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July 7, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:41
GETTR DONE! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 126
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Trump strikes back at digital censorship.
Boom! And Jason Miller, the CEO of the exciting new social media platform Getter, joins me to say, let's get her done.
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.
Big news today, Trump announces massive lawsuits against digital media censors, Twitter and Facebook.
And, of course, some people who say right away and foolishly, Oh, Trump can't do that!
These platforms have Section 230 protection, Dinesh.
Well, Section 230 protection only immunizes these social media platforms...
From being sued over content that is allowed on those platforms.
So if somebody, for example, libels me on Facebook, I can file a lawsuit against them, but I can't sue Facebook for allowing that content to appear.
That's what Section 230 protection means.
But it doesn't mean that Twitter is protected, for example, for statements, let's say libelous statements made by Twitter.
Trump can certainly sue Twitter over that.
It also doesn't mean that Twitter can't be sued or Facebook for violations of their contract with users.
When you sign up for these platforms, there's a mutual contract.
Twitter and Facebook are bound by the terms of the contract, as we are, as users.
So there are all kinds of ways, all kinds of bases for litigation that fall outside the orbit of Section 230.
And the Trump lawsuit needs to be seen in the wider context of pushback, I would say global pushback, against social media censorship in general, but Twitter in particular.
Now very importantly, India has just stripped its version of Section 230 protection from Twitter.
And obviously India doesn't have Section 230, but India had also immunized Twitter from content, from liability over content posted on the platform.
But apparently Twitter's been posting a whole bunch of pornography that is in violation of Indian law.
India has issued multiple warnings to Twitter.
These have apparently gone unheeded.
And so India has taken action.
The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but also the Indian High Tech Minister, I believe his name is Ravi Shankar, have basically said, sorry Twitter, Ravi Shankar Prasad has basically said, that's it.
Twitter is now liable.
Apparently, there's a case involving a user who has complained about defamatory tweets, and India is now allowing that lawsuit to go forward.
By the way, the Indian government has also filed multiple criminal cases against Twitter, and these are related to child pornography.
And this is a way of saying that these countries are saying enough.
You might remember a few weeks ago Nigeria banned Twitter because they had stripped down the posts of the Nigerian Prime Minister.
And think about this.
You've got countries that are trying to engage in democratic debate.
Twitter suppresses that debate.
Meanwhile, it allows things like pornography and child pornography to slide.
So, even in the United States, I mean, when Trump was banned on these platforms, I don't think people grasp the full significance of the ban, because we have a two-party system, and think about it.
These platforms all say, we're promoting democratic debate, and then you ban permanently the leader of one of the two parties.
What does that mean? I mean, that basically means you're allowing only one party to have its say.
How is that different from what happens with digital censorship in places like North Korea, which is a one-party state?
Or China, which is a one-party state?
So there are chilling global ramifications here.
Now... When Nigeria banned Twitter, Trump basically said, this is fantastic.
Lots of countries should do the same.
And of course, we heard from some conservatives, this is becoming an increasingly tedious habit of conservatives, but also from some of the familiar never-Trumper types.
Oh, Trump is being so inconsistent.
He's not standing on principle.
Trump himself was complaining about digital censorship, and now he's calling for countries to ban Twitter.
This makes no logical sense.
Now, this is the point I want to investigate, because there's a statement that Aristotle makes I believe in the politics or in the Nicodemian ethics, I'm not sure, where he says that natural right is changeable.
Now, this is a statement that has puzzled me for years because natural right has to do with the division between right and wrong.
And what Aristotle seems to be saying is that natural right is not some absolute.
It doesn't exist in stone or in the sky.
Rather, what's right and wrong depends on the complexity of a given circumstance.
And here's the point I want to make, which is that if you look at the greatest threats to free speech in the world, and you were to enumerate them, one, two, three, you'd have to say the greatest threat is Xi Jinping.
He's the greatest danger to free speech worldwide.
Number two, I would have to say Mark Zuckerberg.
Number three, Jack Dorsey.
So these are the three greatest threats to free speech globally.
They represent, if anything, the three faces of tyranny.
And so anything that strikes against them, that undermines them, that weakens them, that dissolves their ability to do this with impunity is good.
How can you possibly say that, oh, you know, China practices censorship, but anyone who goes after the Chinese Communist Party and calls for suppression of the Chinese Communist Party in its material is practicing the same kind of censorship?
