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July 13, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
58:05
SHORTAGE OF FREEDOM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep130
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Why, the Biden administration, just like the Cuban communist regime, wants the protest to go away.
And the runaway Texas Democrats, what to do about them?
Hint, lock them up.
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.
Huge protests have broken out over Cuba in resistance to the communist regime's horrific deprivations of freedom.
This has been going on now for 70 years and it looks like tensions have just boiled up to a point where they are expressed, even though there's a crackdown on dissent and a great danger in being a dissident on the streets of Cuba.
Now, as conservatives, when we see things like this happening abroad, we're usually tempted to rally to the cause of the protesters there.
But in this case, We can't do that without some ambivalence.
Normally we see America as a free society and we go, oh wow, isn't it horrible what's going on in Hong Kong?
Isn't it horrible what's going on in the Middle East?
Isn't it horrible what's going on in Cuba?
But we're now looking at all this at a time when there are political prisoners in this country.
We have January 6th protesters locked up for months.
Some of them in solitary confinement.
Many of them denied bail.
For what? For having the wrong opinions?
For wanting to protest the election?
And these are people who haven't even had a trial.
They haven't been convicted of anything.
It is bound to affect the way, the lens through which we see what's going on abroad.
In fact, it mirrors what's going on to some degree here in this country.
Now, here is the traditional Republican drumbeat.
Here's Mike Pence. America stands with the oppressed Cuban people.
Yeah, but here's a guy who hasn't stood at all with the January 6th protesters, who are actually protesting in order to keep Trump and Pence in power.
In other words, to validate what they believe was a win in the election by Trump and Pence, and yet not a word about them.
Here is Kevin McCarthy.
I'm proud to stand in solidarity with the people of Cuba.
Well, again, this fills me with a little bit of disgust because I'm thinking to myself, what have you actually done to stand with GOP supporters, loyal Republicans who went to the mat and are now in dire straits without proper legal representation and huge fences erected around D.C. to create this sort of false idea that there's an insurgency underway and the Republican leadership is silent.
Let's turn to Cuba, because the Biden administration is trying to camouflage what happened in Cuba.
They don't want it to be seen as a rebellion against socialism.
Why? Because they're pushing here in America in the socialist direction.
And so here's Julie Chung, the Assistant Secretary of State.
Peaceful protests are growing in Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising Covid cases, deaths and medicine shortages. They're trying to narrow the scope of the protest to Covid. These are people who want vaccines and that's the reason they're protesting. And of course, Twitter, happy to oblige, is echoing this. Here's Twitter describing the hashtag SOS Cuba. They go, people are helping to spread awareness on the impact of
Covid-19 in Cuba as cases hit an all-time high. So this is outright lying by the Biden administration, which is matched by outright lying, you may say collaborative lying, by Twitter.
But the question to ask is not whether there is a COVID vaccine shortage, but why is there a shortage of COVID vaccines?
Why is the Cuban healthcare system such a mess?
Now, if you go back to Michael Moore's movie, Sicko, which came out several years ago, he was extolling the virtues of the Cuban healthcare system.
Of course, he was lying, too.
And we busted him in the movie, Trump Card.
Here's a short clip from that film about this.
Listen. Where did Michael Moore go to champion healthcare?
Copenhagen? No.
Havana? The Cuban people have free, universal healthcare.
They become known around the world as having one of the best healthcare systems.
This is not a normal Cuban hospital.
This is. This is the emergency room?
Yeah. Doctor, how old are these syringes?
That thing looks like it's from the last century.
Do you have sufficient facilities to sterilize all these old syringes?
You know. Most of your shelves have nothing.
Nothing. The hospital in Moore's movie is only for foreigners who can pay and elite members of the Cuban regime.
So Moore is colluding with the Cuban socialists to intentionally mislead his viewers.
Now, if you listen to the slogans that are being shouted on the streets in Cuba, queremos libertad.
Queremos libertad.
Queremos libertad.
We want freedom.
I don't hear the slogan, we want vaccines.
No, it's we want freedom.
Now, interestingly, you know, under socialism, you're guaranteed all these things.
You're guaranteed food, you're guaranteed health care, you're guaranteed shelter.
But notice how empty these guarantees are when socialism can't produce enough to provide these things to its citizens.
It's the failure of the regime to deliver on these guarantees.
I'm entitled to this.
I'm entitled to that. Good luck, buddy.
You can be entitled to whatever you think you are, but you're not going to actually get it if there aren't those provisions available or if the government decides to keep it for themselves.
Here's Adonis Milan, a theater director in Havana, as interviewed by the New York Times.
