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July 1, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:06:35
WITCH HUNT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 123
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The witch hunt against Trump.
They looked into all his affairs and this is all they got?
Can you imagine if they subjected Biden to this kind of scrutiny?
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.
Oh, the left has been hoping and well I won't say praying because they don't pray a whole lot.
Salivating is probably a better term for this day.
The day when they would get Trump and the day that they would get the Trump Organization on criminal charges.
Well, that day is here, and the criminal charges have come down, but they're not quite what the left was expecting.
They thought that a searching examination of Trump, his dealings, the Trump corporations, would find a slew of atrocious violations, shoddy business practices, corrupt dealings, backroom payments, all kinds of illegality.
And yet, despite a thorough review of tens of thousands of pages, they've come up basically with, well, virtually nothing.
Nothing, to be more precise.
Sure, they went ahead and brought the indictment not against Trump, But against a Trump organization and the organization's executive, a top executive named Allen Weisberg.
And Allen Weisberg surrendered to the authorities.
He's been booked.
But here's the charge against him.
I have to sort of laugh.
Apparently he has benefited from, quote, tens of thousands of dollars, I'm now quoting from the New York Times, in private school tuition that was paid by the Trump Organization.
In short, he benefited from a company PERC. And evidently the PERC's extended to, quote, subsidies for, quote, rent on apartments and car leases.
Are you serious?
First of all, companies all around the country, if not the world, provide perks.
Part of your job benefits are going to be healthcare and we'll pay for this and we'll pay for that.
And I guess the government is alleging that, you know what, this is a clever way to evade taxes because if you give someone a benefit, let's just say a private school tuition benefit, that's not declared as normal income.
But guess what? This actually applies to all perks.
If we go back to when American companies started awarding healthcare benefits to employees in the 1950s, one major rationale for doing that was essentially that the beneficiaries, the employees, wouldn't have to pay taxes.
So in other words, if you gave them the money to buy healthcare insurance, that would be income.
But if you give them the healthcare benefit, it's just counted as a perk.
And it falls outside the tax net.
So nothing that is done here is out of the ordinary in any way.
And what you have here is a vicious, ruthless prosecutorial operation, one I'm very familiar with, the Southern District of New York.
In this case, it's headed by this guy named Cyrus Vance, a partisan Democrat.
And these are people who have been out to get Trump.
And they can't get Trump, but they're going to try to get this guy, Mr.
Weisberg. Apparently, the scheme here is to try to get Weisberg to flip on Trump.
Because here's a guy who's worked for Trump for 40 years.
He knows everything about the Trump Organization.
And so their idea is to get him on something and then use that as leverage to make him turn on Trump.
Well, his lawyers have said...
Good luck. That's not going to happen.
He's not going to turn on Trump.
There's nothing to turn on Trump for.
And this Weisselberg guy seems like a great guy.
In fact, in the New York Times profile, they talk about a meeting that he had with the New York Times some years ago in which he had made a claim that Trump's net worth was $6 billion.
And the New York Times asked for a review of Trump's assets, and he provided that.
And the New York Times goes, wait a minute, we added it all up.
It only comes out to $5 billion.
And then Mr. Weisberg apparently got up and said, uh-oh, I've got to go back to my office and find that other billion.
So this guy sounds actually like a pretty cool cat.
But the broader point I want to make here is that this is, as Trump says, a witch hunt.
What else can you call it?
Remember that our federal laws are like an accordion.
Every American is vulnerable.
They can always find something to get you.
And if they can't get you on anything substantive, they get you on, well, you know, we interviewed you for eight hours, and your statement on the first hour contradicted your statement on the seventh hour, and there you go.
You're lying to a federal authority, and that's going to be your crime.
Now, can you imagine if they took the same standard of review that they've been applying to Trump and applied it to Joe Biden?
I mean, with Joe Biden, with Hunter Biden, with James and Frank Biden, you have crimes that are just screaming out to be investigated, screaming out to be prosecuted.
And with every new revelation, I just read in Miranda Devine reporting in the New York Post, Joe Biden is present now at Hunter Biden's meetings with a bunch of corrupt Mexicans.
That's a flat-out lie.
And so there's plenty of material here for prosecution.
And so I think there are really two dogs here that have embarked.
The first dog that has embarked is, you aren't going after Joe Biden for doing things a hundred times worse than anything that Trump has ever done.
And the second dog that has embarked is, you looked at Trump, and this is all you got.
I mean, here's a guy who has a giant enterprise, who's building, has built hotels and the Woolman Rink, and he's built towers and developed real estate, and he's got properties abroad.
You would think that any corporation, you could always find, well, this went wrong, and that went wrong, and so we're going to nick you on this, we're going to get you on that, and after this massive review, all they got is...
You provided Mr.
Weiselberg with some free tuition for his kid to go to a prep school.
I think what it really shows is, contrary to what the left portrays, it shows the cleanliness of Trump.
This guy is actually abnormally squeaky clean.
Almost any other businessman in his position would have a lot more to answer for.
So I think Trump comes out of this looking terrific, looking fantastic.
And the really corrupt operation is the Southern District of New York.
This is an infestation of power-hungry bureaucrats who are trying to make their name in New York and in the corrupt politics of New York by going after a political opponent.
Remember that the Attorney General even campaigned, I'm going to get Trump.
I'm not just going to go after him on civil.
I'm going to go after him on criminal.
So this is how these people campaign.
They vow that getting Trump is going to be their goal.
In other words, an investigation in search of a crime.
