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July 2, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:05:54
FINALLY! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 124
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Time Text
Finally, the Supreme Court comes through and strikes a huge blow for voter integrity.
So they don't want to look at whether the horse was stolen, but at least they're going to let us lock the barn door.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Finally, finally we win a big one at the Supreme Court, a case with far-reaching implications and on a critical issue, namely voter integrity laws.
The Supreme Court appears to be saying in this decision that it doesn't want to look at the 2020 election.
It doesn't want to, you may say, investigate whether the horse was stolen.
But it is going to let states lock the barn door, which is to say to take practical measures to ensure against the possibility of voter fraud in the future.
And the left, of course, is screaming because they hate these voter integrity laws.
And their main argument has been that these laws are discriminatory.
They make it harder to vote, in Biden's phrase.
And the good thing about a Supreme Court decision is that these arguments engage each other.
We find in the legal reasoning of the decision—and I have the decision right in front of me.
It's 80 or so pages— No, I'm sorry.
It's about 40 pages, single-spaced.
But it is a very illuminating clash between Alito, who writes the decision for the majority.
By the way, it's a 6-3 majority.
All the conservatives are the six, and the three progressives, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer.
Are on the other side.
And so we get a kind of a Kagan writing the dissent.
We get kind of a sharp contrast of views and a contrast of legal reasoning.
Now, we're talking really about two things in an Arizona law.
Arizona's voter integrity law requires two things, and Alito sums them up, so I'm going to read.
Voters who choose to cast a ballot in person or on election day must vote in their own precincts, or else their ballots will not be counted.
That's provision number one.
In other words, this whole idea of a guy showing up with a suitcase of votes.
Oh yeah, I got these from a bunch of guys in my neighborhood.
That is not going to fly.
So now...
Here's the question. The question before the court arose out of a provision in the Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act was initially passed in 1965, I believe, but it's been amended subsequently.
And basically, the Voting Rights Act simply says that you can't have a voting law that, quote, denies or bridges the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.
Now, that is broad enough, but what does it actually mean?
Now, in 1980, the Supreme Court said that what it means is that the law in question, the law that falls afoul of the Voting Rights Act, must be discriminatory in intent.
So not merely in effect.
It must be discriminatory.
It must have a discriminatory motive.
But that, of course, is hard to prove.
So Congress sort of amended the Voting Rights Act basically to say that no voting law can be passed that, quote, results in the denial or abridgment of the right to vote.
Now, here's the question.
Do these Arizona provisions, which are, on the face of them, neutral?
Because, after all, they don't single out blacks.
They don't say things like, well, blacks can't do this, but everybody else can.
They're facially neutral.
They apply to the whole voting community.
And the question is, do these constitute a violation of the Voting Rights Act?
Now, the Circuit Court of Appeals, which took the decision Sort of one rung down, said yes.
They said, quote, Arizona's policy of discarding out-of-frecinct ballots have a discriminatory impact on American, Indian, Hispanic, and African-American voters in Arizona.
Now, how is this even possible?
How do they have a discriminatory impact?
Well, it turns out that the appellate court said that American Indian voters, minorities, quote, renters and poor people don't really have the habit of using the mail.
Quote, minority voters rely on third-party ballot collection for many reasons.
So the idea here is that here are these American Indians, and they don't like to use the mail.
They don't like to also show up in person.
They just like to sort of, hey, Chief, running bear, come over here.
Here's 800 ballots.
Why don't you take them in for all of us?
So this kind of stuff, apparently, it was the basis of the appellate courts saying that the Arizona law was invalid.
And of course, this is now picked up by Eleanor Kagan.
Who basically says, oh yes, we're not supposed to just look at the intent of the law, but we have to look at the discriminatory impact of the law.
So the idea here is that if you have a law, even if it's facially neutral, but it has a disproportionate impact on different racial groups, that by itself creates a presumption that the law is invalid.
Now, this is exactly the issue that Justice Alito takes head-on.
And Justice Alito starts off by saying, wait a minute.
He goes, first of all...
He says, voting does impose burdens on everybody.
After all, it takes effort to vote.
Your vote doesn't magically transfer from your mind into the machine.
You have to show up to vote.
You've got to take the trouble to request ballots.
You've got to send in your ballots. So voting imposes burdens on everybody.
The question at hand is, does this type of voting rule impose an unfair burden on certain minority groups?
And Alito says, no.
He says, first of all, Thank you.
Every state has a, quote, strong and legitimate interest in preventing fraud.
This is a key point.
He says, quote, fraud can undermine public confidence.
He says there's another important consideration here, and that is voters should be able to vote without intimidation or undue influence.
And this is why, for centuries, countries have used, quote, the private voting booth.
So people can't strong-arm you into voting a certain way, or you can't go to a nursing home and sort of pressure people to all vote for your candidate.
And then you bring the ballots in.
So Alito is saying, no, states have a right to protect the integrity of their votes.
Second, he says, and this is a key point, that a quote, a law is not discriminatory.
Even if its impact falls unevenly on different groups.
So the general idea here is that, I'm quoting him now, the mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote.
So, let's just say, for example, that American Indians have a cultural practice of not using the mail.
Well, okay, then you can show up in person and vote.
So, you have options.
You're allowed to vote. They've actually, Arizona, the court agrees, has made it easy to vote.