People are hitting the street, quote...
They are asking for an end to this government, to one-party rule, to repression, and the misery we have lived through for 60 years.
And right there, that kind of sums it up.
Now, one of the points, Debbie and I were talking about this this morning, and she made the point that, you know, one of the terrible things about this slide into socialism and communism is once you get down deep enough, it's really hard to get out.
And even if you do get out, you don't get out unscathed, unwounded.
Communism in Eastern Europe lasted shorter than it has in Cuba.
40 or 50 years in Eastern Europe.
In Cuba, it's been around since, what, 1959?
So that's 60 years.
When I was in Prague filming Death of a Nation, I noticed that the people in the Czech Republic are still not over communism.
They've got this hangdog look.
They're a defeated people.
They still have the lacerations of what they and their parents and grandparents lived through.
There seems to be a divide in the world between the party of freedom and the party of repression.
And this divide is mirrored in America.
Notice that in Hong Kong there are protests.
And what do they wave? The American flag.
Look at the Cubans on the streets of Cuba.
They're waving the American flag.
In Venezuela, the dissidents wave the American flag.
So the American flag worldwide is a symbol of freedom.
Now notice that here in America, for the left, Why is that?
Because the left is on the side of the tyrants.
They're on the side of the tyrants here at home.
In fact, notice that the Biden administration's own forms of political prosecution, silencing of dissent.
Here's a comic tweet by Brian Stelter.
He's talking about... The fact that the Cuban government is restricting Internet access.
Restricting Internet access has become a tried-and-true method of stifling dissent by authoritarian regimes around the world.
Now, here is Brian Stelzer, the Pillsbury Doughboy.
No sense of self-consciousness.
I mean, basically all he does is poke himself in his belly and laugh.
But the guy doesn't realize that, yeah, who's censoring Internet access in America?
The left, the Democrats, in cahoots with the...
With the digital platforms.
So where's Cuba going to come out on all this?
I don't know. It's very difficult to overthrow these regimes once they get installed, once they have all the power on their side.
But I am obviously on the side of the Cuban protesters because I'm on the side of freedom, but freedom not just in Cuba, not just in Hong Kong, not just in Venezuela, but how about some freedom here also in the United States?
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I'm really chuckling at the effect that the Cuban protests against socialism must be having and are having in leftist and socialist quarters in the United States.
You can just imagine these clowns kind of huddled around thinking, Look at all these images.
How are we going to explain what the Cuban people are really protesting against?
Now, here's a scene of what has them really troubled.
This is this is a scene of the Cuban protests and this is specifically directed against Fidel Castro and Castro ism The the Democratic Socialists of America is trying to
pretend like there are no protests going on in In fact, they claim that the protests are on behalf of the Cuban Revolution.
So they have a little clip saying, Cubans chant, I am Fidel, as thousands flood the streets in defense of the revolution.
Now, this, of course, is in response to the Cuban Communist Party's call for thugs to step out and push away the protesters who are spontaneously flowing into the streets, not just of Havana, but apparently 32 cities.
So I can just imagine meetings going on right now at the squad in the Congress, AOC, Rashida Tlaiba.
What are we going to say about all this Bernie Sanders?
And so I decided to kind of drop in on one of these meetings and kind of eavesdrop on them.
And here's kind of what I heard.
How are we going to explain away these protests in Cuba?
They're very disturbing.
They seem to be protesting against socialism.
Well, we really can't acknowledge that that's what the protests are all about.
We've got to come up with some other explanation.
Well, what amount of money we say that they're protesting against climate change?
It's really hot in Cuba and maybe the Cuban people don't like the fact that their oceans are rising and their cities are being swallowed up by the water.
Well, that's one possibility, but maybe it's more believable if we were to say that they're protesting against the COVID vaccines.
They don't have enough COVID vaccines.
You know, the good thing about saying that is we can then blame the Americans who won't take vaccines.
We can say, hey guys, you won't take your vaccine and there are people in Cuba who don't have vaccines.
So we can shame them with the COVID issue.
It's kind of a winner if you think about it.
Or what amount of we basically saying the Cubans are rebelling against gender inequality?
I've been reading some stuff about machismo in Central and South America.
There's a lot of machismo going on.
And so maybe what's happening is the Cuban people don't like it anymore.
And that's why they're protesting.
Or maybe we can, if we want to be really current, we can kind of go with the trans issue.
Maybe the Cuban people are waking up to the fact that a lot of their men are really women, a lot of their women are really men.
There's kind of a big Cuban switcheroo going on between the genders, you know.
Well, one thing we can't say is that this is a protest against the fact that the Cuban regime has failed.
