineage to the slave patrols.
The slave patrols deputized white Americans to stop, to Question to search any black person who was walking about to ensure that enslaved people were not escaping or going in places where they weren't supposed to be.
Now, this is the usual humbug, and as you can see, it's percolating through academia.
Cypress College is not exactly a well-known college.
It's about as well-known as, say, Pine Tree College or Magnolia College or Bougainville College, and since those colleges don't exist, you get an idea of the Now, the simple fact of the matter is that the police do not trace themselves to the slave patrols.
They trace themselves to, not surprisingly, the police force in England.
By the way, prior to the existence of modern police forces, you really had vigilante justice, kind of like in the stereotype of the Old West or in the old cowboy movies, where if you want to protect your ranch, you've got to hire some gunslingers to do it because there are gunslingers who are out there ready to take your stuff.
So this is vigilante justice.
And by the way, there was a lot of this in the Old South.
I'm sure this is not what Nicole Hannah-Jones wants to have back in any form, the pre-police.
Now, in early America, you didn't have a formal police force, but what you typically had was, you would call it community watch.
Neighborhoods would get volunteers, and they would originally do these night watches.
Of course, some of them fell asleep, and this wasn't really a very organized operation.
Eventually, some cities then instituted day watches, and this was the kind of germ of the police system.
But meanwhile in Europe, I think the French were the first to start with a professional, paid, you may say, state-administered police system, but it was quickly picked up in England.
It's identified in England with the name of Robert Peel.
In fact, the English Bobby.
That name Bobby is taken from Robert, from Robert Peel, the founder of the modern English police system.
And the American system was, in a sense, taken from England.
And we're talking here about police who are accountable to the community, administered by the state.
There's a whole code of conduct.
So this has nothing to do with the slave patrols of the Old South.
Let's look at Philadelphia had the first, well no, Boston had the first American police force.
1838, pretty soon it was New York and Albany and Chicago, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Baltimore.
So this model began to spread.
Obviously in the North, you're talking about slavery being abolished at the time.
There are no slave patrols to speak of.
Now what about the South?
Now, it's true. In the South, the police force was used to do slave patrols.
But let's remember this. Who makes the laws?
Do policemen make laws?
No. Police are there to carry out the laws.
Somebody else makes the laws.
Who made those laws?
In the South, the laws were made by Democrats, by the Democratic legislatures of the South, initially promoting slavery, later promoting segregation, and Jim Crow, and the harassment of blacks.
These were Democrats. Let's remember, in the...
In the South, even after slavery, every segregation law was passed by a Democratic legislature.
It was signed by a Democratic governor.
So the police were called on then to carry out these laws.
They were made an instrument, if you will, of the bigotry of the Democratic legislatures.
Notice how Nicole Hannah-Jones is trying to shift the blame away from the Democrats.
By the way, the party she belongs to.
And pin the blame on the cops who are forced...
To carry out what the Democratic legislatures deem to be the law.
So, the bottom line of it is this notion that the police are nothing but slave catchers in disguise, you know, circa 2021.
It's complete nonsense.
It gives you the idea of the depth of deception and lying that has now become our public propaganda.
Not only spouted on the airwaves, as you saw, but also making its way into the classroom and used as a bludgeon to go after students who should know better but are not going to learn any better from their teachers.
The real genius of Mike Lindell is this guy has turned pillow making into an art.
Most of us think of a pillow as a pillow as a pillow.
There's nothing special about a pillow.
That's what I thought until I discovered my pillow.
And what Mike Lindell taught me is that a pillow like a watch or a phone or a car can be a work of art.
These pillows won't go flat.
You can wash and dry them as often as you want.
They maintain their shape. They're made in the USA. For a limited time, Mike is offering his premium MyPillows for the lowest price ever.
You can get a queen-size premium MyPillow for $29.98, normally $69.98.
So that's a $40 savings.
KingPillows only $5 more.
All the MyPillow products come with this 10-year warranty and a 60-day money-back guarantee.
You'll get deep discounts on all MyPillow products, the Geezer Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, MyPillow towel sets, Call 800-876-0227 or just go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use promo code Dinesh.
Who is responsible for the culture of violence that we see in our inner cities?
To listen to the left, you'd think, well...
It's the cops. The cops are going after people who are just going about their ordinary life.
But I think we know differently.
In fact, even the people who say it's the cops do know differently.
They're simply trying to highlight a villain to take attention away from what's really going on.
Interestingly, one group that does know what's going on are the rappers.
Why? Because many times their life comes out of inner city experience.
They're not known ultimately for making stuff up.
They tend to speak out of experience.
Here's one rapper speaking very candidly.
