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July 23, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:10
BORDER INVASION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep138
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The migrants are coming here in droves and they might think that they're going from a dinghy to a ship.
But are they boarding a sinking ship?
This has been 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.
Do we still have, really, a country?
Is the United States spiraling into a sort of irreversible decline?
The historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, writes as follows.
It was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing among the ruins of the capital while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing The Decline and Fall of the City first started to my mind.
So here's Gibbon in the glory of Rome, but it's a decayed glory, and he sees these sort of monks that to him represent Christianity, which is to say the destruction of Rome.
And he's filled with this sense of dread and mourning, and he gets the idea, let me write about this great civilization that is now never going to be great again.
Now, something like those feelings passed through my mind recently as I watched the sort of open border that the Biden administration has created in the South and watching people just kind of pour in.
Here's a little glimpse of what that looks like.
If you're listening on audio, I'm just going to describe what we're seeing.
And what we're seeing is just an open gate People come streaming in, and this is happening hour by hour, constantly.
And we're not just looking at it, I'm just looking at the pictures here.
We're by and large looking like what appear to be a group of South Americans or maybe even Africans.
They're not Mexicans.
They're coming through Mexico, but from all over the place.
Why? Because they know that the gate is open.
They, in fact, turn themselves right into the border people.
Why? Because the border people give them a court date and then go, yeah, head on in.
It's kind of like going to Disneyland and you can come to your court date if you choose to later, but in the meantime, you're already in the park, in the country.
Now, some senses, as an immigrant, I can kind of identify with the eager anticipation with which these people are coming.
They're coming for a better life.
Some of them, by the way, are Venezuelans.
There's an article in Reitbart that 100 Venezuelans crossed the border into Texas.
And obviously, I have sympathies for the Venezuelans.
Debbie, my wife, is Venezuelan.
So the idea that people are fleeing Cuba, fleeing Venezuela, fleeing political persecution, by the way, that's a legitimate reason to be a refugee, and our refugee laws allow for that.
It's completely different, by the way, when people just come because, hey, you know, I think life will be better for me in America.
Or even I'm poor.
There are poor people, let's remember, all over the world.
I grew up in a city where probably 80% of people are living in virtually destitute conditions.
Yeah, all of them would come here if they could.
So what we're seeing here is a border invasion.
A border invasion. But Debbie said a striking thing to me this morning as we were sipping our latte.
She goes, you know, all these people are coming here and they think that they are going from a little dinghy that's abandoned at sea.
And they think, wow, there's a big ship!
This is amazing! This is fantastic!
Rescue! But, says Debbie, are they actually boarding a sinking ship?
And I think what she's referring to is the fact that, look, you have Venezuelans fleeing socialism to come to a free country, but isn't America moving in the direction of Venezuela?
Isn't it the case that liberties that we once took for granted in this country are now jeopardized?
Isn't it true that America now is not the same country that it was even 10 years ago, let alone 20 or 30 years ago?
And if that's true, if we are a sinking ship, then eventually the immigration will stop.
It will stop when?
It will stop when America stops being an exceptional country.
It will stop. It's kind of like saying that, you know, water will kind of find its own level.
But once water reaches its level, once everything is level, once life in America is not particularly different or better than anywhere else in the world, well, who's going to want to come to America anymore?
Now, who's doing this?
Who's making it happen and why?
The left traditionally has been anti-immigrant for an obvious reason.
Immigration and illegal immigration, notably, drives down the prices of labor for the working class.
This is why socialists historically have been against immigration.
Marx, I think, would find what's going on in America really surprising.
Why is it the case that a party that purports to be for the working man, for the ordinary guy, would want to bring in all kinds of foreigners who are going to make life more difficult for the working class in America?
But I think for the left and the Democrats, they've kind of given up on the American working class.
They see the working class as sort of racist and religious and no longer sympathetic to the objectives of socialism.
I think the way we can understand this is that they're engaged in a kind of great remaking of America project.
That was Obama's term.
I'm going to remake America.
Well, how do you remake America?
As the left sees it, there's kind of old America, and that's the America that stretches from the founding to now.
And then there's kind of new America with new people who don't have the old kinds of attachments, who don't really believe in American exceptionalism or the American experiment either.
If you think of all these immigrants, yeah, they want, you know, they're coming to America, but do they believe in America?
Or is it just the case that they want to have a better standard of living, but they have no broader loyalties than that?
Old America, and you may say New America, have been precariously balanced, the one against the other.
And you can see this in the very close elections we've been having between these two kind of evenly divided groups.
And I think what the left wants to do is tip the balance.
And so their way of tipping the balance is, you know, open the gate.
Let's sort of change the DNA of the country.
Let's literally change the composition of the country.
And by changing the composition of the country, we bring in new people, Who reduce the influence and cultural power of the old people, and in this way, new America doesn't coexist alongside old America, but new America supplants, pushes out, and ultimately brings to an end old America.