But the simple fact that your group doesn't feel like using the mail because we're just not into the mail doesn't mean that allowing mail-in ballots and establishing some ways in which those can be sent in is, quote, discriminatory against Indians.
So this is the kind of illogic that the left has been using very effectively.
In other cases, but here the court clamps down and goes, no, that's not the way to go.
The court looks at, quote, the totality of circumstances in which Arizona passed these rules.
And finally, Alito makes an absolutely critical point.
He goes, the...
The left is constantly saying, well, you know, you haven't actually proven that there was discrimination.
You haven't proven the need for this voter integrity law.
And Alito basically goes, so?
He goes, you don't need your house to be robbed before you establish an alarm system.
You don't need to have proven that there was, in fact, fraud and there was, quote, a need for a ballot integrity measure.
States are perfectly free to say, listen, whether or not there was fraud the last time around, we just don't want to have fraud in the future, and therefore we're going to do A, B, and C to...
To ensure against that.
One more quote from the opinion.
Having to identify one's own polling place and then travel there does not exceed the, quote, usual burdens of voting.
It's kind of hard to believe you have to have the Supreme Court actually saying such obvious statements that when they give you...
It's kind of like saying, you know, you have...
You have a local public school to go to.
All of this has, as I say, wide-ranging impact because the Biden administration, really right before this decision, filed a lawsuit against the Georgia Integrity Law.
And that, if you read it now, you have to sort of keep laughing about it because all the arguments rejected by the Supreme Court are coughed up in that lawsuit.
So you can safely assume that that lawsuit is pretty much of a dead letter at this point.
And this is also a green light to other states to pass voter integrity laws.
Because the standards of having those laws are clearly set forth here.
There's nothing wrong in protecting voter integrity.
You don't have to prove that there was some preexisting fraud.
It doesn't matter if there's some disparate impact as long as you're allowing everyone to get out there and vote some way or the other.
You're not singling out a particular group.
It's perfectly fine to go ahead.
Of course, here's Biden in his usual kind of mumbling, bumbling mode.
Today's decision by the Supreme Court undercuts voting rights in this country.
And he basically says, this is why we've got to pass the For the People Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Quote, our democracy depends on it.
And the sheer idiocy of this, our democracy depends upon laws.
It's a mortal threat to democracy to tell people, listen, you've got to vote at your own And you've got to show up in person.
And it's got to be you. It can't be somebody else.
And no one can show up with a Volkswagen full of ballots.
All of this, according to Biden, is a grave danger to our democracy.
So these people are beyond parity.
And I think the Supreme Court is on to them.
They recognize that this is basically the, you can almost call it the guys who are trying to make it easy to cheat.
They deny that. They say, we're not doing that.
We're just trying to make it easy to vote.
But in making it easy to vote and removing authentication requirements, you are also making it easy to cheat.
And it's hard to believe that the Democrats who are pushing for this don't know that.
The Supreme Court, which has disappointed us in some recent decisions, has finally come through with a big one.
And for that, we should be grateful.
Nancy Pelosi's task force to investigate January 6th is now underway.
Of course, it features a dissident Republican.
Yeah, no surprise.
Liz Cheney. This woman has become just a poisonous influence in the Republican Party.
And I normally think of the party as kind of a big tent.
But when someone is just doing the bidding of the other side, is actively working to undermine Republicans...
Then this person is just absolutely a liability.
So I hope that the voters in Wyoming decide that Liz Cheney does not belong, you may say, on the boat.
She needs to be jettisoned, at least into the ocean.
Now, this task force has one simple purpose, to vindicate the left's preposterous narrative of January 6th, which is not to say that there isn't room for genuine investigation, it's just that it's not going to come out of this task force.
There are legitimate questions being raised, the most recent, in Revolver Magazine.
What is the role of this guy, Stuart Rhodes?
Stuart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, who may very well be an FBI informant.
In fact, he might even be the instigator of the plans for violence on January 6th, drawing other people into the net and then having them get arrested and charged while he, quote, the lead insurrectionist.
I mean, he's sort of the, you may almost call him the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, if you will, of January 6th.
The whole analogy to 9-11 is, of course, preposterous, but I'm going with the left's view of it.
And so how odd it would be if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or even Osama bin Laden was not charged.
And that's exactly the case with Stuart Rhodes.
Now, what makes one even think that this guy is an FBI informant?
Well, as it turns out...
He was very involved a few years ago in a showdown at the Bundy Ranch.
I don't know if you remember this. This goes back to 2014.
By a weird coincidence, I was actually there.
I wasn't there as a participant.
Debbie's laughing. Of course you were there.
But no, what happened was that I was regularly appearing on the Megyn Kelly show on Fox.
And Megyn Kelly said, hey, Dinesh, you know, there's some crazy stuff going on at the Bundy Ranch.
Would you be willing to be a kind of Fox man on the scene and keep your eyes open and we'll have you on the show and you can talk about what you see and what you hear?
So I kind of did a little bit of a somewhat peculiar Fox correspondent work, if you will, on that one singular occasion.
But when I was there, I noticed that there were all kinds of—there was, first of all, massive military presence from the U.S. government.
I think there were some threats to sort of raid the ranch and take over the Bundy land, and it was a land dispute between Bundy and the government.
But there was also a huge presence of militia to, quote, defend the ranch.
And, of course, it was a little bit It's scary because of the possibility of a showdown and, in fact, the eruption of massive violence between the government and American citizens.
Fortunately, none of that happened.
