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July 29, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:53
CRIME AND THE DEMOCRATS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep142
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On today's show, the murder Olympics in Democratic cities.
I'm going to be awarding gold, silver, and bronze to some Democratic mayors.
Also, Kelly Shabaka, who got the GOP endorsement for Senate in Alaska.
She joins me.
And finally, who's the real Chief Justice on the Supreme Court?
Hint, it's not John Roberts.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
You know, the Olympics is in full swing, but I've been watching a different kind of Olympics.
I would call it the murder Olympics in democratic cities.
It's almost as if democratic cities are competing to win a kind of murder race, to be first in line, to win gold or silver or bronze.
And at the end of this segment, I'm going to be awarding those medals.
Now, there are so many democratic cities in contention that we almost have to have heats to decide who's going to even make it into the final.
And let's just get a little sprinkling of this crime wave that has been surging.
But surging not just sort of...
Equally around the country, it's surging in Democratic areas.
By the way, there are Republican cities.
Dallas, San Diego leans Republican, at least slightly.
Tampa, Miami, Salt Lake City.
We don't see massive crime surges there.
Where you do see crime surges is cities like Seattle, San Francisco.
Oakland, Baltimore, Portland, Chicago, St.
Louis, Detroit, Philly.
So these are the competitors.
Here are a few data points.
Atlanta. Homicides are up almost 60% just in this year alone.
And 60 people have had their lives ended by violence this year, 2021.
This is the highest rate, by the way, in Atlanta in 30 years.
Philadelphia. Murders have surged 33%.
There have been 169 murders in Philadelphia this year.
Baltimore. Another massive surge.
162 homicides this year.
10 more than this time last year.
Philadelphia. Well, I just mentioned Philadelphia.
Seattle, we see a surge as well.
Now, these are all heavily Democratic cities, and it's not just important to note that they have Democratic mayors.
They have a Democratic structure all the way down.
They have Democratic prosecutors.
Very often, the prosecutor is as culpable as the mayor.
They don't bring charges.
So... We've also seen, by the way, an exodus of police in these cities.
This is not unrelated to these crime waves.
So in Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, more than 200 officers have quit the police force last year.
Let's look at Baltimore.
Another exodus of 230 officers short, according to the police commissioner.
New York Police Department down 1,500 officers.
Chicago lost 700 officers since 2019.
250 officers have quit in Seattle.
So it's kind of obvious what's going on here.
We have an emboldening of the criminals.
That's point number one.
And we have a weakening of the cops.
That's point number two. Obviously, point number one and point number two are related.
Point number one results from point number two.
In other words, the cops are emboldened because the police force is weakened or is doing nothing or because the prosecutors aren't bringing charges.
So now the question becomes, how did these police forces get weakened?
And the answer is really simple.
Number one, Black Lives Matter.
Number two, defund the police.
And number three, the adoption of a kind of go-easy-on-crime attitude by Democratic mayors and Soros-funded prosecutors.
So here we have the responsibility falls squarely on Democrats.
Now, who is going to come out ahead in this race?
We kind of know who all the finalists are.
But interestingly, if some people had to guess, they would guess, well, I'm going to give Chicago number one.
And Chicago does have a gruesome murder toll.
It's kind of funny to see, you know, the mayor, Beetlejuice, standing there, you know, talking about how important it is to wear a mask when you've just got corpses lying all over the place.
But But Chicago is also a very large and spread out city, and there are some of the ethnic neighborhoods that are more safe than others.
So when you average it out, when you look at the per capita homicides per city, Chicago actually doesn't come out at the top.
It's not even in the top three.
It's not even in the top ten.
It's closer to number 15.
And so I want to award my medals.
The bronze medal.
It goes to Baltimore.
Now, it could have gone to Oakland.
It was really close at the end there between Baltimore and Oakland.
I think Baltimore just pushed its nose and hit the finishing tape before Oakland.
Oakland kind of falls into fourth place, narrowly missing a medal.
Silver medal, Detroit.
And the gold medal, St. Louis.
St. Louis is the murder capital of America.
Now, interestingly, you may ask, why are Democratic voters in these areas okay with this?
And the answer is, they're not.