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There's strong opposition emerging to any attempt to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and specifically to investigate whether it came either unintentionally or deliberately out of the Wuhan lab.
Not surprisingly, one group that is vehemently opposed to this investigation is China.
And it's just come out that China is blocking the World Health Organization from coming back to China to look at the lab and demand the kind of information they would need to figure out where this virus really came from.
You might remember that the WHO conducted a kind of sham inquiry.
The inquiry, by the way, was led, at least on the American side, by Peter Daszak.
This is the guy who was funding the gain-of-function research, actually collecting federal money and then funneling it to the Wuhan lab.
In fact, he sent the Bat Lady, this is the Chinese researcher heading the Wuhan lab, Shi Zhengli, $600,000 in American taxpayer funding.
So, these are guys with dirty hands, and no wonder they're very eager to kind of, no, it didn't come from the lab, it must have come from this wet market.
But here is the Zeng Jizin, the Vice Minister of the National Health Commission of China, and he says, oh no, there's no reason to come here anymore.
He goes, if you want to do any tracing, I'm not quoting him, he goes, in the next step, I think animal tracing should be the priority direction.
That's the best, most valuable field for our efforts.
And then he says, and this is the killer, we are opposed to politicizing the tracing work.
So, he wants to focus on only one theory, not two.
And that is the wet market theory.
Let's kind of look at the animals, because this obviously must have come from there, untouched or uncontaminated by human, not just intervention, but human projects to make these viruses more contagious, more deadly.
Interestingly, the House Democrats, on their part, kind of, I wouldn't say in league with China, but alongside China, are blocking a bill that would force the Director of National Intelligence here in America to release any information that he has about the connections between COVID-19 and the Wuhan lab.
So there's a bipartisan bill, driven by Republicans but supported by some Democrats, To make this information public, but the Democrats don't want it to be made public.
You see here that they have, it seems, an ideological stake in protecting China.
Dr. Fauci has been out there saying that he still believes it's the wet market.
And he cites a paper that recently came out, actually this month.
But it's a paper signed by the same gang of suspect virologists who signed the original sort of deceptive article in Nature, which was intended to create a bogus consensus.
Oh, we scientists all agree.
This does not show any fingerprints of human touch.
And it's the same guys who are basically now trying to shore up this thesis.
And Fauci is throwing in his lot with them.
So while he's kind of theoretically open to the possibility that this virus was made, was generated by gain-of-function research, nevertheless, he's trying to say that most likely it didn't.
But here's... Here's Ralph Baric.
Ralph Baric is the virologist at the University of North Carolina, a big participant in gain-of-function research.
And interviews just emerged that he gave with an Italian newspaper called Presa Directa, and this was last year.
And he was asked a very simple question.
Can you make deadly viruses in such a way that there will be no trace that they were man-made?
And here's his answer.
Quote, End quote.
And he goes on to say, So in that case, they deliberately made the virus so you would know it was a man-made virus.
He goes, but otherwise, there is no way to distinguish a natural virus from one made in a laboratory.
Now, the reason this is significant is that it is exactly this point that the virologists used a year ago, and they continue to use, and Fauci continues to rely on to say, hey, listen, we don't see any clear proof that the virus was manipulated.
And here's Ralph Baric saying, you can make a virus in such a way that that proof is not going to exist.
You can make man-made viruses and they're indistinguishable from naturally occurring viruses.
We can, in a sense, you may almost say, wipe out our tracks.
And so, where we are in this, and Richard Ebright is a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers.
He basically says that these guys are running a kind of racket.
And I think what he means is that he doesn't know where the virus came from, but he says that there's an effort here.
There's an inquiry that's theoretically open, but it seems that the Biden administration isn't really pushing it.
The Democrats are blocking it.
The Chinese are blocking it.
And that leaves the sad truth that even if the evidence does exist, we may still never find out where this lethal virus that killed so many people, caused so much suffering, unleashed a global pandemic, actually came from.
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Nancy Pelosi has unleashed her task force to investigate, I'll put that word in quote marks, the roots of January 6th.
But it's turning out to be not really a bipartisan commission.
Well, there's Liz Cheney on it, but Liz Cheney seems to have arrived at the conclusion that she has no future in the Republican Party and she may as well behave like a Democrat because her road ahead has got to be painted with a big D. Now, the discussion around this is focusing on the politics of it.
The Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, wanted to appoint people like Jim Jordan and Jim Banks to this commission.
The Democrats essentially vetoed them.
Pelosi did. And so McCarthy goes, well, listen, you know what?
If we don't get to pick our Republican members, I mean, what is this, a one-party state?
The Democrats get to choose even their opposition, right?
That's going to be on this commission.
So McCarthy goes, we're out of here.
And I think this has actually been a win for the Republicans because it removes any shred of bipartisan credibility that this commission might have.
The comic aspect of all this is they're investigating something where they don't want to provide the answers to the really critical questions.
