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June 15, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:05:29
NO WHITES NEED APPLY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 111
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Is there state-sponsored discrimination in America?
Yes, there is. And it's coming from the Biden administration.
Also, how inflation isn't just a hidden tax.
It's theft.
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.
Is there state sponsored discrimination going on in America today?
Incredibly, there is.
But you know what? It's coming from the Biden administration.
So here's the incredible irony.
The very party that says that it's fighting racism, that it's identifying white supremacy as the problem, that is mobilized to act, is the party that is using the government to discriminate against citizens based on their race.
Wow. When I was at the Michael and Dale rally this past weekend, I was chatting with Diamond and Silk in our little trailer before we went up to the stage.
And Diamond and Silk were saying to me, they were like, Dinesh, you know, we keep hearing about racism and we separately keep hearing about discrimination.
So what is the relationship between those two things?
Are they the same thing?
Is racism and discrimination, are they sort of synonyms for each other?
And I said, no, there are actually two different things.
You could argue that one comes out of the other.
Perhaps you could say racism is the theory and discrimination is the practice.
But racism by itself is a system of beliefs.
It's a system of thought.
If I believe that another ethnic group is not just inferior, but intrinsically inferior, you may say biologically inferior, that's racism.
That is the classic meaning of racism.
But discrimination is not a thought, it's an action.
To discriminate is to make a choice.
To make a preference based upon race.
That's racial discrimination.
And in some ways, when we think about America after the Civil War, in other words, after slavery, it's really primarily discrimination that is the problem, even more than racism per se.
Why? Well, for the simple reason.
Imagine a country, let's just say, full of racists.
But no one discriminates.
So lots of people think, let's say, blacks are inferior or Latinos are inferior, but they don't do anything about it.
And then the question becomes, so what?
So what if in your mind you think something, but you don't segregate, you don't discriminate, you don't deny blacks opportunities or jobs, you don't access...
If you act in any way that enforces your theory, well, in that case, racism would be sort of a paper tiger.
It would be completely harmless. It's the discrimination, if you will, that puts the evil into action.
And that's why, by the way, our civil rights laws and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, no discrimination on the basis of race or gender.
Now, the remarkable thing is the Biden administration is actually discriminating in exactly this way.
And it's doing so in a manner that flatly contradicts the Civil Rights Act of 1964, flatly contradicts the idea of equal rights under the law.
The good news is that judges are striking these Biden administration policies down.
So let's look at two of them.
The first one is the Biden administration's policy of using its COVID restaurant relief program, but making that program available on a preferential basis to Black and Latino and Asian Pacific Islander restaurant owners.
In other words, I won't say no whites need apply, but it's close to that because it's sort of like if you're whites, Get to the back of the bus.
Get to the back of the line.
Why? Because they've defined socially disadvantaged in such a way that in order to be socially disadvantaged, you have to be, quote, a person of color.
Now, Greer's Ranch Cafe, which lost out on its COVID benefits during the pandemic, sued and won.
And the court basically said, no, Biden administration, you cannot do this.
Stop this. So the Biden administration goes, oh, that's in Texas, these Texans.
You know what? We'll appeal it. And so they appealed to Judge Tapar.
This is at the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
But guess what? They lost again.
And here I'm now going to quote from Judge Tapar because his quote is so telling.
This case is about whether the government can allocate limited coronavirus relief funds to Based on the race and sex of the applicants, we hold that it cannot.
It cannot. So in other words, you can't discriminate on the basis of race in either direction, in favor of whites or in favor of blacks.
It is unconstitutional.
It is not permitted.
Now, the Biden administration had a second program, and this was a program to provide race-based relief for farmers.
And the idea here is that the government, the Biden administration, had a loan forgiveness program for farmers and ranchers.
This was under Section 1005 of the so-called American Rescue Plan Act.
But a bunch of farmers who were not eligible for this...
Not eligible because I'm now going to read the Biden administration's definition of a socially disadvantaged group.
See how telling this is. A group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities.
So in other words, if you're a member of a historically disadvantaged group, as they define it, then you qualify.
If you're not, you don't.
And the court basically said, no go.
The court struck it down.
And now I'm going to quote from the court.
The court found the program was unambiguously discriminatory, quote, Since the only consideration in determining whether the farmer or rancher's loan should be completely forgiven is the person's race or national origin.
Now the court said, look...
If you can show that these particular farmers or ranchers have been victims of discrimination, then you can provide them with compensatory relief.
But you can't just assume that because someone is a member of a minority group, they are automatically victims of discrimination.
In other words, you have to prove actual discrimination, not merely appeal to what the court called anecdotes or references to historical discrimination.
My great-great-great-grandfather was discriminated against, therefore I deserve preferential COVID relief.
That's not going to work.
Now, what is really telling about this, and I think this is actually going to end up going to the Supreme Court, is that I think the Supreme Court is going to find in the same direction.
Here's a quotation from Judge Roberts from a 2007 case, and I think it sums up the whole issue.
The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race...
It's to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
By the way, I said virtually that exact line in my book, The End of Racism.
I'm just delighted to see that this idea is now becoming mainstream.
Let's remember that the Biden administration thinks that there are two types of discrimination.
The reason, if you ask them to justify their program, and you see this in their lawyers' briefs, they think that there is benign discrimination, which is what they're doing, and there's invidious discrimination, which used to occur in the past.
But think of how dumb this is.
All discrimination is benign to the guy doing it.