This is Chicago G. Erbo, speaking very candidly about what's behind inner city violence.
Listen. I can't tell you why, like it's just been so much, you know what I'm saying?
Like after a certain point, a beef could start with something so little as an Instagram post or a fight, like a petty fight.
You know him, alright y'all fight, he whoop you.
And you see him the next time and you got your gun and he don't.
And you shoot at him, you might not hit him, but now it's a war.
He gonna try to get his lick back.
And if he hit you, bloodshed.
It's a war. Somebody die, it's an everlasting war.
Yeah. So that's just the way it is.
And that's crazy.
It's like that everywhere.
So a lot of the beefs, people don't know why.
Like a lot of people coming up, especially now that Chicago is being known for Rap and violence and stuff like that and the spotlight is on Chicago rappers.
A lot of people get into shit that they don't know what's going on.
Say for instance, you not from this area but your homie from this area.
And you come around and you want to get into their beef and somebody comes shooting and you get killed the first day you come around.
That's the way it is, he says, and it's like this everywhere.
Other rappers say the same thing.
Here's a Chicago artist, King Yella.
He basically says, in the old days, old days meaning a couple of decades ago, people would get killed over drugs or they'd get killed over some robbery.
But he goes, now they get killed over sneakers.
They get killed over someone said the wrong word or looked someone the wrong way.
Another rapper, this is Polo G, also from Chicago.
He says, listen, in downtown Chicago, people look up to the shooters.
They don't look up to someone who is a successful businessman or realtor.
Those people are scarce.
And so what you have here is a...
It's a culture whose roots need to be identified.
Now, it may seem at first glance that the roots of this inner city culture is obviously it comes out of slavery.
But the truth of it is it doesn't.
It's more the culture of the slave owners than it is the culture of the slaves.
This is a very shrewd point.
And it's made in a couple of very important books.
This one is called Honor and Slavery.
And there's another one.
The other one is called Masters and Statesmen.
But both books are by the political scientist Kenneth Greenberg.
In Honor and Slavery, the whole book is focused on the institution of the dual.
Now, the duel, he says, is, I'm quoting him now, the central ritual of antebellum Southern life.
So, two guys lined up side by side, firing shots at each other, a duel.
And notice the similarity, by the way, between these duels and the duels that are going on right now as we speak in Oakland, in Baltimore, in St.
Louis, in Chicago, and so on.
Those are duels, too. Those are modern-day duels that are kind of a copy of these old duels.
Greenberg makes a very startling point.
He goes, According to Greenberg,
the key to all this, the reason the duel even became so popular, is that the antebellum culture, this is, by the way, the culture of the Democrats who maintained the slave plantations in the South.
He goes, their culture was almost defined, you might say, in opposition to slavery.
If the slave does X... The Southern Democratic slave owners would make sure that they did the opposite of X. And so, for example, slaves were thought to be habitual liars.
If you ask the slave, did you get that done?
Did you steal this? No, no, no, it wasn't me, it wasn't me, it wasn't me.
So since the slave was known to be a habitual liar, the code of the Democratic Southern slave master was the opposite.
Never tell a lie.
That's why if you accuse someone of being a liar, you insulted their honor.
Why?
Because in a way you were comparing them to slaves.
That's the point.
So right then the guy who was insulted would say, let's fight a duel.
And the duels, so today we may have duels over sneakers or over, you know, giving a leering look to somebody's girlfriend.
And the old Southern slave master duels were also over points of honor.
So, ironically, here in the inner city, we have a quasi or almost imitation aristocratic culture, which is to say a culture of honor, a culture of, you think about the phrase, you dissed me.
You dissed me means you disrespected me.
And so in a culture where there's very little genuine respect to be had, very little earned achievement where people can say, listen, I have a sense of respect and self-esteem because I worked hard, I got good grades, there's none of that.
Therefore, it's all based upon a show, a kind of exhibition.
And Greenberg makes the point that this was also the case in the Old South.
It was really all about...
Exhibition. To say something really funny is that Greenberg makes the point, he goes, for the southerner, his public image was defined by his nose.
He goes, why? It wasn't really about anything else because many parts of your body are hidden.
What is the part of your body that really, quote, stands out?
Well, it's your nose.
So Southerners, Southern Democratic, the slave master class as Greenberg, was obsessed with their noses.
And the worst thing you could do to a Southern gentleman is tweak his nose.
If you tweaked his nose, he's sure to challenge you to a duel.
Why? Not because his nose represented anything in terms of inner character, but his nose was sort of his public...
It was the key part of his face.
And so to tweak his nose is to insult his appearance, the way he carries himself in public space.