There have been a number of surveys of public opinion in these Democratic cities, and they overwhelmingly show that people want more cops.
They are much more sympathetic to, let's embolden the police, not the criminals, than they are to let's defund the police.
And so it's very clear these Democratic mayors and prosecutors are going not where their constituents are, We're good to go.
Which is pushing these defund the police campaigns than they are to public demands that the police be, you know, shackled so the criminals can run amok.
At the time when we're celebrating the achievement of man in the Olympics, the International Olympics, there's a dark side inside of America, a murder Olympics, and it is wholly sponsored by the Democratic Party.
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And it seems like the country was in trouble in three distinct areas.
Inflation, crime, and illegal immigration.
And I mention this because you have a feeling of deja vu now in America.
You have a Democrat in the White House.
At that time it was Jimmy Carter.
Now it's Biden. You had a Democratic Congress, as we have now.
And we're seeing a surge in all these three problems.
A surge in inflation, a surge in crime, and a surge in illegal immigration.
Now... Of course, the main difference is that the surge now is occurring in the wake of lessons that should have been learned from dealing with those problems over the past few decades because crime was curbed in America.
Inflation was brought under control.
Illegal immigration was, well, not stopped, but you may say arrested, slowed down, brought to somewhat manageable levels, certainly under Trump.
And so what you have is that in these areas, the Democrats are pushing forward as if it was the 70s all over again, as if they never knew how to deal with these problems.
I mean, Carter certainly didn't know.
Listening to Carter talk about inflation, you felt like you were on another planet.
The man had no clue about what to do about it.
In fact, his remedy was simply to diagnose the American people as suffering from some kind of malaise.
But after Carter, when Reagan came in, along with the head of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, who was a Democrat, but Reagan nominated him to continue his term, Reagan and Volcker worked together to sort of tighten the money supply and squeeze inflation out of the economy.
It was admittedly a painful remedy, but that's how you cure it.
And the lesson of the Reagan years was don't let inflation rear its ugly head again.
But here we are. The consumer price index for June rose 5.4%.
That shows you inflation isn't just here.
It's accelerating.
The Fed has tried to keep inflation around 2%.
At one point, Janet Yellen...
The former Fed chairwoman, now Treasury Secretary, said, hey, you know what?
These are temporary adjustments to COVID. But we're getting the idea that they're not so temporary.
Inflation is here to stay.
It's kind of feeding on itself.
Let's turn to crime. We've seen a surge in crime in all these cities.
I just talked about that a few moments ago.
And the national average has thus pushed up dramatically.
25% increase in homicides in the calendar year 2020.
We're on track to outpace that this year in 2021.
And by the way, that's the highest since 1960.
So a real spike in crime.
And yet, there's a lesson to be learned.
Which is to say, in the 1980s, but continuing in the 90s, first Rudy Giuliani, and then under Bloomberg, under police chief Bill Bratton, New York showed a recipe of how to fight crime.
You fight it at all levels.
And other cities picked up the New York formula, and that's how we saw a decline in crime.
And by the way, this benefited disproportionately black neighborhoods.
You could go into New York.
When I lived in New York, from 2010 to 2012, you could go to Harlem.
You could go to Brooklyn. You could go to neighborhoods that were once very dangerous, almost uninhabitable in the 70s, but they were completely safe.
They were gentrified. There were shops.
There were Starbucks. There were bookstores.
There were restaurants. And all of this is now kind of going back to the way it was, which is to say, emboldening the criminal and endangering the black and Latino inhabitants of those areas.
And then illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration was brought, curbed under Trump.
But apparently Biden thinks it's a really good idea to have one to two illegal, one to two million illegal immigrants swarming into the United States.
And these are COVID infected.
There are people who are, there are cartels involved.
There are violent gangs involved, MS-13 and so on.
Why would this be a good idea for the United States?
And by the way, the Biden administration is doing this while turning away distressed Cubans who are fleeing genuine political persecution, who legitimately qualify as refugees.
They're being sent home while all kinds of people, by the way, not just Mexicans, but Haitians and Asian Orientals and Chinese are showing up at the Mexican border and they're all being let in.
Yeah, here's the gate. Walk right through.