Now, the Republicans say, we're starting our own commission, and I hope they do.
And if they do, these are the questions I actually want to know the answers to.
Number one... In what sense is January 6th even described, or could be described, as an insurrection?
None of the participants call it an insurrection.
Their stated motive is completely different.
And stated motives are critical here.
At 9-11, the stated motive of the terrorist was to inflict a grievous blow against America.
And so what you have here is we want to know what their motives were.
Their motives, I think, were to demand an honest count of the vote.
Number two, what was the actual justification, or was there one, for a black Capitol Police officer shooting Ashley Babbitt through the neck?
Even though she seemed to pose no imminent threat, either to him or to anyone else.
There were lots of armed officers there at the time.
Yes, the woman was coming through a window.
Yes, she broke the law. But George Floyd broke the law.
Does that mean George Floyd deserved to die?
Wasn't there a way to apprehend Ashley Babbitt or shoot her in the leg, perhaps?
As opposed to a lethal shot that killed her almost instantly.
Number three, why did Nancy Pelosi reject repeated requests for additional security?
What did Nancy Pelosi know?
What was her reason for rejecting the additional security?
Even though there had been, according to the FBI, prior warnings that there might be some trouble at the Capitol.
Number four, the big one.
What was the role of the FBI in this January 6th event?
Did the FBI infiltrate the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers?
Or did the FBI instigate the attack?
Did the FBI put them up to it?
Did the FBI go, let's storm the Capitol?
Why do I say this? Because if you go back to the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping, it's now become pretty clear that it was an FBI guy who said, let's storm the Capitol in Michigan.
So you notice a kind of chillingly similar MO. And by the way, the FBI guy who ran the Michigan operation and infiltrated the group was then transferred to D.C. And he's apparently now involved in the January 6th inquiry.
Finally, has January 6th been exploited politically as a kind of Reichstag fire event?
In other words, the event becomes the pretext for a much broader militarization of the Capitol, for a much broader empowering of the Capitol Police, who, by the way, are now demanding nationwide surveillance powers to supposedly thwart Future threats to the Capitol.
So all of these, these are the real questions surrounding January 6th.
They will most emphatically not be answered by the Pelosi Commission, but it's an open question whether they will be answered by the GOP alternative.
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An old friend of mine, a Dartmouth friend of mine, somebody who actually met me when I was just a freshman at Dartmouth, Ben Hart, is here.
Ben is today a very successful political consultant.
But, Ben, you were a senior when I was a freshman, and I thought it'd be really fun for us to join on the podcast and talk about the old days, talk about the Dartmouth Review, the renegade campus newspaper that we were both part of, but also talk about Reagan conservatism and Trump conservatism.
But let's begin kind of at the beginning, which is we met through this new student paper that you actually were one of the...
I wasn't a founder, but I joined right at the beginning.
Right. Let's start by telling the story of how you got the idea for starting this rebel right-wing paper.
Yeah, well, it's called the Dartmouth Review, and it's probably the most famous of the student conservative newspapers that really have ever existed.
It was one of the first, maybe the first, maybe not the first, but certainly the most famous of the student conservative newspapers that sprang up at that time.
In fact, after the Dartmouth Review had started, more than a hundred other And conservative student newspapers started kind of in the wake of the Dartmouth Review because the Dartmouth Review was getting a lot of attention.
60 Minutes did a piece on the Dartmouth Review, New York Times, Time Magazine.
I debated Abbie Hoffman on CNN's Crossfire.
The old 60s. The old 60s radical.
So it had a great sort of start in tradition.
And a lot of great... Talent really came out of the Dartmouth Review.
Laura Ingraham also joined the paper as a freshman.
I met Laura her freshman year.
She came into the office of the Review and she said, I'm here to work on the Dartmouth Review.
That's why I came to Dartmouth.
And she was dressed like in a snowsuit or something.
Like, she was dressed in, like, glosses that were, you know, sort of open and, you know, hat on.
And she walked into the office, and that's how I met Laura.
And I think she was same year as you?
No, she was a couple years younger.
Yeah, okay, so she – exactly.
So I would actually – Stayed at Dartmouth an extra year to continue to build the paper.
Because we started the paper when I was a senior.
And so I really kind of hung around an extra year to keep working on the paper, raise money for the paper, get it off to a good financial start and that kind of thing.
And I also wrote a book that year called Poisoned Ivy, which was one of the first books on the whole sort of political correctness phenomenon.
And it was a bestseller.
And so I sort of did...
I spent an extra year at Dartmouth doing that.
But I met you, Dinesh.
Go ahead. No, no. I was going to say, when I first joined the Review, as you know, I actually wasn't all that political.
Right. And, in fact, shortly thereafter, when I was nominated to be the editor of the Dartmouth Review, you were strongly opposed because...
Well, you tell why. I'll tell a little bit.
Yeah, just a little bit of a backstory.
I don't know how much detail we want to go into, but anyway...