All discrimination is invidious to the guy who's suffering from it.
So when a person is being deprived of a benefit merely because they belong to a group, you're black, you're not going to get it.
Or you're white, you're not going to get it.
Who's going to think that's benign?
Why would that guy who is losing out on a benefit that he would otherwise compete for or otherwise be in line for?
Why would that guy think this is benign in any way?
So it's not benign.
It's invidious. All discrimination of this sort is invidious discrimination.
And when the left talks about structural racism, racism embedded in policy, racism that still finds its way through the veins of government, Yes, it exists, but you know where to look for it?
Look straight at the people in the White House.
Look straight at the perpetrators in the Biden administration.
I want to talk about digital censorship and I want to explore why it is a problem in a democratic society for speech to be restricted in the private sphere.
Now, there are some libertarians and, of course, there are many on the left who say, well, Dinesh, why are you complaining about these platforms?
They're private platforms.
They should be able to do whatever they want.
Where's the threat to free speech?
The only threat to free speech comes from government restriction.
That's why the First Amendment talks about Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech.
I want to argue that this is actually a narrow way of thinking about free speech, because not only does free speech need to be protected in the private sphere, that's the most important place where democratic debate occurs.
I'm going to make my case by recourse to an important philosophical thinker.
This is the philosopher Charles Taylor.
I'm going to be referring to his book, which is called Modern Social Imaginaries.
Charles Taylor, by the way, for many years a philosopher of note, worldwide renown at Oxford, now at McGill University in Canada.
He's Canadian. And what does he mean by the concept of a social imaginary?
Well, here's what he's getting at.
We live in a society where we have these large organisms that we refer to, and yet these organisms are puzzling when you think about it.
Think about a phrase like the economy.
We speak about the economy, but what do we really mean by an economy?
We're referring to 300 million people in America who trade and interact with each other, and you're interacting with people you don't know, you've never met.
It's essentially a community of strangers who are collectively, through their voluntary actions, producing a kind of result, and the result we call the economy.
That's the gross domestic product of America, for example, the collective effort of all these people acting individually but acting as part of a network.
Well, says Charles Taylor...
Our public debate is like that.
It's a network. It's a network of communication.
And it's a network of communication, he stresses, that occurs not in the government.
There's very little genuine argument, debate, that occurs in government.
Government is ultimately about making and carrying on policy.
But, says Taylor, this debate occurs in the private sphere.
And very beautifully in this book, Modern Social Imaginaries, the imaginary here refers to an imagined community.
There's an imagined community in America that forms things like, well, we use the term public opinion.
Well, what is public opinion? Public opinion is what emerges through the private interaction of lots of people who are hands-on about politics, who communicate with each other through social media, through newspapers, letters to the editor.
They do all kinds of things, but their collective effort Produces something where, you know, you can say Americans think this or Americans think that, but that is the result of this sustained political engagement and action and discussion.
Now, says Taylor, in the old world, people had their place in life.
You were a serf or you were a craftsman, and you didn't really necessarily have to engage with people.
You just learned your craft, and you did it, and you looked after your family, and that was it.
The political affairs of society were handled by someone else, by the monarchs or by the aristocrats.
But says Taylor, in a democratic society, that begins to change.
It begins to change first with the emergence in Europe of what Taylor calls the Republic of Letters.
The Republic of Letters would be basically people who are not in the government.
But they are interested in what the government does.
And these are people, well, in England, they would meet in cafes.
I talked on an earlier podcast about Samuel Johnson sitting across from David Hume and Edmund Burke and the actor David Garrick, and they would We're good to go.
But it exercises a moral force on the government.
In fact, its moral force is all the greater because it is thought to be deliberative.
These are people who are distinguished thinkers in their own right, Johnson the literary scholar, Edmund Burke the statesman, and then you have Adam Smith the economist.
So you've got people from different walks of life bringing their knowledge and expertise into interaction with each other, and the idea is to improve the moral but also the political tone of society.
So here's the point I'm trying to make.
This debate in America occurs in the sphere outside of government.
If it occurs at all, it's going to occur through the media, it'll occur in academic journals, it's going to occur in public debates when they occur on campuses, for example, or elsewhere.
It's going to occur in civic meetings.
And so when you shut it down in any way, digital media being, for example, the most powerful way of saying, listen, in the public square, outside of government, admittedly, but nevertheless still public, where people communicate with each other and argue back and forth.
You have these digital censors who go, we're going to take one position in this debate.
We're going to excommunicate everybody who takes the other position.
You are delivering a mortal blow to a practice intrinsic to democracy that developed alongside democracy in Western societies over the past 200 years.
This is the way things are done in our society.
This is how we keep an external intellectual and moral check on power.
So the digital census, it isn't just about, you can't say this about hydroxychloroquine, or you can't mention election fraud, Dinesh.
It isn't just about that.
It's ultimately about restricting, kneecapping, decapitating, defenestrating, and choking off the intellectual lifeblood of a free democratic society.
I have been signing some books and movies as part of the Dinesh, Mike Lindell, MyPillow deal.
In fact, Debbie had a great idea.
She goes, you should bring a couple of books and do it on the show.
He forgot. I might.
I did forget today.
But I'll bring a couple of books tomorrow to sign them right on the air.
In any case, this is the Dinesh book and movie deal.
I haven't actually mentioned it to Mike Lindell, but I am working behind the scenes with the guys at MyPillow.