And since they've got, as I say, this massive arsenal of statutes to pull from, they were bound to find something.
The something that they found is a big nothing.
But if it affirms anything, it affirms the truth of Trump's claim that he is being not just prosecuted, but persecuted.
And the real crooks, Biden, the sharks, the really bad guys, are still on the loose.
America's top general in Afghanistan, this is Austin Miller, recently had a press briefing with a group of international American reporters.
And he said that an American withdrawal pullout from Afghanistan could very well lead to a civil war within the country.
He makes the point that the Taliban has been capturing more and more territory, not only territory in the middle and south of Afghanistan, which has been their stronghold, but they're also now capturing roads and infrastructure in the northern part of Afghanistan, which is where the other ethnic and Tajik minorities are, which is to say that the Taliban is getting in a strong position to be able to take the whole country, not just a part of the country,
but the whole of Afghanistan.
And so I think General Miller's worried, perhaps worried even less about a civil war than about an imbalance of power in which the Taliban will be able to hold power.
Now, there may be other tribes that are trying to dispute Taliban hegemony, but the Taliban appears to be by far the strongest force.
And it seems like Miller's trying to keep America in there a little bit longer.
And he says this.
He goes, the future will tell the rest of the story.
What we have to do is make an honest assessment of what went well and what didn't go so well over the years as we work forward.
And that's kind of what I intend to do now, which is to say, I want to raise the question of whether...
The Afghan enterprise was doomed from the start.
I think that when I look back on it, it was.
I didn't see it at the time, and I was supportive by and large of Bush policies in Afghanistan, as in Iraq.
But I think in retrospect, the Afghan operation, perhaps even the Iraq operation, although I'll discuss that another time, It's a replay of what can be called the Vietnam mistake.
Let me talk for a moment about the Vietnam mistake.
You had North Vietnam, led by the Viet Cong, the forces of Ho Chi Minh, essentially threatening to take over the South and turn all of Vietnam into a communist country.
So what does the United States do to stop that?
The obvious thing to do is Which is, of course, what we didn't do, is to say, all right, let us attack the North.
Let us go after Ho Chi Minh.
Let's go after the infrastructure in the North.
Let's debilitate the ability of the communists to make war upon the South.
And that is the best way to win, to win outright.
Instead, the United States draws a line, the so-called DMZ, the demilitarized zone, and the basic idea is let's only fight south of the line, which of course made it easy for the North Vietnamese.
The Viet Cong would come over the line, they would raid villages, they would cause havoc in South Vietnam, and then run back across the border where U.S. troops couldn't pursue them beyond the DMZ. I mean...
What kind of stupidity dictates this kind of tactics?
But yet, this was exactly why the United States lost in Vietnam, and this is ultimately a failure, not of the American troops, but a failure of leadership.
Now, let's move to Afghanistan, because I think it was pretty much the same thing.
Now, the Taliban and the Afghan regime was, of course, complicit, in fact, the organizers, if you will, of 9-11.
And so it was fully appropriate for the United States to retaliate for 9-11 against Afghanistan, against the Taliban.
But retaliate how? Well, the simple way to do it would have been to say, all right, you've got these bad guys, the Taliban, in power.
Let's pulverize them out of power.
And of course, they're going to be rival tribes that hate the Taliban.
Let's install them in power.
And having installed them in power, not that we're their friends, but they're a preferable alternative to the Taliban, let us then go home and But that's exactly what we didn't do.
Now, why didn't we do that?
We didn't do that because of intellectual oaths like Colin Powell advancing idiotic doctrines that go something like this.
You know, it's just sort of like in a store that sells curios.
If you drop it, you break it.
And if you break it, you own it.
So literally, Powell with a straight face advances this doctrine for countries.
If you break it, you own it.
As if the United States, having pushed out the Taliban legitimately, having every legitimate national interest reason to do it, now somehow has a responsibility to To bring democracy to Afghanistan.
To, quote, own Afghanistan.
And here's where the problem starts.
Namely, the attempt to try to impose American values, by the way, from the 20th and 21st century into a country that quite honestly is largely in the 13th century.
Now, a more modest goal might have been, listen, let's take the country in the 13th century, introduce a couple of reforms, bring them into the 14th century, and then go home.
But we didn't even try to do that.
We essentially tried to import or export American-style democracy, American-style government, feminism, blah, blah, blah, into Afghanistan.
And needless to say, this was a disastrous failure.
In fact, it alienated a lot of the Afghan people.
So there's really no quarrel here with American troops.
We've lost troops there.
They fought valiantly.
They did as they were told.
They carried out their missions.
It's incredible that we were able to hang in there as long as we have.
But I think, again, it's failed leadership and not failed action on the ground that has produced this outcome.
And we don't have a choice now but to get out.
And I don't think that the danger really is so much civil war as it is a return to power of the Taliban.
And that is something that we are going to have to perhaps somewhat bitterly live with.
The British, when they ruled India over all those centuries, were much smarter about all this.
The British didn't try to change India in any fundamental way.
Yeah, there were a couple of outrageous practices like tossing the widow on the pyre of a burning husband.
The British go, you know, you can't do that.
But otherwise, the British left the structure of Indian society undisturbed.
India had a local panchayat or ruling headman form of government.
The British said, fine, do that.
The Indians had centuries of freedom.
They had the caste system. The British go, fine, do that.
In fact, someone once joked that all the British, they love the Indian caste system.
They merely install themselves at the top of it.
Okay, you have the untouchables at the bottom, the Brahmins at the top, and the British on top of them.
