All Episodes
June 29, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:04:11
THE EXODUS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 121
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Americans in droves are leaving the blue states, like New York and New Jersey and California, and moving to the red states, like Texas and Florida and Tennessee.
What does that tell you?
And how transgenderism inspired transracialism.
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.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
You flatter someone by copying them.
But one could also say, with slight modification, that immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
You show that a place is attractive and you show that it's got policies that work by moving there.
You vote with your feet.
Now, when we think about test cases of capitalism and socialism, we often look on the international stage.
We look, for example, historically at North Korea versus South Korea.
Socialist, South Korea capitalist, which one works better?
Which country are people trying to move out of and move to?
Or in the old Soviet times, East Germany versus West Germany.
East Germany socialist, a disaster, the Berlin Wall to keep people in.
And West Germany capitalist flourishing, doing much better.
But this comparison of places that are better or worse can even be applied inside the United States.
And so we've got blue states that are governed according to blue democratic leftist policies.
And we've got red states governed according to more conservative principles.
And it's kind of a good question as to who's leaving what type of regime and moving where?
Well, the answer to that question is in.
There is a massive migration underway.
Here's a new study, and it's actually done remarkably by a trucking company, United Van Lines, which obviously has an interest in who's moving and why and to where.
Well, according to the study...
Americans are fleeing states like New York and California for places like Texas and Florida.
And this is a trend that has been going on now for a number of years.
It is in no way stopped by COVID. In fact, accelerated in some respect.
And by the way, it isn't just the Californians are moving to Texas and New Yorkers are moving to Florida.
It is also the case that other blue states are suffering a hemorrhage.
Places like Pennsylvania and Michigan and New Jersey and Washington State.
And there are other red states that are also gaining people.
These are states like Arizona and Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina.
In fact, here are the top five inbound states for last year.
Idaho, Arizona, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina.
Wow! All of them red states.
Now, the question is, why is this happening?
The economist Friedrich Hayek many years ago talked about a framework of competing utopias.
And what he meant is that, you know, when you have a lot of different experiments, experiments in socialism and capitalism, people can sort of see what works.
They can look over their shoulder. And it turns out people are exiting the blue states and moving to the red states.
Now, some people might think, well, that's obvious.
You know, that's just due to the weather.
It's so much nicer in Florida than it is, for example, in New York, which can be frigid for parts of the year.
But this explanation doesn't really work.
Why? Well, how can it explain people leaving sunny California and moving to Texas, whose landscape is a lot more questionable, whose weather is a lot more dubious, as I can testify as someone who moved from California to Texas.
So the weather doesn't provide an adequate explanation, nor is it, by the way, adequate to say, well, you know, people are moving out of cities and they're moving more to suburban and rural communities.
No, that's not really true either.
Why? We're good to go.
Why is this occurring?
Well, one reason, taxes.
Taxes in the red states are lower.
We're talking, obviously, about state taxes.
So we're paying federal taxes anyway, but why would you want to pay another 9 or 10% on top of that and live in California when you can pay 0% and live in Texas or in Florida?
So taxes, not just income tax, state income taxes, but also property taxes are relevant.
Florida's property taxes, for example, are low.
And New Jersey's are very high.
So that's one reason why people move from New Jersey to Florida.
The second reason, cost of living.
You walk into a grocery store in California and your bill is $120.
You go buy the same stuff at a grocery store in Texas and your bill is $55.
It's a noticeable difference, not just for food and groceries, but also for gas.
Gas prices have gone up everywhere, but they're still much lower in places like Texas.
Another factor, jobs.
Much easier to find a job in the red states.
Why? Because there are entrepreneurially friendly policies.
And by the way, this applies to working class jobs.
If you want to work on a fracking rig, it's easier to do it in a red state.
But it also applies to high tech jobs.
And what's happened is California has been losing a number of the big high tech companies.
Elon Musk relocated to Texas recently.
But he wasn't the only one.
The software giant Oracle has unveiled plans to get out of Redwood City, California, to move to Austin.
Charles Schwab moved from San Francisco to Denton, Texas.
And these are not the only examples at all.
So jobs. What about crime?
We've seen a festering surge in crime, not just in cities, but in blue cities.
And who wants to live under the looming threat of being mugged or robbed or attacked or even just kind of molested in normal life?
I'm talking about the fact that you're eating in a restaurant in San Francisco and some homeless guy comes up and starts hassling you or yelling at you or spitting in your food or picks a chicken wing off your plate.
This is not the kind of life people want to live.
And this is what blue states not only tolerate, but to some degree encourage.
They build the tent encampments for the homeless guys to basically be right across from a nice Italian restaurant where they can basically go and hassle not only the staff, but also people living there.
And finally, I would say more broadly, just freedom.
Because the blue states have shown a certain kind of cynical appetite for tyranny that has somewhat come out of COVID. This idea that, oh, we're just going to not only lock you down, we're going to tell you what to do.
We're going to establish all kinds of regulations.
If you want to live, you've got to live in this regimented way according to our kind of code.
And if you don't do it, we're going to, if not fine you or harass you, we'll at least ostracize.
Oh, that guy's not wearing a mask.
Let me call him in. Let me report him.
This is life in the blue states.
And not surprisingly, it's unlivable for a lot of people.
Now, true, some people like the regimented life.
And these are people who go into the army.
And they want that, but that's not what most people want.