So here's the deal you go all out all out and buy $250 $500 or thousand dollars whatever you can afford of my pillow merchandise And this is not hard to do this guy Michael and L has more than a hundred great products It's classic premium pillows to the geezer dream sheets to the my pillow robes the my pillow mattress topper the my pillow Dog beds the list goes on now. Here's the fun part if you spend $250 I'll send you a copy of one of my recent books one of my favorites
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Again, that number is 800-876-0227 or just go to MyPillow.com and use promo code DINESH. Inflation is back in America, which is another way of saying we might be heading back to the 1970s.
The 1970s were notoriously the era of inflation, an inflationary spiral that was out of control and that threatened to shipwreck the American economy until When Ronald Reagan came along and put a stop to all that.
Now, we've seen from other countries how destructive inflation can be.
I don't even know the inflation rate in Venezuela.
It started out at thousands of percentage points and now it's millions of percentage points.
Essentially, it renders the currency totally useless.
We have an inflation rate now of 5%, but it's gone from like 0 to 5 in no time.
This is almost like an unwelcome visitor who's been hiding behind your door and he jumps out and goes, I'm here!
And we haven't had this problem in America now for almost, well, for three decades, really since Reagan.
And so we're not used to it.
And for some people on the left, it's like, no big deal.
What's the big deal? Inflation.
They've never lived under it.
They don't know what inflation even is.
So I want to talk about inflation in its very basic meaning from the ground up.
First of all, what is it?
The word itself doesn't really tell you that much.
Inflation, which just means kind of blowing up.
You inflate a balloon.
There was the inflationary expansion of the early universe.
What does this have to do with the economy?
What do we mean by the word inflation?
Well... I would explain it this way.
Try to imagine, for example, a small society of 100 people with a certain price level.
And the price level is, let's say, $10.
Everything in society costs $10.
And it's been that way, which means that the inflation rate is zero and the price level is stable.
Or it could be that the economy is growing at a slow pace, let's say 3% a year, and prices have been rising at exactly that pace, which is to say they have kept pace with the overall growth of the economy.
Now what happens is that the government of this society decides, for example, to double the amount of money in circulation.
They print money.
And now suddenly, where there was X dollars, there are now 2X dollars.
Double the amount of money, but the same amount of goods.
No one's made anything new.
The economy is proceeding at exactly the same clip, but it's got this new infusion of cash.
And what would happen?
Well, suddenly you'd find that prices begin to dramatically increase.
Why? Because of the law of supply and demand.
By and large, you've got more money.
Chasing the same amount of goods.
And so, as a result, there's a bidding up of the prices of those goods.
That's essentially how inflation occurs.
And how is it occurring in America today?
Well, basically, it's because the Biden administration is printing money.
Now, they don't do it in this crude way.
They don't just say, well, listen, let's just print a bunch of money and stick it into circulation.
But rather what happens is the government spends money and they spend money they don't have.
And they spend money, but they don't want to increase the national debt.
So in various ingenious ways, using bonds and treasury bills and so on, they, in effect, print money.
And the effect of printing money is to put more dollars into the country.
It's the same amount of goods.
And so it pushes up the prices of things.
And we're seeing prices jumping up here, jumping up.
Prices seem to be jumping up everywhere.
And remember that when prices of one thing go up, say fuel, that affects the truckers.
That affects the goods that go to the grocery store.
That affects the price of lumber because lumber is transported.
And so there's a kind of effect in which inflation starts pushing from one product to another throughout the economy.
Now, we haven't had inflation in America for three decades, in part because we've had relatively stable monetary policies, and also because of technology.
One of the good things about technology is it has a deflationary, an anti-inflationary effect.
Why is that? Well, think about your TV. The same TV that cost...
$1,500 five years ago now costs $500.
That means that you're actually getting more TV for the same price or you're getting the same TV at a much lower price.
So that is the opposite of prices going up because in effect what's happening with technology is prices are going down.
And yet despite this deflationary effect of technology, We have so much inflation in America today that the net inflation rate is still pushing up now to 5%, and it can go much higher.
And if Biden's spending programs are put into effect, it will go much higher.
Reagan realized that he had a serious problem on his hand.
Inflation was out of control.
Inflation was actually double digits.
It had begun in the late 60s, but in the 1970s, you saw rates of 10, 11, 12, even 15% inflation.
And what would happen is you'd go to the grocery store, you'd go to the mall and you'd find...
That the same piece of merchandise often had multiple stickers.
Why? Because it would sit there for two months and the price would go up.
So then you'd have to put a new price tag on.
And really poor people I would see in the grocery store in the late 70s, when I first came to America, they would be going to the back to pick up an old tin because the old can had the old price and therefore they would be able to get something a little cheaper than it was before the price went up.
There was a remedy for inflation, but it's a very painful one.
It's the same remedy you have if your car's out of control and going really fast.
You have to slam on the brakes, and that's exactly what Reagan did.
He supported, through Paul Volcker, Paul Volcker was the head of the Federal Reserve, a kind of Clamping down on the monetary supply, which squeezed the economy and in fact flung it into a recession, the recession of 1982.
It caused a lot of strains on people.
It was very difficult for the economy.
Reagan's unpopularity actually went up.
Reagan's approval rating plummeted.
And it was only when the economy slowly began to recover that Reagan's popularity was restored.
So the bottom line, the Biden administration is engaging in very irresponsible policies that are driving prices up across the board.
Inflation is a hidden tax, if you think about it.
