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June 16, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:10:49
PROGRESSIVE RACISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 112
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Why progressives are the real racists.
A bombshell revelation about January 6th.
And Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina joins me to talk about the border, Antifa, and a whole bunch else.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We hear a ridiculous amount of rhetoric these days about racism.
I mean, it's so over the top.
It's so extreme.
And I gotta say that for an immigrant coming to America, this whole thing is surpassingly strange.
It's almost like if I were to go to a country, you know, Rwanda or Somalia, and they tell me, you know, basically the country's divided between the tall people and the short people.
And all I hear people talking about are tall people and short people.
I would think I was...
Arrived in a place where the people had something psychologically wrong with them.
Why? Because how can these characteristics, these characteristics bestowed, you may say, by nature, have anything to do with who you are or what you believe or how you feel or what kind of country you have?
I mean, there's something fundamentally preposterous about it.
And we have from the left, from the progressives, the constant cry that America's full of racism.
Now, for a while, I thought to myself, this is just so insane.
No, the post office isn't racist, and no, you know, our universities by themselves aren't racist.
But then it occurred to me, wait a minute, don't speak so quickly, because there actually is racism in American institutions.
Our universities, to a degree, are racist.
Why? Because they have racially preferential policies.
So if you want to talk about institutional racism, there it is.
Now, the point I want to make is that when you really think about it, the progressives are the real racists.
And I don't just mean by this it's the Democratic Party, their history of racism.
I'm talking about the progressives now.
I'm talking about the left now.
Now, what is my proof?
And my proof is really quite simple.
It is both an observation about something going on today, and there's a historical kind of lineage for it which I want to draw out.
Here's my observation. When you look at the way that progressives and Democrats and the left in general approaches minorities, but specifically blacks, there is an underlying assumption of black inferiority.
And that's the core meaning of racism.
What does racism mean at its core?
It means that I or my group thinks that your group Basically, is inherently inferior.
They can't do it. They can't make it.
They've got to be treated as if they can't make it.
Now, let's look at the way, for example, that the left treats blacks.
And the question you want to think about is this.
If the progressives were the true racists, this is obviously an assumption.
We can't go into their minds and see what they think.
But if they are, in other words, if racism is really on the left, How would they act any differently than they're acting now?
That's my point.
So, let's look at how they're acting now.
They're acting now as if blacks are so incapable that they can't go out and get an ID. They oppose voter integrity laws because blacks can't get IDs.
They act as if blacks are so delicate that anything you say that they disagree with or find insensitive isn't just sort of a word.
Yeah, I don't like it.
But a kind of an action.
It's a sort of verbal bullet.
Everyone has to jump because you can't say that.
You can't disturb these fragile egos in this way.
The underlying assumption of the left is that blacks can't compete academically with any other group, that if you had meritocratic rules, well, we all know where blacks will end up, at the bottom.
We hear from the left that math is too linear, too structured, too logical, and therefore too Eurocentric for blacks and other minorities to be able to do math.
What? Excuse me?
How can you say this to people around the world, Chinese, Indians, black and brown people, and yellow people who do math and do it very, very well?
This is absolutely insane, but it's not insane if there's an underlying hidden assumption of inferiority that is guiding the way you think and the way that you talk.
Blacks are unable to keep time.
Have you seen this? There's actually critical race theory that says to the effect that only the idea of keeping time, of punctuality, of getting things done, of being able to complete a task in a certain amount, in a certain bracket of time, that's racist.
Why? Because, well, we all know we can't really, you know, color people's time.
Haven't you heard of that one? People in other cultures don't keep time.
Blacks can't think logically.
Here's another assumption of the left.
Blacks can't compete for jobs on the same terms.
You need to have preferential treatment.
Why? Because if you had meritocratic treatment, let the best man get the job, it's not going to work.
The only things that blacks can do, apparently, is keep time in music and run or do athletics.
Because notice, in those areas, the left is perfectly happy to have meritocratic rules.
No one says, hey, listen, Jews and Asian Americans are greatly underrepresented on the basketball court.
We don't hear that. Meritocracy is fine in that domain.
So the bottom line of it is that...
For the left, blacks are treated kind of the way you treat someone in a Special Olympics.
You've got to give them special consideration.
I mean, I think back to India where we had a kid in my class who had a kind of mild case of Down syndrome.
I think his name was Prakash.
And the point is that whenever he did something, there was always ridiculously excessive applause.
But the applause was only an indication that people really didn't expect much of him.
Oh, that was a sentence from Prakash.
How wonderful, Prakash.
Keep using sentences.
Prakash says, let me go get my shoes.
Oh, Prakash is going to get his shoes.
This is amazing. Let's all applaud Prakash.
Prakash, go get your shoes.
What a great job by Prakash.
The underlying assumption here is Prakash has got something wrong with him.
And therefore, every little thing that Prakash does requires excessive solicitousness, requires excessive applause.
The expectation, to be honest, is one of inferiority.
Now, interestingly... This has an historical pedigree because if you go back to the days of segregation, it's not widely understood that there were two racist groups in the South.
There were the radical racists and these were the Ku Klux Klan guys.
They were the people who wanted to beat up blacks and hang them from trees and lynch them.
But this was only one wing of the Democratic Party.
There was another wing of the Democratic Party.
Let's remember the South was a one-party state.
There was hardly any Republicans with any influence in the South.
But the Democrats were divided into two camps.
There was the radical races, but then there were also the Democratic patricians, the kind of ruling class of the South.
And I want to read a very telling line about them from Joel Williamson.
This is the historian Joel Williamson in his book, The Crucible of Race, published by Stanford University Press.
And he's talking about segregation and he says that the patrician class of the South wanted to figure out a way that blacks and whites could coexist.
Of course, they thought blacks were inferior.