Sign up for a court date.
Ha ha ha. We know you're not going to show up, but there you are.
You're now in the United States.
So we're watching this wretched movie play out a second time.
And the disgusting thing is that the last time the Democrats arguably didn't know.
This time they do know.
And they're still doing it.
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Is it time to defund the police?
In the case of the Capitol Hill Police, I believe the answer is, in fact, yes.
So, defund the Capitol Police.
That's my hashtag for the present.
Now, why? Well, because the Capitol Police are showing themselves increasingly to be A, chronic liars.
B, chronic haters of Republicans.
And C, completely in bed with Nancy Pelosi.
Now, I immediately regret using that image because the concept of being in bed with Nancy Pelosi is indeed terrifying.
But nevertheless, these Capitol Hill police are not to be trusted.
And the classic example of this, if you listen to their January 6 testimony, one after the other, You realize that it was lie upon lie upon lie.
And the telling signal of this was the way that they presented the death of Brian Sicknick.
In a sense, they recycled the original lie that Brian Sicknick was killed by Trump supporters.
Now, they couldn't recycle the original lie in its original form.
He was hit on the head by a fire extinguisher.
By the way, they're quite likely the people who put out that lie in the first place, because when the New York Times reported it, they cited unnamed officials.
Officials from where? Well, probably from the Capitol Police.
But now, appearing before Congress...
They used the word homicide to talk about sickness.
He was killed by, quote, homicidal Trump supporters, except that this was a completely made-up account.
The Capitol Police have repeatedly been pushing out this line.
In fact, when two men were arrested for spraying Sicknick with a chemical irritant, a bear spray, the Capitol Police cheered the news.
They said that the officer Sicknick was, quote,"...injured while protecting Congress during the riot at the U.S. Capitol." Now, that's not true.
Even when the fire extinguisher lie collapsed, the Capitol Police pushed a new lie, which is that Sicknick died because of bear spray.
He suffered a fatal allergic reaction to bear spray.
And then, quote, After the attack, he, Sicknick, was taken to a hospital where he succumbed to his injuries on the evening of January 7th, end quote.
Except... There were no injuries.
And all of this has now been thoroughly documented.
An autopsy was done on Sicknick.
The medical examiner released a report.
No injuries. In fact, the report concluded Sicknick died of, quote, natural causes.
The meaning of that is that Sicknick would have died anyway.
And even after he died, the Capitol Police, continuing in their tradition of habitual lying...
Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman told the Senate Appropriations Committee two days after the medical examiner's report that, quote, the January 6th protest, quote, resulted in the death of Officer Sicknick, end quote. Now, when you begin to look at these Capitol Police guys, particularly the ones who testified, like Officer Harry Dunn, you see what a vicious Trump hater this guy is.
In fact, he refers to Trump, quote, as a hitman, as if Trump is some kind of a hired assassin who didn't merely use irresponsible rhetoric that got people fired up and they went to the Capitol.
Trump was actually some kind of an assassin himself, an assassin, I take it, of the democratic process.
Earlier in his tweets, Harry Dunn has called Trump, quote, the racist in chief.
So these aren't cops in the normal sense.
They're ultimately a kind of militia operating at the behest of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.
And that's why she was able to rustle them up.
Hey, listen, I need you guys.
You know, I'm going to supply you with some scripts.
You just basically read these lies out because we're trying to create a theater.
For the American people.
Now, what can Republicans do?
It turns out they can do something.
Recently, Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House, but it barely passed the House by a hair, a $1.9 billion emergency appropriation bill.
And this is full of nonsense.
It gives, by the way, the Capitol Police the power to track people nationwide, supposedly to prevent future attacks on the Capitol, but it gives them surveillance powers on people living outside the Beltway Really?
4.4 million for wellness and trauma support?
This is outrageous.
Now, the Republicans in the Senate are completely in a position to block this.
And so this isn't really defunding the police.
It's just not giving these habitual liars more money to wreak more harm on the American people.
And the Republicans can finally do something.
And all they have to do is come together and say no, just say no to this additional appropriation.
And it can and should and I hope will Be defeated.
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Or your pants. I'm really thrilled to welcome Kelly Shabaka back to the podcast.