Why? Because what it does is it erodes the value of your money.
Without even imposing a tax increase.
If there's 10% inflation, that means if you had $100, now you have $90.
I mean, you still have $100 in your wallet, but it only buys what $90 would buy before.
So it's cost, it's like a 10% tax on you, but they never tell you.
They never enact the tax.
They don't have to face the political risk, or we're going to impose taxes on the middle class.
And inflation is also, it hurts the middle class and the poor more.
Why? Because think about it.
Who spends a greater proportion of their income on basic necessities?
And so when basic necessities go up in price, it hurts people who can least afford them the most.
Inflation is also a certain form of theft.
Essentially taking resources away from you and me, from the private sector, and transferring them over to the government.
Why? Because the government is the one that gets to do the spending, but you and I end up paying the price, even though they never tell us that we're doing it.
Kind of amusingly, toward the end of the Reagan era, when Reagan's policies had all worked and the economy was now going really great, somebody asked him, they said, you know, how do you know that your economic policies are working?
And Reagan goes, well, the best sign that my economic policies are working is they don't call it Reaganomics anymore!
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In 2016, the World Economic Forum, this is the collection of bigwigs who get together every year in Davos, Switzerland.
World leaders are there.
Rock guys like Bono go.
And you have all kinds of prominent writers, Nobel laureates, scientists.
This is a kind of let's fix the world problems kind of summit.
I was invited several years ago.
I debated the issue of Western civilization.
Is Western civilization a good idea?
It was me and the former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres against the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who's from, I believe, Nigeria, and also the American political scientist Benjamin Barber.
In any event, the World Economic Forum Put out this meme on its social media.
Very striking.
It goes, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
This is how our world could change by 2030.
And it's kind of funny.
They have this beta male picture of this little bearded guy.
And he looks happy.
And he looks happy because he owns nothing.
Yeah. So, this was seen as just a kind of idiocy from the liberal mindset, which thinks, I suppose, in early Marxist terms, that, oh, if I could only be freed of all my possessions, I would have no anxieties whatsoever.
It's really great.
I don't own a house.
I don't own a car. I don't own anything.
I don't even own myself.
I'm free as a bird.
But all of this has taken a little bit of a dark turn because in recent years, the same people who have been talking about how great it is to own nothing have also been talking about the great reset of the world economy.
Let's use COVID to sort of re-engineer the economy.
Re-engineer the economy to make sure that other people don't own anything either.
Now, this is the key. It's one thing if you say, hey, listen, I want to go live in the mountains and I want to follow, you know, do bird watching and fishing, you know, be my guest.
But on the other hand, if you want to take away other people's homes or take away the prospects of people buying a home, that's a whole different matter.
Now, In recent years, and this has accelerated, it seems, now in the COVID era, we find huge corporations, giant conglomerates, a real estate investment trust moving into neighborhoods and buying the whole neighborhood.
Not buying a house. Not buying, oh, this is a good investment value.
We think we'll add it to our portfolio.
No. They'll buy 130 homes in one neighborhood.
A couple of scholars here in the Nashville area, and they noticed this trend in Nashville.
They found that out-of-state investment groups are moving into sort of desirable Nashville neighborhoods and buying tons of homes.
They found that six out-of-state investment groups have bought 4,900 homes in Smyrna, Murfreesboro, Antioch, Spring Hill, Mount Juliet, and a couple of other fast-growing neighborhoods.
What they do is they find middle-class family homes that are near good schools and in safe areas.
And this is happening not just in Nashville, by the way.
It's a national trend. It's happening in Charlotte, Atlanta, Dallas, Tampa.
So all the desirable parts of the country, by the way, it's worth noting these are by and large Republican areas.
That's why they're desirable.
These huge conglomerates come in and they sort of buy up the neighborhood.
This is happening through companies like BlackRock.
Which often pay 20 or 30% over the market value, in some cases over the asking price.
There are pension funds doing this, giant corporations, property investment groups.
I mean, think about BlackRock.
BlackRock controls almost $8 trillion.
It's the largest investment vehicle in the United States.
There's another huge operation called Invitation Homes.
Invitation Homes owns 80,000 houses.
And Invitation Homes has just made an agreement with another group called Rock Point to get cash to buy even more homes.
Invitation Homes, by the way, is owned and was started by the Blackstone Group.
Blackstone is different than BlackRock, but both are now doing massive real estate investments.
Warren Buffet is in on this, the Carlyle Group.
There's an organization called American Homes for Rent, which was founded by billionaire self-storage magnate Wayne Hughes.
This is a group, by the way, that owns 48,000 homes.
So we're dealing here with something that is really affecting the whole real estate market.
Now, there's a little bit of fear about this for two reasons.
One, That what these property companies are doing is they're not buying the homes in order to sell them, even for more, to some other homeowner.
Rather, their goal is what they call single-family rentals, SFRs.
I hadn't even heard the term until recently.
Single-family rentals, the idea you buy a home...
But you keep owning it.
You put it up for rent.
So the mega corporation owns these homes, and American families, which have traditionally aspired to buy a home to build wealth that way, now become mere renters.
I think, obviously, long term, this is a serious problem for the simple reason that, for most Americans, their wealth is in their home.
If you look at their net worth, and their net worth may seem rather high, it's, oh, my family's net worth is $400,000, but as it turns out, $300,000 of that is equity in your home.
And then you've got some money in retirement funds, and you've got some money here and there, but your actual amount of disposable cash is pretty low.