No, that's because there's no moral equivalence between the Chinese government The voice of tyranny and its opposition which is struggling for freedom.
You have a global push now against these digital censors.
In some ways, you can borrow a slogan from the left.
You might remember Herbert Marcuse and his idea that we should not be tolerant of intolerance.
This has kind of been a leftist mantra, but I'm going to borrow it for the moment and apply it to this case because what we have in the case of digital censorship is massive intolerance.
And what Trump represents, what India represents, what Nigeria represents, is a global movement that basically says we're no longer going to be tolerant of this intolerance.
And in not being tolerant of intolerance, we are in fact striking a pragmatic blow for free speech.
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Hey, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Jason Miller.
Jason's been part of the Trump operation for a while, but now he is the CEO of an exciting new social media platform, which I'm on.
I urge you to join.
It's called Getter, G-E-T-T-R, Getter.
Jason, thanks for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
I want to talk about Getter, but let's start by talking about this press conference that Trump just did today, announcing major lawsuits against Twitter, against Facebook.
Is this the latest sign of a real pushback against censorship?
How do you interpret what Trump said today?
Well, Dinesh, thanks for having me on.
I think this is an important step, and it's really a sign of just how frustrated and angry so many people across the country and across the world are, quite frankly, with the censorship that we've seen purely based on political reasons.
I'll give you a quick example.
Dinesh, I follow you on Getter, and thank you very much for joining the platform.
I follow you on Twitter as well.
And I got to tell you, I never see your tweets at all in my timeline.
And you're pretty prolific on social media.
That is very clearly an act of shadow banning.
And to have these companies come in and decide that they're going to play judge, jury, and executioner with our First Amendment rights, I think is really disgusting.
And so I'm not a constitutional lawyer, so I don't know about the prospects of the lawsuit, but this really is indicative of that anger out there towards these big companies and the hunger for free speech.
Now, let's talk for a moment about political censorship, because a lot of times when the term censorship comes up, people think of the sort of absolutism of the First Amendment, or they think about the right to express yourself through pornography, or they think about hate speech.
They think about these extremities.
I think the point that you're making is that on these social media platforms, leaving aside what you think about those things, I think?
Here's the clear leader of the opposition party in a two-party democracy, and he is essentially banned off all the major social media platforms.
How does that make us different from, say, China or North Korea?
Well, no, you're exactly right.
And here's the other distinction is it's obviously free speech.
There are certain limits to free speech.
The courts have said that. Your rights basically go up to the point where they start infringing on other people's rights.
For example, you can't go out there and threaten physical violence against somebody.
Using racial epithets is also threatening and harmful to people.
So there's some very clearly established things that are encouraging someone to commit self-harm, for example.
But there are specific acts of speech, maybe, and again, I'm not saying that it's okay, I don't like any of the political censorship, but there's also this new thing where they go to permanently ban somebody's speech.
Not a particular act, not a particular company saying, we don't like this statement, or our guidelines don't allow this one statement, but to permanently ban somebody.
I think there's a lot of vulnerability there for these companies.
I just don't understand how they think they can get away with permanently banning someone, especially as President Trump said in his press conference, they'll do it to me, they'll do it to you.
Now Parler was kind of knocked off its seat, off its pedestal in a coordinated attack from Amazon and from Apple.
Now my question is this.
Of course their justification was that Parler didn't have in place sufficient Sort of content moderation to make sure that violent speech and so on was being disallowed.
Now, I think Parler made the valid point that, hey, listen, you can find more violent speech on some of these other platforms.
But it seems that Getter does have these content moderation policies in place, in a sense, to set the rules of the game.
But what you're saying is that within those rules, you're not going to be suppressing either the left or the right, correct?
Yeah, we're absolutely against political censorship.
Nobody is going to be deplatformed or cancel culture because of their political views.
Like I said, we have a pretty robust moderation program where we work with an AI component to identify some of this.
Then there's a human review team.
And then for things that are questionable, it gets escalated to an executive review team.
So this is something we take very seriously.
But again, the fact that somebody...
Here's an example, hydroxychloroquine works.
Or somebody says, I think that there was voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election.
That's your opinion.
That is fine. There is nothing that is infringing or hurting people in any way, shape, or form.