I had Kelly on earlier to talk about her campaign for the Republican nomination for the Senate in Alaska against Lisa Murkowski.
Kelly, thanks for coming back on.
I really appreciate it.
I was thrilled to see that you got the Republican Party The Republican Party of Alaska's endorsement in this race.
It's not normal for the GOP to endorse kind of an outsider running against an incumbent senator.
Tell me a little bit about how that came about and why the GOP decided to take this bold move.
Yes, thank you so much for having me today, and you're absolutely right.
This is really unprecedented for our Republican Party in Alaska to endorse a Senate candidate.
You know, it's over a year in advance of what would be our primary, but in Alaska we have a different election system.
We will not have a party primary this year, and so the Republican Party has taken matters into their own hands.
They censured Lisa Murkowski, They said she does not reflect the party platform.
She has made votes that are against the interests of Alaska and she's not allowed to use the Republican name in her race in 2022.
And they endorsed me as their candidate for this race, which functionally makes me the primary candidate for the Republicans.
This is huge. Because in Alaska, in statewide races, we vote Republican.
President Trump won our state in both elections by double digits.
We have another Republican senator in the US Senate.
He cleared 50% in both his elections.
A Republican congressman, a Republican governor, you get the idea.
Alaska is a conservative state, so I'm quite confident That I am all set to win this election because Alaska is really rallying behind this campaign.
They are ready to change out the Murkowskis.
They've had that Senate seat for 40 years.
We want to take our seat back and we want to get someone in who's going to really fight for our state.
Now, Murkowski ran in a sort of three-man race as a third-party candidate the last time and kind of eked out a victory.
I think the circumstances are very different.
But are you a little worried that out of spite, she might run as an independent or run a third-party campaign, really as a spoiler, despite Trump, despite you, and despite the GOP for, perhaps from her view, turning on her and not giving her her due?
At this point, it looks like Murkowski's planning to run.
She's fundraising like she's running, but we've had polls released up here in state that were conducted by liberal groups showing that she's coming in a really low third place, that I've got a 20-point lead over her.
Even the Democrat that ran against our Senator Dan Sullivan last cycle is beating her soundly and I've got a 14 point lead over him.
I'm not worried that she's going to run whatever party she runs under.
She's a woman without a party right now.
We have well over 50% of our independents in Alaska are showing that they disapprove of her.
Lisa Murkowski's approval rate among conservatives and Republicans in Alaska is only 6%.
I think she's just made everybody mad because she can't decide what she wants to vote on and when And she's just not representing Alaskans of any party or any philosophy or any value.
She only represents herself.
She is a DC insider.
And I haven't found a DC insider in Alaska yet.
Well, you know, she, just to confirm what you're saying, she seems to be part of this kind of D.C. insiders gang, which includes Romney, but includes some Democrats as well.
These are the people who are trying to hand Biden his first victory, which is a kind of an infrastructure deal, admittedly a lot less expensive than the one the Democrats really would like to push.
But nevertheless, why would the GOP at this stage, when Biden is floundering on 10 fronts, Want to hand him a victory in anything?
It seems that Lisa Murkowski is part of the group that is trying to give Biden an actual legislative bill that goes through.
Yes, so Murkowski is part of that deal, but she's given him a lot of victories already.
It started with things like being the deciding vote and pushing forward the Department of Interior nominee Deb Haaland for confirmation.
And that vote alone has cost Alaskans billions of dollars.
And Alaskans are really aware of that.
We're tired of Lisa Murkowski playing on Team DC Insider.
When she really needs to be scoring goals for Team Alaska, we are the key to energy independence and security for the nation.
And right now, our resource industry is shut down.
We know up here that we are also the group that does energy development cleaner and greener than anywhere else in the nation.
And when the Biden administration, with the help of Lisa Murkowski, shuts down our resource development and then outsources it to places like Russia and China, who just don't seem to care a look about our environment, That actually hurts our environment here in Alaska more than any other state in the nation.
And so Lisa's participating in that, hurting our environment, hurting our energy industry, hurting our workers, and that's really affecting us up here in Alaska more than anywhere else.