They shared this assumption with the other Democrats in the South.
They agreed with the radical racists about this.
But while the radical racists wanted to kill blacks and hang them and destroy them, the patrician class said, let's find a way for these inferior people to coexist with us.
And they came up with the idea of segregation.
I'm now quoting him. Far from putting down the self-esteem of black people, says historian Joel Williamson, segregation was designed to preserve and encourage it.
In other words, the basic idea was let's let blacks have their own schools.
Let them drink from separate water fountains.
This way, they don't get in our way.
This way, we don't have to deal with them.
But on the other hand, they will be able to develop, in a sense, to the limits of their own, you may say, arrested development.
And what I'm getting at here is there was a built-in racist assumption among the Democrats, both the radical racist and the patrician class.
All of this, by the way, spelled out.
I don't know.
But what it tries to excavate is that there is a whole school of, I would call them, the condescending races.
These are people who build their policies on inferiority.
And what I'm trying to get at is that there's a kind of continuity.
The old Democrats of the South who devised segregation, who thought of themselves in a sense as moral.
They're like, you know what? We've got to help our own little precautions to make it in America.
We're doing them a favor.
We're allowing them to develop to their own capacity.
It may be a lesser capacity, but that's okay.
And I think there are a lot of Democrats today who feel sort of the same thing.
We've got to sort of take care of blacks.
Why? Because they obviously can't take care of themselves.
America should provide them with a living.
Why? Because they can't earn a living.
So the point I'm trying to make is that the deep, built-in racist assumption that these people are inferior, the left normally doesn't say it.
Every now and then it kind of sneaks out.
But by and large, it's the hidden assumption that explains not just some, not just a little bit, but all the policies of the contemporary left.
There is, as we all know, a concerted effort by the left and by the Biden administration to claim that the greatest threat faced by America, not just the greatest domestic threat, the greatest threat from anywhere comes from white supremacy.
Here's Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, saying exactly that.
Listen. According to an unclassified summary of the March intelligence assessment, the two most lethal elements of the domestic violence extremist threat are racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists and militia violent extremists.
In the FBI's view, the top domestic violent extremist threat comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the white race.
Now, you know, I shouldn't be laughing because you've got this serious person according to classified, but you're dealing with a ridiculous individual.
This is an unserious person.
By the way, I'm extremely relieved that this clown, and I'm going to call him a clown, isn't on the Supreme Court.
Thank you, Mitch McConnell, for squelching this fool, for keeping him off the bench.
Can you imagine this loon on the Supreme Court?
Now, these people don't look like loons.
They've got the graying hair.
This is what I call the John Kerry posture.
It's a posture of seriousness, but when you listen to what they're saying and think about it, you realize you're listening to a raving maniac.
A raving maniac. Here's another raving maniac.
This is the former FBI, top official, Frank Figluzy.
He was on Meet the Press, and he goes, he's talking about January 6th, arresting low-level operatives is merely a speed bump.
Not a roadblock, and how I'm quoting him.
In order to really tackle terrorism, you've got to attack and dismantle the command and control element.
That may mean people sitting in Congress right now.
What? Does he actually want the Biden administration to go arrest members of Congress?
Members of Congress who did nothing?
For what? Arrest them for their intemperate rhetoric that led to January 6th.
So these people have totally lost their minds.
But, even as they try to magnify January 6th with comical exaggeration, there's a dangerous aspect to this.
People are sitting in solitary confinement because of this rhetoric.
And a new question has kind of arisen, and once again I want to congratulate the writer Julie Kelly for digging into this.
I also want to congratulate Senator Ron Johnson, who seems to be the sole Republican senator who is really getting into this.
Now, here's Senator Ron Johnson's point.
Who let the protesters into the Capitol?
I don't know if you've ever done a Capitol tour.
I have. You can't just walk into the Capitol.
The doors are locked.
You have to go through metal detectors.
You have to have a pass.
How did all these people, hundreds of them, get in?
A simple question. And by the way, it's never been answered.
Now, there's one easy way to answer it.
There are 14,000 hours of footage.
Everything that happens in the Capitol is recorded.
14,000 hours of footage.
And guess what? The Biden administration won't release it.
Because, I think, they're afraid that if they did, we would all see what happened.
We would actually know the truth.
What they were hoping for is a January 6th commission that would edit and dock to the footage, would basically show excerpts, would do the same kind of cherry picking that the House Democrats did.
But if you show the whole picture, the context, if you will, then we can all see what's really going on.
Well, it turns out...
That Ron Johnson has seen a lot of this footage.
Guess why? The answer is because Johnson is on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for the Senate.
And Johnson's office has flagged a piece of footage that's very, very disturbing.
Here's what it shows. That around 2.30 p.m.
on January 6th...
More than 300 protesters were able to enter the building.
Before that, Johnson says there's an unauthorized person, unidentified, who is trying unsuccessfully to open a set of double doors to get into the Capitol.
Then, five people return to the double doors shortly thereafter, and they walk past a Capitol Police officer.
In other words, they are apparently doing this with sanction or with permission.
And these five people, it says, once at the double doors, one of the five people push the left door's crash bar, and this time it opens.
And all five individuals then exit the building at 2.33 p.m.
Five guys show up. We're good to go.
People begin to enter through the door, and the police officer who was in the vicinity of this door one minute earlier walks away to another hallway away from the door and out of view of the security camera.
So, the guy who was supposedly guarding the door decides to take off.
He moves outside the view of the camera, and then for the next 15 minutes, 309 people enter the Capitol with no law enforcement there to stop them or to tell them not to do that.
Now, one of the guys involved in the January 6, quote, insurgency, this is Jason Dolan.
He's an alleged member of the Oath Keepers group.
He makes a very striking statement in an interview, this was a little while ago, with the Gateway Pundit.