And as President Trump also said in the press conference today, it works the other way, where we would see the banning by these companies of certain topics.
So, for example, the Hunter Biden laptop drama before the election, where upwards of one out of every six Biden voters polling has shown would have changed their vote or reconsidered their vote for Biden if they knew about the Hunter Biden story.
So that was an active, coordinated effort to beat Donald Trump.
You're never going to see that type of thing on Getter.
Jason, how sad we are that we've reached the point where you have to make a point like this, which I have to say I respond to with exhilaration because we have reached such a point in our society where the normal expression of debate is now seen as a kind of threat.
Let me ask you about...
One of the things I love about Getter is the cleanliness of the format, the ease of use.
And... Tell, say a little bit about the backstory about how this got done, because it's just delightful to see a platform that works well, that's easy to navigate, that in a sense almost self-teaches you how to do it.
It's a little bit to me like Twitter, but it's a lot better than Twitter, and of course it's much better to be on a place where you don't have the sword of Damocles hanging over your head.
Well, great question, Dinesh, and thanks for asking.
I had the opportunity to speak with the engineer on our team that really started the whole process last year as he was working through it.
Me, someone who went to USC undergrad and USC grad school and worked for all the big companies, all the big tech and industrial type companies that are out there.
And really what set out to do is say, you know what, we're going to make something bigger and better than anyone has ever done before.
And you see it now with the longer posts, 777 characters, longer videos, three minutes.
The fact that you can import in, which is such a genius function that I never would have thought of.
These guys, their heads are just like this.
They're so smart. It's your property.
Your tweets are your property.
Let's give people the opportunity to bring that history with them to this new platform so they don't feel like they've left something behind.
And here's the one other thing. Think about the folks that we know, whether it be a DC Drano or President Trump or someone like that who has had their entire timeline wiped out on one of these other platforms.
This allows you to keep and to have a backup of your videos, of your articles, of your pictures that otherwise will be lost and there'd be no way for you to get those if you were deplatformed on the other side.
When we come back, I want to ask Jason Miller what new features we can look forward to on Getter and also whether or not Getter is invulnerable to attack and takedown from the left.
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Miller, the CEO of the terrific new social media platform called Getter.
Jason, talk about, I mean, you've basically been, you've hit the ground running on Sunday, and we're just into day two or three of Getter.
How are you doing so far?
And what can we look forward to in the, in the weeks ahead?
Well, Dinesh, we've been up to some pretty exciting, start so far.
We've crossed over a million users who've signed up for the platform.
Literally three days, a million users.
That's the fastest ever in social media history to get to that point.
We've also, we have folks all over the world.
Brazil was actually our number two most active country when we kicked off, excuse me, and when we launched.
And so we're seeing number one ranking in the Google Play Store.
We got up to number eight in the overall Apple app download store, number three for social media networks for Apple.
So we're seeing just huge growth.
And as we talked about, just the people like the clean look.
They like that it's smooth.
They like that a lot of prominent names, conservatives are on there.
Dinesh, folks like yourself.
Secretary Pompeo, Ben Carson, Steve Cortez, Jenny Pellegrino, Natalie Harp.
All your favorites are coming over.
And some of the folks who've been previously kicked off, like D.C. Drano, Rogan O'Hanley.
He's on there and he's posting away, so we're glad to have him.
You know, I think, interestingly, of course, it's great to have a refuge for conservatives.
It's a place where people who are right of center can speak freely.
I wonder if over time it might even be that we get some liberals who come over, because after all, you know, there's no debate occurring on Twitter.
There's no debate occurring on the other platforms.
They suffocate debate.
So, in a way, a platform like GetterCon, I'm assuming that you have a right-of-center audience mostly now because, of course, it's those of us who are right-of-center who are the ones being choked on the mainstream platforms.
But do you foresee the possibility of Getter being a kind of place for the kind of real engagement that should occur all the time in a democratic society?
Absolutely. In fact, I'm interviewing someone to be our lead Democrat for outreach this afternoon.
And so we want this to be folks all across the political spectrum.
Yes, right now, a lot of the hunger for a new platform is coming from conservatives.
But also, Dinesh, this is important because think around the world.
Think about, again, Brazil, India, South Korea, Japan.
Folks in a lot of these countries wouldn't necessarily wake up and say, I'm a Republican or Democrat.