The editor of the paper, the founding editor of the paper, was a guy named Greg Fossetal, a very talented guy, terrific writer.
And I was on the business side.
I was the publisher president.
I didn't have any kind of journalism background.
I had not worked on the regular daily paper.
Dinesh, you worked on the Daily Dartmouth, which was the regular paper.
And Greg Fossetal was the editor-in-chief of that paper.
But he got fired by the paper for writing a conservative editorial.
Right. We can get into that a little bit too, because that was really part of the genesis of the paper.
I wanted to start the Dartmouth Review.
I wanted to start a conservative student newspaper for a number of years, but I didn't have any experience in journalism.
I hadn't worked on the paper. So when Greg got fired...
As a regular Dartmouth, I saw that as a terrific opportunity to launch this paper.
Greg and I talked about it and we wanted to launch this paper and he wanted to bring you on board because you were writing a lot of great investigative stuff for the Daily Dartmouth.
But you weren't very political and you weren't that sure if you wanted to join the paper.
But the attraction for you was we were going to give you pretty much unlimited freedom.
As long as you were writing about investigative stuff.
Debbie's like, oh no, this was the start of something very bad.
Unlimited freedom for the next.
So you liked that part. Otherwise, no limits.
You had some problems with the paper because it was a conservative paper.
And it was kind of a bomb-throwing paper.
It was a bomb-throwing paper, right?
Well, it was supposed to be sort of a conservative national lampoon.
At least half of it was sort of national lampoon and half of it was...
Just commentary about what was going on in the campus, but mostly reporting.
But we needed you because you were a very good reporter.
Well, a little funny tidbit was that we were closely affiliated with National Review.
And National Review at that time, edited and founded by Bill Buckley, but your dad, Jeff Hart, who was an English professor at Dartmouth, was also one of the senior editors of National Review.
I came to learn, by the way, that National Review had something called the Bad Taste File.
Right. And they would come up with jokes that were a little too salty to appear in National Review.
Those would go into the bad taste file, and your dad would bring the bad taste file to Dartmouth, where we would go through them and give them a second betting.
And we'd kind of Dartmouthize them.
And frequently what National Review would not touch appeared in print in all its glory in our paper.
But at the beginning I was...
Yeah, let me...
A little background, Dinesh.
I hope you don't mind. No, I don't mind.
So Dinesh came to the paper.
He was kind of critical, uncomfortable with just it being a conservative newspaper.
Greg really wanted to bring Dinesh on, the founding editor, because he wanted Dinesh's investigative reporting.
I thought that was great. Dinesh would do his investigative pieces.
But Dinesh wanted, apparently there was a secret condition that he would be allowed to publish an article in the paper called Reviewing the Review, where he would critique the review and complain about the review.
Absolutely. Reviewing the review.
I'll never forget it. So Greg and I had finalized the, I think it was the second issue of the paper.
It was one of the early issues.
At the very beginning. So I was very proud of this paper that we had just laid out.
I had gotten back from the printer.
It looked great. I think Greg and I had gotten back.
But it hadn't been printed yet.
So it got printed.
And then the paper arrived in a sort of pickup truck.
I think Greg brought it in. Remember, we would hand deliver the paper to all the dorms, to every dorm room door.
So I get my paper, and I'm in bed.
I open it up, and on the front page is Dinesh's article, reviewing the review, trashing the review!
So I was just like, I was really steamed.
I mean, I was so angry about it.
I get on the phone with Greg, and I'm like, what is going on here?
This wasn't the paper that we had approved.
So, you know, he explained that Dinesh is the condition of Dinesh working for the paper, that he would be allowed to write this article.
So that's what happened.
So anyway, but Dinesh then became, I guess, adopted kind of, became conservative.
Dinesh, why don't you talk a little bit about that?
Like, what was it that moved you from being kind of just neutral, more or less, and then...
Well, you know, I was, you know, I won't say off the boat.
I'd been in America for a year, and I came to Dartmouth, and of course I wanted to learn what it's like to be, you know, an Ivy League kid and what books I should read.
And so when the idea of the review came along, I thought, wow, this is a place for me to kind of spread my wings and write ideas.
But, you know, I think what happened, and this is an important point about liberalism, if you're not actively conservative, You're pulled by the liberal tide.
And I think I was infected to that degree with certain elements of liberalism.
And so I found the review initially too conservative, too right-wing, too extreme.
And that was the nature of my critique.
So we're going to come back and dive into this a little bit more with my buddy, my longtime Dartmouth buddy who's making revelations about me along the way.
We'll be right back.
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I'm back with my Dartmouth buddy, now political consultant, Ben Hart.
We're talking about our days at Dartmouth.
You know, I think for me, Ben, there was two things.
One is, I was drawn into the intellectual world of The Review, which was, of course, our leader was your dad, who would introduce us to ideas.
And I think I was also...
Initially, I thought your dad was a little too outrageous.