Most people want to live their own life.
They want to be the architect of their own destiny.
They want to choose the food that they eat.
They want to choose the people that they socialize with.
If they want to go to church, they want to be able to go to church on Sunday.
And the left has been clamping down in subtle ways on all of this.
So, As a result, people go at some point and think of it.
It's not easy to pick up and leave.
It's going to take a lot to make someone do that.
And there are some people, all kinds of conservatives, for example, who are prisoners in the blue states because they can't leave.
Their job is there. They've got kids already in school.
So I sympathize with people who are trapped in societies that have horrific policies that they have to endure.
So think of all the people who, if they could leave, would pack up and leave.
California is still the most beautiful state in the country, but despite its beauty, life over there is becoming increasingly unlivable.
And as a result, people are basically deciding, let's pick up the tent if we can.
Let's move to someplace where the sun may not shine as brightly, but my life prospects are a lot sunnier.
I've been reading the lawsuit filed by the Biden administration, the United States government, against the state of Georgia.
This is an attack on Georgia's voter integrity law, passed a couple of months ago and signed by Governor Kemp.
And this is amusing and instructive on two counts.
First, because I think it actually contains a hidden admission that massive cheating occurred in Georgia.
The government never says that, but the way they structure the lawsuit is kind of obvious.
That is kind of what they are saying.
And the second thing is the extremely degraded view that they have of minority voters, whom they seem to think basically cannot function at all in normal life.
And, you know, by the way, when I think about all this stuff, you know, blacks can't get an ID, blacks can't request an absentee ballot, this picture of minority voters, and I guess I'm included in this group, were considered to be so inept that we need to be taken by the hand and, oh, don't have no ID. Sorry, I'm from India.
I don't know what an ID is.
I don't know where I should get one.
This is the mentality in the lawsuit.
Now, separately, in other contexts, let's say university admissions, the leftist line switches to the opposite.
Oh, we need a lot of blacks and Hispanics at Yale and Harvard.
Why? Because they bring these amazing new perspectives.
They have this kind of new innovative mindset produced by racial diversity.
They're going to provide a kind of...
A kind of novelty of mind that is otherwise unavailable on the Ivy League campus.
So on the one hand, you're saying that these minorities are so dumb they can't get IDs.
On the other hand, they're like masters of variety and intellectual novelty and innovation.
Well, which is it? Obviously, if these people are so dumb, what possible big new ideas and innovations do you expect them to bring to corporate America or to the campus?
But let's turn to the government's lawsuit itself.
First of all, they have the usual nod to Georgia's long history of discrimination against black Georgians.
No mention, of course, that this history was driven by the Georgia Democrats.
That's a kind of neat omission from the document.
Then it talks about the fact that in 2020 there was, quote, And so the point here is, and this is kind of how slyly the government gets to this, they go, well, the fact that Georgia is now imposing certain limitations, like they're not going to mail out millions of ballots and just see what comes back.
They go through the different provisions of the law, one by one.
But they go, the government says that the net effect is, quote, to deny or abridge the right of black Georgians to vote, On account of race or color.
So let's go through this to see how the cat is being slightly let out of the bag.
They say in 2020, the Georgia Secretary of State mailed absentee ballot applications to 6.9 million active registrants.
Just mail them out. Now they say, according to the reform, the new law, it prohibits state and local governments from just mailing these generic absentee ballot applications.
The absentee ballot applications have to be requested by the voter.
So a kind of a common sense modification, if a voter wants an absentee ballot, ask for one.
This is now treated as, oh well, this is going to restrict voting.
Let's go on. It turns out that there are new Georgia ID requirements.
Before that, there was really no ID requirement hardly at all.
All you would do is compare the voter's signature on an absentee ballot envelope with the voter's signature.
In a voter file, but now you have to prove that it's actually you.
This would seem to be commonsensical.
You don't want people voting who are not that person.
And so any attempt to clarify and establish that it is the right person voting is treated again.
Oh, this may lead to a reduction in the black vote, evidently because there were voters the last time around who were not able to prove or authenticate that they were who they said they were.
And here we go. Before the passage of this law, various groups and organizations distributed food and water to persons waiting in long lines to vote.
These efforts were frequently led by black-led community organizations.
So here we go. We've got voter lobby groups that are pretending to be, oh, we're just providing food and water.
Battle! By the way, who are you voting for?
By the way, listen, vote for Osloff.
So what you got is you got, in order to prevent this kind of thing, in order to prevent last minute voter coaching, or let me fill out that ballot for you, or to prevent all that.
They say, listen, you've got to keep a certain safe distance from the poles.
Now, there's no prevention of providing water.
The law simply says that pole workers can make self-service water available from an unattended receptacle.
You can have a water fountain there.
People are free to go and take a drink of water.
So this idea of, you know...
I'm waiting in line to vote.
I'm so thirsty.
I may have to go home.
I don't know if I can really stay here and vote.
This is a completely fraudulent spectacle.
This is not a real thing.
And on and on it goes like this.
One comic obstacle after another.
And I think the bottom line of it is that what George is saying is...
What the Biden administration is saying is that we got away with all kinds of shenanigans the last time.
We want to keep getting away with these shenanigans.
Georgia wants to lock the barn door because of suspicion that the last time some horses got out.
And we want to make sure that doesn't happen.
Look, as a legal matter, this lawsuit I think is laughable.
It's not going to go anywhere.