Of course, there are different parties there.
They might not even say, I'm a conservative or I'm a liberal.
But there are really two things I think anyone would draw anyone to this platform.
If you believe in free speech and you're against cancel culture and deplatforming people, if you believe in those two principles, then we think Getter's a perfect place for you, regardless of where in the world you're from.
Jason, the more successful you are, I think you know, the more you become kind of a target.
A target not only for potential hackers, but for people on the left to go, hey, these guys are getting too dangerous.
Let's try to figure out ways to take them down.
Now, as I understand it, you are currently using the Amazon Web Service.
I don't know if you're in the Apple App Store, but...
Are you vulnerable to these left-leaning digital moguls who could say, hey, listen, Jason's getting too big for his boots.
Let's launch the kind of coordinated strike on him that we launched successfully against Parler.
Another great question.
So we do have certain redundancies in place with regard to the cloud hosting operation.
We do think that the way that we've been proactive with our moderation efforts that it won't get to that.
But that doesn't mean that I haven't spent an inordinate amount of time thinking through it.
So we do have redundancies and backups available.
You know, the one thing on the Apple front that's notable, and folks may or may not realize this, but say if you have a Samsung Galaxy, for example.
Which, by the way, some interesting market research on this.
For folks that voted for President Trump, actually 57% have a Samsung Galaxy or another Android-operated device.
So even though Apple has a much bigger market share overall nationally, over half of Trump voters actually are on the Samsung Galaxy or Google Android.
Why is that significant?
Because it's an open system.
So you can go right to a website and download an app of your choice.
Whereas Apple is a closed system.
And so they literally, again, they can play judge, juror, executioner with who even can be on an iPhone.
It's a key distinction. I think there's going to be a backlash, I think, with regard to this whole notion of a closed system.
But the other point I want to hit on, Dinesh, is just regarding the security issue.
And we did have a hack in the very first day that we launched, in the very first hour, where someone went in and changed about 20 user profile names.
First of all, we don't collect any data from people, any personally identifying data.
We've also made a commitment we'll never sell or give off any of our user data, unlike the other companies.
We were able to fix it and plug that hole within an hour.
And the cybersecurity aspect is something we take very seriously.
We've retained an additional white hat firm to go through, do penetration testing just to make sure that the platform is completely safe.
And that's what they've come back and said.
But look, we have a big target on our back.
This is the fastest growing social media app in world history.
And when you're in the first place, yeah, that target's right on your back.
Well, Jason, I just want to congratulate you.
I personally am having just fun on the platform.
And just that sense that you can breathe freely and you can speak openly.
I mean, I just don't see how platforms that allow censorship have a long-term future.
So, all the best for Getter.
I want to do what I can to let people know about this and also come on board with Thanks for giving us this gift of a platform that we can all engage on.
Dinesh, thank you. And most importantly, thank you for your voice.
Thank you for your leadership within the free speech movement.
Thank you for your efforts to push back against censorship or deplatforming.
And thanks for your leadership, even with the conservative movement, being a thought leader.
I think you're a very important voice in this process.
We're honored to have you on our platform.
Jason, that means a lot. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
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Get ready for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
When will it happen?
I'm not sure, but I think not very long from now.
Why do I think that this is something that is possible, perhaps even likely, even if not imminent?
Well, because you can see that the Chinese are flexing their muscles.
If you listen to Xi Jinping's speech on the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party, if you look at the kind of buzz, if you will, that's being generated by Chinese propaganda organs around the world, There is a rising drumbeat of Chinese nationalism.
Let's remember that China has always believed in what they call the One China policy, that Taiwan is part of China.
So, as the Chinese see it, they're not invading Taiwan.
They're simply reclaiming something that was always theirs.
And the Chinese are making all kinds of insinuations That they are now confident enough on the global stage to attempt something like this.
I think it would have been unlikely, maybe even inconceivable, a few years ago.
Now, for a little bit of background, Taiwan and China have been separated since 1949.
When the Communist Party took over in China, the nationalists essentially broke off and started Taiwan.
Taiwan and China are separated, by the way, by about an 80-mile stretch of water, the so-called Taiwan Strait.
Now Beijing has over the past, well, decades tried to isolate Taiwan, tried to build economic alliances with other countries to the detriment of Taiwan, has been also trying to woo Taiwan.