But interestingly, this fellow, Stuart Rhodes, was there.
And not only was he there, but he was apparently...
He's stirring up, in all kinds of public ways, the troops, if you will, the militias, for the potential of violence.
And he made several kind of calls to that.
And at the end of the day, several of the Bundy people were arrested, the entire Bundy family.
The father, Cliven Bundy, the son, Eamon Bundy, a friend of the family, a guy named Ryan Payne, They were all arrested on conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
Sound familiar? Very familiar charge.
This is exactly what is being charged on January 6th.
But again, Stuart Rhodes was never charged.
He got off scot-free.
Raising the question, again, if the guy who is making the biggest hoopla about violence is mysteriously not charged, does it not follow that this must be a guy who's working with the U.S. government?
So that's the question being raised here.
Now remember, why is this important?
Because there's all this public rhetoric...
Well, the FBI was taken by surprise.
The Capitol Police were taken by surprise.
We had no idea January 6th was coming.
No idea. Well, what if your guy was the head of the Oath Keepers, and he was the guy whooping everybody into the violence?
Surely you would then have known about it.
Why? Because you actually caused it.
You're the insider of it, not Trump.
The FBI. So this is the big unanswered question that...
A commission would do well to look at, but you can feel sure that this commission is not going to look in this direction at all, even though there is a real possibility that the lead insurrectionist was an FBI informant.
Which means, in effect, that January 6th was an operation run, in a sense, by the U.S. government itself.
Because they were the ones directing, they would have been the ones directing this guy to do what he did.
And that, of course, would blow into the water the entire issue that this is sort of some grave threat to national security.
The Oath Keepers are some dangerous group that is operating unhinged, kind of like ISIS. No, the idea would be that the Oath Keepers is a group that is being cunningly manipulated and steered By the U.S. government itself through one of its own operatives.
And so these questions, I think, vitally important involving January 6th.
But if we do get the answer at all, it's certainly not going to be from the Pelosi-Cheney faction.
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I read an article in the New York Post written by Miranda Devine about a New Yorker, Joseph Bolanos, who had a really chilling experience with the FBI. And as I read through it, it struck me that this is the sort of corruption of the deep state in a nutshell.
And so I invited Joseph Bolanos to come on the podcast.
Joe, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate you doing this.
Let me start by asking you to say a little bit about yourself.
Where do you live? What do you do?
Just so people have a little introduction to Joe Bolanas.
I was born and raised in New York.
I live on the Upper West Side.
I've been in the security business for over 44 years.
And I've also become a community leader in my area in that I'm the president of a landmark block association and I've pretty much devoted one-third of my life to my block and to my neighborhood.
And isn't it also true that you are a bachelor and that you have a 90-plus-year-old mother and that part of what you do is you look after your mom?
Yes, my mother is 94 and she's in the throes of dementia.
Not full, but about three quarters.
And back in December, I had to take her to a rehab home because she kept falling and couldn't get up.
So she's been there since December.
And so I do go visit her, let's say, twice a week and have lunch with her and basically take care of her and monitor her condition.
Now, on January 6th of this year, you were in Washington, D.C. for the Trump rally.
Talk for a moment about, are you a Democrat, a Republican, are you a Trumpster?
Why did you go to the rally, and what did you do after the rally?
Well, actually, I had no idea that I was going to go to Washington, but a friend of mine spoke to me four days prior, and she told me she was going to Washington to do some sightseeing.
She lives in Sonoma. So she's a dear friend.
So I said, great, I'll join you.
And I made a reservation for that Wednesday morning to go to Washington.
And we knew that there was going to be the certification of the electoral votes.
So that was kind of a double reason for being there.
But I had no idea there was going to be a rally.
I've never attended a rally.
I'm really an independent, but I'm a registered Democrat only because in New York, you're not allowed to vote in primaries if you're an independent.
So talk about voter suppression.
They don't let you vote, so you have to be the Republican or Democrat.
But anyway, getting back, I got there about 1045 and I started walking toward the Washington Monument.
And I have to tell you that I was a volunteer at 9-11, after 9-11 with the Red Cross.
And since then, some of the side effects that I had was I can't be around crowds.
I really feel very uncomfortable.
I've walked out of concerts.
I just can't do it.
And this was the first time in Washington...
Where I was walking with a partial crowd to a huge crowd at the Washington Monument.
And instead of being anxious and kind of a little shaky, I just felt so relaxed because the people were just, they were, you know, Heartland people, what they call flyover people, are my kind of people because, you know, in the East Coast, they say that, you know, they send their kids to Ivy League schools.
The Heartland sends their sons and daughters to war.
So these are the people that I really love and I care for.
And they were so nice. Anyway, I digress.
So I shot some footage.
I was shooting with a 13-foot pole, some 360 video.
President Trump was still talking.
And he wasn't really – I didn't see him, but he wasn't animated like he is at rallies.
It was just basically – Not really high tone or high energy.
So it was very cold.
And so I said, I shot enough footage.
So I started walking toward Constitution.
I texted my friend who was in the crowd and I said, I'll meet you at the hotel.
She said, fine. While at Constitution, I took some more video.
And that was about 1247.
OK, so at 1247, I took thousands of people walking.
Then I headed toward the JW Marriott, where I was meeting my friend.
And I got there between 105 and 110.
We went upstairs. She was with her girlfriend.
We warmed up. We were eating organic chips.