But I think it's valuable as a case study for the corrupt psychology of the left.
Essentially what they're asking is...
Why don't you want to keep it such that we can keep cheating?
It's worked out well for us the last time, and we kind of would like to keep it going, if we can.
Guys, this is our very last week for the Dinesh MyPillow promo.
And what that means is if you spend $250 or $500 or $1,000, you get autographed books and movies from me.
And I hope you'll sign up.
This is kind of your last chance to do it.
Just a few more days left.
It ends on July 4th.
Now, I want to talk to you about Mike Lindell's Great products.
This is a guy who has a passion to help people get the best sleep of your life.
Now, he didn't stop by creating just the best pillow.
He created the new Giza Dream bed sheets.
These look and feel great, which means an even better night's sleep for me, which is crucial for my busy schedule.
Mike found the world's best cotton.
It's called Giza. It's ultra soft and breathable, but extremely durable.
Mike's Geezer Sheets come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 10-year warranty.
The first night you sleep on these sheets, you're never going to want to sleep on anything else.
Geezer Dream Sheets come in a variety of sizes and colors.
And Mike is making a special offer for my listeners.
You'll get two-for-one, low-price, plus...
Free shipping. Go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Dinesh.
There you'll find not only this amazing offer, but also deep discounts on all MyPillow products, the MyPillow mattress topper, the MyPillow towel sets, and so much more.
Call 800-876-0227 and use promo code Dinesh.
Or just go to MyPillow.com, but to take advantage of the discount and also to get the books and the movies, make sure you use promo code DINESH. There's an important case that just came out of the Texas Supreme Court, which is important in its own right,
but also punctures the sense of immunity and invincibility that digital platforms, high-tech companies, claim under Section 230.
Now, the case itself It involves sex trafficking.
And the Texas Supreme Court in its ruling held that Facebook...
Is not immune from lawsuits that are brought by young girls, underage girls, who have been trafficked as a consequence of trafficking operations set up on and through and with the facilitation, if not the outright cooperation, of Facebook.
Now, very interestingly, Facebook fought back against the lawsuit, basically saying, Section 230, we're a publisher.
We're not a publisher. We're a platform.
People can do whatever they want on the platform.
And the Texas Supreme Court said no.
The Texas Supreme Court basically said, number one, Facebook has allowed all kinds of pimps and sex traffickers to operate on its sites, not just on Facebook itself, but also on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
They also said that Facebook failed to warn these girls or anyone about the sex trafficking operations that take place on Facebook and all its various platforms.
And the lawsuits, by the way, also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking.
Facebook basically makes money on sex trafficking.
And the significant thing here is that the Texas Supreme Court emphatically rejected Facebook's defense.
They said, look, we're not going to address the issue of whether or not Facebook has, quote, free speech under Section 230 to allow or say whatever it wants.
They said that sex trafficking is not fundamentally about speech.
It is about pimps, and it is about money changing hands, and it is about underage girls being unlawfully captured and kidnapped and raped and sold.
And so, the fact that Facebook is facilitating this criminal operation I'm now quoting from the court's decision.
Or actions of their users is one thing.
Holding internet platforms accountable for their misdeeds, for their own misdeeds, is quite another thing.
And this is particularly the case for human trafficking.
So the court is not holding Facebook accountable for what the pimps do, but they're holding Facebook accountable for what Facebook is doing to enable the sex trafficking operation to go forward.
Now, when you look at the cases that are advanced by these plaintiffs, It's genuinely very heartbreaking.
You've got a young woman at 15.
A mutual friend reaches out to her on Facebook.
He offers her a modeling job.
Pretty soon, he takes nude photos of her, posts them on various platforms, and pretty soon she's being sex trafficked.
Another plaintiff in 2017, an adult male user contacts her on Instagram.
Pretty soon, she's kidnapped.
She's sex trafficked. She's advertised as a...
They use Instagram itself to advertise her as a prostitute.
She's been raped numerous times.
And the girl's mother says that she reported what had happened to Facebook, but the company showed no interest whatsoever.
A third girl was 14 on Instagram in 2016.
A man sent her a friend request.
They exchanged some messages.
Pretty soon, the girl was kind of groomed for sex trafficking.
He brought the girl to a motel, photographed her, and evidently, allegedly, raped her.
So, this is what these internet platforms, which, by the way, purport to be the, oh, you know, we have these content regulation guidelines, you know, we're making sure that people don't talk about hydroxychloroquine, we make sure that there's no misinformation on Facebook.
So, while they put on this kind of Civic responsibility pose.
It's important to realize it's a pose.
That is just ideological hits masquerading as civic responsibility.
Meanwhile, these platforms are doing all kinds of sordid business work.
Under the table, you might say.
They're aware of what's going on.
They let it go on.
The same kind of censoriousness and let's ban these users and de-platform those guys.
That applies to conservatives, but it doesn't apply to pimps.
It doesn't apply to sex traffickers.
It doesn't apply to people who are not just saying things that are unpopular or run a tort the Biden administration, but are doing things that are grievously against the law.
Whether you're buying a home or refinancing to a better rate, the lender you want on your side is American Financing, America's home for home loans.
Because this is a company that's in it for you.
I mean it. Their process starts with a free mortgage review.
There's no pressure, no obligation, no upfront or hidden fees.
They don't do that. The mortgage consultants take the time to understand your goals so they can present custom loan options that may save you up to $1,000 a month.