He said that when he approached the Capitol, somebody from the inside opened the doors.
Now, the government has never admitted this is true, but once again, where is the surveillance footage?
The surveillance footage would show us how the doors got opened.
They would show us not just from the outside, but from the inside.
So this is an obviously critical question.
How did those doors get opened?
What we're getting at here is, we all know, there have been a lot of assertions that there was intelligence beforehand of what was going to happen.
And one can interpret somewhat benignly this as a major intelligence failure, a major government response failure.
There should have been plenty of security there.
They should have known what could happen.
They should have acted to prevent it.
But all of that implies mere negligence.
What I'm getting at here is something perhaps more insidious, which is to say, perhaps it was the case that they wanted people to come into the building, that there was a scheme afoot, if you will, to make it easy for them to come in.
Not that the people didn't choose to go in, they did, but crowds have a certain psychology of their own.
If people are moving in one direction, you and I have all been members of crowds, you kind of get pushed by the crowd in that direction.
But my point is, normally you rely on organization, on planning, on authority.
Go over here, you can cross over there.
No, this barricade is up here to tell you not to cross.
So the bottom line of it is, and the question being asked by Ron Johnson, he's the only GOP senator asking it is, was there a scheme afoot by someone?
We don't even know by who.
To let these guys into the building so that a mere kind of crowd-pushing activity, a walkthrough, as I've called it, the kind of thing that you'd see on a college campus, you've seen it with Occupy Wall Street.
This is much milder than anything that happens with, by the way, Antifa or Black Lives Matter.
This is not even anything approaching what's happening in Portland for the past year.
And by the way, Ron Johnson's been good about that as well.
In a letter that he's written, he basically said, listen, please explain to me, he's asking the Biden administration, Why there is such a huge discrepancy in federal treatment of the January 6th protesters on the one hand, and the so-called George Floyd protesters on the other.
Very lenient treatment for the George Floyd protests, as if to say, this is a marvelous display of idealism on your part.
Okay, we got you.
Okay, you can leave, you can leave, you can go.
Minor charges or no charges at all, whereas in the case of the Capitol, of the January 6th protesters, one charge on top of another, many of them repeating the same old thing, but an attempt to give maximum sentencing, maximum penalties, maximum intimidation.
And so why this double standard?
Is it the case that the January 6th protesters were sort of...
From the Biden people's point of view, they're guys, and so we go after them.
Whereas, hey, the Antifa guys, the BLM guys, those are our guys.
Those are our street thugs.
So we're going to treat them, obviously, more benignly.
Why? Because they're basically doing our bidding, or they're acting out the results of our policies.
We want to defund the police, and so we should fully expect, if you will, a kind of upsurge of crime.
And if there is an upsurge of crime, well, the criminals are basically responding to our policies, and therefore we should not be too harsh in going after them.
I think what we're seeing here, and this is an investigation that goes on, and I was against the January 6th commission because I thought that it was a fake, it was a rigged inquiry, it would come up with pre-decided results, but a real inquiry, that is desperately needed.
That is not something that has happened as of yet.
You know, I was thinking about Mike Lindell from the rally and from hanging out with him on the day of the event.
He's just an awfully nice guy, and I think this is actually part of the reason why he inspires such a hateful reaction from the left.
It's partly because he's so clean.
And I mean not just clean in the sense that he's clean from addictions, but there's a certain authenticity, a certain genuineness, a certain kind of moral honesty to the guy.
And so he makes the left feel dirty.
Why? Well, because they are.
We're now in major Mike Lindell promotion mode and I am doing my book and movie deal.
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I brought some books with me today, so I'm going to do some signing right now.
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So, Wendy...
And then I'm going to do one more for right now, and this one is going to Lyle from Michigan.
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This offer ends July 4th, so not very much longer to get Again, the number to call, 800-876-0227, or go to MyPillow.com and use promo code DINESH. I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast newly elected Congresswoman Nancy Mays from South Carolina.
She's actually the first GOP woman elected to Congress in South Carolina.
And it sounds like she has hit the ground running.
Nancy, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me. Let me start by asking you about this weird episode that happened at your house where vandals showed up, they defaced your property, they scared your family.
Talk about that and give us an update into where that stands right now.
Yeah, it's very scary and frustrating.
During my campaign, you know, I've received threats for a long time now.
As a state lawmaker, these things are not uncommon.
And, you know, oftentimes we get these threats, we feel a little, you know, jouster, you know, off key for a couple of days and we're right back to life as normal.
But when they show up at your house and they vandalize your home where you're raising your two children, and I'm a single mom, It changes things for you.
The fear that I felt that day when I came home and I saw what had happened is the same fear that I feel today.
It hasn't gone away. I have to take these things more seriously.
I had a concealed carry permit.
I've had it for several months, but I wasn't using it.
Now I use it every single day, especially when I'm home and I'm in the process of getting my concealed carry permit.
In D.C. And so, you know, we've seen, especially over the last year and a half, increases of political attacks from the left.
And they're seeking to destroy.
They seek to intimidate.
And I am a strong conservative woman.
I was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel of the Military College of South Carolina.
So if you think for one second that you can't intimidate me by showing up on my front door, you can't.
And I'm going to continue doing the work that I was elected to do.
And nothing's going to stop me from that.
You know, and there was a recent anniversary just a few days ago when Steve Scalise was shot.
Recently, also, Rand Paul was put in the hospital, and today he's missing part of his lung.
And it's past time that we hold people accountable for this political violence.
Today, we have some video footage of the person because they did another similar crime.
In the city where I live, but unfortunately it's very hard to identify somebody who's hooded, wearing dark clothes, and at night, in the dark.
And so right now we're just begging people for tips to call law enforcement, and I want to hold this person accountable, whomever it is.