Reach out to Taiwan.
Hey, you've got to join China.
You're, after all, ethnically Chinese and so on.
Now, the Taiwanese have always been somewhat resistant, but they have become much more resistant.
Taiwanese elections have by and large been won by people who go, listen, we're going to keep an arm's length, a very cautious distance from China, even as we maintain some form of relationships with China.
But I think more importantly, the Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong has shown Taiwan, hey guys, this is your fate if you decide to go under the Chinese umbrella or to be squeezed, if you can say, by the Chinese dragon.
So the Taiwanese are not going to want to do this.
But the question is, can China make them do it?
And there's a very interesting article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs That talks about how the Chinese might go after Taiwan.
It's a kind of a war game.
A war game is an imaginary exercise, but a kind of playing out in the mind of what this battlefield might look like.
And essentially what they say in the article is it's sort of articles written, by the way, by...
By a scholar at Stanford University, Ariana Mastro.
And the argument is this.
Number one, the Chinese launch a blitzkrieg, a blizzard of airstrikes and missile strikes.
To disarm Taiwanese military and government targets.
Boom. Unexpectedly.
One after the other. Number two, the Chinese launch an immediate and simultaneous blockade that cuts the island off Taiwan from the outside world.
And number three, the Chinese launch missile and airstrikes against U.S. forces in the area that are deployed in the region that could come to the aid of Taiwan.
And finally, the Chinese launch a massive land invasion, an island landing effort in which the People's Liberation Army, the Chinese Army, a gigantic army, the biggest in the world, begins a...
It begins an assault on Taiwan backed up by heavy Chinese bombing of Taiwanese resistance.
Now, think about this.
What would the United States do in this kind of situation?
Let's start with our sort of military options because this would be a fight very remote from us.
The United States militarily is much stronger than China.
China cannot threaten the United States on the global stage.
But what about in Taiwan?
First of all, what would the United States be able to do?
The United States might react, try to mobilize its allies to go after China.
But let's remember that China has been wooing our allies and establishing very close trade relationships with our allies.
Australia, South Korea, even the European countries.
So even though you have lots of democracies that would not be happy about this, They might well decide, and China knows this, that their trade relationship with China, their long-term prosperity, the so-called China price at which they're able to buy all kinds of goods, outweighs their affection for Taiwan, which is perhaps not very great in the first place.
What about Chinese casualties?
The Taiwanese, by the way, do have sophisticated weapons.
They have high-tech ways of fighting back.
But the Chinese are giving the indication, at least in their military journals, that they're willing to take a lot of casualties.
It's kind of like saying that if you consider Taiwan to be part of your own country, you don't really care if it's going to be expensive.
In order to be able to recapture it, it's essentially taking possession of your own property and you're willing to suffer quite a heavy price.
I mean, you can imagine that Chinese having 1.3 to 1.4 billion people are not going to be exactly broken hearted at the level of the Communist Party to lose substantial numbers of their troops in this kind of a battle.
And my greatest fear about all this is that the Chinese appetite for aggression would be caused not only by Chinese self-confidence, but the absolutely pathetic status of the Biden administration.
You've got this doddering fool who's running the country.
He doesn't even know half of what's going on.
Of course, there are people around him who are advising him, do this, do that.
But on the other hand, those people are extremely feckless.
I don't think that they have the backbone to stand up against a Chinese invasion.
probably the best the United States would do tragically, pathetically, embarrassingly in such an eventuality is for Joe Biden to get on the phone with Xi Jinping and go, Come on, man!
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One of the gurus of critical race theory is a fellow named Derrick Bell, a former Harvard Law professor, now passed away, the late Derrick Bell.
And I went back to read Derrick Bell's book.
It's called Faces at the Bottom of the Well.
This is a book that was published quite a while ago.
In fact, 1992. So kind of when I started writing myself.
And I remember the Derrick Bell controversy at Harvard.
By the way, Harvard did not want to give tenure to Derrick Bell.
And you can kind of see why when you read the book.
The book is, well, it's a little bit better written than Michelle Obama's thesis, but not much better.
It's written kind of at the eighth grade level.
And what you realize is, you know, the obvious question is, how can a guy who's at the eighth grade level become a professor at Harvard Law School?
And my two-word answer is affirmative action.