You choose what makes sense and they make it happen.
Mortgages don't get much better than that.
Call 888-528-1219 or apply online at AmericanFinancing.net AmericanFinancing NMLS 182334 NMLS Consumer Access Thank you.
For many months now, we've been hearing from members of the squad.
This is the kind of socialist gang inside the Democratic Party in the House.
They've been talking about defund the police, and they've been demanding this aggressively, incessantly, militantly.
The uncompromising tone of the squad's position can be seen in a tweet put out recently by Rashida Tlaib.
This is from April of 2021.
She says, and she's talking about the Daunte Wright case, quote, no more policing, incarceration, or militarization.
It can't be reformed.
In other words, you can't fix the police.
It's not a matter of improving the police.
You've got to get rid of the police.
You've got to take away their funding, and in doing so, you've got to cut them off at the knees.
You get the same message from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
This is from the summer of 2020.
She says, defunding police means defunding police.
Nothing could be more clear than that.
Now, all of this makes it particularly interesting to note that recently, when a bill came before the House, this was a bill to approve $1.9 billion In what?
In increased security.
In funding for the police.
The squad, which was in a position to kill the bill, decided to let it go through.
In other words, let's put it differently, the squad decided to protect itself.
And defund the police for you.
Defund the police for other Americans.
So let's leave poor and black and vulnerable Americans at the mercy of criminals.
Let's vote to bolster the fortifications for ourselves.
This is basically what the squad did, but they did it in such a sly way that their sly way needs to be outed, needs to be exposed.
So the bill passed by one vote, 213 to 212.
Every Republican voted against it.
Now, among the Democrats, six Democrats voted no.
Now, who were those six?
Interestingly, three members of the squad voted no.
And this would seem consistent with their position that they want.
They don't want added fortifications.
Let's think what the bill does.
It provides armed security for members of Congress.
It fortifies security protections of the Capitol.
It provides funds to the National Guard.
And it increases funding for the Capitol Police.
So, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Ayanna Pressley vote no on the bill, but three other members of the squad, AOC, Jamal Brown, and Rashida Tlaib, vote present.
They vote present.
Why? Because they want the bill to go through.
Notice that if the squad combined and voted six no's, the bill would have failed.
So what they did was three of them, to maintain their public posture, vote no.
But this might have even been by prior agreement.
Three of them go, well, listen, we'll just vote present.
That way the bill will go through.
Since we voted present, nobody can say we voted for the police.
But on the other hand, our collective action enables the bill to pass when we could have stopped it.
If we really were for defunding the police, not just for the poor, but also for ourselves, we could have done it.
But we didn't do it.
Meanwhile, they make sure I've got my private security.
These guys have plenty of arms.
There are all kinds of walls.
So the same people who are against walls and against fences and against gated communities and against armed security change their position really quickly when it comes to those provisions for themselves.
If you're thinking of replacing your carpets due to pet stains and odors, you must try Genesis 950.
The reviews are unbelievable.
This is one product that actually works.
Now, with water, it breaks down the bonds of stains and odors so they are gone for good.
Its antibacterial component removes pet odors from carpet and padding.
It can be used in a carpet cleaning machine, and it's green so it's safe for your family and pets.
Genesis 950 is made in America.
1 gallon of industrial strength Genesis 950 makes up to 7 gallons of cleaner.
But Genesis 950 is also great for bathrooms, floors, upholstery, and grease stains.
Debbie uses it to clean the entire kitchen.
When I got chocolate all over my pants and on the couch, Genesis 950 took it right off.
Genesis 950 has great customer service.
Order 1 gallon direct at Genesis950.com to receive a free spray bottle, free shipping, a $10 coupon code using the code Dinesh.
That's Genesis950.com.
Coupon only available for one-gallon purchase.
Genesis950. It's much cheaper than replacing your carpets or your pants or your couch.
We're all familiar with the transgender phenomenon, which is to say you've got people of one sex who decide that they want to become the other sex.
And so they undergo treatments and go through all kinds of transformations.
And their point isn't just that they are becoming something else.
Their point is that they have always been That's something else.
They were a woman trapped in a man's body or the other way around and so their transition, if you will, is nothing more than a return, you might say, to what they originally were or perhaps should have been.
They're, you may say, anatomically in the wrong place.
So we've heard all of this.
And now we have a twist on that phenomenon.
I would call it not transgenderism, but transracialism.
In what I think is the first case of its kind, we have this British white guy...
His name is, I think, Ollie London, Ollie something or other, who decides he wants to become Korean.
Or maybe more precisely, that he always was Korean, but he's a Korean trapped in a British white body.
And so he has taken some real measures to become Korean.
Listen. Hey guys, I'm finally Korean.
I've transitioned. I'm so, so happy I've completed my look.
I'm finally Korean, guys.
I have the eyes. Just had a brow lift as well.
So I'm so happy.
Finally, I've been trapped in the wrong body for eight years.
Now, this is a guy, by the way, who's had 18 surgeries.
Apparently, this all started when he developed a kind of obsession with one of these K-pop or Korean pop bands.
This is a band called BTS. And I think he decided, I want to become like those guys.
And so, he began this process of transitioning...
To becoming Korean.
Now, you might say, well, listen, is this a guy who's simply, like, fascinated by Korea?
He wants to become Korean in the same way that I, for example, became American?