You mentioned, Kelly, the last time you came on, that the national media, and in particular CNN, was sort of doing a kind of hit on you in order to advance Murkowski.
I mean, kind of interesting that you've got media that plays this kind of role in which they see themselves as participants in an election process.
Are there any further indications that the national media is trying to go after you to undermine you and, in that sense, help Murkowski?
You know, we've seen different pieces that have come out nationally, and I expect that we'll see more.
We see them at the state level.
We see them at the national level.
But I've also seen, Dinesh, that America has really woken up to that, and they just don't seem to buy into it anymore.
We read media and pay attention to it differently than we used to.
I just don't see Alaskans buying it.
It seems everywhere we go, We get more and more favor in this campaign.
People you wouldn't expect or think would sign up behind a conservative candidate running up against an incumbent who they've supported her entire election cycles in the past.
They're lining up and endorsing me and supporting me.
Former Democrats, former Lisa supporters, Alaska Natives who've always supported Lisa, they're supporting our campaign now.
And they're not buying the stuff that they're reading and seeing in the media.
So I'm not particularly concerned about anywhere Lisa's going to rally up her henchmen to come and attack me with false stories.
It's just not that effective.
Now, for the Republican Party to maintain its long-term viability, it seems that the GOP needs to be simultaneously a party of the middle class and the working class, but it also needs to be a party of the suburbs.
The cities, as you know, are overwhelmingly Democratic, not everywhere in the country, but mostly.
What is the GOP formula for We're good to go.
Yes, I agree with you.
I'd say we're seeing that already coming across the nation as common sense and courage.
My family's story is one of them.
My parents lived homeless in Alaska for a while, and now they've got this daughter who's a law school grad who's had positions of leadership in both state and federal government.
So I am both one of those working class families and also living in the suburbs, right?
The answer to that is we all share those values in common.
We value our freedom.
We want good paying jobs to put a roof over our head, maybe send our kid to college.
We want equality in opportunity, just a chance to work for it, to fight for it.
We don't want to see differences in opportunity based on whether you live in the working class neighborhood or you live in the rich neighborhood.
We just want the government to help us out of the people, by the people, for the people, but not give different privileges to different people.
The people of privilege and means shouldn't have better chances and better access than the people who don't.
That's the American dream.
We can look at places like Cuba and see that when the government controls your chances and your outcomes and what you can do and what checks you get, it doesn't work.
That's just called the American dream.
It's called capitalism.
It's called government for the people where the people are actually in charge of the decisions.
It applies to the working class or the suburb class, as you call it.
We need the separation of powers.
We need the balance between those different branches of government.
It's the accountability of government.
That's everything every American is possibly saying.
And so that's how I think the Republican Party is just simply messaging courage and common sense policies that apply to every American.
Kelly, I believe you are on the way to the U.S. Senate.
Let's close out by telling people how they can support your campaign.
How can they find out more about you and help you get across the finish line?
Oh, thank you. We appreciate all of America's support.
We're at kelly4ak.com, and we will need help in order to get our Senate seat back from Lisa Murkowski.
Kelly4ak.com.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
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Who's the real Chief Justice of the United States?
Well, officially the answer is John Roberts.
John Roberts was confirmed by the Senate to be Chief Justice.
In that sense, he is the Chief Justice.
But let's think about what the Chief Justice does.
What differentiates the Chief Justice from the other associate justices of the Supreme Court?
Well, it turns out that the Chief Justice has the right to assign the court's opinion When he's in the majority.
But when the Chief Justice is not in the majority, who gets to assign the opinion?
The answer is the most senior of the other associate justices.
And it turns out that for a conservative majority, when Chief Justice Roberts is not in the majority, when he votes with the liberals or when he votes to the middle, and there is, let's just say, a 5-4 decision, then it is Clarence Thomas who assigns—he, in a sense, becomes Chief Justice.
He assigns the opinion, and he can, of course, assign the opinion to himself.
Now, to understand how all of this kind of plays out, we have to dive into the actual makeup of the court.
And I'm interested here because there's a Martin Quinn study, a kind of a scorecard of the court that gives you an idea of how the center of the court has kind of shifted.