Now, what's kind of funny about the whole situation is that you have a guy who benefits from affirmative action, and yet his big complaint is that Harvard, and in fact the whole country, is full of white privilege.
You have a guy who's a beneficiary of black privilege whining about white privilege.
Harvard, I think, realized that they had a complete kind of a loser on their hands.
And so they weren't going to give him tenure, but there were big demonstrations at Harvard.
Oh, we've got to give him tenure!
By the way, one of the leaders of those demonstrations, Barack Obama, young Barack Obama, it helped sort of launch Obama's career at Harvard when he became president of the Harvard Law Review and then went on to do all the damage that he's done to America and to the world.
Now, the opening lines on the first page of this book are, quote, racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.
And you see right here, in 1992, a kind of prophetic early statement of the premise of critical race theory.
Racism is permanent.
And Derek Bell goes on to say that movements of reform So, in other words, the effort to fight racism and undo racism itself causes more racism.
So, you can see what's going on here.
I can kind of see why these critical race theory guys love this stuff.
They love the idea of the permanence of racism for one simple reason.
If racism is permanent, They have permanent jobs.
There'll never be an end to the need for critical race theory because the struggle has to continue, Dinesh.
We've got to keep fighting.
We might be like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill, but we've got to keep rolling.
So you've got this somewhat comic and ridiculous effort to keep the problem alive so that you can continue to cash your paychecks.
Now, in Derek Bell's book, he has a fantasy, a kind of fictional story that I want to touch on, where he talks about the fact that you've got space invaders who come to Earth.
And what do they want to do?
They actually want to take all the black people from America and use them as slaves in space.
Yes, I'm not kidding.
This is a fantasy in Derek Bell's head.
And you begin to see here how people who actually cannot point to evidence of racism in their own lives have to create racism in their minds.
You also see here, by the way, why people do racial hoaxes.
Because the racism that's alive and well in America in their minds doesn't match the racism that they see around them.
Which is to say, the racism they don't see around them.
So here's Bell and he talks about, he goes into this kind of paroxysm of victimization.
He asks, what precisely would you do if they came for you?
They meaning the space invaders.
He goes, where would you go?
How would you get there?
And so on. And then he finally talks about the fact that he puts in his story, he has a black conservative who actually favors selling the blacks into slavery to the space invaders.
He imagines white TV evangelists holding massive rallies in the Houston Astrodome.
Where they tell people that God wants the blacks to be sold into slavery.
And finally, I want to read the final line of the book because it really shows what happens when you've completely lost your mind.
He means this with utmost seriousness, but I cannot help but chuckle.
On the dunes above the beaches, guns at the ready stood U.S. guards.
There was no escape, no alternative.
Heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains...
Black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived.
So here's a guy living in the middle of Western freedom.
He's got this big fat contract at Harvard Law School, and he's imagining himself like a 17th century slave with shackles around his wrists.
There's something pathological about this, but there's also something slyly opportunistic.
These are people ultimately living, you may say, a fantasy.
But it's a profitable fantasy.
Ultimately, you find that people who are elevated on the basis of affirmative action discover in critical race theory, as Derek Bell did early on, that there is a lucrative market for this kind of foolishness.
When inflation is the problem, investments in gold and precious metals, that's the solution.
Now, in May, the U.S. inflation rate, 5%, the highest in 13 years, and you're seeing it all around you.
Higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher new and used car prices, construction costs, housing prices, the list goes on.
So inflation isn't just coming, it's here.
Now, have you protected your savings, your investments?
If you have not yet diversified a portion into precious metals, the answer is no.
For decades, I never really wanted to invest in gold, only the stock market.
But now, I'm seriously worried, as many economists are, about the regime we have in Washington.
No sense of fiscal responsibility.
So listen, if your investments are all tied to greenbacks, you're sitting on a bit of a ticking time bomb.
Invest a portion of your savings into gold and silver.
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The writer Michael Knowles has a bestselling book, Speechless.
You might remember I had Michael Knowles on the podcast just a few days ago talking about his book.
A terrific guy and a really good book.
And it is on the bestseller list, but not if you look at the New York Times bestseller list, where it doesn't appear at all.
So you might think, well, wait a minute.
Is it kind of one of those books kind of lowdown in the bestseller list and the times just didn't count, make the same count as everybody else?