Your main asset is the equity that you've gradually built up in your home.
And so, if this is being taken away, I think it's a serious problem.
All of this is being done, by the way, by the left.
This is being done by left-wing corporations that are working sort of hand in hand with the Biden administration.
And I think for us as conservatives, it shows us that we can't just be reflexively pro-corporate.
Yeah, you know, we don't like big government, but we're perfectly fine if these corporate conglomerates do whatever they want, from buying single-family homes and converting them into rentals to imposing all this woke indoctrination on their employees.
No. I think in the new way we think about the Republican Party, we don't think about sort of what's good for General Motors is good for America.
That was sort of—that was a— Eisenhower dooficism from the 1950s.
No. The way we think about it is we start thinking about American families.
And we start thinking about how do people who are starting at the bottom or low down on the ladder make their way up.
We focus on things like social mobility.
We focus on policies that enable people to form families and live the American dream, improve their prospects over the years.
And things that make that more difficult to do are bad.
They're bad. We may have to figure out how we deal with them, what kind of policies are.
Maybe the policy here is not to restrict corporate home buying, but rather to focus on the Federal Reserve, which has the kind of, you may say, loose monetary policy or has had a loose monetary policy.
That enables these companies to do this by putting a tiny fraction of money down and having very easy access to credit.
Think about it. Even though these companies have huge amounts of cash, by putting small amounts of money down, they're able to leverage the cash they have into far greater sums.
In other words, every $100,000 that they have, you could say, buys a million dollars in real estate.
And so they can afford to buy 100 homes here, 1,000 homes there.
They're not They're not paying for the thousand homes.
They're paying a fraction of that money and then they're hoping to be able to pay the mortgage by taking in the rental income that comes in from these SFRs.
Pay the mortgage that way.
So the renter ends up paying off the house that the corporation owns and the corporations get richer and the American dream begins to recede one step at a time.
I want to talk to you about a movie that you've got to see.
Now, it's about fathers and we're coming up on Father's Day.
For many Americans, Father's Day is a day to celebrate, but for many others, it's a day to get through.
Why? Because Father's Day hurts if you don't have a father.
Now, the facts are really clear.
Fatherlessness drives many horrible outcomes in America, from teen pregnancy to incarceration.
An astounding 85% of youths in prison come from fatherless families.
That's 20 times the national average.
Fortunately, there's a path forward from the grim statistics, and this is why I really urge you to order this powerful new film.
It's called The Streets Were My Father.
It features the journey of three inner-city Chicago men from fatherlessness to gangs and from life in prison to prison ministry programs that set them on the road to redemption and lives as productive members of society.
Here's a short clip.
plissom.
Debbie and I saw it. We loved it.
In fact, we loved it so much, I said, listen, let's get Lee Habib.
This is the executive producer of the film.
So he's coming up next to talk more about some of the themes in this movie.
But you've got to get the streaming version or the DVDs.
You can get them both from SalemNow.com.
Buy a copy or a bunch of copies.
Get one for someone you know who doesn't have a father.
Get one for someone you know who doesn't believe in the power of God to change lives.
Once again, go to SalemNow.com.
That's S-A-L-E-M-N-O-W.com.
And order the movie, The Streets Were My Father.
As promised, we have Mr.
Lee Habib, the executive producer of the film The Streets Were My Father.
Now, Lee, I've actually known for several years.
We've got mutual friends in common.
We've talked about politics and many other issues.
Lee is the CEO, by the way, and host of My American Stories, which is a program that runs on 330 radio stations across the country.
He's also a weekly columnist and writer for Newsweek.
Lee, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. Great to talk to you again.
Let me start by asking you, what got you interested in a movie like this?
This is a movie that is kind of gritty.
It takes you into the lives of people who have lived some rough and hard lives, who have been involved in gangs and crime and some horrible stuff.
Was this new territory for you, or was this a topic kind of familiar to you?
It was really familiar to me.
My dad was a superb dad.
He was an educator, a high school coach, an All-American athlete, and then a superintendent of schools.
And he was always trying to convey to us how lucky and grateful we should be for having fathers.
In fact, forget white privilege.
My dad always talked about the father privilege.
And he saw it as incumbent upon us to put bodies on people who didn't have fathers.
And I was a very good basketball player in high school, and I was routinely finding myself playing ball with kids in Newark, New Jersey, Camden, and Jersey City.
And when I saw the lives of these young men, my heart broke for them, living in their auntie's house, their cousin's house, moving from school to school, wretched public schools.
And I had empathy for them, and I think we should all have empathy for them.
They're the victims. They're the real-life victims of fatherlessness, these kids.
Would you say that, I mean, I can only envision what it must be like to grow up not just without a father, but without that extended support.
I mean, there are kids in India, for example, where I grew up who didn't have a father, but typically they would have a grandfather or they would have a sort of encircling group of relatives who would take charge of them.
When I look at what happens in some of our inner cities, the loneliness of that experience, the vulnerability of it, The fact that, I guess we see this in the movie, some of these young kids look at gangs as being a sort of alternative family.
I think one of them, one guy actually talks about how the gang served the functions of a family, and it was the first group he said to look out for them.
It's true. I mean, look, it's logical.
If you follow the story of these guys, and what really empathy is about is walking in another man's shoes, not judging him.
In Christian life, judgment should be the last thing from our lives.
Empathy and love and compassion should be.
And these guys were all recruited as young boys, 12 and 13, by older men.