Now, you mentioned political violence, and we've been seeing political violence, but to listen to the Biden people and to listen specifically to people like Mayorkas or Merrick Garland, you get the idea that all the political violence is coming from one side.
White supremacy is the engine of political violence in this country.
Isn't it a fact that we're seeing a great deal of political violence from the left?
What do you make of this kind of blatantly one-sided approach to political violence that is the official narrative of the Biden administration?
Well, it's absolutely wrong.
And we've been seeing it for a year and a half.
You've seen Black Lives Matter.
You've seen Antifa. I guess there's a difference between Antifa and anarchists.
I got criticized when I labeled my graffiti as Antifa.
It looks like Antifa to me. I don't really know the difference.
But these groups that hate the government are out there.
We've seen videos of them pulling people out of their cars in broad daylight and beating them.
They're burning cities down.
And so the right is often attacked, but we don't get a fair shake.
We don't get fair coverage. If I were a Democrat and this happened, there would have been wall-to-wall national coverage.
There would have been empathy. People would have cared.
But because I'm a Republican, because I'm a female Republican, and worse yet, a female conservative Republican, I was re-victimized.
I had the left. You had people on Twitter and on social media with We're good to go.
And it's up to us that when we are victimized to stand up and talk about it, to defend ourselves, to stand our ground, to not allow it to happen, which is why I'm really grateful for the federal and local law enforcement and state law enforcement that are trying to find this person and do this.
I want people held accountable.
I want us to be able to fund the police so they can do their job.
Get these people charged.
And it's not fair that conservatives are targeted.
And this is very one sided.
And it's up to us to elect people with strong backs and strong minds who will push back against this.
And violence is wrong on either side of the aisle.
And we have to be sure that we have people who are strong and we're going to be a strong voice when they're in Congress and this happens.
We've got to hold people accountable.
You came to my attention, I think, for the first time.
I think when you sort of busted AOC, AOC, of course, had posted this idea that she was hiding in her office, and then she went across the street and hid in somebody else's office, and she was terrified because there were terrorists swarming all around her.
Now, not to minimize the fact that that was a scary event.
And of course, when you don't know what's happening, a certain amount of trepidation is normal.
But what you pointed out was that whether or not she felt that fear, the real threat did not in fact exist in that building.
And you knew that because...
Your office is right next door.
Say a word about that, because I think it may get to the point of how the left is so good at sort of putting on a drama and inflating these episodes to make it sound like they are in mortal danger.
And as for us conservatives, we face no real threats that anybody need really worry about.
What is their mantra?
Let no good crisis go to waste.
And I deal in facts and not fiction.
I'm the daughter of someone who served in the military for almost 30 years.
And nearly every member of my family is an active duty member of our military or veteran.
And one of the things that I learned growing up is that you do not exaggerate your experiences in the military, especially And a combat type of situation.
And what I learned, you know, hearing stories from my father over the years and the men and women that he served with is that when that kind of exaggeration happens, you water down the experiences, the valid traumatic experiences of everybody else that was there that day.
And make no mistake, January 6th, for those of us that were here, was a traumatic experience.
And everyone handles their trauma differently.
But what we can't do is exaggerate claims because then people aren't going to believe what actually happened here.
And I remember at one point, I got stuck.
Our office at Cannon Building was evacuated.
I got stuck in a corner office in Longworth.
I had my staff meet me there.
And then when we were allowed to go back to our offices in Cannon, I got stuck in a tunnel under the Capitol just as they were, I believe, breaching The Capitol dome up above us.
And I was stuck down there with Dan Crenshaw, and there were probably 50 to 100 other staffers down there stuck in a tiny hallway together.
And I remember, you know, Dan Crenshaw saying just how dangerous the situation was.
And when, you know, former Navy SEAL and military war hero expresses that, you know, there's fear and trepidation.
It's my goodness, you know, we are in a situation we need to keep ourselves safe.
And so I just want to make sure that when we're We're talking about the experience that we're being honest and truthful.
And you would never think that telling the truth would get you in so much trouble.
And she picked a fight with me on Twitter for four or five days.
We had very relevant media subtweeting me and attacking me for telling the truth.
And I'm not going to stop doing it.
It's just like when my home was vandalized.
I got attacked for that as well.
This is where we are in this country, and it's got to stop, and I'm going to continue to tell the truth no matter what.
The American people demand it, and they need it, and they deserve it.
And the truth in this case was that there were, in fact, no Trump activists in the building.
The only person in the vicinity was a Capitol Hill police officer, as I understand, there to protect AOC. When we come back, we're going to talk about Ilhan Omar.
We're going to talk about the future path for the GOP. We'll be right back.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Congresswoman Nancy Mace from South Carolina.
We're talking a moment ago about AOC. I want to pivot for a moment to Ilhan Omar because recently she made this kind of controversial moral equivalence, I guess I would call it, between Israel and the United States on the one hand and groups like Hamas and the Taliban on the other.
So what she was basically saying, I think, Is that there are equivalent atrocities being committed on both sides or all sides, and we need to have a kind of universal condemnation of all of them.
Now, what did you, as someone who has went to the Citadel, thinks about America, what did you think about putting America in the same basket with the terrorist groups like Hamas or groups like the Taliban, which was, of course, instrumental in orchestrating 9-11?
It's appalling, quite frankly, and I think we should rename the squad to Hamas Squad.
America is not a terrorist organization, full stop.
And it's unacceptable that Representative Omar continues this vicious, hateful assault on America.
Serving in Congress for the United States of America Is a tremendous, tremendous honor.
And members shouldn't have this hateful assault on Israel or the United States, the country that they serve.
And Israel is one of our greatest allies in the Middle East.
And we're seeing more and more anti-Semitism on the streets of America and around the world.