Well, in that case, you just move to Korea, get a job in Korea, go through the various requirements, become a Korean citizen.
That's doable. But he doesn't want that.
He's not trying to become a Korean that way.
He wants to become ethnically Korean.
And my question is, are these things really possible?
How do you do it?
He says, well, I've got the eyes.
I've got the eyes. Is that all it takes to become Korean?
Well, here's a Korean political commentator, Kang Min Lee, who goes, who goes, I can't believe this.
This is actually unbelievably degrading to Koreans like me.
Because you can see why he's saying that.
He's saying that being Korean is a lot more than just adjusting your eyes to look Korean.
There is something about being Korean.
It's kind of like if I were to say, I mean, try to imagine if I were to say, you know, I want to become Korean.
A woman. And how do I do that?
Just wear a dress? Just take hormones?
Or I want to become Chinese.
How do I do that?
Do I just go to have an eye operation?
Do I just try to make my skin look a little bit different?
Do I start eating with chopsticks?
Start learning Mandarin? Do I become Chinese that way?
Take things a little bit further.
What if I decide I want to become a bat?
Or to go even further, I come to believe I'm really a bat.
I've always been a bat.
I'm a bat trapped in a human body.
Now, I choose this example very carefully because a few decades ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel at New York University, I believe, wrote an important essay, widely discussed, by the way, in the philosophical literature, and I have it in front of me.
It's called, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
And Nagel makes a very interesting point.
He says that you can put on a bat uniform.
I'm Batman. You can undergo various kinds of surgeries, and maybe at some point in science there'll be a way to try to rewire your circuits and your nerves.
But Nagel's point is, does that really make you a bat?
No. Or does it make you a human being pretending to be a bat?
Or a human being trying to imaginatively wonder what life might be like as a bat?
And now I'm going to quote Nagel.
He goes, there is something that it is like to be that organism.
And he calls it the subjective character of experience.
In other words, a bat has a bat's consciousness.
And no matter how much you...
Act bat-like and start jumping around the ceiling and maybe deprive yourself of your normal sound facilities.
You're trying to develop echolocation like a bat.
That doesn't make you a bat.
You're not a bat.
Now, here's Nagel again.
He says, He goes,
insofar as I can imagine any of this, it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave like a bat behaves.
But that is not the question.
What I want to know is what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
I think what Nagel is getting at here is that nature imposes certain limits.
Now, true through technology, there's a lot that we can do to modify our appearance.
It's also true that the human mind is very malleable and can, through empathetic exertions, we can put ourselves in the place of other people.
I can try to imagine, for example, what it's like to be Debbie.
This is a kind of mental leap.
But this doesn't mean I acquire Debbie's inner consciousness.
It doesn't mean that if I have an eye operation, I suddenly, quote, become Chinese or become Korean.
Nor does it mean, hard as I may try, and however much I may want, that psychology in the end can completely trump biology.
And a human being can somehow become, just by choosing to, a bat.
If inflation is the problem, gold and precious metals are the solution.
Now in May, the U.S. inflation rate, 5%, the highest in 13 years.
You're seeing it all around you.
Higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher car prices, construction costs, housing prices, the list goes on.
So inflation isn't just on its way, it's here.
Have you protected your savings, your investments?
If you haven't yet diversified a portion into precious metals, The answer is no.
Now, for decades, I never really wanted to invest in gold, only the stock market.
But now, I'm really worried about the regime we have in Washington.
No sense of fiscal responsibility.
Now, listen, if all your investments are tied to greenbacks, you're sitting on a ticking time bomb.
It's time to invest a portion of your savings into gold and silver.
Birch Gold Group. That is who I purchase from. That's who you can trust to convert an IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by gold and silver.
That's right. Through a little-known tax loophole, you can convert your retirement savings tied to the stock market into an IRA backed by precious metals.
It's your hedge against inflation.
Text Dinesh to 484848 for your free information kit on precious metals IRAs or to speak with a Birch Gold representative today.
With 10,000 customers, an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and countless 5-star reviews, Birch Gold can help you too.
Text Dinesh to 484848 and invest in gold like I did before it's too late.
I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast, Kenny Zhu.
Kenny is a journalist, a writer, an author.
He's been written for The Federalist, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Signal, Quillette.
He's the author of the book, An Inconvenient Minority, The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy.
Kenny also has a group, Color Us United, that fights for the principle of meritocracy.
Kenny, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
Start by updating us.
It seems that recently the Biden administration dropped a case against Yale University, in which Yale had been, as far as the data appears to show, systematically discriminating against Asian Americans, but also against other successful minority groups, you could say, and discriminating in favor of groups that were seen as underrepresented at Yale.
Tell us where that stands now and what does the legal landscape look like?
Yes, and I don't use the word systemic discrimination casually.
I think that word is tossed around a lot in our culture.
A lot of people like to say, oh, America is systemically racist, or this is systemically racist.
So when I say that something is systemically racist, I really mean it.
This is an example, the Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Ivy League discrimination against Asian Americans, of systemic discrimination against Asian Americans.
There is institutional collusion to actually lower the number of Asian Americans in these schools.
And Harvard does it by this use of a personality score, where they rate Asian Americans the lowest among all of the races.
And so in 2014, a group of Asian Americans said, hey, we had enough about this.
We're going to stand up for our equal rights.
They sued Harvard.
The case has been progressing through the courts.