So they had their father figure.
They also had their belonging, their sense of brotherhood.
And here's the big one, Dinesh.
They had a sense of protection.
The father protects the kids.
But with gangs, you need protection from the other gangs.
And sooner or later, you got to join one or you're vulnerable.
And all of them talked about the word vulnerable.
And you're right. You know, everyone can survive not having a father with father figures around.
But in a community with high levels of fatherlessness, the gangs replace the fathers.
We've got black characters in the movie.
You've got Hispanics.
But interestingly, today in America, this is a national problem.
I mean, I remember when Moynihan did his report on, he called it the report on the Negro family, I think 1965.
He said it was a national tragedy that the illegitimacy rate for African Americans in the country was 25%.
Obviously, the black rate today is much higher than that, 75% thereabouts, but the white rate is higher than 25%, which means that what Moynihan described as a crisis for the country because of what was happening in the black community is now something that's become an American problem with whites having many of the same problems that other ethnic groups experience.
This is so true, Dinesh.
What we're finding is the call now to do the next film next year about girls and to go to a white neighborhood where there's abject poverty and factory jobs have left.
And the same problems that hit and befall the African-American community befall the white community in a place like Youngstown, where we will probably go to film the next film.
And the key is this.
What's the hope? We know what the problem is.
But what's the solution? And that's really what I think it's the reason why our nationally syndicated storytelling show has done so well.
Rather than just pit people against each other, we ask for people to call their higher angels.
If you're in a church, put a body on a kid next door.
Find out what the problem is and do the invitation.
Bring him to your church.
Put bodies on them, go fishing with them.
What happened in this film is that a man, Manny Mill, had prison ministry programs in these prisons.
And these guys, when they finally said enough is enough, there were people in that prison who put a body on these men and radically, radically, as you saw in the film, Dinesh, changed their lives.
I mean, I love the moments of even humor in the film.
At one point, the black guy was talking about, you know, that when he heard the message of the gospel, he was so instantly captivated by it because I suppose he was at that moment in life where he was ready to turn, make that important turn, that he was literally running up the aisle even before the guy had finished the altar call.
He was just so ready.
And he said that the next couple of weeks, he was almost in a daze.
But what I found particularly striking was the fact that this wasn't just some kind of emotional experience that dissipated, you know, a few days later, but rather it was truly a transforming moment that changed his whole life.
And you can see this now much later, and he's still in that new mode, and he hasn't gone back.
He hasn't had the recidivism problem we hear so much about people who fall back into a life of crime, even after they get out.
Well, you know, one of the last scenes, we go to Leslie to end it, and that's Leslie Williams.
And he talked about how he wished he'd had a father who would have disciplined him, who would have encouraged him.
And he starts to break down and cry.
This man in his 50s, who was one of the leaders of the Black Peace Stones, one of the most notorious gangs in Chicago.
And then he said, but then I met God.
God became my father.
And he taught me the habits of living.
He taught me the habits of loving.
And by the way, isn't that all of us?
We get better, hopefully, one day at a time.
Some days we slip. Heck, some days we make that cry for ourselves.
We get stuck. We make a mistake.
And we fall at the cross.
And we seek redemption.
And this happens again and again in all of our lives.
And every one of us, Dinesh, can create a prison cage of our own.
We need not go to jail to create a prison for ourselves.
I think one thing I found moving about the film is the way in which some of these guys...
I mean, the spiritual element is clearly critical.
But another thing that I think all of them said at one point was that they had sons or kids of their own.
And they didn't want their kids to go the same way that they did.
So part of their motivation for reform was, hey, listen, you know, I didn't have a father or I didn't have a good father.
But I want to be a good father so that I can help some other young person, mine, to have better prospects than I did and not to make the mistakes that I did.
That's so true, Dinesh.
And in the end, these guys did something so heroic.
They broke the chain and the cycle of fatherlessness in their families.
And what a thing to do.
What a thing to celebrate.
I also urge people who are good fathers, make sure your kids see this film, because sometimes we can't appreciate something unless it's absent.
And for young people to see what it would be like to not have a father, to imagine their lives without their father, To have a father like these guys had.
We'll create empathy for them.
And maybe if they're Christians or they're people of good heart and will, like I did when I was a young man, I spent a lot of time in these neighborhoods with these young guys.
I befriended them. They became pals.
They came over to my house a lot.
One of the great experiences of my life, actually.
This is awesome, Lee.
Guys, you need to see this movie.
As I mentioned earlier, very easy to do that.
You just got to go to SalemNow.com and click on.
You can get either streaming or you can order DVDs.
Get a bunch of them.
The movie, once again, The Streets Were My Father.
Lee, it's been a real pleasure having you on the podcast.
Thanks for all you do, Dinesh.
Earlier in the podcast, I talked about the corrosive effect of inflation, how it isn't just a hidden tax.
It's really a form of theft.
And it robs the middle class and it robs the poor.
Now, in May, the U.S. inflation rate hit 5%.
That's the highest in 13 years.
And we're seeing higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher new and used car prices, construction costs, housing prices.
Hey, the list goes on.
And so inflation isn't just coming.
It's not on the way. It's here.
Have you protected your savings and your investments if you haven't yet diversified a portion into precious metals?
The unfortunate answer is no.
Now, for decades, I never wanted to invest in gold, only the stock market.
But now I'm seriously worried, as many economists are, about the regime we have in Washington.