And I photographed the chips were so good that I photographed them.
So there's a timestamp for that.
And then we were there till 205.
We went down in the elevator, took another picture, and we headed toward the Capitol.
Now what the interesting part of this is, is that we were walking with a crowd, there were no unruly people, there was no civil disobedience, violence, what have you.
As we approached the other side of the Capitol, not where the breach had taken place, there were no police cars, there were no barriers, there were two barriers on the grounds, there were no signage, no JTTF, there was no authority.
So basically I kept shooting as I was walking, we were walking onto the grounds, And we didn't know we were on the grounds because the Capitol was still, you know, a few hundred yards away.
So, and there happened to be a couple of porta-potties.
So I'm thinking, this is an event, you know, this is a crowd event.
And it was a real, very surreal feeling because there was also a platform, which later they were saying was going to be the inauguration platform.
There were a bunch of people up there and we thought, I thought, that there was going to be a speaker.
Somebody was gonna say something and all of a sudden they unfurled this huge It had to be 70 foot American flag. I get goosebumps thinking about it and Everybody went wild and no let me let me let me jump in here for a minute though Because I want to ask you this simple question Did you or did you not enter the Capitol?
Not at all. Not at all.
And you have not only an FBI raid of your apartment, but an FBI raid of your mother's apartment.
Let's fast forward a little bit and talk about that.
What happened there?
Well, I was staying at my mother's because my mother is still in rehab.
She's in a rehab home facility.
So I was spending time there trying to clean up for her because I wanted to make it wheelchair access.
They had visited me at her house on February 4th, Thursday.
Four agents. They asked me if I was at Antifa, blah, blah, blah.
I said no. I gave them a copy of the videos I had shot.
So I said, okay, fine.
Everything is fine. A week later at 6 a.m.
in the morning, I'm sleeping on the couch at my mother's place.
And there's banging. Open the door!
Open the door! FBI! FBI! So I get up, I'm half asleep, I open the door, and there are like these eight to ten tactically dressed, I guess, soldiers with JTTF on them.
One of them was pointing an automatic rifle at me, an automatic, yeah, automatic, like an assault weapon, about five feet away.
He was, I guess that's procedure for them, but, you know, you don't wake up, you open the door, and you have soldiers at your door with a thing aimed at you, a rifle.
So they took me down and they basically put me in a car.
They handcuffed me when I went out of the apartment.
They asked me to step out. They handcuffed me, gave me some clothes.
We went down to the car where they interviewed me for about four hours.
When we come back, I'm going to go into a little more in-depth about why the FBI came to your apartment and what the aftermath of their raid was.
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I'm back with Joe Volanos.
Joe, we were talking about the FBI raiding your apartment, but also raiding your mother's apartment.
And is it a fact that the reason that they did that was that somebody kind of, quote, ratted you out?
In other words, said that, oh yeah, this is the guy who was at the Capitol.
And the FBI evidently went to a district judge, Gabriel Gorenstein, Who gave them a warrant to make this search.
Now I want to emphasize, you never went in the Capitol, but nevertheless, based on some information the FBI got, they were able to convince a judge that there was probable cause to make this armed raid.
I want to show how on so little.
I mean, clearly they didn't have evidence you got in the Capitol because you never did.
But nevertheless, they come storming down your door and pick up the story from there because, like you said, you went down to the station and then what happened?
I went down to the car.
Excuse me. I went down to the car and then I started feeling very ill around four hours later and they said, you're not under arrest, they told me, but we'll call an ambulance.
They called an ambulance and I went to the hospital.
Now regarding, the big mystery is exactly what you just stated is that How could the FBI do so much, I mean, double teams, raids, search warrants, what have you, on the word of one person on a tip line?
I mean, that almost seems bizarre simply because had they checked my geolocation on my phone, they would have realized right away where I was at 1 o'clock, where I was near the Capitol but not at the breach.
And they never checked that.
In fact, they never checked my friend who I was visiting with.
So it seems awkward that this one person is a very...
I don't want to characterize him, but it's a neighbor.
And in the last year we've had, during COVID, three or four people who have been radicalized somewhat and they become political.
And again, as a bloc president for 23 years, I've always been apolitical because I like to stress the commonality of our neighbors.
Nothing political because the vitriol starts flowing.
In this case, this individual was actually interviewed by a local TV station, and he claimed that he walked by the cafe where I was sitting at, and that I was bragging about being in Washington, and that I had footage or video of the Capitol.
He never said in the Capitol.
So he basically tells the FBI, this guy's bragging he was in Washington, and he has a video of the Capitol.
And that's what they acted on.
He never had contact with me, and I never told him any details of where I was.
I want to talk also about the element of media humiliation, because as I understand it, when you were handcuffed and taken out of the car, there was an NBC camera crew that had been tipped off about the raid, and they were there to sort of film you.
And so what I'm talking about is it's not just a matter, because I mean, I know what this degradation feels like, but it's always magnified when you've got flashing lights and people shouting questions at you.
Is it not a fact that you have actually had two strokes?
Subsequent to what happened to you, and would it be reasonable to assume that at the very least these events contributed to those?
Without a doubt, these events did contribute.
The first stroke was considered mild, they said, although in the ambulance, the records show, I pulled the ambulance records, my blood pressure was 220 over 143, which is hypertensive crisis, which is close to...
Serious, serious stroke.
And then I had another stroke about 100 days after the first mild one, which begs the question, if it's so mild, would I have another one 100 days later?