And so these are people who would go to shots.
They would put their lives in danger.
Why? Because ultimately this was a kind of carnival of...
A carnival contest of respect.
A contest in which respect could be earned or could be lost and it could be lost on something so simple as a misplaced word.
Greenberg writes, By assuming the greatest risk.
If you don't put your life in danger, that's why actually sometimes duelists didn't even like it if they were a great shot and the other guy was not a good shot because the outcome was predetermined.
So the dueler goes, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm a really good shot, so I'm going to let you have two pistols.
Why? Because that way you kind of have an equal chance to kill me as I have to kill you.
So I'm not saying all these elements are directly displaced into the inner city today, but many of them are.
And so we have supreme irony.
That the dysfunctional culture of the inner-city underclass bears an eerie similarity and could, in fact, be traced from, at least according to Kenneth Greenberg, the culture not of the slaves, but of the slave owners.
You know what saved us during the COVID lockdown?
Omaha Steaks.
Debbie likes to have our cooking kind of simple and easy, yet the Omaha Steaks are delicious, and I've got to say this as a foodie who's not all that easily convinced.
I've got so many Omaha Steaks favorites, the beef stroganoff, the fully cooked pot roast, the chicken and dumplings, jambalaya is making me hungry right now.
Now, Mother's Day is this weekend.
Send mom exactly what she craves this year, the mouth-watering Let's Go Grill Package from Omaha Steaks.
Visit omahasteaks.com and her keyword Dinesh in the search bar to order today.
This package includes signature butcher-cut filet mignons, boneless pork chops, kielbasa sausages, and so much more.
Plus, mom will get the tasty bonus of 12 ultra-juicy Omaha Steak Burgers, That's almost four pounds of free burgers.
To top it off, you also get $20 off on your first order.
Treat mom to the best steak of her life, guaranteed.
Visit OmahaSteaks.com.
Use the code Dinesh in the search bar.
Give mom something she'll love.
Plus, 12 free Omaha Steakburgers.
$20 off at checkout on the first order.
This is the Let's Grow Grill package.
It's selling out fast. Don't wait and miss out.
OmahaSteaks.com.
Keyword, Dinesh.
In the last segment, I talked about the ways in which inner city gang culture, the culture of you dissed me, let's fight a duel, closely resembles the similar culture of aristocratic respect and easy offense that existed in the 19th century in the slave-owning South.
And I want to continue that exploration by turning to something that is very strange, but I think very interesting.
It is why the old Southerners hated the game of baseball.
This may seem like an odd topic for me to choose, but you'll see that it ties right back into what we're talking about.
So, Kenneth Greenberg, in his book on honor and slavery, makes the interesting observation that in the Old South, they didn't like baseballs.
Now, baseball, by the way, started the first baseball clubs in upstate New York, Rochester, in the 1820s.
And there began to be baseball leagues organized.
It began to spread through Manhattan and Brooklyn.
And then baseball spread like wildfire to the United States.
It made its way to the Midwest.
We saw baseball clubs popping up in places like Cleveland and Philadelphia and Chicago, Detroit, Minnesota.
But, says Greenberg, baseball never really caught on in the antebellum South.
He says, it's not that no one played baseball there, but he goes, you'd be hard-pressed to find baseball leagues.
And he says, it was kind of a rarity.
At the time when New York had more than 100 organized baseball teams, you were hard-pressed to find a single one organized in the South.
Now, the question is, why is that?
Greenberg's overall point in his book is it's because the southerners, the slave owners, this is the democratic slave owners of the Old South, developed a culture in direct opposition to the behavior of the slaves.
So whatever the slaves did was bad.
So if the slaves stole lies, the masters would develop a code of honor in which telling a lie was absolutely anathema.
Someone who's accused of telling a lie, they want to fight you to the death.
Because the slaves were seen to steal.
The concept of a gentleman stealing in any way was seen as anathema.
And very interestingly, the other feature of slaves, says Greenberg, is the desire to run.
Because slaves were often challenged.
They were chased. They were whipped.
And what would they do? They'd take off!
They'd flee. They'd run for their lives.
And so, therefore, says Greenberg, the Southern gentleman developed an aversion to running.
Running was seen as a slavish thing to do.
Now, Kenneth Leitner, who was once a slave in South Carolina, describes the first attempt by a Southern slave owner to play baseball.
And it's very interesting to watch.
Here's what he says. He says that the slave owner...
A guy named Mars, Mars meaning master, Kitchen.
Mars Kitchen is getting ready to play baseball.
He goes up to the bat, and the ball comes flying toward him, and he hits it.