The Castro experiment has failed.
Oh, no, we're not going to say that, because if we say that, we're going to have to say, well, you know, people are going to start thinking if it doesn't work in Cuba, it doesn't work in Venezuela, it doesn't work in North Korea, it didn't work in Eastern Europe, it didn't work in the Soviet Union.
I know, this is the problem.
people are gonna start thinking that if it doesn't work over there and over there and over there, maybe it doesn't work anywhere, and that means it's not gonna work in the United States.
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I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a state senator from Texas, Angela Paxton.
There's a lot going on in Texas, a whole slate of proposed laws that are being discussed by the legislature, but the Democrats are not present.
A bunch of them, I believe 58, have jumped on a couple of private planes and fled the state.
Angela Paxton, welcome to the podcast.
I wouldn't say it's unprecedented because the Democrats did do a walkout before, and that brought the legislative process to a halt.
But now that the governor has called a special session, I guess they've decided that they need to be out of state to block the plate of legislation that's in front of you.
Talk a little bit about what the Democrats are up to and what they're trying to achieve or perhaps more accurately not achieve.
Well, it's pretty clear that what they are doing right now is they are attempting to avoid and basically prevent The taking of a vote on a specific bill in particular, which is the election integrity bill, very much like the bill that we passed in the Senate during the regular session and the Democrats walked out on in the House at that time.
And of course, that is a lot of the rationale for the governor's calling of this special session is that didn't happen, it needs to get done, and we're going to do it like this.
Now, these bills, I mean, Democrats seem to react to these voter integrity bills kind of like Dracula before the cross.
And their argument is always, it's voter suppression.
Texas, like Georgia, is trying to suppress the vote.
Talk about why that is a manifest falsehood and what is this bill trying to accomplish?
You know, that's such a great point.
And we have seen You know, I've heard folks talk about there are three kinds of information.
There's misinformation, which is just wrong information, but it's generally not distributed with malintent.
People are just misinformed.
There is malinformation, which is negative information that's true, that is distributed with malicious intent in order to harm or destroy.
And then there is also disinformation.
Which is patently not true, known to be patently untrue, and distributed to deceive and confuse people.
That is what we see with the narrative from the left on election integrity legislation.
This bill is designed to make sure that every legitimate voter, that their vote counts.
That is the essence of our democracy.
And for anyone to say that that is suppression or any other kind of language that we hear around it, it is patently untrue, and it is what I would consider disinformation.
Now, do you think the fact that the Democrats are so dead set against these voter integrity bills casts a shadow of suspicion backward on the 2020 election?
I say that because it's kind of like saying this, if you, you know, let's say you have a maid who comes and cleans your house once a week and you suspect her of having, you're missing a watch and you think she may have stolen it, but you don't want to accuse her because you don't know for sure.
So you say, okay, I'm going to put some cameras in the house.
I'm going to try to make sure that my property is carefully protected.
And then the maid goes, oh my gosh, I can't believe you're doing this.
It's unbelievable. It's shocking.
It's racist. You're doing it because I'm Mexican and so on.
You would say, no, I haven't accused you of anything.
I'm merely introducing these security measures to prevent wrongdoing from happening in the future.
So my question is...
Isn't it telling that you've got this kind of blanket...
I mean, they carry their opposition to fanatical levels, which suggests that they know that something was up the last time, and they're hoping that it will continue because you're ruining their picnic.
Well, it certainly brings to mind the Shakespearean observation of perhaps the Lady Death protests too much.
I had a friend who also used to say, if you throw a rock into a pack of dogs and one of them yelps, that's the one you hit.
And so I think, honestly, if anyone who believes that legitimate, qualified voters should have the right to vote and that their vote should count once and it should count for real, the way they meant it to be counted, anyone who believes in that should have no problem and, in fact, should feel very confident
about the intent and the implementation of this bill.
When we come back, I want to ask Angela Paxton about what are the implications of a minority party blocking a legitimate democratic process and essentially leaving the state to prevent laws from being passed by a duly elected majority.
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I'm back with Texas State Senator Angela Paxton.
We're talking about the Democrats fleeing the state to kind of escape the passage of a voter integrity law in Texas.
Similar, I take it to laws that have been passed elsewhere in places like Georgia.
Angela, when the Democrats boarded these planes, and you know, first of all, I noticed that none of them were wearing a mask in this plane.
They're all densely packed together.
But they're having press conferences.
They're talking about the fact, I'm quoting one of them, Chris Turner, we're determined to kill this bill today.
And initially, it seems that the governor, Greg Abbott, here's a tweet, Democrats must get back to the job they were elected to do.