I mean, he would wear buttons like Soap the Poor.
You know, he had all kinds of funny devices.
Vote no on women's suffering.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
That was sort of the joke, yeah.
But I realized that he drew me into a world of ideas.
And I realized that conservatism is not just a political program, but it's a cultural and intellectual program, which will broaden your mind.
And you guys would talk, you, Greg, and Wendy Stone, later Wendy Long, this was the root of my campaign finance problems.
But I mean, you guys were talking about books and ideas I'd never heard of.
And I was like, wow, how do they have answers when I don't even know that these were questions?
George Orwell's 1984 and stuff.
Solzhenitsyn, Hayek. But the second thing was the extreme reaction of the college.
As soon as the paper came out, as you know, we got a letter from the college basically saying, cease and desist from using the name Dartmouth.
Remember this? And if you walk down Main Street in Hanover, there's Dartmouth Bookstore, Dartmouth Cleaners, Dartmouth this...
Every institution at Dartmouth is named Dartmouth, and these are independent institutions, and yet here was the college exercising this authority over its own students who are writing about the campus or the alumni.
I mean, I just found that so outrageous.
We saw even then the intolerance of the left, the fact that they didn't want this kind of dissent, And I think what made them particularly dangerous was that this newspaper was independent.
Talk a little bit about why you decided early on that the paper should have no affiliation with the college, but should operate, raise its own money, and function independently.
Well, I mean that it was it could not be affiliated with the college because the college was pretty much Defunding not funding at all conservative groups, you know So if you were a conservative group and applied for student funding and when you would not get funding, right?
Yeah, you couldn't if you were the gay Students Association funding if you were, you know any kind of liberal organization you get funding But there's no chance that the Dartmouth Review is going to get funding. So the other issue that we the other Issue was that we wanted to go out to the alumni and be an alternative to the alumni magazine because the alumni magazine is basically It's to go out to the alumni and paint the rosy picture of Dartmouth but without really seeing what's going on in the campus.
And the whole strength of the Dartmouth Review and one of our rules was we could only write about Dartmouth.
Students didn't know enough about national politics or economics to really write about national issues and people could get That information other places, reading National Review or whatever.
But what they couldn't get was information about what was going on in the Dartmouth campus.
And so that was our rule, that the students had to write about issues that were affecting the campus, that what was going on on the campus that did have a broader national implication.
But in terms of the alumni, it was eye-opening to the alumni.
And the other thing, the other reason that Dartmouth really hated the Dartmouth Review was that we were Going out to the Dartmouth alumni.
There was an alumni directory.
Another source of legal problem for us was that we were using the alumni directory to build a mailing list to send this paper free to every single Dartmouth alum.
It's all 40-something thousand.
And that just freaked out the college.
I mean, this is key because, you know, at a state college, the funding comes from the state through the taxpayer.
But private colleges are funded by the alumni and the college relies on tapping these alumni to give money.
Now, they don't raise the money based on what the college is like now.
They appeal to the nostalgia of the alumni.
Weren't things great? Exactly.
But the key thing about the Dartmouth alumni list, the reason they could not get us for that was that the purpose of the alumni list was stated right on page one, and it said that the purpose was so that alumni could easily communicate with each other, and that the Dartmouth community could easily communicate with each other.
Well, guess what we were doing?
We were communicating with the Dartmouth community, so there was really nothing that they could do about it.
It was the stated purpose of the alumni directory, so we loaded that into a computer, and we started sending out fundraising appeals and subscription appeals to the entire list.
And the first mailing, the first mailing to all 40,000 Dartmouth alumni brought in, I think, over $100,000.
I mean, I had never seen this amount of money before in my life.
I mean, that was like an enormous amount of money in 1980, probably worth a million dollars.
It made us a force.
But let's talk about the type of articles that we did that drove the college insane.
Because I think it's fair to say that they had no idea how to react to the review.
So one of those articles involved a professor named Bill Cole.
Now this was obviously an affirmative action hire.
There's a guy who was in class.
But, and I was editor of the review at the time, we had heard this guy was not only using obscene language in class, the F word and so on, but he was also engaging in massive political diatribes.
Right. I think Laura Ingram, I think she went in and did a report on the class.
I think she might have recorded it.
Right. So she audited the class in the beginning where you're allowed to go to a class even if you're not formally enrolled.
Right. And she turns on the recorder.
Right. And Bill Coyle, of course, engages in these political diatribes.
And we just ran a massive...
Obscenities and things. Obscenities.
And then we couldn't even print in the paper.
You had to put like the little asterisks.
And it was explosive when the article appears.
And then I remember a few days later, I was in the review office and the phone rings.
And I pick it up. And he goes, D'Souza?
I go, yeah. He goes, Professor Cole here.
I was like, oh no.
And then a rain of obscenities.
You! But the thing is, it took me a moment to get my footing.
And then I remembered that we did interviews with people like Buckley and Buchanan.