And so the British ultimately were prudent in recognizing their goal is to rule India, but not ultimately to try to interfere with the ordinary sociological rhythms of Indian life.
America, I think, could have learned from this...
You may say a modesty in approaching foreign policy.
We obviously haven't.
We've learned bitter lessons and lost a bunch of wars in trying to impose, I think, ideals that can't be imposed in quite this way.
Notice that, by the way, when the British left India, the Indians took the British system of government.
They established parliamentary democracy.
They established a largely British system of laws.
They took up tea. They took up cricket.
So, the Indians voluntarily embraced these institutions, and that's why they're so deeply embedded now in Indian life.
Not because they were imposed by force from the outside, but because they were incorporated by the Indians from the inside.
This is a very good lesson in how to produce real change in societies, and it's also a bitter lesson about why our great project in Afghanistan, although well-meaning from the start, has proven to be a failure in the end.
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There's a remarkable new article in Revolver magazine.
This is the online magazine published by Darren Beattie, whom I've had a couple of times on this podcast.
And I should say that Revolver News and American Greatness have become two of my very favorite references.
Reading sources, American Greatness for the breadth and incisiveness of their articles and also their thorough reporting, much of it done by Julie Kelly.
And then Revolver News, which is doing, I think, just investigative work par excellence, raising questions no one has even thought of.
And very often in investigative journalism, it is posing the question, The correct question and focusing people's attention in the right way, that is critical.
Now, the latest article focuses on a guy named Stuart Rhodes.
And who is Stuart Rhodes?
He is the founder, the chief, the kingpin of an organization called the Oath Keepers.
Now let's remember that the Oath Keepers is the group that the left, the Biden administration, the Department of Justice, the prosecutors of January 6th, they all present this as the most dangerous organization in America.
This is basically America's Al-Qaeda.
This is a white supremacist militia.
The military needs to be on guard against the Oath Keepers.
They have to worry more about the Oath Keepers than they have to worry about radical Islam or even China.
So this is the outward portrait.
And therefore, says Revolver, we have kind of a mystery.
Because on January 6th, the one organization that is supposed to have been the worst instigator, not the guys who just pushed their way into the Capitol, not the guys who stormed around or took selfies, but the people who actually talked about violence, planned to do some bad things in the Capitol, were the Oath Keepers.
And yet the chief oath keeper, the guy who runs the organization from top to bottom, other oath keepers have testified that this guy, Stuart Rhodes, calls the shots.
There's a board, but no, it's all Stuart.
Stuart tells us what to do.
And yet, while all these other oath keepers have been indicted, the kingpin, the guy in charge, Stuart Rhodes, is free.
Not only is he free, there hasn't been any thorough search of his home or his possessions.
At one point, I believe they confiscated his cell phone, but that's it.
And he hasn't been indicted.
And Revolver's question is, why?
Why is that?
Now, let's dive into the details of this a little bit, because this is where the questions really become, I think, important.
This fellow, Stuart Rhodes, is, by the way, a former Army paratrooper.
He claims to have gone to Yale for a while.
He's a gun enthusiast.
He founded the Oath Keepers in 2009.
And here's a guy who has...
Who was evidently whooping up his militia to be very active on January 6th, to in fact cause a lot of trouble.
I want to read a few statements by Stuart Rhodes because it kind of gives you an idea of the rhetoric that he was engaged in.
So he says, for example, he's talking about why they have to be active and take on, defend the president in his words.
Quote, because if you don't, guys, you're going to be in a bloody, bloody civil war and a bloody, you can call it an insurrection or you can call it a war or a fight.
So here's a guy actually talking about using the language of insurrection.
And let's look at a couple of other things that he says.
Well, here we go.
He goes, we want him, meaning Trump, to declare an insurrection, meaning invoke the Insurrection Act, and call us up as the militia.
So here's a guy actually planning or talking about using the language of violence, but violence authorized presumably by Trump.
And then in speaking about January 6th, he says, QRF is an abbreviation for Quick Reaction Force.
It's kind of a military term, which implies that if called upon, we can move in quickly and apply stunning blitzkrieg type violence in order to achieve our goals.
So here's a guy using very much the language of violence.
Now, one could say this violence wasn't in fact deployed by the Oath Keepers in the Capitol, but the government in its prosecution case on January 6th is saying it doesn't matter if the Oath Keepers used violence, the mere conspiracy to plan violence, to block an official proceeding, to put people's lives at risk or in danger, even the planning for this constitutes a violation of law.
So this is their standard.
And let's also remember that the government has been using a, quote, shock and awe standard against a lot of vulnerable people who didn't do all that much.
They were just in the Capitol.
They just walked in.
They didn't break anything. They didn't hurt anyone.
But they're being treated as horrific criminals because of the idea we've got to make an example of these people.
We've got to go after them, even if what they did seems to be Pretty minor.
And we can see this so-called shock and awe standard applied against other guys.
Here's a fellow named George Tanios and his companion Julian Cater.
So they're going after Tanios because they claim that even though Tanios, number one, didn't go in the capital...
He's accused of helping his friend use bear spray, but when his friend took out the bear spray to use it, Tanios goes, quote, hold on, hold on, not yet, not yet.
So Tanios doesn't say to use it, he just goes not yet, but the government is drawing the implication not yet means perhaps he was saying use it later, and therefore he too is part of this conspiracy to, quote, use bear spray even though he did not.
In fact, he actively tried to stop his friend from doing that.
And this is the government standard.