Absolutely no sense of fiscal responsibility.
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It seems like we have a kind of a Nostradamus in America.
And his name is Trump.
Trump Adamus. I say this because this guy is proving to be right.
Well, I won't say on everything, but on a lot of stuff.
Trump, by the way, came on the Jumbotron at the rally that I was at last weekend.
And he sort of rattled off a list of things that he was right on.
I'm just going to give you a few that...
I remember he talked about, he goes, well, I was right on Russia collusion.
I was right about the border, I warned you.
I was right about the Biden crime racket.
I was right about Hunter Biden's laptop.
I was right about the fact that I never paid bounties.
I was right about the mail-in ballots and the threat that those pose and the dangers to free elections.
I was right about the China virus.
And guess what?
Now it seems Trump is also right about hydroxychloroquine, HCQ. Now Trump said early on, and he said in fact he was taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive.
This is before he even got COVID. A huge uproar.
This is an unproven drug.
This is ridiculous. Trump is actually putting out dangerous disinformation.
The World Health Organization issued a warning against people using hydroxychloroquine.
And by the way, social media began to ban people who talked about hydroxychloroquine.
I actually know a radio host, a good friend of ours, who has literally kicked off social media or kicked off one of the big platforms for doing hashtag HCQ. Wow.
Donald Trump Jr.
posted a video of doctors touting the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, and Twitter restricted his account, accusing him of, quote, spreading misleading and potentially harmful misinformation.
Well, now it turns out there is a flurry of studies, in fact, three, all showing that hydroxychloroquine is effective in treating COVID-19.
It's not a vaccine, it's not a cure, but it's an effective treatment.
The new study, by the way, is very telling.
It shows there was a study of 255 patients at St.
Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey.
The drug, when used in a high dose and with zinc, increases survival rates by 200%.
In other words, it's dramatic.
It's not slight. Now, the authors say that their study focused on people who had severe cases of COVID-19.
These are very large people, many of whom are on ventilators.
But what it says is that this drug dramatically increases survival rates significantly.
And it's supported by other studies.
Here's a study that came out in December from the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents shows 84% fewer hospitalizations among patients treated with the drug.
And then a separate study that came out in January, January of 2021.
This was done by Hackensack Meridian Health Group.
It found that patients with mild symptoms who were treated with the drug got better.
So we've got one study saying that if you have mild symptoms, you get better.
The most recent study saying that if you have severe symptoms, you have a much higher rate of survival.
And this is stunning vindication of Trump.
It's also a stunning rebuke to not only the health professionals who jumped in early and goes, oh, no, no, no, don't take this drug.
Obviously, they were mistaken.
And obviously, the digital platforms, once again, arbitrarily censoring people when they don't themselves know what the correct answer is.
This is what's so amazing about it.
They keep saying, you're spreading misinformation.
And so the point is, what is your authority?
What is your knowledge base?
What is your expertise to tell me what information is?
What's your basis for making claims about health, which requires a high degree of technical expertise?
You think that all the man-bunned guys sitting around Facebook have that expertise?
You think they even know what the hell they're talking about?
No! All they do is take instructions from someone that they think, well, this is our authority, since the World Health Organization said it.
That's the truth.
Since the WHO said it, the virus must have come from a wet market.
Since the WHO said it, the virus can't be treated with hydroxychloroquine.
Is this actually the way we conduct debates now?
Where some pompous authority says something, they have no basis for it, but they say it anyway.
And by saying it, they not only claim a sort of elevated position in the debate, they get to shut down everybody else who's saying anything different.
This is the horrific state of free speech in the United States.
And one only hopes that a bitter lesson is drawn from all this.
And case after case, the kind of approved position on the origins of COVID, on HCQ, turns out to be wrong.
And one would think this would introduce a modicum of humility, of introspection, of revised judgment so that the guys who have been confidently banning and deplatforming and knocking people off the podium would say, listen, we don't have the expertise to do that.
Let the debate rage on.
Truth doesn't emerge at the beginning of the inquiry, but only after careful consideration and competing positions are aired at the end.
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I know it's really difficult to identify a single root cause of America's social problems, but I want to give one writer, this is the writer Michael Kelley's very sophisticated answer to that problem.
Now, by way of preamble, when I often talk to conservatives about where our problems derive from, social problems, cultural problems, moral problems, they say the 60s.
It all came out in the 60s, and the basic idea here is that things were going very well swimmingly in the 50s, and then they took a kind of nasty downward spiral in the 60s.
But I don't find this position to be very satisfactory for the simple reason that if the 50s were so great, how did we get the 60s?
There must have been something, some vulnerability in the 50s that caused, or at least made room for, the social convulsions of the 1960s.
Now, the writer Michael Kelly, who's actually passed away, in a very important essay many years ago, an essay, by the way, that you can find in his book called Things Worth Fighting For.
Things Worth Fighting For. Michael Kelly basically says that our problems actually do go back to the 1950s.
And he draws a sharp distinction, a distinction between what he calls...
Smart versus cool.
Cool. Michael Kelly says that the prototypical sort of hero of the 1950s was Frank Sinatra.
Why? Because Frank Sinatra was the inventor, you might say, of a kind of phenomenon all too familiar with us today. We see it today with Ellen, we see it with LeBron James, we see it with so many others. The phenomenon of the sort of iconic celebrity. This is, by the way, someone who's good in one thing. Let's say they can sing or they can dribble and yet they become a sort of role model, a cultural oracle on a whole bunch of stuff. And it's not just the way they
they say or what they believe.