And so I hit the record button of the tape recorder that was attached to our phone.
So I was recording his diatribe, his obscenities, his threats.
Right. He's like, I'm going to get you.
I'm going to make sure that you can't show your face in this town again.
All this on tape.
And that was the next article. And that went into the paper?
Okay. And so, suffice to say, I mean, you know, we're living now in the sort of the Trump era.
We have Fox News. We have, of course, Rush Limbaugh, the late Rush Limbaugh.
National Review is a different creature than it was in those days.
But it seems to me that when you now look at Fox and you look at Limbaugh, look at a lot of talk radio, there's a lot of Dartmouth review in that.
And so the style that the paper pioneered, the kind of, I would call it iconoclastic conservatism.
Very much so, yeah. Very much. When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about what Ben Hart in his book, he wrote, Ben wrote a great book called Poison Ivy that chronicles our days at Dartmouth together.
And in that book, he uses the term the ethos to describe liberalism.
That ethos is with us today.
And when we come back, we'll talk more about it.
Thanks, Dinesh. Mike Lindell is offering a ridiculously good deal on his towels.
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Right. So at Dartmouth at that time, there was kind of the, I would say, the germ of the whole woke ideology that we see today.
And it was in what we call the victim studies departments that were spring that we're starting to spring up at that time on campuses Across the country particularly in the Ivy League, so let's explain what that means so you've got that You've got the English Department the history department The way that the left borrowed its way in is they didn't they weren't able to take over the English Department So what they did was they started the women's studies department and the black studies department I don't think there was a gay studies department American.
There was a Native American Studies Department So these were the you know enclaves of radicalism exactly, but this was actually not and this is an important point This was not the mainstream history professor No. So talk about who...
Well, let me just talk a little bit about this whole ethos thing.
The whole thing about ethos, what I call the ethos, which now would be like maybe critical race theory or woke ideology, is it's not just about political positions.
It's about you have to have an attitude about everything, all aspects of life.
It's about what clothing you wear.
It's about what... It's virtue signaling everywhere.
And so that really started in these victims, what I call victim studies departments.
That whole critical race theory was present back then.
Nobody took it seriously on the campus.
The students didn't take it seriously.
But these ideas were germinating in these radical departments, these specialized departments, which were very different from like the English literature department or the history department, where you had liberal professors But they were more sort of, I would call, John F. Kennedy-type liberals or New Deal-style, old-style liberals. They weren't radicals.
And I'll give you one example.
We had a great professor, very much a Democrat, very much opposed to the Dartmouth Review, named Jim Cox.
And I took his courses.
He was one of the nation's expert...
We're experts on Mark Twain.
I took his course on Twain.
Of course, Mark Twain is basically banned from the library today.
Because the N-word appears in Huckleberry Finn.
Even though the whole point of Twain is anti-racism, but because it's not using the proper language, it's banned.
So someone like Jim Cox, who did not like the newspaper, didn't agree with us at all, he would be canceled today just for being a Mark Twain scholar.
And he loved Mark Twain, and he would never have been on board with the idea that you shouldn't be Moby Dick, or you shouldn't be the Scarlet Letter.
And he was a great professor.
I got good grades with him.
I never got, even though we disagreed politically, you know, he was a Democrat, I was a Republican, but I never had any problems with grades from a lot of these professors that were in these traditional departments.
They were Democrats, didn't agree with the paper, but they stuck to the material.
They didn't bring politics into their classes.
Here's another example, Ben.
You know him well, Professor Charles Stinson in the religion department.
He was on the left. Now, interestingly, he had a fascination with the review, and when he would spot you or me or Keeney Jones or one of us, he would essentially kind of say, come over here, and he would take us into an alley where we could converse with him unseen by the community.
Right. Because it's a small community.
He knew that if he was seen talking to us, this might be lethal for his career.
And in fact, he even said once to me, he goes, listen, he goes, Jeff Hart, your dad, goes to New York and he's in part of the cosmopolitan world.
He eats at peonies. And he goes, but I live here.
He goes, you know, this is my social life.
These are all the people I know.
So I can't afford to be ostracized here because this is my whole life.
Exactly. Well, he was probably in disagreement with the paper, too, probably a Democrat.
But yeah, he could not really be seen, even though he liked us.
And we took all of his courses and he gave us good grades and treated us very fairly and so forth.
But yeah, he could not be seen in public talking with us.
So would it be fair to say, Ben, would it be fair to say that the radicalism represented by Professor Cole, Marissa Navarro, you remember?
Oh, Marissa Navarro, I forgot about her.
Yeah, she was like the champion of the wokeness back then.
Totally. I mean, these are people who wanted to shut down the fraternities.
They were basic. They hated us.
Right. And I remember Marisa Navarro, she would say things like she didn't like to walk across the Dartmouth campus because the huge towering Baker Tower reminded her of a phallic symbol.
Right. So it disturbed her.
She was on the cutting edge.