So given all this, you have Stuart Rhodes, and Stuart Rhodes is facing, at least as of now, no charges whatsoever.
Now, interestingly, there are other guys.
There's a fellow named Thomas Caldwell, and Caldwell is accused of being part of a conspiracy to plan violence, even though Caldwell himself doesn't do any of this planning.
Caldwell is merely on an online loop involving Rhodes, and the government in the charging documents against Caldwell is actually quoting Rhodes.
But they're saying that since Caldwell was, quote, listening to this or in on this, he's part of it.
So here's the remarkable thing.
Caldwell, who's only in the loop, is charged and is charged on the basis of what Rhodes said, and Rhodes isn't charged.
And therefore, says Revolver, now raising the critical key question, was Rhodes himself a plant of the FBI? Is the number one guy in the Oath Keeper organization a government man?
And is his job to make incendiary instigations and get people to be in on it and then have them all arrested while he goes scot-free?
This is the question. And it is only a question, but it seems to me a very relevant question.
Now, there are obviously some obvious objections that one can make to this question.
Well, wait a minute, Dinesh.
Just because they haven't yet indicted Rhodes, maybe they're trying to build a case against him, and so they haven't indicted him because they're just trying to get more evidence.
They're going to impose the most serious charges against him.
But wait a minute. Normally, if you have some guy and you're accumulating a case against him, You would file minor charges against him already.
Why? That's how you can get him into captivity.
That way he can't flee.
He doesn't become a flight risk.
But the government, in letting Rhodes go free...
This is actually not a guy we're going after.
This is not a guy we have to hold now.
And so, once again, we're back to the revolver question and think of the implications of it.
If Rhodes is a government guy, and by government guy here, we don't necessarily mean solely the FBI, because the question raised by revolver, and it's a series of questions, is basically asking, hey, listen.
Was Rhodes an informant for the Army Counterintelligence?
Was he an operative of the Department of Homeland Security, the so-called DHS? Was he somehow connected to the Joint Terrorism Task Force?
So you've got all these multiple government entities, which, by the way, have vowed to penetrate groups like the Oath Keepers.
I've had long-standing dealings with this guy, Rhodes.
And so the question becomes, if Rhodes is their man, think of what that means.
It means that he was put up by the government to foment January 6th, upon which they arrested all these other people.
And think of all these low-level guys sitting in solitary confinement, facing the most horrific persecution by their own government.
While the kingpin, the guy who, in most explicit terms, the planner, the organizer, the instigator, the most violent rhetorician, if you will, of January 6th, Sleeps in his own bed.
Now, Revolver's not saying here that they want the government to go arrest Rhodes right now.
They're actually raising a more important policy question.
Who is Rhodes accountable to?
Who's he working for? Is he really a right-wing militia guy?
Or is he actually a government guy posing as a right-wing militia guy to get other people?
Militia guys, to entract them.
And this question, I think, is of fundamental importance.
It needs to be answered because it helps to answer the bigger story of what really happened on January 6th.
So you've got this idiotic Nancy Pelosi task force, which is really not a task force to find anything out, but to cover things up.
The real questions are being asked by groups like Revolve or by reporters like Julie Kelly.
We want a real inquiry into what really happened on January 6th.
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I'm back with Debbie.
And while we were doing a little conversation about all these things swirling around in the news, we got a few things we wanted to talk about today.
Let's start with this business about the House voting to remove Confederate statues.
These are statues of people like Roger Taney, the Chief Justice who was the author of the Dred Scott decision.
The Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens, and also Jefferson Davis, who was the President of the Confederacy.
Now, during this debate, Kevin McCarthy, the GOP leader, Made a very striking statement that I have to take a little bit of credit for because this is a theme that I've been driving home in a series of movies and you'll recognize it as soon as you hear it.
So here's Kevin McCarthy making a point about these statues.
Listen. All the statues being removed by this bill are statues of Democrats.
Madam Speaker, as I heard the Speaker talk earlier about removing of the four portraits of speakers in the hall, The same answer goes for that as well.
They were all Democrats.
What's interesting, the statues that need to be removed were sent to the Capitol by states that were majority controlled by Democrats, sent to a house that had a majority controlled by Democrats, accepting of these statues.
I think the bill should go further.
Maybe it's time the Democrats changed the name of their party.
Now that exposition I thought was terrific, but the solution, inadequate.
What? Kevin McCarthy says the solution is to just change the name of the Democratic Party?
This is like saying, you know, you got the Nazi Party, it's done this, it's done that, but you know, why don't we change the name?
What's that gonna do? I think what they need to do is the Democratic Party needs to, number one, make a public admission of all its crimes.
Acknowledge it's the party of slavery, of segregation, of Jim Crow, and of racial terrorism.
We need a commission to make an inventory of these crimes.
And I mean in all their specificity.
The Trail of Tears, the unjust internment of the Japanese, all the slave camps, all the so-called Negro barbecues where they hung blacks on trees and ate burgers.
It's all horrible. But we need to lay it out, and we need to lay it out on the Democratic Party.
Then we need a public apology from the Democrats.
And then finally, we need a willingness to pay reparations.
I propose $1 trillion.
A lot of rich Democrats can put money into this.
The Democratic Party, as a party, needs to pay reparations to the black people who are descended from the slaves and the victimized blacks that they injured.
And finally, stop blaming the GOP, which was the party that fought them all the way.
The Democrats have very cleverly taken their crimes and tried to move them over to the other party.
It's a sleight-of-hand operation.