So, and the second one was a lot more severe.
Now, regarding NBC, there's an interesting fact here, because often you hear the FBI, when someone comments or questions them about an investigation, they go, we can't comment because it's an ongoing investigation.
Now, the guy who did the NBC story is a guy named Jonathan Deans, His partner, okay, at NBC, is the former spokesman for the FBI. So how does this guy coincidentally have a cameraman show up?
They weren't flashing lights or anything.
There was just one cameraman, but that kind of tripped me off.
So you have NBC with the former FBI spokesman with the FBI doing a raid.
I mean, common sense says that there's a linkage there somehow because it's not a coincidence.
Not only that, but they reported that same day, that evening, that I was going to face charges in a matter of days once the FBI checked my electronics.
It's been four months.
I've never been charged or arrested.
So there's one story.
And on May 11th, they said also that in the tri-state area, many people had been arrested from the Capitol riots, including an Upper West Side community leader, which was me.
Now, let me ask you, has the FBI returned all your devices and all your stuff, or do they still have some of it?
They still have all of it.
They haven't contacted me.
Even though they knew that they put me in an ambulance, there's been no contact whatsoever.
And you asked earlier, but why would they do this?
So let me offer one answer to that question and see if you agree with it or disagree.
They talked, one of the lead prosecutors, Sherwin, I believe his name is, talked about the need after January 6th to use shock and awe.
And I think what that means is to send a message.
It's almost as if you're trying to go after al-Qaeda.
You would pursue every tip.
You would treat everybody as a potential terrorist.
You're trying to send a message, not just to the terrorists themselves, but But even to their larger body of sympathizers that, listen, you're going to be leaving no stone unturned.
So my question to you is, do you think that this is perhaps a reflection of a kind of larger campaign that goes beyond the immediate community of people who went in the Capitol to kind of send a message that, hey, we've got our eyes on you and this is what we can do to ruin your life?
Absolutely yes. Because there was so much drama involved in this.
In my apartment where I wasn't, I was at my mother's, they blocked off the street with NYPD. They were walking up and down in uniform.
Neighbors were confused what's going on.
And the fact that the media on top of that was in sync with them.
And the fact that there was no protection two hours at the Capitol when we arrived shows me that this is political.
There's something here that, I mean, they used to be the good guys.
I've always been law enforcement.
But when you have guys pointing a rifle at you at 6 o'clock in the morning, they had interviewed me, so if they wanted to serve a search warrant, they could have come in and just rang the bell and given me the search warrant.
But instead, all this drama happened.
It's very uneasy because I watched the Richard Jewell movie by Clint Eastwood.
I was in tears. I was in tears because the parallels are...
I mean, unsettling beyond words.
I've seen it too, and I can totally sympathize.
And then you have the fact that here you are a man with an impeccable reputation, and now there are guys who live in your own neighborhood who think you're some kind of a domestic terrorist.
I mean, is that something that stings to have to live with, the unjust accusation that was implanted there by your own government?
Yes, undoubtedly.
And, you know, being shunned It's not that it's the end of the world, but it reminds me of 1938 Germany, where propaganda turned people against, let's say, Jewish people, and they rounded her up to an untimely end, and all because the neighbors were dropping phone calls saying my neighbor is a Jew.
And I gotta tell you, every time I think of that, it's really very, very sobering because when I walk out my door, I mean, I would say good morning, like we always say, good morning, and they would just walk by.
And it's like beyond uncomfortable.
And I've devoted one third of my life to these people.
Joe, you're a brave guy and a good guy.
I'm really sorry what you went through.
It doesn't just make me sad, it makes me really furious.
But thanks so much for sharing your story on the podcast.
Thank you, Dinesh.
It's been a pleasure.
MUSIC If inflation is the problem, is there a solution?
Yes, there is. Gold, silver, precious metals.
Now, in May, the U.S. inflation rate, 5%, the highest in 13 years, and you're seeing it around you.
Higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher car prices, construction costs, housing prices, the list goes on.
So, inflation is now here, and have you protected your savings, your investments, if you haven't yet diversified a portion into precious metals and The answer is no.
Now, for decades, I never wanted to invest in gold.
Just the stock market.
But now, I'm seriously worried about the regime we have in Washington.
No sense of fiscal responsibility.
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Alan Weisselberg, the senior executive at the Trump Organization, has surrendered to the Southern District of New York, which means that he's felt that cold feeling of the handcuffs, which, by the way, I remember...
Myself, having gone through a similar experience several years ago.
And what is his crime?
His crime is that apparently over several years he received perks from the Trump Organization, such as...
Private school tuition subsidies, such as security, such as a rent subsidy for apartments and apparently a car lease.
So he got a private car, he got security.
Now, think about this.
Every company in the United States, every major company, gives its CEO these sorts of perks.
And perks, unlike income, is not taxed.
So the Southern District of New York is accusing the Trump Organization of trying to avoid paying taxes, and they're accusing Weisselberg of not paying taxes on these perks, of taking, you may say, the income in kind.
And this is supposed to be some kind of criminal operation.
It's ridiculous.
It's absurd.
Ronald Fischetti, the personal lawyer for Trump, in my more than 50 years of practice, never before have I seen a district attorney's office target a company over employee compensation or fringe benefits.
And then, the next line in the New York Times, lawyers who specialize in tax rules have told the New York Times it is highly unusual to indict a company just for failing to pay taxes on fringe benefits.