She was on the cutting edge. I'm sure she's really mad that she didn't come up with intersectionality and nobody uses her name today.
Yeah. But all this stuff that was crazy then, and on the margin, how did it become mainstream?
Did it become mainstream because the liberals, people like Professor Cox, even though they knew it was nonsense, they were too invertebrate to stand up against it.
Well, he was a Democrat.
I would apply that more to the administration, which did have Republicans running the administration.
Remember, the president of Dartmouth was a Republican, David McLaughlin, a business guy, successful in business.
But he totally caved to the woke ideology because he just didn't know how to kind of intellectually deal with it.
So his reaction was to just cave.
And so in a way, he was worse than the previous president, who was also very liberal, but at least he was serious.
John Kemeny was a very serious mathematician.
He was actually Einstein's math guy.
Einstein made math mistakes, and John Kemeny was a mathematician, and he corrected Einstein's math.
And so that's how smart. But Kemeny was not really suited also to be a president because he was a mathematician and intellectual, and so he was also getting kind of steamrolled by this woke stuff.
Well, he was steamrolled because he was, in a sense, in the sciences, and so he didn't even know what these people were talking about.
He had no idea. And I'm sure if you went to him and said things like, math is racist, and, you know, 2 plus 2 equals 4, or, you know, you want ethnomathematics to replace...
I think he invented or wrote basic computer language.
So you built the Kiewit Computer Center, which is one of the really pioneering – so we had a lot of serious intellectual firepower at Dartmouth, but it did get infected with this woke stuff coming out of the victim studies academic departments, which were small, but they were influential.
Let's talk about how small camps can produce lasting influence.
I mean, if we think about our Dartmouth days and we trace people, so let's look at Peter Robinson.
So Peter Robinson, neither of us, I mean, I didn't know Peter well, because when I was at Dartmouth, when I was running the paper, Peter was at Oxford, and he was writing, very pompous, by the way, Letter from Oxford, which he would talk about, you know.
I have to make just one comment about that.
That was one of the very big differences between conservatism then and now.
Back then, Buckley was very erudite, very intellectual, right?
So he started National Review.
His purpose in starting National Review was to bring conservatism into more the ivory tower into the elite, because conservatives were considered kind of, you know, fever swamp and just kind of, you know, not intellectual and so forth.
And so Buckley was trying to change that with National Review.
And so some of the people who were affiliated with the Dartmouth Review were a little bit like that, you know, excessively sort of pompous and erudite.
Right, and they were anglophiles and they were, you know, kind of eccentric characters.
And a couple of them, you remember when Buckley would do Firing Line, he would sit at a 45 degree angle, you know.
The opposite of Trump.
So Trump is totally different, you know, it's a totally different kind of thing.
And we can get into that maybe a little later about the difference, you know, the direction that the movement has taken.
It's been a long road from National Review and the Dartmouth Review and from the Reagan era that we were a part of to the Trump era.
So we're going to actually close the interview for now, but I'm going to do a couple more segments with Ben Hart that will be aired on Monday's podcast.
So we're going to keep it going.
Make sure you tune in on Monday to get more...
of the Dartmouth Review, National Review, all the way to the MAGA movement.
I want to talk in this segment about a very famous short story by the writer Franz Kafka.
It's Kafka's Metamorphosis.
And I'm sort of provoked to do this by a tweet by the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, an infamous atheist.
But here's Dawkins.
He goes, Kafka's Metamorphosis is called a major work of literature.
If it's science fiction, it's bad science fiction.
If, like Animal Farm, it's an allegory, an allegory of what?
Scholarly answers range from pretentious Freudian to far-fetched feminist.
I don't get it. Where are the emperor's clothes?
Here's Dawkins. And, you know, part of what we're going to get into, we're going to see, is that you've got this kind of very staid, stiff upper lip British tradition.
So we're like, I don't see the point of Kafka.
The basic idea is that a man seems to turn into an insect.
What possibly could this man have been thinking?
So this is the Dawkins sensibility.
And I think it's kind of ironic, because here's Dawkins, and if you think about what his field is, his field is about, well, the transformation of species.
That's the basic idea of Darwin, that species can somehow metamorphose from one into the other.
In other words, not just microevolution, but what is sometimes called macroevolution.
The Origin of Species.
That's the title of Darwin's book.
So you would think a biologist would show at least some natural curiosity about a work called Metamorphosis.
By the way, this is in a long Western tradition.
The writer Ovid, centuries earlier, wrote a book called Metamorphoses.
So this notion of transformation, very central to Western civilization, And what I want to do by looking at this story briefly is to show not just the literary value, but sort of the relevance of Kafka's story, in which a man wakes up one day to discover that he has become a loathsome insect.
Here's the first line. And the creature is some kind of an unknown insect.
Right away as I read this, I was thinking to myself, this is sort of, this is the trans phenomenon carried to its logical limit.
Of course, if you wrote it today, you'd have to sort of write it a little differently.