So, with Kevin McCarthy and the GOP, it's not enough to expose the Democrats and name them, but it's important to hold them to account.
That's, I think, the essential next step.
And, of course, the point you are making, which is that you've seen this before.
Oh, yeah.
I even watched the PragerU video that your wife did, me, about her home country.
I was hoping that maybe you could explain the appeal of socialism versus the reality of socialism.
During all of this talk about racial division and about critical race theory and all of that, I just go back to the beginning of the end for Venezuela and how it started.
People assume that it was socioeconomically, that that's what set it off.
The division was socioeconomic.
But I argue that it wasn't.
It was actually racial division in that country.
And there's plenty of sources on the internet.
You can look for yourself about how this went to be.
So let me just read to you.
This is an Al Jazeera article from 2013.
It's this African-American woman that wrote this for Al Jazeera.
But the first thing she does is she puts a quote from Hugo Chavez.
It says, Racism is very characteristic of imperialism and capitalism.
Hate against me, Hugo Chavez, has a lot to do with racism.
Because of my big mouth and curly hair, and I'm so proud to have this mouth and this hair because it's African.
Uhud Chavez played up his African roots and his indigenous roots like there was no tomorrow.
And he did this really as a way of dividing that country.
Well, let's set a little backdrop because you've told me...
That in the Venezuela you grew up in, it was a multiracial society.
You had people of every hue.
You had Iranians and Italians and Asian Indians and black people and brown people and lighter-skinned people.
And this reflected the sort of spectrum of Venezuela.
So the idea of dividing Venezuela into two and driving a wedge, Hugo Chavez started that.
Hugo Chavez did it, and he did it.
The preamble of the new constitution in 1999 that he did with his judges, right?
States that Venezuela is a multi-ethnic and multicultural society that guarantees the right to life, to work, to culture, to education, to social justice, and the equality without discrimination or subordination.
So, basically, he nips this.
And this is sort of the language of critical race theory now.
This is exactly that. In other words, it's benign on its surface.
Yeah, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, no discrimination.
But the way that these policies are carried out is discriminatory.
Absolutely is.
And that also goes further.
And he basically incorporated the...
The Afro-Venezuelan day into this.
So he had to have that, not to be confused with the indigenous Venezuelan day, which, remember that the statue of Christopher Columbus came down and was replaced by an indigenous man.
I noticed that there were Venezuelan ships that had been named after, I guess, lighter-skinned Venezuelans who had won Miss Universe.
And so he stripped those names off and he replaced them with the names of native Indian names.
So the same kind of purge of statues, of public monuments, and of history Occurred in Venezuela, I would say, it seems 20 years before it's come to the United States.
Absolutely. And here's another article.
Chavez made Venezuela face reality of racism.
It stems from all of this.
So as I always say, yes, the road to socialism has many faces.
This cry of racism is one of them.
And don't confuse it with just your little, oh, this is going to be in my curriculum.
I don't want my child to know this.
This is all the roots that are being planted.
To prepare America for socialism.
This is what Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela.
And look at the disaster that happened there.
And I'm very afraid that this is what's going to happen here.
So what you're saying is that when people talk about a statue, this is not really about Alexander Stevens.
It's not really about Calhoun.
It's not about...
Rather, what it's about is an effort to purge the whole society, to disinfect it as they see it of capitalist influence, imperialist influence.
It's a massive remaking of the American mind, as well as the school system.
So in other words, it's replacing, it's establishing an official indoctrination system driven by Marxist and critical race theory.
Absolutely. And just like parents are upset about it in America, the same phenomenon happened in Venezuela.
Parents were just livid that their children were being indoctrinated in this way.
Many of them cried out, they had signs, leave my child alone, not here, you don't do this here to my kid.
And look at what's happened.
When we come back, we're going to dive into Bill Cosby and Trump at the border and a couple of other pressing issues.
Thanks for joining us.
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That's 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. We're back, and we're talking about issues of the day, things going on around us.
We've got to say a word about Bill Cosby, because this guy is out.
He's free. I guess this is not an exoneration.
The court basically decided that he had made some deal with a prosecutor, that he wouldn't be prosecuted.
They went back on that.
So the court goes, you've got to honor that, and that's why he's out.
I mean, what I found amusing was the first thing he said and his lawyer said when he came out was, it's a great victory for black America.
And the way I interpret this is that, you know, Cosby knows that he's going to be hit with the Me Too outrage, right?
How can he get away with it?
He's only served a couple of years and he's out what?
So what he's doing is he's playing the race card.
He's hoping the race card will prove stronger than the gender card.
So that's, what's your reaction to Cosby?
Roaming free. Yeah, I think it's horrible.
But I also think that if any black American is proud of Bill Cosby, what does that say?
Well, a lot of black Americans, they started with OJ. I mean, it's not that they were proud of OJ. They thought of it as a win for blacks.
Yeah, but you know, there's got to be a line drawn there.
And the repulsive nature of what he did to these women...
I mean, that should trump race.
That should trump anything, really.
And also, you know, we could talk about the Me Too movement and what that has done.
But really, this man, old as he is, really, the fact that he's celebrating anything, he should just really just go home and just shut the door and be done, right?
I do want to acknowledge that he has made a signal contribution to the English language by introducing a new word.
It's a verb. The verb is Cosby.
You can kind of think of like a guy and a gal are out on a date and the guy goes, oh yeah, I have more drinks, I have more drinks.
And the girl goes, are you trying to Cosby me?
So Cosby here has now taken on a kind of grim significance, which is making someone comatose so you can take advantage of them.