And we need to protect our sister nation.
We need to protect Israel. But likening our country to terrorists is appalling.
And, you know, I hope that the voters in her district in the future will hold her accountable for that.
Antisemitic remarks have no place in the halls of Congress.
I mean, what's so odd to me about Ilhan Omar is I'm an immigrant as she is.
Now, in her case, she was a refugee, so her condition was, in a sense, even more dire.
And you may say America comes to her rescue.
I mean, what is the psychology of someone who benefits from America, has a life in America that would be inconceivable for her in Somalia, and then bitterly attacks the country in that way?
Do you have any take on how someone sort of gets to be this way?
I think these extremities that we see, it's I'm sure great for fundraising.
The crazier things that you say on the left, you raise more money, you get more TV interviews, you become a social media influencer rather than an influential, effective and efficient member of Congress.
I think at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.
It's about drifting and taking advantage of the American people and further dividing our country.
We're in a place now, I worry about my kids' future in this country based on the divisions that we have, and they further sow those divisions.
But by all means, if it's going to destroy the Democratic Party and give us an edge in a year and a half, then we'll take advantage of that because we can run on these messages.
These are un-American thoughts and symbolism and statements that are being made by members of Congress.
Let me ask you about, I think, a very important question for the GOP, for the Republican Party going forward.
It seems that the Republican Party is divided into kind of a traditional Republican wing and a sort of MAGA wing, if I can put it that way.
And I don't just mean that this is a temperamental difference because the traditional wing came through the Reagan years.
It supported free trade.
It was essentially an establishment wing of the Republican Party.
But now you had the sort of the Trump influence, which is more emphasis on a sort of nationalism, a willingness to use tariffs on certain occasions to sort of tame, to level the playing field on the trade side.
How do you think the GOP should negotiate these different sides in order to have a unified front going into 2022?
Well, the beauty of the Republican Party is that we do have different types of conservatives.
Part of the American experiment, part of living and being part of a free country is having the ability to debate ideas, to debate policy, and not be personally attacked for it.
And I do think that both sides sort of have gotten away from that.
We won so many, we flipped so many seats in November That were Democrat seats or swing seats.
Take my seat, for example.
I'm in a 50-50 swing district right now and a conservative that was elected there.
And so for me, too, it's not our position so much as how we talk about it, how we communicate it to people.
And bring people back in the fold because I'm not the enemy.
The person in the next state over who's Republican, they're not the enemy either.
The real enemy is the radical left, are these socialist policies.
Look at the infrastructure bill that we did last week that passed out of the House, all Republicans voted against.
But that was socialism. That was Green New Deal.
That was school lunches. That was social justice, environmental justice.
Had nothing to do with filling potholes and helping our airports or expand roadways.
And so we've got to make sure that we stay unified.
But also look at the policies that won us so many elections around the country last year.
President Trump's policies need to be a cornerstone.
Look at the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that happened under his administration.
We have one of the most flourishing economies in recent history and generations even.
If you wanted a job, you had a job.
In my district, our unemployment rate was 1.86% because of the tax cuts.
We had Operation Warp Speed, where you had an idea for vaccine to market in 10 months versus 10 years.
The FDA was run like a business rather than like a federal agency.
And, you know, we had things like prison reform.
We had the First Step Act, signing the law in December of 2018, a bipartisan campaign.
We've got to make sure that we're unified, that we're not attacking one another, and that we're working together because the seats that we're going to win back to get the majority in 18 months, they're not going to be 70-30, 60-40 Republican districts.
They're going to be districts that are 50-50 that are swing districts like mine.
And we know that our conservative ideas are the best ideas, but it's how do we make sure we communicate them in an effective way that doesn't alienate people?
But we want to bring people into the fold and show them why we need to have a seat at the table, why inflation is bad, why high taxes are bad, because that's what's going to happen under the Biden administration over the next couple of months and years.
Just one last question.
What do you think of this when you think that this is what the United States is putting forward, and these are very cunning, capable adversaries, Russia, China, and so on.
We're not really fielding our A-team, are we?
Right. And I met President Biden several years ago when U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings, who's also a Citadel grad, when he passed away.
I met him at his funeral and heard him speak.
And he gave a great speech, and he seemed very focused and understood what was going on.
But when I watched his press conferences and his speeches at the G7 summit, it really...
It broke my heart in a way.
It made me sad and very worried that this is what we're presenting on the world stage.
And I wondered, does he really know what's going on, what's happening?
And it was really, really sad.
And when America is strong, when we show strength, the rest of the world is dependent upon our strength because they're strong as well.
And here we have China putting warships in the Atlantic.
We've got Atlantic Ocean.
We've got Putin.
I mean, I just... We're not sending our best.
We're not showing our A-team.
We're not showing strength.
We're condemning China via words and nothing more.
We're not giving anything but a slap in the wrist.
And they need to be held accountable for COVID-19.
They need to be held accountable for the lab leak.
We've got to investigate that.
And when we're weak, the world is weak.
And we've got to be stronger, which is why I think we have a really good chance in 2024 of winning the White House back.
And in 22, we're going to get the House majority back.
And I'm working toward that every single day.
That is the mission. That is the goal.
And we're going to do it if we come together.
That is awesome. Nancy Mace, thank you very much for joining me.
I appreciate it. Anytime.
And thank you for having me on.
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It's time to bring back states' rights.
It's time to bring back states' rights partly because states' rights is an important part of the architecture of our Constitution.
But it's also important to bring back states' rights because states' rights are a check and in some cases the only check.
On a lot of the extremism and craziness that's coming out of the federal government, which is to say, out of the Biden administration.
I'm really happy to see the sort of states' rights activity that's going on around the country.
Just see that Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, our governor, says, I just signed a resolution asserting Texas sovereignty under the 10th Amendment over all powers not granted to the federal government by the U.S. Constitution.