Now, before the addition of Amy Coney Barrett, you could argue that the center justice, the median justice, the justice right in the middle, with, in a sense, four to his left and four to his right, was Justice Kennedy.
He was the swing vote.
And very often it was his vote that decided, as with Obamacare, which way the pendulum was going to swing.
And then, of course, it was Trump.
Roberts himself who would assign the opinion.
But now, according to the Martin Quinn scorecard, the center of the court is Justice Kavanaugh.
Brett Kavanaugh is the medium vote.
And that means that the court has pushed measurably to the right.
You obviously have the three liberals on the court.
And then you have, in a sense, six conservatives.
But among the six conservatives, you have sort of four solid conservatives.
And then you have Kavanaugh and Roberts, who are a little bit more, well, let's just say wobbly to the right.
But Kavanaugh... Kavanaugh is less wobbly than Roberts.
Kavanaugh is, in fact, more reliable.
By the way, Kavanaugh was in the majority in almost 100% of the cases recently decided by the court.
Kavanaugh is the guy who sort of, you can say, sets the course for where the ship is going to sail.
Thomas was in the majority most of the time.
Thomas was in the majority 80% of the time in recent decisions.
Now, Thomas is known as the maverick.
In the past, what happened is he was noted for his kind of fiery dissents in which he would rage against the opinion of the majority.
Memorable dissents.
But Thomas was seen as kind of an outlier.
No more. Thomas is now not an outlier.
He is, in fact, you may say, in the conservative mainstream of the court.
And because he's the most senior, Thomas, of course, his appointment goes way back.
He has the benefits of seniority.
He is the de facto chief justice when Roberts is not in the majority.
And the beauty of Thomas is that you've got these really important cases coming up.
Only most notably, the one that jumps to mind, the Mississippi abortion case, which essentially says that Mississippi is going to prohibit, largely prohibit, abortions after 15 weeks.
Now again, the court could say, all right, we're going to uphold the Mississippi law.
Or they could go further.
This is, I think, where Thomas would want to go and overturn the law and overturn Roe versus Wade.
So the real question is, can they get five justices to go that far?
Probably it's going to hinge on whether Kavanaugh and Barrett vote to overturn Roe.
It would be genuinely, I think, shocking to conservatives if Barrett did not vote to overturn Roe.
This is part of the reason she was put on the court to do that.
And Kavanaugh's vote also should be one that we can count on.
But we're going to see.
But Thomas, again, once the bad boy of the court, somebody who occupied the far right flank, he was even to the right of Scalia.
Why?
Because Scalia would sometimes say in my, both of them have what's called the original understanding of the Constitution, but Scalia would say, I pay more attention to the text, whereas Thomas pays equal attention to the text and to the motives of the founders who And by the way, they aren't all the founders of 1789.
In discussing the 14th Amendment, for example, I'm now quoting Justice Thomas.
He says, our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled.
Great. But he goes on to say, the idea that the framers of the 14th Amendment, think of this, this is the 14th Amendment passed after the Civil War that guarantees due process and equal rights under the law.
So Thomas is saying the idea that the framers of the 14th Amendment understood the due process clause to protect a right to abortion is farcical, which is to say it's ridiculous, it's absurd.
Abortion was the furthest thing from their mind.
And what he's getting at is it's not just a matter of reading the text.
Yeah, equal protection of the laws, you know, why not apply that to abortion?
His point is, let's look at why they passed that amendment.
What was the context that lies behind the text?
Every text has a context.
And the framers of the 14th Amendment were dealing with racism.
They were dealing with the aftermath of slavery.
That's what was on their mind.
They were no more thinking about transgenders than they were thinking about abortion.
This has nothing to do, I guess Thomas is saying, with the 14th Amendment.
So we've got this very solid figure, Thomas, who...
Who, in some respects, is the de facto Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
And for that, I think, we can in these difficult times be very grateful.
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I want to talk some more about Clarence Thomas.
And the reason is, number one...
I have some personal knowledge of Thomas.
He is a kind of old buddy of mine from the Reagan years.
When I knew Thomas he was not on the Supreme Court.
In fact, I knew him before he was appointed by Reagan to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, which Thomas headed for some years.