That's horrible. That is a verb, and you've made many verbs out of these.
Well, I also like the reference to OJ, because some years ago I heard someone, they were talking about some crazy thing they did, and someone said, you know, that's real crazy behavior.
And the guy goes, yeah, that's a little crazy, but it's not OJ crazy, where OJ crazy means taking craziness to the limit.
That's when you love it. And then, you know, there's tubinisms.
I've referred on the podcast a few times to tubining.
I use it in a metaphorical sense, meaning doing nothing.
Kind of like, here are a bunch of CNN anchors tubining as they wait to figure out what Trump is going to do next.
Right? Because they don't have any viewers when Trump isn't around.
So it's kind of like, we're waiting for Trump.
We're hoping Trump will say something.
Is this where we can get our 203rd viewer?
You know, what? Or, you know, Don Lemon or Rachel Maddow.
But my favorite. What's my favorite?
I know your favorite, but you can tell what it is.
Swalwell. Just swalwell.
Just swalwelling.
And I must admit, I'm sometimes on the receiving end of this word because we'll be like, are you sure you want to eat Indian food?
You could be swalwelling all night.
Yeah, we don't need to be swalwelling on set or at home or anywhere else.
But no, I don't need to... Making fun of it.
So now, coming back to Cosby, do you think Cosby will...
I mean, it would be horrible if Cosby becomes some kind of a George Floyd-type icon.
That's one of the other possibilities.
He just slinks off into anonymity.
He doesn't seem to want to do that.
I heard this morning that he wants to do some shows.
He wants to immediately go on the road, is what I heard.
So I hope those of you out there don't buy any tickets.
Yeah, let's hope not. Hey, let's turn to Trump.
Trump went to the border.
He went to your original neck of the woods, which is McAllen, Texas, the Rio Grande Valley.
And we have a little clip of people coming out to meet him.
watch. Well, so basically what this is, the phenomenon that this is for those people that are able to watch is just lines and lines of people outside near the overpasses with flags, with Trump flags, and Latinos for Trump, and Texans love Trump, all of this, which I actually witnessed for myself. One of the times that I went to go
visit mom down in Harlingen, and I could not believe it, that really the valley was so excited about.
But I mean, this is a guy, they've demonized, he hates Mexicans, he hates immigrants, he doesn't like brown people.
So the vilification of Trump on this very issue, but evidently the Mexican Americans aren't buying it.
Yeah, no, they're not buying it because what Trump, the hope that Trump gave them, well actually it was more than hope, really.
It was results.
Unemployment for Latinos went down under Trump.
A lot of entrepreneurs were able to open businesses under Trump.
The taxes were low.
They knew that this man, Trump, was doing some great things.
They weren't being fooled by the Democrats.
I also think it's interesting that they're not flustered by Trump's rhetoric.
In fact, they see it as a kind of ordinary- No, they love it.
I have friends down in the valley that absolutely, the more Trump says, the more they cheer him on.
It's like, really? Because you know I'm a little bit more straight-laced than that, and I'm like, ugh.
And they're like, oh no. I love that you said that.
I absolutely love it.
And good for them.
Now, I have to say, my mom this morning told me, well, Debbie, my 85-year-old mom, Debbie, not everybody was happy he was here.
And I go, really, Mom?
Who? The Democrats.
The Democrats are a little worried.
The Democrats were not happy he was there.
Of course not. Why would they be?
I mean, to me, the largest significance is this, that the Republicans have been trying to get Mexican Americans over to our side for a long time.
Republicans have made headway before with Cubans, with Venezuelans.
People who've lived under socialism.
But the Mexican-Americans come out of a democratic tradition.
Many of them are habitual Democrats.
Even the more conservative ones tend to vote instinctively Democratic.
So for Trump to be the catalyst for winning them over, I think, has huge significance.
It does. And they adore him.
They adore him for him.
They adore him for what he did.
And I have to say that they wish he was still their president.
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I want to talk about the legacy of Roger Taney.
I mentioned Taney a little earlier.
He is the author of the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
A notorious decision in which Dred Scott, a former slave who had applied for his freedom, was denied that appeal on the basis that he couldn't be a citizen, and he couldn't be a citizen because he was black.
And we'll come to that in a moment.
Tawny, as I mentioned, is one of the figures whose statue the House voted to pull down, to remove.
And in that context, Kevin McCarthy mentioned that the Democrats are the party of slavery.
But of course, a Democrat today could say, well, that was in the past.
That's not who the Democrats are now.
We're no longer the party of people like Jefferson Davis or Roger Taney.
And the question I want to raise now is, is that really true?
We can answer that question by looking at the reasoning of Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision.
And we can look at an article, a very telling article about this subject, published in the recent issue of The New Yorker, written by a Harvard Law professor.
A left-winger named Jeannie Suk Gerson.
So here's Tawny in the Dred Scott decision.
He's trying to answer the question of whether or not Dred Scott, and by extension a black man, a black person, can be a U.S. citizen.
And Tawny says, to answer this question, we have to look at the statement in the Declaration of Independence.
That it is self-evident that all men are created equal.
And Taney agrees that if, in fact, all men are created equal, then, obviously, Dred Scott is created equal, and Dred Scott can be a U.S. citizen.
But Taney says it's not up to him to decide.
He goes, the real question is not whether he, Roger Taney, thinks all men are created equal, but whether the founders...
People like Thomas Jefferson thought that all men are created equal.
And Tawny reasons this way.
People like Jefferson cannot have believed that all men are created equal.