The 10th Amendment very clearly.
The powers not given to the federal government specifically are reserved to the states and to the people.
And then, even more impressive, Mark Brnovich, the Attorney General of Arizona, writes to Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, and basically says,"...butt out." He says, listen, you're violating the 10th Amendment.
I'm now quoting him. My office is not amused by the DOJ's posturing and will not tolerate any effort to undermine or interfere with our state Senate's audit to assure Arizonans of the accuracy of our election.
We stand ready to defend federalism and state sovereignty against any partisan attacks or federal overreach.
And then this... It is important to remember that the states created the federal government, not the other way around.
Today, our federal government has largely forgotten the founder's intent, but my office has not.
So this is great stuff because this is basically telling the federal government, you stay in your lane and we'll stay in our lane.
Now, of course, I'm very familiar with the left and its usual.
States' rights, Dinesh, are just a pretext for slavery and segregation.
States' rights were used in the past to defend these horrors of American history.
That's what states' rights really means.
No, that's actually not what states' rights means.
The argument about states' rights began with the debate over the Constitution in 1789.
It had at that time nothing to do with slavery or segregation.
It had to do with the fact that we have a sort of divided sovereignty.
Madison called our system partly federal and partly national, meaning some powers to the states, some powers to the government.
And this whole idea that somehow the federal government represents the people, the The federal government is the defender of individual rights.
No, the states represent the people.
State representatives, state legislatures are no less elected by the people as federal legislatures.
So this sort of idea that there's an automatic presumption of the larger, the federal, over the state is absurd.
We have multiple attachments, by the way, even in ordinary life.
We have local attachments to our family, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our local community.
And then we have larger attachments to our state, to our country, And there's no automatic assumption that one attachment is better than the other.
Will anyone say, for example, hey, my attachment to my family is just really local, so it should be overridden by my attachment, let's say, to my local community?
No. Actually, my attachment to my family is much stronger.
So... Here's the point.
The Democrats used states' rights to promote slavery and segregation.
But that's what they did.
They abused the idea of states' rights.
So the problem is not with states' rights.
It's with the Democrats.
It's kind of like saying that, you know, guns are being used by criminals to murder and rob people.
Therefore, we have to get rid of guns.
No. Therefore, we have to get rid of criminals.
Keep the guns. Lock the criminals up.
Then this won't happen. So, by and large, what we're saying is that guns are not the problem.
And similarly, states' rights are not the problem.
The problem is the way that those things have been abused in the past.
Fortunately, we're talking about states' rights here, claimed not by the Democratic Party, the bad guys, but by the Republican Party, the good guys.
And in this case, states' rights are being used to tame the power of an overreaching federal government.
We don't need less states' rights.
We need more of them.
I talked yesterday about how inflation isn't just a hidden insidious tax that is imposed on all of us, but it's also a form of theft.
Now in May, the U.S. inflation rate, 5%, the highest in 13 years.
And we're seeing all around us higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher new and used car prices, construction costs, housing prices, the list goes on.
So inflation isn't just coming, it's here.
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Now, for decades, I never wanted to invest in gold, just the stock market.
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When we think about critical race theory, when we think about a lot of the extreme and somewhat nonsensical things that are said about race, many conservatives focus on the sort of triviality of it.
The sheer foolishness of what is being said on the surface.
Someone getting really upset about the wrong word.
You call me the wrong thing.
I'm a person of color.
I'm not black. I'm not black.
I'm African American. So this kind of argument about nomenclature...
Or, you find that racism is extended into absurd precincts.
The Washington Post literally published an article recently talking about how birds and bird migration patterns are racist.
I kid you not.
Now, but is that all there is to it?
Or is the reason that critical race theory has sort of found a receptive hold in so many precincts of our culture?
Because it is actually tapping on something a little deeper.
That's what I want to get into here.
And I want to get into it by looking for a moment at what Karl Marx—yes, Marx— And we trace critical race theory to critical theory, and we trace critical theory back to Marx and to Marxism.
This is a kind of cultural Marxism we're dealing with.
But I want to focus on something that Marx said not about race, but about religion.
Now, we're all familiar with kind of the slogan that Marx used, that religion is the opiate or the opium.
And this is widely taken to be Marx saying that religion is a kind of drug.
Religion is worthless.
Religion is harmful.
And that's all there is to it.
And this is partly what Marx is in fact saying.
Marx is actually building on...
Something that was said by the philosopher Feuerbach.
And Feuerbach basically said that God doesn't create man.
Man creates God.
Wow. Man creates God.
Why? Well, according to Feuerbach, a man has all these anxieties and fears, and he doesn't know how to live his life, and he's scared of life itself.
And so what people do is they take all their good qualities, all their noble qualities, all their hopes and aspirations, and project them onto God.
They project them onto an invented deity.
And they take all their hopes for a better life and they say, oh, that better life is coming but it's in the next life, not in this life.
It's a way of them explaining and consoling themselves for why this life isn't all that good.
And so, in a sense, says Feuerbach, people learn to hate themselves.
Man begins to hate man and love God.
And Feuerbach says it's only when you stop loving God, which is to say you kind of abolish this idea of God, creation of your own imagination, and learn to love yourself.
Learn to have justice, not in the next world, but in this world, that's when you become, if you will, a revolutionary.
And Marx, of course, just took all of this directly from Feuerbach.
Marx didn't think of it.
He didn't invent it. He got it.
He borrowed it from Feuerbach.
But Marx went on to say something about religion that I think is very interesting.
And I want to just highlight it in the next segment.
I'm going to try to explain what this has to do with critical race theory.
I'm now going to read from Marx.
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.
It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.
So, when we come back, I'm going to say what that means and show how it provides a kind of profound insight into critical race theory.