And the ball goes sailing away and he has a triumphant look on his face and he's enjoying the game so far.
But then everybody watching the game shouts, run, kitchen, run!
And according to the observer, Ken Leichner, he goes, kitchen froze.
He goes, he shouted, why should I run?
I've got more hits at the ball.
So the fielders retrieve the ball, they tag him out.
But Mars Kitchen simply refused to run.
Why? Because running is something that the slaves do.
So the incredible fact here is that the first aspect of baseball, hitting the ball, the slave masters love that.
Why? Because that's a masculine thing to do.
It shows mastery over a fast-moving object.
They love the idea. You're in charge.
You hit the ball. But the next step of baseball is you have to take off!
You have to go to first base and second base.
This part of it, the southern slave owners absolutely hated because this to them suggested cowardice.
This suggested basically fleeing for your life.
This suggested some guy chasing me with a whip.
So suddenly baseball itself and the simple routine of this game becomes anathema because of its resemblance to something that the slaves might do.
The slaves run, so I refuse to run.
You know, many years, several years ago, I had an old friend in Washington, D.C., a very interesting man named David Bovenizer, and we were going to a conference, and we were late and the plane was going to leave, and in those days, this was pre-9-11, you could get to the airport, you know, 30 minutes before, and like, David, we have to run!
But he wouldn't.
And I'm like, David, we're going to miss the flight.
And he said something very interesting to me that I only understood when I read Greenberg's book.
He goes, Dinesh, a southern gentleman never runs.
And I was so flabbergasted.
I looked at him like, you're kidding, right?
And he was not kidding.
And so I ran, and I made the flight, and David took the next flight.
So we see here how in the 20th century, some of these habits somehow ingrained themselves in people.
So when we think of culture, we talk about culture, making culture, the culture of the inner city.
We have to realize that these are practices that developed in response to To certain conditions, in this case the conditions of slavery themselves, they embed themselves in the culture, and then in some ways they have lasting influences.
In the case of my friend David Bovenizer, even in catching a flight, and as I mentioned before, residual influences even among the very people who were the targets of the oppression of the slave owners, namely the descendants of those slaves now living in inner-city America.
You know, for a long time, I never gave a moment's thought about digital security, and this is kind of the way the digital platforms like it.
They want unlimited, unquestioned access to your data.
But now I've gotten smart.
Trust me, there's never been a more important time to protect your digital rights.
That's why I and thousands of my listeners choose to secure our online data by using ExpressVPN.
Did you believe that a VPN isn't for you because you can use the Internet just fine without one?
Anytime you go online, your internet service provider can see every site you're visiting.
Are you confused about how a VPN works?
ExpressVPN is an app for computers and smartphones that encrypts your network data and reroutes it through a secure server.
That means you can use the internet more anonymously without having your activity tracked.
VPNs aren't complex.
They aren't just for tech experts.
Take it from me. With ExpressVPN, you launch the app, tap one button to protect yourself.
It's that simple. I trust ExpressVPN to protect my online data because they're rated number one by CNET and Wired, and they stand for my values.
Now's the time to take a stance.
Take back your privacy at expressvpn.com slash dinesh.
And get three extra months free on a one-year package.
Again, that's expressvpn.com slash Dinesh.
E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash Dinesh.
Three months free. Visit the site expressvpn.com slash Dinesh right now.
Alexandra Lanes is a political commentator.
I came across her, well, I have to call them rants, on social media.
It's a little kind of an intellectual firehose.
They're really fun to listen to.
By the way, you should follow her on Twitter.
She's RealAlexLanes.
And then I heard she had gone down to the border, and I thought it'd be really fun to have her come on the podcast and talk about her experiences.
Alex, thanks for coming on.
It's glad to have you.
Let me start by asking you, you've been sort of a, well, I don't want to call you a ranter, but what gave you the idea to go down to the border?
Well, I've been wanting to go down to the border for a few years now, and it's pretty personal to me because my father is actually not from America.
My father is from Mozambique in Africa, and he has his own immigration story, and he did it the legal process.
And hearing his stories and hearing what he had to go through and then seeing what we're dealing with now down at the border, I just really wanted to take it upon myself to go and see it in person.
Now, is your father alive today?
Yes, he is.
So what is his view when he sees, you know, this sort of surge of the border, people kind of pushing their way through the Biden administration?
Does he feel, I mean, as I do, you know, as a legal immigrant, that we went through a lot, we stood in line, we played by the rules, and to see this kind of blatant skirting of the rules, I mean, I find it extremely annoying.
I just wondered if your dad shares my sentiment.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I had the honor, or he had the honor, we both were able to go down to the border together.
So seeing it in person together was extremely eye-opening.