They must have been either hypocritical or lying or both because they didn't act on that themselves.
So Jefferson, for example, continued to hold slaves.
So, if he truly believed all men are created equal, says Taney, then he would not only have freed his own slaves, but he would not have allowed slavery to continue in America beyond the founding.
Since he didn't do those things, he was obviously kind of not sincere about his claim that all men are created equal.
And therefore, not only was Jefferson a racist, but the founders were racist, and racism is baked into the American founding.
This was, and this is, Tawny's argument.
Now, it's important to note that this is exactly...
Exactly. The argument of critical race theory.
The critical race theorists, the leftists today, believe in Tawney's argument.
They agree with it.
Now, Abraham Lincoln did not agree with it.
Abraham Lincoln, in fact, said, of course the founders sincerely believed that all men are created equal.
But for very good reason, they were not able to realize that equality right then.
To quote Lincoln himself, the founders declared the right so that the enforcement would follow when the circumstances permitted.
If I can give an analogy to clarify what that means, it would be something like this.
Let's say that we were to decide now that abortion is evil.
Abortion is wrong. It is the taking of human life.
And therefore, in order to implement that idea, we overturn Roe v.
Wade and we return abortion to the states.
That would be in fact a pro-life victory.
But, of course, a future generation could look back and say, no, these people living today, even the conservatives, even the pro-lifers, are complete hypocrites.
Because after all, if abortion is the taking of a human life, why would you allow a single abortion to occur in the country at all?
Why merely return it to the States?
Why not absolutely outlaw every single abortion, jail every abortionist, jail every woman who wants to have an abortion, and in that way you're being consistent with your beliefs.
Otherwise, you are stating a principle and not living up to it.
But of course, this would be a poor and inadequate argument because it would miss the fact that we are doing what we can in the circumstances in which we are now to push back on abortion.
And that's what the founders did.
That's the point that Tawny completely missed.
Now, interestingly, in The New Yorker, the writer Jeannie Sue Gerson quotes all kinds of left-wing professors who agree with Tawny.
So, what she's really getting at is, here's a guy.
Let me find him.
Yeah, Jamal Green, a constitutional scholar at Columbia.
He goes, quote, Casting Tawny as a villain who ignored the Constitution is a distraction from the reasonable possibility that the Constitution itself enabled Scott, Dred Scott, to lose.
Nicholas Bowie at Harvard Law School.
He says the Constitution sanctions slavery.
He said it would be profoundly irresponsible to tell a history of the Constitution that intentionally ignores the injustice that the Constitution has perpetuated.
So the bottom line of it here is you've got all these leftists who are not saying just that the Democrats were the party of slavery in Tawny's time.
They're saying they agree with Tawny now.
And what that would mean is that the taking down of the Tawny statue, far from being an act of disavowal of Tawny, is actually very dishonest because they're disavowing Tawny the man, while in fact Tawny's reasoning Taney's attack on the American founding,
which was done, by the way, in the name of slavery, in the name of the party of slavery, that logic, that reasoning continues, showing that the, you may say, the bigotry, the bigoted vein of the Democratic Party is not just a phenomenon of the past, but also of the present.
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I want in this segment to discuss, in some detail, a beautiful short story written by the American writer O. Henry.
And the story, one of my favorites, I read it probably first when I was in my teens, it's called The Last Leaf.
You might wonder, Dinesh, you do a podcast and it focuses on politics.
Why do you do these forays into philosophy and occasionally music and literature and art?
What is the point of doing that?
Well, the point of doing that is this, that we spend a lot of time deploring the depravity Of liberal culture, of left-wing, the kind of perverted values that Hollywood transmits in movies, the kind of disgusting exhibits that they try to parade before our children, the corrupt values that they have become brazen and open advocates for.
But we don't spend much time affirming our values, affirming conservative values, values that are not only Christian in their root or Judeo-Christian, but values that appreciate the sublime, that appreciate beauty and dignity and the kind of things that conservatives are supposed to conserve.
So fortunately for us, there is a great tradition of this, and it's not just a tradition of the sort of top writers that come to mind when you first name the great writers Milton and Dante and Shakespeare, but they're also minor writers.
And here's O. Henry, whose particular forte was the short story.
A little bit about O. Henry.
His real name was William Sidney Porter.
He was from, born in Greensboro, North Carolina.
But he moved to New York City.
He wrote some enchanting tales about the West, but he then became a short story writer and a very successful one, and his stories are often set in New York.
There are a number of stories I would recommend to you, two of my favorites.
One is called The Gift of the Magi, probably O. Henry's most famous story.
Another one I read recently called The Furnished Room, a very eerie but interesting story.
But I want to focus on my favorite, which is The Last Leaf.
A very short story. You can actually find it online.
It's no more than six or seven pages.
You can read it for yourself. But I'm going to give you a brief summary of the story itself.
You've got a little brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village, the kind of art center of New York City.
And you've got these two young girls, probably in their 20s.
They're both artists.
One is named Sue, and the other one is Joanna, also called John Zee.
And they're trying to make it in the competitive world of art, and they do sketches and they do paintings, and it's the dead of winter.
And one of them gets sick.
She gets, in fact, a kind of severe case of the cold that is kind of bordering on pneumonia.
And Sue begins to look after her roommate, Johnsy, who is sick, and give her hot soup and this sort of thing, and the doctor is called, and the doctor goes, this is a very persistent ailment, and I don't think that Johnsy has the kind of will to live.
That you need to fight through this kind of thing, even if you take medicine.