In fact, that's where he worked with the infamous Anita Hill, who subsequently made those incendiary charges against him when he was nominated to be on the Supreme Court.
I mean, how vividly those memories are seared on our, on my mind.
Here's a little clip from those hearings just to give you an idea of how fraught that time was and also how familiar how we saw that that was the start of what we would later see happen to Brett Kavanaugh.
Listen. As a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.
Who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.
And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you.
You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.
I mean, you see here, movingly, the vehemence of Thomas.
When Debbie and I watched this, and just to refresh our memories, Debbie goes, I can see why this guy has not forgotten what the left tried to do to him.
And it actually reminded me that when Thomas was confirmed, I actually sent him a short note that essentially said, hey, pal, Don't forget what they tried to do to you.
And I don't think he has.
Now, I'm not suggesting, by the way, that Thomas is, like, motivated by revenge.
No, what I'm actually suggesting is that he recognized that he is dealing with people who will stop at nothing.
Who are liars, fabricators, who will stage a prosecution even though they know that the defendant, in this case him, kind of a defendant, up for a major position, even though they know there's nothing to it.
It doesn't matter. We saw it with Kavanaugh again.
There was no corroborating.
There was just an ancient accusation really dredged up by the left.
And they created a sort of a show trial.
And this is what they do. And this is, I think, and this is the key point.
This is who they are.
And Thomas knows it.
And they know he knows it.
And this is why they hate him so much.
Now, interestingly, when I knew Thomas, what struck me about him is that as Reaganite conservatives in those days, we were all believers in the kind of the colorblind ethic.
And at the same time, I noticed that Thomas was, I would call him a race man.
And what I mean by that was that he was fiercely proud of being black.
He saw his story as a black narrative.
And at the same time, he was forcefully committed to the colorblind ethic.
Now, you might say, isn't that kind of strange?
If we're supposed to get rid of race, how can somebody be simultaneously a race man, very proud of their heritage, actually very proud of their color in that sense, their color as a badge of a certain type of hard life that he had lived?
He was raised, by the way, not by his father, but by his grandfather.
And if I remember, he wrote a book years ago, very movingly called My Grandfather's Son, because his grandfather's values became his values.
If you want to know, really see the difference between the conservative and the sort of progressive ideal, just read Clarence Thomas as My Grandfather's Son alongside Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father.
And you realize that the reason that Thomas is so admirable and so great is his grandfather was a great man.
And the reason Obama is so demented and pathological is his father was a loon and an ideological fanatic of the worst sort.
So, the key to Thomas is that he doesn't just, even as a Supreme Court justice, he attacks the left's narrative in a way that no other justice does.
I'm thinking of, for example, he, in discussing the McDonald versus Chicago case, this was a 2010 case about handguns.
And of course, the leftists put out, they still put out the narrative that somehow the Second Amendment is racist.
And what Thomas does is he goes into a history and he talks about how after the Civil War, The Democrats in the South passed a whole series of gun control laws.
And their motive was really clear.
To disarm blacks so that the blacks would be vulnerable to attacks by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan, as you know, was the military arm of the Democratic Party.
But the Klan didn't want to go visit some black guy's house where he might pull out a rifle or pull out a handgun.
And so the Democrats in the South passed gun control laws to suppress...
To suppress the ability of African Americans to defend themselves.
Thomas knows this, and there it is in his opinion.
Similarly, in an abortion case that dealt with Planned Parenthood...
Thomas goes right into the history of Planned Parenthood, the eugenics record of Margaret Sanger, the fact that Margaret Sanger was sympathetic to the Nazi eugenic and forced sterilization laws.
And then here's a line from Thomas, quote, There are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted.
Than to be born alive.
Wow. And he goes on.
And are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area.
So the left likes to do these so-called disparate impact studies to see where blacks are disparately being hurt by something.
And here's Thomas saying, okay, you want to do disparate impact?
let's do the disparate impact of abortion and the disproportionate way in which it is a death sentence for minorities over, let us say, whites.
Thomas exhibits an intellectual bravery and depth, as I say, historical depth that you don't get in other justices.
And I think for this reason you have a guy who, when we know when he was nominated to court, people said, well, this is not a guy who's been, who served in the judiciary for years and years and years.