Here is Senator John Cornyn.
It's not very Texan, he says, to do this kind of a retreat in the wee hours of the morning.
This is a kind of an appeal to the Democrats' better selves, but I'm really not sure that there are any better selves to appeal to.
And my question is, if the Democrats are making a power play here to block a legitimate democratic process, what is the next move by the governor or the lieutenant governor to hold them to account. Well you bring up a great point.
I saw some pictures that look a little more like, not a business trip, but a bunch of people leaving for spring break with You know, cases of beer on the seat behind them and that sort of thing.
It's concerning to me.
And, you know, there are any number of reasons that a member of our legislature in the House or Senate, we are citizen legislators.
We have jobs. We have businesses.
We have families. We have lives outside of this Capitol building.
But any number of reasons where we might need to miss on a day.
We get sick. We have family events that happen.
We have businesses to run.
But the Democrats have left for the express purpose.
And I saw someone quoted that's on this excursion away from democracy just this morning that expressly stated that they were doing this to break quorum.
And what that means is...
You know, just constitutionally, we are required to have a certain number of people on the floor when we vote on a bill.
And that's a protection, right?
So you can't have just three people show up and vote something that's against the will of the body.
So a sufficient number.
The Democrats in the House, this is not true in the Senate, interestingly, and I can talk a little bit about that and what we'll be doing today because we have a quorum in the Senate.
But the Democrats in the House have broken quorum So that the vote cannot be taken.
So what that means is they know that the body has the votes to pass this legislation and they are doing something to...
Prevent it from happening.
They are leaving the state on top of that because if they were in the state, the lieutenant governor, the speaker, could actually, they have the authority by law to compel them to come and do their duty.
But because they've left the state or beyond the state boundaries, our Texas law enforcement doesn't have jurisdiction to bring them back.
But is it possible to arrest them when they do come back?
I assume they're not going to stay away permanently.
They're going to return at some point.
Can at that point they be compelled to show up and participate in the democratic process?
If we are in session, then that certainly could happen.
You know, it's very interesting, Dinesh.
They've left, but not only have they left in order to prevent this legislation, which is designed to protect people's votes.
To protect people's voting rights.
They've gone to D.C. in order to push for another voting bill, which is designed to completely undermine what vote integrity is all about.
And you know exactly what I'm talking about there.
That's why they've gone to D.C. So they've gone to D.C. to push H.R. 1, which is a federal law that would presumably override state laws.
And so let's be very specific.
They're so defeated and not having the majority here in Texas.
They're hoping to now go to D.C. and draw on the power of the central government to trump the democratic process here at home, correct?
That's correct. And of course, we all know that one of the central elements of that bill is the removal of a very simple, straightforward, common-sense measure that's been in place in Texas for quite some time and in many other states and protects votes like nothing else, and that is voter ID. Right.
Now, I think I saw Kamala Harris recently saying, and I almost had to laugh out loud, she was saying things like, well, you know, there are people in rural areas, mainly minorities, and these are people who don't know how to go to Kinko's and make a copy of their ID. I mean, leave aside the question that Kinko's has not been in existence since 2008.
But what kind of a...
Is there a legitimate argument against voter ID or is this just a transparent ploy that essentially says to people of color, you know, you're incapable of getting an ID. If you're going to have to vote, we can't have an ID requirement.
What's going on with this voter ID business?
I mean... European countries are politically to the left.
They all have voter ID requirements of one sort or another.
So how does one with a straight face come out against voter ID when you have to produce an ID for medical appointments, to open a bank account, for 25 other things that people normally do in the course of American life?
No, that's exactly right.
I mean, to get on an airplane, you've got to produce a photo ID. My goodness, I had to produce a photo ID to pick up a curbside I placed at Target.
And you know what? I didn't feel discriminated against.
I didn't feel suppressed.
I felt confident that they were making sure that my package didn't go to someone else.
They were giving it to me, which is the total point of photo ID. And we all know this is well accepted, well understood by people in this country.
That that is something that builds confidence and especially with something as important and fundamental as your right to vote.
Now, I'm concerned.
I want to push this to the end point, because it looks to me like one of the things we learn from the Democrats is that they think differently than we do.
In other words, they're willing to go to the mat.
Very few Republicans in the...
Generally, if you had Republicans who are the minority in, let's say, a blue state, they're going to be like, let's show up to vote.
We're in the minority. We're going to lose the vote.
But that's the way the state is.
But the Democrats don't think like that.
They're thinking, even though we're in the minority...
We know a clever way to throw a wrench into the process.
We will bring this car to a complete stop.