And he feels the exact same way.
You know, he did it the legal way.
And he became an American citizen 10 years.
He had to wait 10 years after getting his green card.
So there was a process that he had to go through.
And it was a very hard one.
And he had a lot of It was a lot on him.
Obviously, he's proud to be an American and he's proud that he did it the legal way, but he feels the exact same way.
It's almost like a slap in the face to people that are doing it the right way and doing it with a long process that we have to go through.
Our immigration process isn't perfect, but There's people that are standing in line and they're working hard and they're researching what our country goes through and the history behind our country.
And to see people doing it so easily, illegally, it's a slap in the face to them.
Which border did you go down to and what were your impressions?
What did you see? Yeah, we went down to McAllen, Texas, and we actually went McAllen, Texas, as well as the Rio Grande City and Roma Bluff.
And we got to see the gaps in the wall.
We got to see the parts where the wall construction has stopped mid-construction.
We talked with Border Patrol agents and state troopers and listening to their stories of the things that they have to go through and see every single day.
With no recollection, you know, no acknowledge of the president and vice president, you know, acknowledging the crisis that's actually down there.
We went to Roma Bluff, which was one of the biggest parts of drug trafficking, drug smuggling.
Very dangerous, by the way.
We were being watched the entire time we were there on the Mexico side and on the American side.
Scouters were watching us the entire time.
We saw a group getting ready to cross as the sun was going down, and they were definitely waiting for us to leave before they did so.
You know, we heard stories of a six-month-old that was drowned in the Rio Grande because the cartel dropped her, and they left her there because they didn't want to deal with her.
We also heard of a seven-year-old that was sexually assaulted so brutally she lost her voice.
These are stories that Kamala Harris needs to go down to the border and hear and see for herself because the news is not reporting this.
I mean, it seems like you have this—although this is all done supposedly for the benefit, the humanitarian benefit of these migrants, I mean, I find it appalling the way in which kids are treated as almost, you could call them human passports, that are being exploited not just by the cartels and the kidnappers on the Mexican side, But I would say in some ways are being exploited politically by the Democrats on this side because they recognize that that is the way for illegals to get through.
So the kid is the excuse.
And then I think you put out some pictures on social media of all this wall that's ready to be put in place, but it's almost as if you've got the Biden administration saying, you know, we don't want the wall.
We'd rather have the problem Because we see this redounding to the long-term benefit of our party.
Do you think that's the endgame here for the Democrats, that it's ultimately about letting people in so that they get more votes, so that it's sort of a demographic shift to the United States?
Why are they doing this in your opinion?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know a lot of people were saying that, you know, Kamala, you know, she was assigned to work on this border crisis and she's not doing it.
But I think this is exactly what she wants to do.
She wants to neglect the wall.
She wants her and Biden both, the administration, they want open borders because they know that in the future that will create more Democratic voters for themselves and for their party to kind of move along with their socialist agenda and so forth.
So this is exactly what they wanted.
Their plan is going forward. But in the end result, it's only endangering Americans and the immigrants that are coming across here.
And kind of going back to what you said with exposing these children that are coming across, that's exactly what it is.
I mean, they're using it for personal gain.
The media is a huge problem with this.
They're banking on these tug-at-your-heartstrings stories, but they're not focusing on the actual horrors.
And at the end result, they're dangering the Border Patrol, state troopers, Americans, business owners, people that live along the border, and the immigrants that are going through this danger crossing.
I mean, there's very little of a silver lining here, Alex.
Now, Debbie, my wife grew up, at least when she came from Venezuela at the age of 10, she grew up in Harlingen, Texas, right near Brownsville, right near McAllen.
I think if there's one good thing coming out of this is that that's the blue part of Texas.
Heavily Hispanic, I think, as you know, many of those people are kind of waking up.
They're beginning to see the sheer callousness of the Democrats.
And so you're beginning to see, I think, a real shift We're good to go.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, being down there in that environment and seeing the people that have businesses down there and that live down there and that have to deal with this influx of immigrants, you know, no one is anti-immigration.
I think that's the biggest key here is that keywords legal and illegal.
No one is anti-immigration.
But many of us are anti-illegal immigration.
There is a process. And I also think it's so crazy.
You know, we saw activity right next to a legal port of entry.
So this just gives you a perspective of how dire the situation is.
And you know, it's so easy to have an opinion in the comfort of your living room with a popcorn in one hand and a soda in the other.
But unless you're actually down there talking with people that have to deal with it every day, you don't get to sit there and say that everything's okay.
I mean, has it been to you startling to see the way in which the media operates in flagrant propaganda mode?