And the Supreme Court just recently decided that it was going to seek the Biden administration's opinion of the Harvard case before potentially taking it up.
Now, let's look at the underlying issue here, which I think is illuminated by a survey that you presented.
The survey is kind of illuminating because it uses as its kind of comparison Caltech, which apparently does not practice this kind of systematic discrimination.
And the number of Asian Americans at Caltech, according to this graph, appears to be right around 40%.
Thank you. And I take it that you would agree that if Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Princeton were not discriminating against Asian Americans, the percentage of Asian Americans on those campuses would be roughly similar.
But in fact, the percentage is under 20%.
Something around, it looks like somewhere between 15 and 18 percent at all the Ivy League schools, which supports your point that all of these guys are trying to keep the Asian level at a roughly fixed number so there aren't quote too many Asians at these schools. Is that an accurate description?
Yeah, exactly. And I'm not the only one who has this opinion.
Harvard's own Office of Institutional Research did a study saying that if Harvard did not discriminate against Asian Americans, Harvard would have 43% Asian Americans.
That's Harvard's own study.
By the way, Harvard University buried that study.
They buried it.
They refused to publicize it.
And then not only that, but many studies have come around.
Asian Americans in the top academic percentile Have a one-fifth of a chance of admission as a black student in the top academic percentile.
And Asian Americans have to score about 440 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a black student.
And not only that, about 150 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a white student.
Now, Kenny, as you know, going back a century or so, it was not uncommon for Ivy League schools.
And we're only using Ivy League schools here because they're elite schools, they're selective.
This could be said of a lot of other selective schools around the country.
But the Ivy League schools, many of them had discriminatory policies against Jews.
And the reason that they discriminated against Jews is they, again, expressed the same fear.
There'd be too many Jews in these Ivy League institutions.
And so there was an informal quota to keep the number of Jews down.
Is it appropriate to think of Asian Americans?
Some people use the term model minority.
But is it appropriate to think of Asian Americans today as being the new Jews?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think so.
I think so, Dinesh.
My book, An Inconvenient Minority, The Attack on Asian American Excellence, right?
It's a similar vein, it's a similar thread of envy and resentment at Asian American academic success in this country.
But just like the Jewish Americans that preceded them, Asian Americans did not get to where they are academically in this country by sitting on their butt and doing nothing.
Asian Americans got to where they are because, on average, Asian Americans study twice as many hours as the average American.
Asian Americans, in general, prioritize education.
You know, there's this story that I tell in my book where Asian Americans who come from this poor Chinatown neighborhood, they spend their weekends taking a Kumon We're good to go.
Harvard rates Asian Americans lowest on personality scores, just like when Lawrence Lowell, the former Harvard president, said what he said about Jews.
He said, well, if we have too many Jews on this campus, then it's going to incite anti-Jewish sentiment.
So he actually provided a quota system against Jews in that regard.
And it's the same thing that's happening here.
When we come back, I'm going to dive into the ideology that drives the systemic racism, the ideology of proportional representation.
We'll be back. Court packing, it's the tool of left-wing authoritarians.
Hugo Chavez packed Venezuela's Supreme Court with his socialist cronies and paved the way for his tyrannical regime.
And now, Joe Biden and America's socialist radicals want to pack our Supreme Court with four new leftist justices.
Court backing isn't just some scheme to improve the courts.
It's really a coup.
A coup to take away your constitutional freedoms and turn America into a socialist country.
Now, this is why the First Liberty Institute, the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated to defending religious liberty in America, is doing something about it.
First Liberty recently launched SupremeCoup.com to serve as a one-stop shop in the fight against court packing and help patriots like you to learn the truth about what's happening in our courts.
More importantly, there's a big take action button that you can click to do your part to stop the Supreme Court coup.
If you want to defend our God-given freedoms and stop the left's court packing scheme, head over to SupremeCoup.com slash Dinesh.
Again, that's S-U-P-R-E-M-E-C-O-U-P dot com slash Dinesh.
I'm back with Kenny Zhu, the author of An Inconvenient Minority, The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy.
You know, I think, Kenny, that the Asian Americans have become, as you say, inconvenient.
But why have they become inconvenient?
because of the reigning leftist assumption that the people at the top of the ladder are the discriminators, and the people at the bottom of the ladder are the victims of discrimination.
And so, as long as you're dealing just with whites and blacks one can make an historical appeal to that and go, yeah, no surprise, whites are overrepresented because they're the discriminators.
But when you have Asian Americans who have not discriminated against Hispanics or Latinos, but who have outperformed these other groups, isn't that what actually makes the Asian Americans inconvenient?
They're supposed to be exhibit A for discrimination because they're at the top of the ladder, but in fact what they illustrate is what you do when you use the ladder of merit.
Yeah, I mean, this is what happens, you know.
The idea is that Asian Americans are now so-called white adjacent.
That's how the left justifies Asian American excellence.
They say Asian Americans conform to whiteness.
That's why they say that Asian Americans are on the top of the academic ladder, not because of merit, because the left does not believe in merit, but because of this so-called white adjacency, which is an idiotic ideology, because Asian Americans, just one generation ago, Asian Americans immigrated to this country with basically nothing, and they had no privileges, no social privileges to justify their status in this country.
They came here with basically nothing and within one generation, and Vietnamese Americans are some of the most powerful examples of this.