And what I want to find out is, let's say that they just stay out of state for the full duration of however long this legislative session lasts, then what happens?
Well, it's a very sad thing because the election bill is not the only thing on this call.
There are a number of other measures that will also go down in flames that impact their constituents.
For example, this morning in the Senate, we'll be also taking up a bell reform bill.
There are five people dead in Houston since this bill should have passed in the regular session, but did not because the Democrats left.
That were killed by people who should not have been out on bail because this law was not in place.
That bill will go down again.
There is funding for foster care youth that will go down again.
There are border security measures that will go down.
There are education measures that will go down.
So they're willing to play hardball alright and they're willing to play it at the expense of the life and liberty of their own constituents.
Right, but coming back to my point, let's say that the Democratic position is, we agree that those things may be moderately good, but we are so concerned about this election integrity bill that we're willing to sacrifice all that in order to block this bill.
My question is, do they successfully end up killing the bill, or is there a way to make sure that the bill eventually gets through?
After their shenanigans are over, we still make sure that you round up these guys, bring them to the vote, and make sure the vote occurs.
Can another special session be called?
What's the way to make sure that the bill becomes a law congruent with the will of the majority, the duly elected electoral majority in Texas?
How do you make sure that your will is done?
Well, and this is where I think what we would see is that the governor, and he's already intimated this, We'll call another session.
He will call another special session until this is done.
We've seen this before in Texas back in 2003, I believe.
Democrats left the state in order to block redistricting legislation.
And, you know, eventually people do have businesses, they have families, and they eventually are going to have to come home, I think, is the point.
The other thing is that The funding of the legislature.
So the very staff members that are employed by these members who are refusing to do their duty, their salaries will stop September 1st.
And that, of course, effectively puts a lot of folks out of work that are counting on jobs.
And so that's another thing that they have to deal with in their own offices.
Angela Paxton, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
Well, thank you, Dinesh. Thanks for the, just the great job you do of helping people hear the truth.
And glad to be on.
I appreciate it.
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Recently, Harper's Magazine published a lead story by the Princeton historian Matthew Karp.
And in that, he did a sort of sophisticated critique of the 1619 Project.
His basic argument was that These are guys who look at American history as frozen.
Racism was baked into the DNA from the beginning, 1619, and there hasn't really been any real change.
There have been cosmetic changes, but the cosmetic changes have only concealed deeper forms of oppression.
So it's kind of this almost monomaniacal, repetitive narrative that doesn't really acknowledge substantive and meaningful change.
And I think that Matthew Karp knows that it's a lie.
It's a distortion of American history.
But he wants to have the credibility to say that on the left.
And so what does he do? He bashes conservatives, notably me, in which he says things like...
You know, that we present these preposterous views of history.
He doesn't say what the preposterous views really are.
In fact, he says something like, he says, D'Souza's shtick is immune to facts and logic and frankly, indifferent to ideological consistency.
Now, you think someone who... What makes this kind of a broad generalization would need to substantiate it, give like three examples of where I have said either inconsistent things or things that are, quote, immune to facts and logic.
So, of course, I thought, look, it'd be interesting to invite this guy to a discussion, invite him to come on the podcast.
And interestingly, I got a note from Julia...
And Malucci, the vice president of Harper's, saying, I'm thrilled you're going to have a conversation with Matthew Karp about his Harper's Magazine cover story.
And she goes, I'd love to see this happen.
And I even suggested debating at Princeton.
And she goes, I like your Princeton idea, too.
And, of course, I realize that this woman is a little naive.
Wait till she talks to Matthew Karp.
This guy's most likely to be hiding under his desk when he hears my name.
He doesn't want to go toe-to-toe with me.
Usually, when that happens, the results are painful for the leftist.
She's like, I'll approach him.
I'll see what he says. But, of course, the guy seems to be ducking because I keep writing Julia Malucci to find out, is he agreed?
And she won't say if he's agreed or not, but she just kind of sends me excerpts from his article as if those are kind of self-explanatory.
Now... Interestingly, this dude, Matthew Karp, has an interview in Slate from a few days ago.
And he makes a really interesting point.
And I think this is really why he's troubled by the work I've been doing, both in my books and in my movies.
He says basically that conservatives, sort of driven by...
Me and a few others are not identifying with the so-called lost cause, with the Confederacy.
We are openly embracing the legacy of Lincoln.
We're openly embracing the Republican role in bringing about the end of slavery.
We are championing the cause of Lincoln and of the Union.
And he says that this is actually a problem for the left because it's not easy for the left to respond to it.
Factually, it's indisputable that Republicans were the party of the union.