None of them could cite any recent example, noting that many companies provide their employees with benefits like company cars.
And this rings again eerily familiar to me.
When my case went before the government, my lawyer Ben Brafman said, name another case where somebody like Dinesh, with no previous offenses, with no corrupt motive even alleged, gave $20,000 of his own money and was prosecuted by the U.S. government for that.
And the government couldn't.
They couldn't name a single case that resembled mine in that way.
Now, The government here is trying to use its strong arm leverage against this Weisselberg fellow to turn on Trump.
That's the game here.
The bad news for them is it doesn't look like Weisselberg is going to do it.
It looks like he realizes this is preposterous.
No jury is likely to convict on this basis.
This is a trumped-up, if I can use that term, charge.
But see, the government these days, the deep state, and sometimes with complicity of judges, this is actually what they do.
I want to talk about a case I'm quite familiar with.
In fact, I was alerted to it by a lawyer friend of mine while my own case was going on.
It is the case of John McTiernan.
John McTiernan is a famous Hollywood guy.
He was the director of some very big Hollywood movies, both Die Hard 1 and Die Hard 2, if you've seen those movies.
He also directed The Thomas Crown Affair.
He directed The Hunt for Red October.
We're talking about a major player in Hollywood.
And the government decided to go after him.
Now, let's think about what this guy did.
As it turns out, nothing.
The government was trying to go after another guy, a fellow named Anthony Pelicano, who was apparently some kind of a corrupt private eye who was supposedly actively involved with a whole network of Hollywood people and ambitious prosecutors with the government.
By the way, this was under the Bush administration, which is very telling because it shows you that deep state abuse is It's not confined to the Democrats.
It's actually, it's occurred under Bush.
It's occurred under Obama.
It's a problem with both parties.
It's a problem with the deep state itself.
And so they go after this guy, Pelicano, but they wanted to nab all these Hollywood movie directors and these big-name actors who they thought were part of this corrupt ring, and they found that they couldn't get anybody.
And so they decide to zero in on this guy, McTiernan.
And so what happened is that the FBI kept trying to get him to disclose his relationship with Pelicano.
They couldn't find anything on him.
So finally they call him.
And they call him when he's at his home in Wyoming, I believe.
And they say, hey, did you ever hire this guy, Pelicano, when you were making the movie Rollerball?
And McTiernan says, no.
The movie, of course, had come out many years earlier.
McTiernan says, I don't remember doing that.
But it turns out evidently that his firm, McTiernan's company, had hired Pelicano.
And so on that sole basis, not for doing anything corrupt, not for any kind of criminal action, but simply for, quote, lying to a federal officer, McTiernan gets, he goes through a seven-year legal battle and It destroys his career.
It destroys his finances.
And he gets one year in federal prison.
And this is a good example of how the government functions.
If they want to get you, they'll find something to get you on, and they've got an accordion book of statutes to do it.
By the way, Cyrus Vance, the head of the Southern District of New York, the guy going after Trump, this is a guy who let Epstein off.
When Epstein was supposed to register as a sex offender in New York, Vance's office made a plea to the judge, and the judge was kind of stunned.
This is, in fact, the judge, Ruth Pickles, saying, quote, I have to tell you I'm a little overwhelmed because I've never seen a prosecutor's office do anything like this.
This guy was going to bat for Epstein.
To cover it up, to make sure that Epstein did not have to register as a serious sex offender.
By the way, Vance is also the guy who refused to prosecute Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
And so here's a guy, this is for groping an Italian model, and so here's a guy who lets off the big guys, but of course politically wants to target Trump.
Imagine if they applied this kind of scrutiny to the Biden organization.
You know, here's Joe Biden, quote, I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
Turns out, he was at meetings in Georgetown with corrupt officials from the Ukraine.
Turns out, I'm now quoting newspaper headlines, Joe Hunter Biden seemed golfing with Ukraine gas company executive back in 2014.
Laptop, another headline, laptop shows Joe Biden attended meetings between Hunter A photo shows Joe Biden meeting Hunter's alleged business partner from Kazakhstan.
So there's lies on top of lies.
There's huge amounts of money changing hands.
It's going through the Biden family up to Joe Biden.
No federal investigation.
No prosecution. Basically, the guy has a sort of permanent immunity.
And the same thing, by the way, was true with the Clintons.
So we really don't have a reason to trust the justice system in this country.
We've seen it with Joe Biden.
We've seen it with Trump.
I've seen it in my own case.
Obviously, we've seen it with the McTiernan case.
And case after case...
The law is used as a bludgeon to go after people who in some cases have done little or nothing wrong.
I have such an eerie feeling watching Biden and the left do what they're doing.
I think to myself, wow, you know, we really saw this coming.
It's right there in my movie, Trump Card, which has proven to be prophetic.
The book, The United States of Socialism, was the kind of spine for the movie.
And it lays out the path where we're headed and also what we need to do about it.
So this is as good a time as ever to watch Trump Card.
Here's a short clip from the film.
Listen. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression.
Are we becoming the United States of socialism?
Who's behind it?
Our country should be more fearful of white men.
They control the black community.
They control the black vote.
The president spoke tonight as if he was dead.
They don't want to hear the truth, the media.
And I almost feel like they gloat when there's a mass shooting.
My hands are being put in handcuffs.
My ankles are shacked.