Because this guy, Samso, he wakes up, he doesn't want to be an insect.
He doesn't identify as an insect.
He isn't taking hormones or medical treatments to become an insect.
He just becomes an insect, kind of against his will.
And the story is about how this kind of, you may say, messes up his life.
And we'll get to that. But I think if you wrote it today, you'd have to start with a guy who says, you know, yes, there are people who are biological men who want to be women, and yes, there's the guy who, you know, is a British white guy, but he wanted to become oriental, so he did eye surgery and all kinds of wacky treatments because he identifies as Korean.
Apparently, this all started because he loved the K-pop bands.
And so it could be that you've got this guy, Gregor Samsa, and he's really fascinated by insects, and he decides, I identify with the insects.
I want to become an insect, or to go even further and follow the logic, I've always been an insect, but I'm an insect inhabiting a human body.
And so I'm going to undergo this mental transformation.
I'm going to demand that society recognize me as an insect.
Well... That's what it would be like today.
Now, in Kafka's own story, this guy, Gregor Samsa, wakes up as an insect, but interestingly, he doesn't become an insect.
He doesn't have an insect's consciousness.
He's still Gregor.
He thinks like a human being, and in fact, initially, he doesn't even quite know what's happened to him.
So... So, he's locked up in his room, and he knows something bad is going on, so he won't open the door.
And so, his boss, who discovers that he hasn't shown up for work, actually comes.
This guy is called the head clerk.
He comes to see Gregor, and he thinks Gregor is sort of playing some kind of a prank.
I want to read these couple of lines because they're sort of downright funny.
They show you the comedy of the situation.
Mr. Samsa, the head clerk, says, what is the matter?
You have barricaded yourself in your room, giving only yes and no answers, causing your parents serious and unnecessary concern, and neglecting your professional responsibilities in an outrageous manner.
I've always known you to be a quiet, reasonable man, and now suddenly you seem to be indulging in rash eccentricities.
He goes, I can think of a possible explanation concerning the cash payment that was recently entrusted to you.
So apparently the guy is giving Gregor a cash payment.
He thinks Gregor is hiding out because he wants to keep the money.
But in fact, I gave my word of honor that this could not be the true explanation.
So, here you have this Kafkaesque theme, and this is, I think, what Dawkins really doesn't get.
The Kafkaesque theme is one of alienation.
In this case, alienation carried to its extreme.
Why? Because Gregor Samsa is literally alienated from himself, from his own body.
His mind and his body have become, you may say, detached from each other.
He has a human mind, and he has an insect body.
This is, by the way, consistent with all of Kafka's great work in the castle.
Here's a guy who's supposed to be the builder and supervisor of a castle, but he can't get in the castle.
Everywhere he goes, he's obstructed, or the entrances are blocked, or he can't find his way.
So this surreal sense that you sometimes have when you're in a foreign country, where am I, even though he's supposed to be in a familiar setting?
Or in the trial, the opening line, somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K. because without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning.
And then Joseph K. tries to find out, well, why am I being arrested?
What are the charges? He can never find out.
When he goes to see the cops...
They basically go, oh, the charges will be delivered eventually.
You relax, Mr.
K. It's alright.
Charges sometimes take a little time, but you'll get them eventually.
And so this surreal feeling that you're being scrutinized and you're in grave danger, but you don't know why or for what.
Now... Back to our story with the metamorphosis, and you begin to see the grim, the black comedy of the situation when you look at Gregor Samsa's family.
First of all, his father is just sort of like your typical irritable dad.
He can't believe it. The whole thing is complete nonsense to him.
He can't even get his head around it.
Now, the mom, interestingly, thinks that Gregor is still Gregor.
She goes, something terrible has happened to Gregor.
We've sort of got to get Gregor back.
We've got to save Gregor.
Call the doctor. But it's Gregor's sister, a woman named Greta, who takes the view that, no guys, I don't know if you can see, but Gregor isn't here anymore.
Gregor is no longer Gregor.
Look at him. He's a loathsome insect.
He's got all these legs.
He's got all this hair.
He's got these mandibles.
This is no longer, in a sense, a human being.
At the end of the story, Gregor dies.
And the surreal aspect and conclusion of the story is that suddenly his death, which had kind of weighed on everybody and confused them and, in a sense, paralyzed their lives, this weight is sort of lifted from their shoulders so that Gregor's death...
It is not a tragedy.
It comes, in fact, as an immense relief.
And suddenly all these people who are sort of discombobulated by this human or humanoid insect in their presence, life goes on normal.
Suddenly they go, well, you know what?
It's a sunny day. I'm going to get my umbrella.
I'm going to go take a walk.
I'm going to go stop and have a croissant.
And so you have this story kind of...
Resumes with normal life restored.
But this terrible calamity that has happened to this person, Gregor Samsa, is now suddenly left as a memory, perhaps itself, soon to be extinguished.
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