It's indisputable that the Republicans mobilized the The force against slavery.
Lincoln, of course, was the one who issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
And whatever its inadequacies, it was, in fact, the first mortal blow against slavery.
Ultimately, slavery ended not just with the surrender at Appomattox, but then with the 13th Amendment, also passed by the Republican Party.
So, Carp knows all this.
And I think what he's really worried about is that the left 1619 project, racism has existed, it's always existed, not just 1776.
You have to go back to the first guys who came to America.
By the way, the first Africans who came to America were not slaves.
They came as indentured servants, the same as the Europeans.
And this has been actually well documented now.
So at its root, 1619 is based upon a false premise that slavery began directly in America in 1619.
Factually untrue. So, what you have with Carp here is he's now talking about the fact that he says, I'm sort of fascinating.
He says, it's fascinating the extent to which D'Souza, Dennis Prager, and these other people accept the story of emancipation.
He goes, they're not interested in tying themselves to the mast of the Confederacy.
In other words, we're not interested in tying ourselves to the mast of the racist Democrats.
And then he says, they're not interested in sentimentalism over the Confederacy.
They would much rather play the strong card.
America is great in part because we destroyed slavery.
And then he sums up the conservative narrative.
We beat Nazism.
America did. We beat communism.
America did. And America beat slavery.
And he says that this is the problem for the left.
So I think here, Matthew Karp is on to something.
He's on to the power of the conservative counterattack.
It's not the kind of old National Review argument which was somewhat sympathetic to the South.
I mean, these ridiculous conservatives would say things like, well, you know, we...
We can't say that one side was absolutely right and the other side was absolutely wrong.
Slavery is an institution that's existed for centuries.
Yes, the moves for civil rights reform are useful, but let's go slow with them.
I mean, I think that this kind of pathetic excuse for conservatism was really easy for the left to attack.
In fact, it made conservatives conserve the tradition of the racist Democrats.
I mean, how obtuse, how stupid.
Karp is correct.
That part of what I tried to spearhead is a move away from this kind of ridiculous, self-defeating argument toward a full-throated embrace of the Republican side.
I mean, conservatism is naturally allied with the Republicans now.
Why wouldn't we want to be historically allied with this wonderful legacy of the Republican Party in fighting slavery, fighting segregation, fighting racial terrorism, fighting Jim Crow, And voting disproportionately, both for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill.
This is the actual tradition of the Republican Party.
And as conservatives, that's the tradition we should seek to conserve.
Hey, how long have you and your family been sleeping on your old pillow?
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Hey, if you can change your gender, why can't you change your race?
This was the question that I raised here on this podcast a couple of weeks ago when I mentioned the quite interesting case of this bloke named Oli London, British guy, white guy, who decided he was going to become Korean.
Or actually, more precisely, as he himself said in one of his videos, he goes, I've always been Korean.
I've always identified as Korean.
And now I'm completing the process.
Apparently, he went through a dozen or more surgeries.
And he goes, look, look, look, I've got the eyes.
I've got the eyes. I've become Korean now.
The funny thing is, lots of people jumped on him and said things like, you know, you fraud!
You can't become Korean like that!
Is that all it takes? You know, you haven't had the experience of Koreans.
You haven't suffered the discrimination that Korean Americans have suffered and blah, blah, blah.
So the idea here was that you don't get to change your ethnicity or your race simply by either feeling that way or taking a few surgical transplants and perhaps even hormones to make yourself appear different.
That's just a white guy pretending to be Korean.
It's not really a Korean guy.
This was the point.
But now... If that is the case, it follows that the same logic could now be applied to gender.
We have all these people who say, I identify with the other gender.
I'm born in the wrong body, and so I'm going to take hormones, I'm going to do surgery, I'm going to do this and that, and I'm going to become, or rather I'm going to sort of now assume the identity I've always had.
I've always been a woman, and now I'm going to...
Be seen as a woman.
I'm going to change my name and I'm going to change my appearance.
Now, the question is, if you can do it with gender, Why can't you do it with race?
What's wrong with Rachel Dolezal saying, I'm black, even though she's manifestly white, and claiming all the benefits of being black, all the black privilege that is built into policies in the United States, affirmative action, Biden administration's, you know, socially disadvantaged categories, which, by the way, include race and ethnicity and so on.
Well, what's wrong with what Rachel Dolezal did?
Now, here's an article Written by a guy named Braden Hill.
And he's trying to distinguish between these two cases.
And I want to explore his logic a little bit.
Because it kind of shows you how it breaks down at square one.
First of all, he goes, gender is our internal sense of self.
Whether that be man, woman, neither, or both.