No. Michael Knowles' book is actually number one on the bestseller list.
If you look at BookScan, which is a kind of systematic count of books sold, Michael Knowles' book sold 18,000 copies in the week ending June 26th.
The New York Times decided to leave him off the list completely.
Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian who wrote a left-wing book called On Juneteenth, which according to Bookscan sold 4,774 copies, is still up there on the New York Times charts.
So what this really means is that the New York Times bestseller list is fake.
Now this has been kind of known for some time. In fact, I can testify from my own experience and for people who go, oh Dinesh, you're just jealous, you know, you're obviously as an author, you're resentful of the other people. No, look, I've actually been one of the most successful writers on the New York Times bestseller list.
I've had three consecutive books that were number one on the New York Times bestseller list of the 17 or so books I've published.
I haven't made a count, but I'm estimating that somewhere between 10 and 12 of them.
Have been on the New York Times bestseller list, so I'm not speaking through a voice of envy.
My first book, Illiberal Education, 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and really launched my career.
That book went up to number four, the three books that have been number one, America, Obama's America, and Hillary's America.
Now, I noticed, though, with subsequent books, like The Big Lie, which was my book about how the left is really the party of not only fascism, but has had many historical alliances and affinities with Nazism.
This book was, according to BookScan, number one, and decisively number one on the bestseller list.
But it was on the New York Times list, but much lower down.
And so Regnery, my publisher, became so disgusted with this obvious argument, We're good to go.
And my point for the New York Times is this.
You don't have a bestseller list.
I mean, don't try to convince us with this kind of nonsense where we have our own way of counting.
You know, this is kind of like saying, you know, we have our own clocks, we have our own telescopes, and the guy who actually came in seventh in the race really came out first according to our count.
No, there's either something defective with your clock or you're only seeing what you want to see.
So I think in the name of Kind of full disclosure, what the New York Times needs to do is rename their bestseller list.
It's not a bestseller list.
It's essentially a New York Times list of recommended books.
These are the books that basically the left-wing Manhattan liberals at the New York Times want you to read.
They're pretending that they're the most successful books in the country.
They're not. They're the books that these dudes like.
And other books that sell more and are more successful are left off the list for the sole reason that they reflect a viewpoint, a conservative viewpoint, that is inhospitable to the characters at the New York Times.
By and large, if you write books that reflect this kind of gay, Jewish, left-wing point of view, books about transsexuals, this is the kind of stuff they love.
They move it up the bestseller list, whether or not it's selling a lot.
On the other hand, if you write books that by and large celebrate patriotism, celebrate faith, family values, are critical of censorship, you're not going to make the New York Times bestseller list no matter how many you sell.
For most of my life, I thought a pillow is just a pillow.
There's nothing special about a pillow, but this is before I discovered my pillow.
Now, what Mike Lindell has taught me is that a pillow, like a watch or a phone or a car, can be a work of art.
These pillows, these MyPillow pillows, they won't go flat.
You can wash and dry them as many times as you want, and they maintain their shape.
They're made in the USA, and for a limited time, Mike Lindell is offering his premium MyPillows for his lowest price ever.
You can get a queen-size premium MyPillow for $29.98.
It's normally $69.98, so that's a $40 savings, and the King pillows are only $5 more.
All the MyPillow products come with a 10-year warranty and a 60-day money-back guarantee.
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With the Olympics coming up...
An exciting prospect, but also a slightly worrisome one because we don't know what sorts of political statements are going to be made right on the stadium.
I mean, suffice to say, you'll expect to see every athlete from every other country celebrating their country, waving their flag, being cheered on by their countrymen.
But we might very well see American athletes, and I hope this doesn't happen, but taking a knee, refusing to doing the Black Power salute.
And apparently, the US Olympic Committee has allowed some of this in the name of social justice.
So you can't get away with this anywhere else.
If a Brazilian athlete tried this or an Indian athlete, their careers would be over and their own crowd would boo them off the stage.
They'd have no future in their own country.
They'd have to go somewhere else.
But, I want to talk about how we can celebrate the Olympics, or at least anticipate it, and one way to do it is to go watch the great movie, came out originally in 1981, Chariots of Fire.
One, in my view, one of the greatest movies ever made, and a movie that really affirms conservative values.