And so the doctor is a little worried about John Z's prospects.
And it turns out that Sue and Johnsy have a neighbor, an older guy, 50 or 60 years old.
His name is Berman.
And he lives downstairs.
And he's a painter, too. And he's a friend of theirs.
And he comes up occasionally and he talks to them.
Sometimes they have him pose.
When they want to do sketches of a scene that involves a man, he becomes their model, so to speak.
And this guy, Behrman, although he's always advising a paternalistic sense, advising Sue and Johnsy, he's actually a failed artist.
He's always talking about his masterpiece that he's going to do one day, but he's really never done it.
He's never amounted to anything.
But he's a big bear-like man.
He's affectionate. He obviously cares about these two young women in an avuncular way.
Interestingly, as Johnsy's health deteriorates, she becomes a little bit, well, almost delusional, and she develops an obsession by looking out the window, and she's looking at a tree, a kind of vine just outside the foggy window, and it's bitterly cold outside, it's heavily snowing, and she's counting leaves on the vine, and she's noticing that one by one the leaves are falling off.
And she calls in her roommate, Sue, and she goes, listen, Sue, look at those leaves.
There were hundreds of them at one time.
Now, every day I look at them, there are fewer and fewer, and now there are only five or six left, and quite honestly, I think that when the last leaf falls...
Well, I think that's going to be it for me.
That's when I'm going to sign out.
And, of course, Sue becomes kind of alarmed.
He goes, what are you talking about?
This is ridiculous. How can you say a thing like that?
And Johnsy goes, no, no, that's kind of the way it is.
I'm not even against it.
I'm kind of ready. I'm going to have to go when the last leaf falls.
I'm just going to count. And each day she tells Sue, so look, there's three left.
Oh, look, there's two left.
And finally she tells Sue, look, there's only one leaf left.
Now, Sue is very alarmed, and she tells Mr.
Bearmon, the bear-like guy who lives downstairs, she tells him, I'm very worried about Johnsy.
She seems to be virtually hallucinatory.
She thinks that when this last leaf falls, that'll be it for her.
And Bearmon goes, what kind of nonsense is this?
And, of course, he's outraged by this.
And he comes up to the apartment where he's going to do a session where Sue is going to paint him.
And the two of them kind of look at each other meaningfully, and they don't say a word.
And then Sue boards up the windows to keep the light out so she can do the painting.
And Johnsy, her roommate, goes to sleep.
And the next morning, Johnsy wakes up, and she immediately goes to the window to see if the last leaf has fallen.
But no, it's still there.
And Johnsy goes, wow.
I don't know. I guess I'll have to wait another day and see what happens.
And then the next day there's more rain, there's more snow.
But the following morning, Johnsy wakes up again and there it is, the last leaf.
It's still there. And Sue says to Johnsy, Johnsy, this could be kind of a sign.
I don't know. And Johnsy goes, yeah.
She goes, you know, I don't know.
I kind of have been sort of wanting to die, but it's sort of a sin to want to die.
Maybe I shouldn't be trying to think that way.
And Johnsy slowly begins to sort of recover.
And Sue brings her food, and Johnsy gets better.
And then we come to the...
To my view, stunning climax of the story, which is to say that Johnsy is now largely recovered.
She's better. And the doctor comes in and he goes, she's safe.
You've done it. Food and care now, that is all.
And now I read. Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay.
I have something to tell you, she said.
Mr. Berman died of pneumonia today in the hospital.
He was ill only two days.
He was helpless with pain.
And then she continues, and then they found some things.
There was a light that he had taken outside and there were materials for painting.
There was paint, green paint and yellow paint.
And as a reader, you're thinking, what's this all about?
And then we come to the end of the story.
This is Sue talking to Johnsy.
Look out of the window, dear.
At the last leaf on the wall.
Didn't you wonder why it never moved when the wind was blowing?
Oh my dear, it is Berman's great masterpiece.
He painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.
So, what do we get out of this?
What are the values we're trying to affirm?
I want to kind of highlight two.
The first one is, from the point of view of Johnsy, the great importance in life of a sense of hope.
That's really what the last leaf represents, the hope of living another day, doing something more with your life.
And notice that for Johnsy there's kind of a religious dimension to this because Because when Johnsy notices that the leaf doesn't fall, she says to Sue, you know, I'm not quoting her, she goes, it's a sin to want to die.
She begins to rethink her earlier almost attraction to mortality.
And she goes, that's not the right way to feel.
Life is a gift. It needs to be affirmed.
And then I want to turn to Mr.
Berman, the real hero of this story.
A hero, why? Because he did produce a masterpiece.
But it wasn't a masterpiece of art.
Now true, he did do a piece of art.
He's the guy who put up a ladder on the window.
He painted the leaf on the window.
And so he sustained John Z's hope.
But in doing it, he was an old man and it was bitterly cold.
And so essentially he caught his death of a cold.
He caught pneumonia. He died.
But his masterpiece was not his art.
It was actually his life, a life in which he was willing to do the right thing, to take a risk, to put his own life in danger, and ultimately to give it up, to protect these two girls, and this one girl, Johnsy, whose own life was in mortal danger.
So this is a...
It is a beautiful character sketch, and it shows the virtues of a short story to be able to encapsulate so much.
At the end of the story, you kind of feel like, wow, I kind of know Sue a little bit, but I kind of know Johnsy better.
And I know Mr. Berman most of all, and if I were in a difficult situation, the kind of guy that I would want next to me or in the trench is some guy like O. Henry's character, Mr.
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