Their kids graduate from college at a higher rate than white Americans, where just one generation ago, those same Vietnamese Americans, 80% of them didn't even know English.
I mean, this is a key point because, you know, when you talk about Latinos in this country, some of them are bilingual, but the majority of them do speak English.
Obviously, blacks speak English and have been here a long time.
And in my case, I came from India as an immigrant, but I spoke English because I was part of the British Empire, you might say, one of the legacies of it.
But for people to come here speaking little or no English, and nevertheless...
I mean, it is a spectacular example of the fact that America makes this kind of success possible.
I think this is why the left is so discombobulated by the example of the Asian Americans, because they are walking refutations of leftist ideology.
Yeah, exactly. And hey, you know a little bit about Asian American excellence, and so do I, but this is a discombobulator of the left's ideology, as you said.
This is why the book An Inconvenient Minority explores this.
You know, how could you How could America be a racist country if it allowed a minority group, Asian Americans, to get ahead of whites in academics?
If the SAT was such a racist and inequitable instrument, how come a group of brown and yellow kids from the Asian continent come over and beat whites at the SAT in math and in reading?
It doesn't make any sense according to the left's framework, so they just prefer to dismiss us.
And by the way, you're talking here not just about academia, but also about economic success, right?
If you were to make a list of the top five ethnic groups in terms of, for example, annual earning power, you again would have brown and yellow people, if I can use those terms colloquially, at the very top of the list, whites falling somewhere in the middle, and then Latinos below that, African Americans below that also.
So that That picture does not look like a measure of American racism at all.
Let me turn, though, Kenny, to ask you this question.
Asian Americans, to this date, largely vote Democratic.
And this to me is a real puzzle because you've got a community that is socially very conservative, that is entrepreneurial, that has tight-knit families, that believes in merit, that would appear to be in complete sync With the ideology of the Republican Party, I would say even that Asian Americans live to the right of Pat Robertson in their actual lifestyle.
And yet so many of us, not you and me perhaps, but a lot of others, vote for the very policies that are keeping us down.
How do you explain that anomaly and what is the way out of it?
Yeah, well, I woke up out of that pretty early and my family did as well, which I'm just extraordinarily grateful for.
Identity politics is very powerful.
And what your listeners should know is that even if Asian Americans tend to have strong two-parent structures, even if they value hard work and education, even if they want to do things the right way and through the law, not through illegal concepts, The idea of politicizing people based on the color of their skin is still seductive to them.
It's still very seductive because the idea of playing off the idea of Asian Americans being a minority is Especially for second-generation, third-generation Asian Americans who are college-educated.
You go to college, and the first thing that they tell you, you're a minority.
You're oppressed. Act like it.
Vote like it. Be like it.
That's what's going on at these elite institutions.
In my book, An Inconvenient Minority, there's this girl named Eileen Huang, who basically wrote an article in Harvard This is the premise of the left, and this is where Asian Americans are really being sent to be indoctrinated.
So part of what you're saying is needed is a kind of almost consciousness-raising project in which Asian Americans come to recognize where our true interests are so that we can actually, as every other group does, by the way, vote for policies and ideas that actually improve our own prospects in this country.
Yeah, and improve American prospects as well.
The fight for meritocracy.
That's the subtitle of my book, An Inconvenient Minority.
The fight for meritocracy.
Meritocracy is something that the left completely ignores.
They don't like the idea that some people are just better at certain things than other people.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Some people are better academically.
Some people are better with their hands.
Some people are better at sports.
Some people are better at the arts.
And meritocracy allows people who are better to get ahead and to be rewarded.
Why? Because they're providing people with a better service.
If you're looking for a surgeon, are you going to look for a surgeon of a certain race, or are you going to look for the best qualified surgeon?
And this is what Asian Americans do.
They work very hard at what they're able to do, so they are able to be better at these certain skills, and they should be rewarded for that.
And Kenny, you're to be commended for standing up for this principle of merit and stand up against the political correctness that I'm sure you've seen all around you.
Best of luck with the book.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
We'd like to have you back sometime. Absolutely.
Thank you, Dinesh. If you take advantage of the Dinesh special with MyPillow, you get some great products, you support Mike Lindell, and you get some Dinesh books and movies in the bargain.
So those numbers are $250 or $500 or $1000 if you can, and I'll send the books and movies directly to you.
I want to talk about one of Mike's products here and these are his MyPillow slippers.
Mike has taken over two years to develop these.
They're designed to wear indoor or outdoor all day long.
These MySlippers are made with the MyPillow foam and impact gel to help prevent fatigue.
They're made with quality leather suede and for a limited time Mike is offering 40% off the new MySlippers.
The MySlippers are so comfortable.
You're going to want to get some for the whole family.
I actually did. Here's Danielle with her moccasins.
And of course, Debbie and I just love ours.
I got the moccasins. She got the slip-ons.
Go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Dinesh.
By the way, deep discounts on all the MyPillow products.
The Giza Dream bedsheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, and MyPillow towel sets.
Call 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com.
Either way, make sure to use promo code Dinesh.
I want to have fun with this segment, which I'm titling Critical Race Theory and the Helmet of Mambrino.
The Helmet of Mambrino is a reference to the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes and his great work Don Quixote.
Now, when I listen to the critical race theorists and their preposterous assertions, which are all about how everything is racist and the racists are among us and we don't see them but they're coming to get us and that the institutions have this embedded...