They do not cover real stories.
They convert bogus narratives into stories.
And when you see it up close, it's one thing to hear about it, the fake news media.
But when you see X and then you look at the newspaper or the television, they're showing a completely different picture.
You begin to suspect that in the cases that you know, they're obviously lying.
So they're probably lying about all kinds of other stuff that you don't know, where you're not on the scene to be able to verify for yourself.
What is your take on the role of the media in perpetuating these, well, big lies?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, like I said before, the media banks on these tug at your heartstrings stories, and they're only showing the groups, the family units, the women and children that are coming across and wanting a better life in America to live the American dream and have a better life for their children.
And yes, that is the case for a lot of them, for most of them.
But you also have to take into account the teenagers, the grown men and adults that, you know, the smugglers and the traffickers cartel, they're pushing these family units to one side.
A lot of them are actually in McAllen, Texas.
But you're forgetting about other parts of the border, like Loretto and Rio Grande City.
They're pushing these teenage men and adults into these other sides where the Border Patrol is not focused so much on them.
And that's where they're smuggling drugs and weapons.
And that's where the danger comes in.
So the media is only portraying one side of the story, which every immigrant that's crossing illegally, they're just seeking asylum and they just want a better life.
And I don't want to take that away from them because that certainly is the case for most of them.
But you also have to give attention to those that want to come here illegally and do harm.
And they're smuggling the drugs, the weapons and human trafficking.
Hey, Alex, thanks for coming on and sharing what you saw and what you experienced.
It's really fun. We'll look forward to having you back sometime.
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Debbie and I recently had a remarkable conversation with Dr.
Douglas Howard, who founded the company Balance of Nature.
This is a remarkable guy.
He convinced both of us that we're not eating enough fruits and veggies, well, even though we thought we were.
There's an easier way than to eat the stuff you don't like.
This is the Balance of Nature solution.
Can you imagine how you'd feel if you were eating 10 servings of fruits and veggies every single day?
Debbie started first. Now I'm doing it too.
We take 6 daily capsules and we're set.
We get all the vital nutrients sourced from 31 fruits and veggies every day.
Debbie also swears by the fiber and spice powder.
She says she's never been... Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code America.
We keep hearing from the left the term democracy.
Oh, we are pushing HR1 because we want to achieve true democracy.
Well, HR1 is more of a rigging of the rules of the game.
It's not about democracy per se.
Or we've got to fight these voter integrity laws because, you know, we've got to protect democracy.
So this is the propaganda of the left.
But Democracy, the popular participation in government, democracy in action, is actually a fun thing to see when it really happens.
And just recently, there was a telling incident in Vail, Arizona.
We're a group of parents who became just disgusted, infuriated, I would say even driven to despair by the irrationality of their school board.
A school board that continued and insisted on strict mask mandates.
And here you have these kids who have a very low to infinitesimal chance of getting COVID and an equally low to infinitesimal chance of disseminating it.
And even the CDC has clearly emphasized the relatively low vulnerability of kids, especially very young kids.
And yet, ignoring all this, you may say, not listening to the science.
The school board is like, no, they're immovable on the issue.
So the parents decided, let's show up and confront these people.
Let's ask them questions. Let's demand.
So you have a remarkable site here where the parents show up and guess what happens?
The school board flees.
They run. They take off, leaving the parents in a very weird position.
And I want you to see what happens next.
Listen. Perfect.
Board member needs to second.
Okay, we need to have a vote.
Okay, say your name. Angelica, I. I, Tiffany Sanders.
I, Stacey Olinger.
I, Billy. I, Anastasia.
Okay, that's unanimous.
No more mask and veil.
So, this is really fantastic.
The part that you see, you have the parents who decide, hey, listen, if the school board is going to run away, a bunch of cowards, let's just take it as a sign that they've all resigned.
They don't want to be on the school board anymore.
So, the school board, which really, in all decency, should have...
Sat down with the parents and listened to what they have to say and given them the justification, if any, could be given for these policies.
But no, they essentially took to their heels.
And so somewhat comically, the parents go, well, you know what?
Let's select our school board right now and let's just vote and abolish the mask mandate.
And so that's what they do. Now, this is not really valid.
It's not the correct procedure.
So it should be understood in a kind of symbolic or metaphorical way.
But what's going on here really is democracy in action.
This is what it looks like.
This is actually the democracy in action that Alexis de Tocqueville, when he came to America in 1831, he went to these New England town meetings.
He would see people show up and argue about this and argue about this road and argue about that tax.
The people directly participated in their local government.
And that's what's going on here.
This is the 21st century version of what Tocqueville saw.
And of course, you see how these elites, you see how these authorities respond.