In a period of 18 months, I went through 23 different audits or investigations.
29 FBI agents with assault weapons.
You know what?
It's all in the movie.
And you've got to see it if you haven't already.
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The Biden administration is planning to go after...
The trusts that very rich people use to avoid taxes and transmit their huge fortunes to their children and grandchildren.
And I, for one, am not sorry about it.
I'm not sorry about it for an obvious reason.
These super rich people who are going to be affected by this are the ones who helped to put Biden in office.
And while Republicans traditionally have defended these people and defended them on probably on a good basis, the basis by and large is this.
Look, it's better to keep money in the hands of the private sector than to give it to the government.
Even if it's abused in the private sector, even if some guy is using the money to buy yachts and traips around the world, So, this is a case where...
It's not that we approve of these huge accumulations of wealth per se.
We just don't trust the government to spend that money well because it never does.
But that being said, let's go into the meat of this, the way that these trusts work.
So you think about it. There's an estate tax in this country.
Now, it doesn't kick in until several million dollars.
It's kind of a floor. But let's say you have a billion dollars.
Then above that minimum, the exempted amount, you'd have to pay 40% in estate taxes before the money goes to your children.
And that means that you're down from, let's say, a billion dollars to $600 million right away.
$400 million is gobbled up by the government.
So very rich people to avoid this will create a trust.
Now, a trust is kind of a legal person, and trusts never die.
A trust is kind of a permanent, ongoing entity.
And so the money, when it goes in the trust, It essentially dodges the estate tax.
And so this is where a lot of the super rich deposit their money.
This is how they get around the estate tax.
And they're also able, by the way, to minimize other types of taxes.
So the Biden people realize, if we're going to get money out of these people, we need to target these trusts.
And they're doing so in a couple of different ways.
They want to put certain types of restrictions on the way capital gains is transferred.
They want to target these so-called dynasty trusts and impose a capital gains tax on them, which even though it's over a long period of time, it kicks in.
In a few years.
And so the reaction among these rich people are now quoting Megan Jones, who's a tax law attorney at a firm called Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.
She goes, quote, I've used the technical term freaking out.
So some of these super rich people and their kids who stand to gain enormously from these existing trust laws are like, we can't believe it.
This is unbelievable. Why?
Because Biden is actually going at the source or intends to go to the source of their wealth.
Richard Greenberg, a lawyer at Greenberg& Schulman, what they're doing is creating a whole new tax regime.
So suddenly, see some of these super rich people, they don't really worry too much about the income tax because a lot of their money comes from capital gains.
And if they can avoid the estate tax through these trusts, they feel like they're okay.
So they thought, hey, it's okay. We can be Democrats.
We can talk about the Green New Deal and talk about the oceans rising, and we can be for racial justice, and we can be comfortable that Biden will protect our pocketbooks.
But now the Biden guys are like, you know what, there's a big bag of loot over there, so let's go after it.
And again, Republicans have by and large been obstacles when the left has tried to do this.
But I think no more.
There's no reason to do that.
We don't care about these people.
If they vote for a Biden regime that then turns around and sticks it to them, I say, you get what you pay for.
You put all this money to get this man into the Oval Office?
And now you deal with it.
It's completely your problem.
So Republicans, again, should not go back to their ancestral impulses, you know, protect the rich.
No, let these people go down and let them defend themselves against these Biden initiatives.
We need to focus on the people that we care about, which is the ordinary American struggling to make his life better, By the left and hurt by what these super wealthy people have been doing in supporting leftist measures.
They've been promoting critical race theory in their own way.
They promote the transgender stuff.
They're corrupt across the board.
So why on earth should we defend their pocketbooks and why on earth should we defend their loot?
Short answer, we should not and we will not.
Hey, Mike Lindell and I both want to wish you a happy 4th of July.
I also want to thank you for supporting my MyPillow initiative, and I'm sure Mike Lindell is very grateful for the business that you brought his way.
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I want to talk about a puzzle about the mainstream media by raising the question, who are these people accountable to?
I've been seeing a lot of posts on social media by the journalist Glenn Greenwald and others talking about how some of these outlets, the New York Times, Washington Post, but also CNN, MSNBC, have lost large swaths of their audience.
Their ratings have fallen through the floor.
In some cases, really hardly anybody's watching.
On the weekends, for example, you have a couple of hundred thousand people watching MSNBC. Just to give you an idea of how pathetic that is, I have over two million followers on Facebook.
I have 1.7 million on Twitter.
So we're talking about the fact that on Facebook or Twitter, I've got 10 times the number of followers.
These people don't see all my posts, of course, because Facebook doesn't send them out to everybody and neither does Twitter.
But my point is my following is actually 10 times the size of an MSNBC audience, let's say on a Saturday or Sunday.
And it's far bigger than MSNBC's audience at any time.
So the question that this raises, the pathetic ratings of these media outlets, is why do they adopt these highly partisan postures that drive away half their potential audience?
Why would the New York Times, which is, by the way, not just a New York paper, but a national paper, why would it chase away the entire...
75 million people who voted for Trump.
Why would it become so aggressively partisan?
As opposed to taking a centrist stance, it can be editorially liberal, but be fair-minded in reporting, and that would give everyone incentive, which used to be the case, to read the New York Times to find out what exactly is going on in the country and in the world.
So what is the explanation for...
The fact that these networks and these newspapers are acting in a manner that would seem to go against their own market interests, and certainly against their interest in maximizing the number of consumers who buy their product.