So gender evidently is in the mind.
It's not real. It's in your head.
He goes, most people have an idea about their gender at two or three years old, but this may not align with the sex that is assigned to them at birth.
Assigned, as if a doctor just assigns you a sex.
It's not if the doctor observes your genitalia and goes, that's a boy.
That's a girl.
The doctor's merely assigning you a sex.
Now, the question is, why isn't race similarly a psychological phenomenon?
Why can't we just decide that we may appear one way, but in our minds we're really something else?
He goes, unlike gender, race presents itself as categorized.
You can't inherit your gender.
Actually, you do.
He goes, this is internal and something individual to you, but you do inherit the social construct of race.
Now, first of all, if race is a social construct, how do you inherit it?
You can inherit your biology, but you can't inherit something that is a social construct.
Basically, what the guy is trying to say is, he says, you can't change your race.
He goes, it's racist to think someone can pick and choose parts of a race or culture they like and then distance themselves from that culture when it suits them.
He's talking here about this Ollie London guy.
He goes, they then avoid the burden of discrimination while reaping the rewards of white privilege.
He goes, there's a difference between affirming your gender as a trans person, which doesn't harm anyone else, and choosing to appropriate another culture.
But first of all, choosing your gender does harm other people.
Think, for example, of all the biological males who want to run in female races or enter female wrestling contests or get into the ring and fight MMA against women.
Obviously, these guys are stronger.
Obviously, they're in this sense literally harming other people.
So this idea that you're not harming someone through changing your gender is simply not true.
He says,"...the gender binary we've come to think of as normal, male and female, has previously been enforced upon people, countries, and cultures through colonization." Now, the point here is that race, too, has been a category that has been fluid over the years.
I remember reading and studying the issue of slavery and racism in South America, the phrase that money whitens, kind of an odd phrase.
But part of what it means is not merely that...
Money enables you to move up the class structure, a class structure that is defined in part by how light you are.
But literally that if you have money, you can marry someone of lighter skin and thus have children who have lighter skin.
So money whitens in this quite literal sense.
We also have the history in America and also in other countries of people who are one color or of intermediate shade passing to appear like they are one thing or another.
So blacks in the early part of the 20th century passing as white.
The West Indian scholar Orlando Patterson has talked about how Jamaican Americans pass as black in America, but they try to pass as lighter skinned or white in their own countries.
So I think what we're seeing here is that race and gender have now become categories to be exploited for political gain.
And we see people trying to cross the gender boundary and the race boundary.
Usually, well, in some cases, it's just because they're messed up, they're confused, they're disturbed.
But in other cases, and this perhaps applies to Rachel Dolezal, they're trying to get the benefits and privileges associated with being a member of another race.
It's time to go to our question for today.
We have a very interesting one.
Listen. My question is, it seems like every current TV show that takes place in a ranching town or community invariably has a population of angry Native Americans who express their outrage at the white man who stole their land and have oppressed them for, you know, 400 years.
I knew a couple, both PhDs in history and were both socialists, that once told me that America was actually the most humane nation in history in its dealings with the Native Indians, which blew me away.
And in light of my historian friend's comment, can you please explain what the accurate history is regarding how the Europeans obtained land on this continent and how they treated the natives?
Also, can you recommend some good resources on the subject?
Thanks, Dinesh.
Wow, this is a great question, Rick, and one that I'm going to take a little longer to answer than I normally do.
The first question you have to ask is, if you have a group of people, in this case you have some sedentary tribes, but you also have other nomadic tribes, and they're occupying, by and large, the stretch of the United States, but they're thinned out, they're spread all over the place, do they, by virtue of being here first, own the land? One way to think about that is that there's the first Bedouin who shows up at an oasis.
Own the oasis.
He got there first.
Can he claim by virtue of first arrival, it's my oasis.
I'm not going to charge rent to every subsequent Bedouin who comes here.
Or if Bedouins come here, then they don't have any claim on this oasis at all.
It's my oasis. So that's a way of thinking about the, quote, property rights.
Remember, the Indians had actually no concept of property rights themselves.
And Indian tribes were perfectly willing to maraud and raid and defeat other tribes and take their land.
So this was going on all over the place.
The stronger tribes, the Apaches, the Comanches, were dominant.
The other weaker tribes, the Hopi and so on, were subordinate to these warlike tribes.
So in a sense, this was the kind of, you may almost call it the law of the jungle, which is often the way that countries get occupied through, in fact, conquest.
Hard to think of historical examples that depart from this pattern.
Now, the American founders had a more positive view toward Native Americans than they did toward Blacks.
And I think this was reflective of the larger society.