They don't want it. When they have it, they take off.
And by the way, this is a Democratic school board.
It's got a couple of Rhino Republicans on it.
They took off too, kind of Romney style.
And so what is the lesson from all this?
The lesson from all this, I hope, is that the school board gets a kind of message that they realize, you know what?
We are accountable to these parents.
We are accountable to these children.
And we need to listen to what they have to say and make decisions that kind of take that into account.
So I'm hoping that the net effect of this, and by the way, if it's not, then these parents should organize, they should mobilize, they should contest these school board seats.
You see here why local elections matter too.
Sometimes we focus solely on the presidential race, but...
Very often important decisions are made by school boards and by city councils, and it's very important for us to be active at that level also to transform politics, in some cases at the level where it matters the most.
We see all kinds of leftist pressure mounting for student debt forgiveness, stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, and a $2 trillion so-called infrastructure plan.
The question comes to mind, who's going to pay for this?
Clearly, the Biden administration thinks they're playing with monopoly money.
Well, for years and actually decades, I never really invested in gold, just the stock market.
But now I'm really worried about the regime we have in Washington.
No sense of fiscal responsibility.
So if all your investments are tied to greenbacks, you're sitting on a little bit of a ticking time bomb.
Invest a portion of your savings into gold and silver.
Birch Gold Group is who I buy from and who you can trust to convert an IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by gold and silver.
That's right.
Through a little known tax loophole, you can convert your retirement savings that's tied to the stock market into an IRA backed by precious metals.
It's your hedge against inflation.
Text Dinesh to 484848 for your free information kit on precious metals IRAs or to speak with a Birch Gold representative today.
With 10,000 customers and A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless five star reviews, Birch Gold can help you too.
Text Dinesh to 484848 and invest in gold before it's too late.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was kind of loosely compiling my list, the Dinesh list of the greatest movies of all time.
And I'll share that list with you once I've got it kind of honed.
I've just been jotting down candidates for the list.
But I also... Introduce that idea by saying that I like to think about movies, I like to watch movies, and I watch them for enjoyment, but I pay attention to what I see, not just sort of architectonically, not just to see now as I myself do films what works well, what dialogue is effective and emotionally powerful.
I do that, but I also pay attention to what's going on in the story and sometimes going on under the surface.
I spoke earlier about the man who shot Liberty Valance.
I want to talk a little bit, just very briefly, about The Godfather, because to me, The Godfather, quite apart from its riveting crime story, and of course, I think The Godfather 1 and 2, I think 3 is a pretty good movie too, but certainly 1 and 2 belong in that list of the greatest movies.
But The Godfather has very powerful messages about all kinds of things going on that define life in America, that in a way define also American exceptionalism.
So, let me talk here about two of those features.
The first one is...
Immigration. Now, obviously, this is something as an immigrant myself, I'm very alert to.
Remember the godfather, Vito Corleone, is an immigrant.
He's a first-generation immigrant.
And his children are...
What I find really interesting about this is the way in which the immigration process plays itself out.
And you can see the difference in Vito Corleone's two children who have a very different American experience.
You may almost say that the older one follows the experience of his dad and is never Fully Americanized.
Whereas the second son, Michael, Al Pacino in the movie, becomes, you may say, American.
And that process of becoming American is critical to the immigrant process.
I have tried to, anyway, become American in the first generation.
But in general, it takes two generations.
And as we see with The Godfather, it happens only partially.
It happens not to the oldest son, but only to the second one, Michael.
So let's start with their names.
The oldest son takes the father's name, Sonny.
Sonny is basically junior.
He doesn't even have a name.
He's essentially an extension of his father.
The younger son has his own name, Michael.
The older son, Sonny, doesn't go to college.
Why? What for?
He goes into the family business.
The second son, Michael, not only goes to college, an American thing to do, you go away to college, but he also goes in the military.
There's a scene in The Godfather where Michael is talking about the military, and Sonny, the older brother, literally goes, why would you join the military?
That doesn't involve us.
We're Italians in America, but what do we have to do with America?
And Michael says, I don't see it that way.
So Michael identifies with the new country.
The second son, you may say, is assimilated while the older son is not.
Sonny marries an Italian girl.
He marries, you may say, in the tribe.
And his lifestyle is defined by that.
Michael courts a non-Italian girl, Kay, from Vermont, Diane Keaton.
Now, admittedly, when Michael is displaced to Italy, he does briefly marry an Italian girl in those circumstances, and then she's killed, so he comes back to America and then goes back to courting Kay.
But the very fact that he marries, you may say, outside the tribe, is part of this Americanization process I'm talking about.