It's not just their ideology.
It's the way they hold themselves and the way they walk and the way they talk.
They, in a sense, generate imitators.
They become symbols of a direction in which the culture begins to push.
So says Michael Kelly, Frank Sinatra made the idea of cool the thing you want to aspire to.
But, says Michael Kelly, before Frank Sinatra, he calls it BFS, before Frank Sinatra, there was a different ideal, represented not by Frank Sinatra, but by Humphrey Bogart.
And that idea was the idea of smart.
Now, if you've seen the movie Casablanca, and you think about Humphrey Bogart's character, I want to now describe him.
This is Michael Kelly's words.
He possesses an outward cynicism, but at his core, he's a square.
He's willing to die for his beliefs and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned.
He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love.
When there's a war, he goes to it.
He might be world weary, but he's not cynical.
Now, says Michael Kelly, that character, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, is no longer a social ideal.
But starting with Frank Sinatra, there was a new ideal.
I'm cool. And what is cool?
Here's Michael Kelly. Cool was something else.
Cool said that the old values, patriotism, hard work, frugality, self-discipline, were for suckers.
Cool doesn't go to war.
Saps go to war. And anyway, Cool has no beliefs that he's willing to die for.
Cool never ever gets into a fight that it might lose.
Cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing.
So what you learn here is that Frank Sinatra, fundamentally, is all about the image.
I'm cool. Now, amazingly, at the end of this article, a very good article, Michael Kelly goes, well, on the other hand, he sure could sing.
And frankly, I disagree with that.
I don't think Frank Sinatra could sing either.
Cool is kind of all he did.
And frankly, if you put together that at Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, those guys...
That's what they were. It was all about image.
And this begins, if you will, the slide to degeneracy.
At least I think this is the unspoken part of Michael Kelly's argument, that we got a lot of the debauchery, the shamelessness, the erosion of standards of the 60s, because there was already a pre-existing debasement in the 1950s.
The replacement of smart with cool.
The replacement of...
Bogart with Sinatra that made the slide possible.
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It's time for our mailbox before I go there.
I hope you subscribe to the podcast.
If you're listening on Apple, please hit the subscription.
Also rate me five stars if you enjoy what you hear.
And also tell other people about it.
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Let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hi Dinesh, this is Al in Florida.
I've observed a noteworthy amount of anti-Semitic content on a certain free speech social media platform since joining it a few months ago.
Along with offensive stereotype images and vile commentary, the basic theme is that Jews operate a global cabal and that they own and or control the news media, social media, Hollywood, the banks, the Federal Reserve, the Democratic Party, and generally exert a large and corrupt influence on business and politics in the USA and abroad.
No question there are many successful Jews, but the secret society cabal story seems like nothing more than old and persistent wingnut hate speech.
I'd like to know your thoughts on this.
We always enjoy the podcast, and thank you for keeping us informed with the facts.
Thank you for that. You know, the anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head in kind of a new way.
And I think what's striking is that the anti-Semitism today comes very much from inside the democratic left.
Now, anti-Semitism has long been a phenomenon of the left.
Think back to the Nazis.
The Nazis were on the left.
They were socialists. And their anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews came out of that.
For the Nazis, the Jews were seen as the quintessential capitalists.
The Jews were seen as the money men, the financiers.
And a lot of these stereotypes that you're talking about, the Jew, you know, with the dollar bill, all of that came out of the hatred of finance and of capitalism that all socialists have had.
And so there was anti-Semitism in socialist Russia, anti-Semitism in socialist Cuba.
There's anti-Semitism. Debbie says that the first people run out of Venezuela were the Jews.
They were seen as the kind of the quintessential merchants, so threats to socialism.
So it's no surprise that from the socialist left, from the squad, we get not only the attacks on Israel, but the attacks on Jews.
So not just an attack on Zionism, you don't need a Jewish state, give it all to the Palestinians, but rather an attack on Jews for being Jews.
This, I think, shows that how dangerous it is for Jews as a group to be so wedded politically as they have been to the Democratic Party.
I mean, why be in the party where you've got malignant forces that are spreading an influence?
By the way, notice how careful...
Nancy Pelosi, when she's asked to distance herself from Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talai, she won't do it.
She won't do it because those forces have become very powerful in the Democratic Party.
Why? Because they are the quintessential embodiment of identity politics.
Think of the 25 Jewish Democrats who protested against Ilhan Omar.
Well, those are mostly white guys.
Whereas Ilhan Omar goes, well, you know what?
I hope you realize I'm a quadruple victim.
I'm black, so I'm a person of color.
I'm a woman. That's two.
I'm also Somalian.
I'm from another country.
I came as a refugee. That's three.
I'm also Muslim. I'm from the desert.
I wear hijab. That's four.
So this is a woman who has grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder.
She's the ultimate victim.
And that makes her, in a sense, untouchable within the Democratic Party and on the left.
So it is dangerous for Jews that a figure like that, who has a sort of political immunity, she can get in all kinds of scandals and get away with it.
This immunity allows her to attack Jews with impunity.
So I would say to the Jewish community, to the degree that they're listening to this podcast...
You might want to reconsider your allegiance to the Democratic Party and consider the alternative, the party that even more so under Trump, but I think has been a stalwart defender of Israel, a stalwart defender of Jews, and not the home where you're going to find any kind of systematic, malignant anti-Semitism.
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