Values of faith and patriotism and excellence and dignity and character, it's all there.
And this is a movie I've seen, I don't know, maybe three or four times.
I have memorized large parts of the movie, so I don't want to start reciting.
But I'll just talk about the opening scene of the movie, which is just downright fantastic.
You have the memory of the war dead of World War I. World War I, by the way, was sometimes called the Great War.
And it was a war that broke the spirit of Western civilization in many ways.
Historians make the point that the terrible war, by the way, a war fought in trenches.
People would lie in the mud, lie in deep pools of water, and they would fight for weeks in order to advance a few yards and then dig another trench.
Germany alone lost two million men in World War I. So there were massive losses of life, and for what?
So, Western civilization, which before World War I had this kind of serene sense of confidence, after the war, began to look ironically, cynically, began to take words like virtue and valor and sacrifice and kind of snicker at them because of the sense that those words came to lose their elevated meaning.
Now, interestingly, you get none of this from Chariots of Fire.
In the opening scene, you have the Dean...
The dean of, I think it's Oxford or Cambridge.
No, it's Cambridge. And he says, I go down, I read the war list.
This is the war dad.
Name after name, and he goes, names that are only names to you.
He's talking it to the new freshman students.
But names that to us conjure up face after face.
These are, by the way, people who are now dead.
And the dean says that we cannot read these names.
We, the faculty who are older than you, cannot read these names without emotion.
And he takes the kind of view that these are people who died for England, and these are people who made the ultimate sacrifice, and then the dean turns to these students and goes, in effect, you bums, what are you going to be?
What is your life going to amount to?
Where is your chance at greatness?
And And of course, the movie then answers this question by pointing not to a war, but to something that in a way resembles a war, the Olympics, the 1924 Paris Olympics.
And let's remember for a moment that the Olympics, which were invented in Greece...
War a form of athletic contest, yes, but athleticism in ancient Greece was very closely connected to war.
The training exercises that you did in the Spartan wrestling pit, for example, throwing the javelin or the discus or engaging in all kinds of combat and competition prepared the Spartans and the Athenians to go to war against the Persians and then tragically against each other.
So this is all the backdrop.
And what you see in the story of Chariots of Fire focuses really on two men, a Jewish student at Cambridge, who is a terrific sprinter, and his main rival, a Scottish We're good to go.
So this is a guy who wants to become a missionary.
And earlier in the movie, when a young kid wants to play football on the Sabbath, he goes, he can't do it.
The Sabbath is not a day for playing football.
Let's play on Monday.
So this very council comes back to haunt him when his own heat in the Paris Olympics is on the Sabbath.
And so he won't do it.
He won't run. And you see here, in the mind of an athlete, the great kind of conflict between the desire to run and the athlete.
Little believes that God gave him speed.
He says, when I run, I feel his pleasure, meaning God's pleasure.
At the same time, he's under divine law, and so he won't run.
There's a kind of beautiful and satisfying conclusion to the film where another guy, an aristocrat named Lord Lindsay, says to Little, listen, you can take my place in the 400 meters.
And Little goes on to a glorious finish in which he wins the gold medal.
So both Little and Harold Abrams, the two heroes, come out on top.
What's beautiful about this movie is it's a movie full of admirable people.
Even the minor characters, a guy named Montague, who's a friend of Abrams, kind of the narrator of the movie.
Just a lovely guy.
And there are amusing sidelights, the two Cambridge deans, one of whom played by John Gielgud.
Very memorable performances.
So these are people who value honor and decency and sportsmanship and excellence and integrity.
And this is the world we have lost.
There's a book by Peter Laslett, now dated many years ago, called The World We Have Lost.
It's a book that talks about England before the Industrial Revolution, so I'm kind of stealing the title.
But merely to make the point that the reason that we need to go back to these great books and these great films is because even though our culture is not like this, we can be like that.
And even though our sort of civic values don't reflect this, we can nourish those values inside of ourselves and transmit these values to our children.
So this is a movie you need to watch this weekend or on one of the subsequent weekends because it shows you, you may say, conservatism at its best.
It also shows you art at its best.
It also shows you that at one time, Hollywood, and this is a British film, Which was a little controversial, even in its time, although it won a bunch of Academy Awards in the end, but it reflects a time when Hollywood knew something that it seems to have forgotten, which is how to make a really good movie.
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