Tragic ironies of the whole story, and this is my second point about the godfather, is the way in which in the name of trying to protect the family, and as we know in mafia families, the term family is a larger term than the immediate family.
It's the La Familia, it's the It's the people who are part of the gang.
That is the family.
So you have the actual family, the Corleone family, and then you have this larger family of really hired thugs and hired businessmen, all of them operating within this family structure.
So it's a very peculiar arrangement.
And, of course, the Corleones always say they're doing it for the family.
But, of course, what they end up doing is they end up destroying their family.
And we see this again and again.
One of the relatives, Pantangeli, is killed by the Corleones, or at least he's forced to commit suicide.
We'll look after your family.
But he is sent to his death.
Michael ultimately engineers the assassination of his own brother, Fredo, who was killed at the end, I believe, of Godfather II. Carlo betrays his brother-in-law to Barzini.
Michael ends up destroying his marriage, decay.
His children become, his son becomes alienated from him.
So the thing about it is, these are supposed family men.
I did it all for my family!
And to some degree, the movie supports this because it's very clear, if you look at the harsh conditions that made Vito Corleone come to America, it's almost like he became a gangster by necessity.
He comes to America and the mafia is now displaced to New York and there's a local mafia don who's taking away their money.
So the movie goes a long way to show that both for Vito Corleone, the father, this is Marlon Brando, And for Al Pacino, the son, Michael, their involvement in the mafia is sort of driven by necessity.
Think of why Michael even gets involved in the, quote, family business.
He doesn't want to. It's only when his father is shot and helpless and there are gangsters trying to kill him that Michael goes, you know...
They need a strong man to take the helm.
And so Michael rises to the occasion.
He steps into the family, but only by necessity.
So even though necessity is the cover for why these people become, you may say, bloodthirsty gangsters, the simple truth of the matter is that their great object of pursuit and protection, namely their own family, is ultimately destroyed in the process.
Mike Lindell has over a hundred products on his website.
All kinds of stuff. But he's always putting out new stuff.
And the new product?
You gotta get it. MyPillow MySlippers.
Mike has taken over two years to develop these slippers.
They're designed to wear indoor or outdoor all day long.
Made with MyPillow foam and impact gel to help prevent fatigue.
They're made with this quality leather suede.
For a limited time, Mike is offering 40% off the new MySlippers.
The MySlippers are so comfortable.
You'll want to get some for the whole family.
Debbie and I just love ours.
I got the moccasins.
She got the slip-ons. Go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Dinesh.
Deep discounts on all MyPillow products, the Giza Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, and MyPillow towel sets.
Call 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com.
Don't forget to use promo code D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
It's time for our mailbox.
Before we get there, I hope that you are subscribing to the podcast, hitting the notifications button.
Also, go on Apple Podcasts if you can and subscribe there and rate me five stars if you will.
Tell other people about it.
Help me get the word out.
I really appreciate it.
Time for our question and listen.
Hi Dinesh, I'm Regina from Indiana.
My husband Robin, I listen to your podcast every day and find your discussion of various issues very insightful, relevant, and informative.
My question is, we often hear people talk about the Latino vote and the African-American vote, but rarely do we hear a discussion of the Asian vote.
I come from the Philippines and knowing that a good number of Asian countries are former colonies of Western countries, I wonder which party or ideology would and could better serve the interests of Asian Americans.
How would you characterize the Asian vote?
This is a very good question.
I think, like a lot of Asian Americans, when I first came to America, before I really began to think politically, I found myself loosely attracted to the Democratic camp.
Why? Because they seemed outwardly, or at least symbolically, to be more hospitable to the outsider.
They seem to be more aware, you might say, about the experience of many of us who are coming to America with very little, starting out with very little.
And Democrats are like, yeah, we understand.
I think this is why, to this day, a lot of Asian Americans vote for the Democrats.
They are sucked into this kind of pose.
But in reality, even though we're starting from the bottom, there is a recipe for moving up in America.
And it's a very clear recipe.
It's called strong families.
It's called traditional values.
It's called studying hard and getting good grades.
Focusing on developing your talents through extracurriculars.
It's called saving as much as you can.
Entrepreneurial formation.
Pursuing professional careers.
So this whole work ethic, you might say, this is the code of the Republican Party.
So the Republican Party actually supplies the ladder for Asian Americans to succeed.
The Democrats, if they had their way, would turn us into dependents, into parasites, into ultimately, we would fall into the same predicament as other groups that are now American Indians, African Americans, highly dependent on the Democrats to pay the mortgage.
So the Democrats inflict the wound and then, in a sense, supply the bandage.
▲
Export Selection