Critical race theory is responding strongly.
Admittedly in a distorted, perverted, and crazy way, but it's responding to a real problem, what Marx calls real suffering and real distress.
I was really happy to have Lee Habib, the executive producer of the movie The Streets Were My Father, on the show yesterday.
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I'm talking about Marx and critical race theory and how Marx's claim about religion as being the opium of the people.
In other words, it is a false solution, but it's a false solution, says Marx, to a real problem.
And I think that that insight, not about religion, But can be applied very effectively to the race debate in America.
Because on the one hand, while it seems like a lot of these new senses of belonging, oh, you know, I'm a black man and blackness is the key to my identity.
Oh, I'm a woman and I'm defined by my gender.
Oh, I'm a transgender.
You know, I'm a... I have my transgender card right here, and I demand to be called by this or that pronoun.
All of this stuff, which we're tempted to dismiss as a kind of trivial nonsense, I want to argue that it's a response to a genuine social problem.
Well, what is that social problem?
That social problem is the breakdown across our society of alternative and, quite honestly, deeper forms of belonging and of identity.
I mean, let's think about this. We have seen in America a deep erosion of what Edmund Burke called the little platoons of our society.
A deep breakdown, for example, of the family.
The family was once the sort of locus of belonging.
Who are you? Well, you know, I'm a D'Souza.
I'm a member of this family.
And my position in the family as a father or brother or husband defines who I am.
That's critical to who I am.
Well, we've seen family breakdown.
We've seen civic breakdown.
We've seen all these civic institutions that define people's lives from bowling leagues to women's clubs and reading groups and little leagues and on and on you go.
And these were once the sort of...
Little affiliations that gave people a sense of real community, the kind of community that Tocqueville observed in America.
We've seen a decline of the churches.
Think of how fundamental the church was as an organizing, not just a social institution, but an institution where people feel, I belong.
I am a member of this church.
And that is about my spiritual life.
But that's also where I see people on Wednesday and on Sunday.
And we socialize together.
And so all these forms of belonging have become thinned out.
And as a result, you might say...
A new form of belonging, a preposterous form of belonging.
Well, I belong to the community of black people all over the world, or I belong to the community of Latinos, and even though I'm Mexican and this guy's Cuban and that guy's Venezuelan, We haven't had that much history in common.
Pretty much all we have in common is we speak Spanish and not even in the same way.
But nevertheless, these kind of artificial, and I would say, in some senses, bogus forms of identification assume this kind of exaggerated importance.
A second point I want to make about all this, coming back again to Marx, a false solution to a real problem.
We have a real problem, and the real problem is that blacks in particular, but to some degree Latinos, have been in this country a very long time, but they're not doing as well as everybody else.
In fact, they're doing markedly poorer, and they should be doing much better.
Why? Because they know the country.
This is their territory.
They've been here an awfully long time.
They obviously also speak the language.
And yet you have these new immigrant groups.
And by the way, I'm not just talking about the Chinese or the Pakistanis.
I'm also talking about black immigrants.
They come to America.
Some of them don't speak the language.
They learn it very quickly.
They do better than the blacks, not just in math, but they do better in English.
And then they claim their share of the American dream.
So what I'm getting at is that critical race theory...
It's a false solution to a real problem.
The real problem is why these groups are falling behind.
And instead of dealing with that, you invent a bogeyman.
And the bogeyman is white supremacy.
America is to blame.
America is... And if it's not in an obvious way...
America is sort of through some kind of secret way, through the institutions of American life themselves, oppressing people.
It's a fantasy.
It is absurd.
It's nonsensical.
But it does demand that underneath it, there is a problem that needs to be addressed.
And I think it's a real tragedy that instead of paying attention to how groups at the bottom that are not doing well Can improve, can achieve their American dream, can reach their full potential.
Instead of paying attention to that real problem, we have this quixotic charging Don Quixote style at the windmills of non-existent structural racism.
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My daughter, Danielle D'Souza-Gill, is starting a new TV show of her own.
This is a little intimidating for me.
I now have competition within the family.
But this is going to be a weekly show, and it's sponsored by the Epoch Times.
So, Danielle, maybe start by telling people, because not everyone may know, what's the Epoch Times and what do they do?
Epic Times is a paper.
They do a lot of investigative reporting.
They have a lot of journalists.
But they're also starting this streaming platform called Epic TV, where you can see different shows, different people talking about different issues.
So my show will be called Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza Gill, so you can hear all about how we'll be fighting back against the radical left's culture.
And that will premiere July 4th.
So... And Epoch Times looks, what I think is so cool, is it looks like a bunch of conservative Chinese, people of Chinese origin, but strongly opposed to the communist government of China and opposed to communism and socialism in general.
And they're putting out their messages not just in America, but they're putting them out in Hong Kong.
They're trying to get behind the walls in North Korea.
They're trying to get behind the walls of China.
So I really commend what the Epoch Times is doing.
And it's really cool. They're expanding their TV platform.
And you're going to have your own weekly show.
So congratulations, that is super cool.
Sometimes we have conversations and I think, oh wow, it'd be kind of fun to put those on this show.
But of course we're talking in the car or talking as we're sipping our Starbucks.
So I thought it'd be interesting to put the ball in your court.
But not always Starbucks.
Not always Starbucks, that's true.
Yeah, we don't want to promote Starbucks.
Yeah, in fact, I just read that Starbucks, when they put their woke messages on their website, they're getting such a torrent of abuse.
And in general, I don't approve of this kind of torrential abuse, but I think this is very necessary.
You've got to send a message to these corporations that, listen...
Make coffee. You know, you're not in business to tell us all about our social problems or our voter integrity laws.
You know, you've got a bunch of very strange people behind the counter, and presumably they're good at being baristas, so do that.