Racism, invisible to the rest of us, but evidently visible to these racism doctors who've got the heightened antenna to be able to perceive it.
I think of nothing more than Don Quixote charging against the windmills of his own time.
So let me talk a little bit about Cervantes and Don Quixote.
You have this squire, this sort of country gentleman.
His name is Alonzo Quijana.
And he reads these medieval romances from centuries ago, which talk about knights and steeds and castles and dancers in distress and wicked enchanters.
And his mind gets filled with this stuff, and so he buys more romances.
And essentially, he mentally becomes detached from his own time.
And he comes to believe that he is living in a time of...
A medieval romance. So he decides to become a knight.
Or to use modern vocabulary, maybe he decides he was always a knight.
A knight trapped, you may say, in a modern body.
So he decides to sort of put on the armor.
He rounds up his servants, Sancho Panza, and they go to take after, to defeat the giants and enchanters and evil demons that prey on innocent people around the world.
Now... The comic trope of Don Quixote is kind of the same.
Don Quixote sees something.
It's not what he sees.
But he insists that that's what it is.
And he and Sancho Panza get into kind of an argument about it.
So in one classic example, Don Quixote goes,"'Look!
There are those giants!' They're coming to get us.
Look at them flailing their arms.
And Sancho Panza goes, No, senor, those are not giants.
Those are windmills.
And Don Quixote goes, Windmills?
Don't you see their giant arms?
Don't you see? They're raised up.
They're turning around.
And Sancho goes, No, senor, those are the blades of the windmills turning around.
There are no giants.
And on and on it goes like this.
on another occasion there's a barber who has his barber's basin over his head.
Why?
Because it's raining, he's trying to keep his head dry.
And Don Quixote decides that this guy is some formidable, wicked adversary and charges against him.
The poor guy gets really scared, the barber doesn't take off but drops his basin.
And then Don Quixote picks it up and goes, Here is the helmet of Mambrino!
In other words, he thinks it's some medieval relic, some priceless artifact.
And once again, Sancho has to kind of bring him down to earth.
Sancho's like, No, senor, it is a barber's basin.
And Don Quixote goes, Sancho, hold on to the helmet of Mambrino!
Take good care of it!
And Sancho goes...
No, senor, I have to repair this so I can use it for my shaving.
And then comes the key scene where Sancho says to...
To Don Quixote, oh, knight of the woeful countenance.
That's what Don Quixote calls him, knight of the woeful countenance.
And Sancho goes, you know, a lot of the things that you've been saying don't really seem to be true.
In fact, one, I hesitate to say this, but one might get the impression that you are a little crat.
A little cracked in the head.
And then Don Quixote's response is priceless.
He goes, Sancho, you know, you are completely missing the point.
Of course we see windmills.
Why? That's because the wicked enchanters are trying to take the giants and fool us by making us think that they are merely windmills.
And of course you think this is a barber's basin.
Why? Because the demons and wicked enchanters in the world are able to take the helmet of Mambrino, this priceless artifact, and make it appear like a mere barber's basin.
Now, when I think of all of this, I think of critical race theory.
Why? Because you've got the same cracked interpretation of what is going on around us.
We'll start off with the fact that just as the country squire Alonzo Quijana changed his name, I'm Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Here we have the leading theorist of critical race studies.
There's a guy named Henry Rogers.
He decided, I can't be Henry Rogers.
It doesn't really sound right.
Let me change my name to Ibram X. Kendi.
So, this is basically this guy putting on his knightly armor.
I'm Ibram X. Kendi.
You look around and all you and I see in the world are pedestrian things.
We see birds flying.
We see math problems.
We see college admissions requirements.
We see the firefighters test.
And these critical race theorists go, oh no, that's not a math problem.
That's the linear white man's logic that you're looking at.
That is Eurocentric thinking.
Obviously, you can't expect blacks to do that.
And then you and I see, you know, it's a flock of birds flying across the sky.
And they go, oh no, those aren't merely birds.
And by the way, you may think I'm making this example up.
No, this is an article in the Washington Post about how the migratory patterns of birds are actually racist.
I'm sure someone points out, look, those are white birds.
Someone probably makes some academic connection.
White birds flying across the sky.
That's white flight!
Wait a minute! Isn't that the same reason that white people are moving out of inner cities and moving to the suburbs?
Isn't the white flight of white people from the cities somehow related to white birds flying across the sky?
By the way... I have here the germ of an A-plus paper at Yale or at Dartmouth because this kind of quixotic craziness, this kind of academic charging at windmills, this kind of acquisition of the helmet of Mambrino shows the air of detachment unreality, an illusion that have now come to supplant reality.
Just as now, In Don Quixote, Don Quixote justifies his illusions by appeals to the past.
There really was a time when you had knights, and there really was a time when they rode steeds and rescued damsels in distress.
And similarly, for the critical race theorists, they always appeal to the dark, dungeon-like experience of American history, because there was a time when blacks couldn't drink out of the same water fountains and had to stay in the back of the bus, and there was a time when the country had slavery.
But as with Don Quixote, those times are past, and living in the past and not acknowledging the changes that have come about in the present doesn't really make you a prophet or a knight-errant.
It just actually makes you an extremely stupid person who is unfamiliar with the way in which the world has changed.
And the world that you're describing bears no more resemblance to the world as it is than a barber's basin bears a resemblance to the helmet of Mambrino.
Export Selection