I think the answer is that in recent years we've seen a shift in which these newspapers don't care about their audience.
This seems like a stunning thing to say.
How in a free market can an entrepreneur of any kind not care about its own audience?
Well, it turns out that the people funding these newspapers, and in some cases networks, are these huge philanthropists.
And what that means is that the newspapers have a customer base of one.
If you think about the Washington Post, it has a customer base of one, Jeff Bezos.
And who shapes the ideas of Jeff Bezos?
Well, Jeff Bezos and his sort of new wife.
And if his wife is left-wing and wants to be in Hollywood and wants to have all the accolades of the left, she pressures Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos pressures the Washington Post.
And the Washington Post, by being super left-wing, it doesn't matter if they're eroding audience.
Nobody wants to advertise. Nobody wants to read the newspaper.
Because the source of their funding is Bezos money.
And that's all they care about.
New York Times has almost exactly the same relationship, not quite, with Carlos Slim, the Mexican multi-billionaire.
And on and on it goes.
CNN is essentially an extension of Ted Turner.
Started the network.
The funding is coming from there.
So these guys basically believe that they're sort of like...
They're like courtiers.
If they can keep the aristocrat in charge happy, the patron who's basically funneling the money into the network, that is the audience of one that they answer to.
So these media outlets, in short, are perfectly happy to be propaganda vehicles.
They don't care to serve the masses.
When we think of the free press, the free press is supposed to be for the people, fighting for the people against power.
No. Essentially what we have with the media is people who reflect power.
Who are in cahoots with power, are using their power of propaganda against the people.
And the only thing that they care about is whether or not their propaganda is working.
They don't want to hear from the people.
What they want to do is arm twist and bludgeon the people into submission so they can make happy their financial patrons and serve their ideological agenda.
It's time for our mailbox, guys.
But before we do that, I just want to wish everyone a happy 4th of July.
For all its troubles, we live in a great country, a country that we're not going to let the Biden people ruin, not just for us, but also for future generations.
Let's go to today's question.
It comes from Tyler.
Listen. Hey, Dinesh.
My name is Tyler. I'm a rising senior at UCLA. I've been a big fan of your podcast and a big fan of your work for quite some time.
So I had a question regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I recently took a history class on it and I was wondering what your thoughts were on the recent removal of Benjamin Netanyahu from power and what this means for the conflict moving forward, what it means for Israel, what it means for U.S.-Israeli relations, and just the overall conflict with Palestine and the recent attacks with Hamas.
Okay, Tyler, so let me offer a couple of thoughts, at least to respond to the heart of your question.
Israeli society is, like America, deeply divided.
But while America is divided almost cleanly into two, Israel is divided more than one way.
It's divided into a number of different camps.
There's of course the ideological divide, which very much mirrors the American ideological divide.
There's also the divide between religious Jews, the Orthodox, sometimes called the ultra-Orthodox, and the secular Jews.
They're all Jews, but they are different kinds of Jews, you might say, in Israel.
Then, of course, you have the presence of the Palestinians and of the so-called Israeli Arabs.
And these are often fairly radicalized Muslims, but they are citizens of Israel, and there are a few of them that are in the Israeli Knesset.
They're in the parliament. And then, of course, there's a divide in Israel over whether the Palestinians should be incorporated into the Jewish state, so-called one-state solution, or whether Israel should contemplate a division into a two-state solution.
And both those solutions have serious drawbacks and risks.
Now, unlike America, Israel kind of has a multi-party system, and Netanyahu, who is a member of the Likud party, the kind of right-leaning party, was never strong enough to be in the government on his own party's strength alone.
In other words, he needed the alliance of a number of other, by and large, orthodox and religious parties, and this was sort of the right, the political right plus the religious right, against the Israeli left.
But what's happened is that Netanyahu, being a controversial figure, somewhat like Trump, Netanyahu has inspired or provoked a rebel faction inside of his own party.
And Naftali Bennett, who is the current Prime Minister of Israel, is to the right of Netanyahu.
He is a kind of a right-winger.
But he broke with Netanyahu.
Now, breaking with Netanyahu would hardly put him in a position of power.
So what this guy Naftali Bennett did was he made an alliance with a centrist leader, Yair Lapid.
And so Lapid and Bennett have come together against Netanyahu.
So this is not so much a far-left alliance, but it's an alliance between the far-right and the center We're good to go.
That is now the majority coalition just by a hair.
And it now makes Netanyahu the head of the opposition.
The Likud is now in opposition.
But I will say that this is, in my view, an extremely dysfunctional setup.
It makes no political or ideological sense.
It's a little bit like a dysfunctional marriage.
And it's not a marriage that's destined to last.
So long-term, to me, this is not in the interest of Israel.
It's a rather bizarre arrangement that reflects not only ideological shifting alliances, but personal animus against Netanyahu.
He's been in for 12 years, so enough of Netanyahu where we want to be rid of this guy.
And that sentiment has driven the rise of this new coalition.
I've always liked Netanyahu.
I always thought that he was a really smart guy.
He obviously is someone who has his country's interests at heart, but he's also someone who's very pro-American.
That's another reason that I like him.
And for these reasons taken together, I think he has made some telling mistakes, as, by the way, did Trump.
But nevertheless, I would like to see Netanyahu be successful in opposition and perhaps at some time in the future, either him or his party.
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