Yes, exactly. Okay, so it's your turn to ask me a question.
We're going to do our Q&A segment, but we're going to do it in-house.
Yes, I'm coming up with a question.
So I thought it would be interesting to ask you, you know, we've seen so much moral decay.
We've seen our society go to such a dark place with Hollywood, what people are learning in schools.
And just in general, it seems like people have turned away from morality.
And I know that, at least for me, I've always thought this kind of went back to the 1960s, and that in the 1960s is when this cultural revolution took place, and the 1950s was when we still had a...
More good America.
That's kind of, you know, when the greatest generation was younger and so on.
So I wanted to ask you, do you agree with this theory?
Is there more to the story?
Did the disintegration happen a little bit earlier, later?
How would you kind of explain that?
Well, I think that this idea, on the one hand, I think it's wrong to say that America sort of had this straight-line moral society from the founding all the way to the 60s, and then suddenly, mysteriously, there was like a collapse.
That doesn't make any sense.
The virtues of the so-called greatest generation, this is the generation of your grandparents, for example, the generation that came of age in the Depression and World War II, is that their virtues were built by those catastrophic events.
You could almost say that their virtues were cultivated in scarcity and war.
Let's remember that before this generation, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald talks about the rollicking 1920s and Morality wasn't exactly in a high station in the 20s.
Even if you read The Great Gatsby, it's not as debauched as the 60s or today, but you nevertheless have this kind of casual approval of adultery, all this kind of bad stuff going on, and Fitzgerald seems to take a merely aesthetic view of it.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think that one sees, as one goes further back into American history, there is social fragility and there are currents of immorality.
The sort of bohemians that we see today existed even a century ago, but they didn't exist in all over society.
They existed in Greenwich Village.
They existed on the left bank of Paris.
They were at the Sorbonne.
They were in little pockets of society.
And you had free love communities, and I'm sure there were all kinds of people, men dressing up as women, and all this nonsense was going on, but the large body of Americans were insulated I think the big change has been that this kind of perverted subculture has now broken out into the mainstream culture.
Okay, so you're saying it's not really the 1960s.
It was earlier. You mentioned the 1920s.
What would you say happened maybe if we go back previous 100 years to 1860?
What happened between 1860 and 1920?
Because it seems like when you look at history back earlier, maybe even, you know, 1760, 1860, those kinds of things I think were pretty unthinkable from what we've seen, even in a smaller subculture.
So what kind of happened between 1860 and 1920 to where you even see women's clothing change so much.
People used to wear, you know, huge dresses and stuff in 1920s.
There's Well, I think that if you go back to the late 19th century, which is about 1850 to 1900, you begin to see the rise of explicit atheism that is riding the coattails of this new phenomenon that can be called Darwinism.
Suddenly this idea that man is evolved from other species, that there's no necessary assumption of a God that made man, this begins to really take hold in the culture.
Educated people come to believe, we don't really need to believe in God.
And even the Victorians, who are very conservative in their manners, were nevertheless, many of them had given up faith in God.
This is the point of Matthew Arnold's famous poem, Dover Beach.
He talks about the receding sea of faith.
And one of the prominent Victorians said something like, you know, when I think about God, unbelievable.
She goes, when I think about the next life, indefensible.
But when I think of morality, absolute.
So the Victorians are trying to hang on to morality, but they're cutting the ground out from under it, the transcendent ground, the idea that morality is supplied through conscience by God.
One other just brief observation, and that is the catastrophic effect of World War I. Remember, unlike World War II, the good war, we defeated the Nazis, concentration camps.
Everybody knows why we fought that war.
But World War I was a terrible war, fought in trenches.
People would sit in deep pools of water for weeks.
And they would lose 2,000 men to gain 10 yards.
And so 2 million Germans died and a whole...
Huge catastrophic losses in the British, the French.
And so I think what happened is after World War I, there was a sense that this flower of Western civilization.
Before World War I, you could use words like valor.
You know, a horse was called a steed.
People said things like, verily I say to you, and so on.
So this was the old language.
And if you think about it, it's the language of chivalry.
It's the language of knights. It's the language of knights in medieval armor.
This began to be replaced by irony.
So now if you said something like, verily, people will think, really?
They start laughing. Because our mode, which is the post-World War I mode, is cynicism.
Whenever we hear someone make a moral claim, we think, oh, that guy's a hypocrite.
He doesn't really believe it.
Let's look and see what he really does.
And so all of this kind of, I would call it low, cunning, know-it-all, wink-wink, Ironic way of thinking.
This is a legacy, I think, of the carnage of bodies produced by World War I. What do you think would be the biggest change?
Because when I look back at revival, religious revival, because we want another great American religious revival to Christianity, Those happened after or around the time of the American founding and then the Civil War.
So why is it that after World War I, it almost had the opposite effect where people didn't instead turn to God, they turned away from God?
Yeah, you get the sense in World War I that there was a lot more questioning of God than there was of turning to God.
There was a group of poets, kind of called the angry poets of World War I, and essentially what struck them, I think part of it was the sense of futility.
People can... Nietzsche says people can endure great suffering if there's meaning attached to it.
But if there's no meaning to it, what am I fighting for?
You know, Archduke was assassinated in Austria and here we are, millions of us getting slaughtered by the bushel.
You know, this sense of anomie, of confusion, I think...
Turns people away from God because they feel like no one is in charge of our spiritual destiny.
No one is guiding our lives.
We're kind of left on our own.
You know, Shakespeare is sort of like flies to want and boys are we to the gods.
They use us for their sport.
So this makes people not even so much disbelieve in God as...
And feel there's a sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness.
So we have to try to create or at least point people towards the meaning in suffering and in everything since that was sort of lost at that time.
Absolutely. Thank you.
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