He's coming, in a sense, as a Reagan bureaucrat who ran the EEOC. How is he going to be qualified?
Is he going to have the intellectual acumen to serve on the court?
And Thomas has proved that he not only has the intellectual acumen, but there's a certain moral grandeur to the man that makes him not only a personal role model, but a model of judicial insight and rectitude.
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You know, it's really cool with this podcast.
We have listeners and viewers from around the world.
And it's great to hear people weigh in from Ireland and from Africa.
And today's question, it turns out, is from Northern India.
Listen. Hello, Dinesh.
My name is Mazi, and I'm from the northeastern part of India.
I'm a big fan of your podcast.
William Dalrymple recently released a book called Anarchy, where he basically tried to show that it was not the so-called British people that ruined the Indian economy, but rather the uncontrolled avarice of a giant corporation, namely the East India Company, that got to be blamed.
I think the release of this book cannot be better timed, even as big tech companies threatened to dictate and run government of nations in our day.
There is no doubt that these big tech companies are the beneficiaries of the capitalistic system of the Western democracy.
My question is, is this where capitalism ultimately leads to?
If not, How are these companies different from the classical capitalism?
Thank you and keep up the good work.
This is a really great question because it gives me the chance to make a couple of really important distinctions that go to the heart of what capitalism is, what capitalism means.
So let's start with the British East India Company.
There's a little tidbit of knowledge that most people don't know, which is that when the British came to India, the British didn't directly rule India at all.
They authorized a single company called the East India Company To rule, in a sense, in their stead.
The East India Company acted not merely as a trading company, but as a political entity that was making decisions about the fate of India.
And then the East India Company would report to the British Crown and to the Parliament, these are our profits, these are our policies.
So this is, I want to emphasize, not capitalism at all.
When the state ordains a single entity, and it doesn't matter if it's a private entity, and makes it a monopoly, you're not only not dealing with capitalism, you are striking against capitalism.
Why? Because the essence of capitalism is the idea of competition.
This is what Adam Smith stresses in The Wealth of Nations.
Capitalism is not. It's kind of unfortunate that capitalism is sometimes, particularly in France, called laissez-faire.
Because laissez-faire is a French word, a term, that simply means let them do.
Laissez-faire is kind of hands-off.
Laissez-faire is sort of let the world become what it is.
Just don't interfere. But that's not capitalism.
Capitalism demands interference, but interference of a certain sort.
Interference to enforce contracts.
Interference to undermine and overthrow monopolies.
Interference to create the conditions for not only competition to occur, but what is called to remove barriers to entry.
New people from entering a market.
So right now, for example, if you try to start any kind of rival to Google, Google will find out they will either buy you out or they will suppress you.
They will find ways to destroy you as a rival.
So there are very high barriers to entry in creating, let's say, a rival search engine.
To fast forward from the British East India Company to the present, and I think you're right to make this linkage between old monopolies and new ones.
The reason we have monopolies now is that these are government-protected entities.
Facebook is. Google is.
YouTube is. Twitter is.
The government, by giving the Section 230 protection to these companies, immunizes them from lawsuits to which they would otherwise be massively vulnerable.
They are, after all, publishers.
They make editorial content decisions all the time.
So, the bottom line of it is, do not confuse Facebook and YouTube with capitalism.
They're, in fact, the enemies of capitalism.
They are the apostles of censorship.
In fact, I've argued before on this podcast that people like Jack Dorsey, like Mark Zuckerberg, they are, after Xi Jinping, the premier of China, they are the worst threat to free speech, the worst endangerers of open expression and democratic debate in the world.
So what do we need to do?
The same thing that we did to AT&T. We need to break up these companies.
Think about it. If there were 40 or 50 Facebooks, then it wouldn't matter if one Facebook tried to censor you because a lot of other companies wouldn't.
And most of us would be very happy to live on free speech platforms.
We don't like operating on platforms where there's a sword hanging over our heads.
But we have to. Why?
Because they're monopolies.
So for now, we are dependent on them.
This is not freedom.
This is not capitalism.
The solution to the problem that you describe, the solution to the East India Company, but also the solution to these digital platforms is not less capitalism, but more of it.
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