A number of the founders, for example, proposed that the way to deal with the problem of the Indians, in fact, the kind of cultural divide between the Native Indians and the white man, was through intermarriage.
So something that would never have been proposed with regard to Blacks, What in fact was seen for more than a century later as being intolerable, impossible, not something that was going to happen, certainly not on a broad scale, was actually advanced as a solution to the Indian problem.
Now, the history of America's dealings with the Indians is somewhat complex, but you can simplify it by saying this.
It wasn't Columbus who was the bad guy.
The American Indians who died in the early centuries died largely because of plagues that the white man did bring, but unwittingly, to this continent.
The problem isn't with the American founders, and the problem isn't with the Republicans.
The worst crimes that have been inflicted on the Indians, and there have been some pretty bad ones, have by and large been inflicted by the Democrats.
Andrew Jackson, who was admirable in some respects, nevertheless was horrible in his treatment of the Indians.
I'm just quoting him here, and this is right out of my book, Death of a Nation.
One of his, what he called skirmishes, you know, Jackson liked to use this euphemistic rhetoric.
He's going, I'm going to chastise the Indians.
What he means by chastise is murder them by the bushel.
And this is his battle against some Creek Indians.
And And what he says is, I'm now actually quoting him, he goes, it was dawn when we finished killing them.
And he describes in gruesome detail how he went about doing that.
And the infamous Trail of Tears, which is the almost massive relocation of the Cherokee tribe, This occurred around 1838.
Now, Andrew Jackson had left office, but his successor, also Democrat, his hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren, was the president.
And the trail of tears has gone down in history as perhaps the single most notorious mistreatment of the Indians has been compared to the internment of the Japanese during World War II, but in fact, it was much worse.
And large numbers of deaths, and really the destruction of the culture of a whole people.
I want to fast forward a little bit to the present because it seems to me that what you're dealing with now is that the American Indians have been reduced to a sort of plantation existence.
Now, we don't call where American Indians live plantations.
We call them reservations. But I want to show it's kind of the same thing.
When I was filming my movie America, I went to the...
The Sioux Tribe Reservation called Pine Ridge in South Dakota.
I interviewed a woman named Charmaine Whiteface.
And as we go, she gave me kind of a tour of the reservation, one of the largest reservations, by the way, in America.
I said, you know, I saw it was kind of a sad sight, ramshackle dwellings built everywhere, cars on the lawn, wild dogs running around.
And I was like, I don't see, you know, many enterprises around here.
Where do most people around here work?
And she replied, and I still stayed with me.
She goes, Dinesh, most people around here do not work.
Our unemployment rate is 80%.
This is a place, by the way, run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and run very much like one of those...
One of those old plantations.
Here's the line I want to quote from David Truer's book.
He's a member of the Ojibwe tribe.
It's called Res Life.
And he describes what the Democrats and what the Bureau of Indian Affairs has reduced these tribes to.
This is what life is actually like for the native Indians.
And he's talking about the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota.
He goes, there really aren't any farms on Red Lake Reservations.
There are only four convenience stores I know of.
Other than these, there's no place to buy gas or food.
There were no hotels until 2010 when Red Lake opened a casino.
Until the new casino was built, the biggest building on the res, except for the hospital, was the Bureau of Indian Affairs Jail.
He goes, there are no hair salons, no Starbucks, no Einstein bagels, no cell phone stores, no radio shacks, no Jiffy lubes, no McDonald's, no Arby's, no rent-a-car centers, no car dealerships, no Gap, no Old Navy stores.
He goes, there aren't even any billboards.
What signs do exist are small hand-painted signs on plywood, as often as not propped up against a tree instead of planted on the ground.
He goes, all of this, all of this, nothing.
On a reservation the size of Rhode Island.
Now... Not surprisingly, the average household income at Red Lake, $20,000, mainly government handouts.
The unemployment rate, 50%.
The teen unemployment rate, basically 100%.
Family breakdown.
All the pathologies that you would see in inner-city Oakland or in Baltimore, Detroit, they're right here on the Red Lake Reservation.
The difference, of course, is that in the case of the blacks, it tends to be urban blight.
In the case of Native Americans, it's rural blight on the reservation.
So what the Democrats have done is they've created this plantation.
And why have they done it? Because there's a little telling remark in Res Life that ends the book.
He goes, he talks about the fact that at Red Lake, more than 90% of the Native Americans vote Democratic.
Why? Because they've become dependent on these benefits that they get from the government, from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
It's a meager, pathetic living, without hope, without aspiration, without upward mobility.
But for people who have become dependent on it, that's sadly all they have.
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