All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 14, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:31
AMERICA’S GREATEST THREAT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 174
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
When the Biden administration launched a drone strike, they claimed to be getting ISIS terrorists, but in fact, they killed an innocent man and his entire family.
In a way, this incident for me is a metaphor for the whole cynical, diabolical deceit that characterizes the Justice Amy Coney Barrett gives an important speech explaining that she is apolitical.
I show why this is a big problem.
And former U.S. Intelligence Chief Richard Grinnell joins me to talk about Afghanistan and terrorism and what's on Hunter Biden's laptop.
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.
In the aftermath of the deadly suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 American servicemen and another 150 people or so, the Biden administration launched a drone strike that they claimed victoriously had killed a couple of deadly ISIS operatives who were in the process of attacking the airport once again.
Well, as it turns out, they didn't do that.
Who did they kill?
They killed an American ally, a guy who was working for a California-based international aid group, a fellow named Mr.
Amadi, Zamari Amadi.
And this guy was incinerated along with his entire family.
Ten people, ten innocent people killed in a drone strike gone horribly wrong.
The New York Times did a kind of detailed analysis of this.
They had people on the ground.
They saw the damage.
They interviewed Mr. Ahmadi's family.
And it's just heartbreaking because the family member says, we have nothing to do with terrorism or ISIS. We love America.
We want to go there. These are people who are on our side and we blow them up.
Now, The question now becomes, how is it the case that the Biden administration could say, not only did they got ISIS, but that this was a car containing explosives, that they claimed there was a secondary explosion over the car, which showed that this was the explosives blowing up.
It turns out that this is all lies.
Now, what seems to have happened is that there was electronic surveillance of what was going on around the airport in Kabul.
This guy, Mr. Ahmadi, was in a car.
He and a friend were loading, not explosives, but canisters of water into their Toyota.
And because they had been recorded doing this, there was apparently the belief that these guys might be packing some kind of a car bomb.
And so it was General Milley who said in a public statement that the United States sort of carefully looked at this and made the decision that these were bad guys, ISIS guys, and this is why they did it.
Now, what I want to get at is, is there a deeper explanation of what's happening here?
I'm not implying for a minute that they deliberately killed innocent people, but we cannot forget here, when we think of Biden, we almost always, you might say, give him the benefit of the doubt by saying, oh, he's old, he's a bungler, he doesn't really know what's happening.
But I think it's more complex than that.
Biden is old and he is a bungler, but he also has a deep strain of cynicism and anger and I don't care, and I wanted to get out of Afghanistan, Why are you bringing this up? It's been five days.
Let's move on.
And I think this is the mentality that led to the strike.
In other words, for Biden, it was a bit like this.
We need to show that I'm doing something so I can get the press and the American people off my back.
You know, I don't need this.
And so we need to make, we need to create an optics.
And it doesn't really matter who we're killing over there.
That doesn't really interest me at all.
We know that the press is going to be sort of cooperative.
And so we want to show, show not the Afghan, show not the Taliban.
We need to show the American people we're taking some action.
We don't really care what the action really is.
But we want to close this book, and we don't really—so the cynicism here, and then the cover-up.
Here is, by the way, the Biden administration's John Kirby, and this is just from yesterday.
I cannot confirm who we killed in the drone strike.
He knows. I cannot confirm is basically a way we killed the wrong guys.
But, he says, quote, It was more important for them not to appear weak,
not to appear like they had no idea what was going on, not to make it appear like events were totally outside their control.
And so what we see here is that right now, the real threat for the Biden administration, they're portraying, oh, ISIS is the real threat, oh, Al-Qaeda is the real threat, the Taliban is the real threat.
But when you look at the cynicism of the man in the White House, we can, I think, come to the objective conclusion that he is the real threat facing our republic.
Guys, I want to encourage you to become MyPillow.
I'm going to call it super shoppers.
If you just have MyPillow towels or the MyPillow pillow, well, you're a shopper, but you're not a super shopper.
A super shopper means you have all the MyPillow stuff, as we do, and we love it.
Now, I want to talk to you now about Mike's Mike Lindell's new Giza Dream bedsheets.
Because if you want a place to start, I would start here.
These bedsheets look and feel great.
By the way, for me, it's a great night's sleep, which is kind of crucial for my busy schedule.
But Mike found the world's best cotton called Giza.
It's ultra soft and breathable, but also extremely durable.
Mike's Giza sheets come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 10-year warranty.
The first night you sleep on these sheets, that's it.
You're never going to want to sleep on anything else.
Giza Dream Sheets come in a variety of sizes and colors.
We especially love the flannel sheets.
And Mike is making a special offer for my listeners.
Sale of the year for a limited time.
50% off as low as $49.99 on the sheets.
Go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Dinesh.
There, by the way, not just this offer, but deep discounts on all the MyPillow products.
You've got to fill your home with them like we have.
Call 800-8760-227.
That number again, 800-8760-227.
Or go to MyPillow.com to get the discount.
You've got to use promo code D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett just gave an important speech at the University of Louisville.
It's the McConnell Center.
She was speaking, and Mitch McConnell was there.
And her remarks, I think, are important because they not only show how Amy Coney Barrett thinks, but they show, in a sense, the problem with conservative jurisprudence.
So, let me analyze this speech a little bit.
She says here, my goal is today to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.
Now, I can see what Amy Coney Barrett is doing here.
She is doing in some sense what Justice Breyer has been doing, which is to say that the court operates by a different set of rules, that it is motivated not by partisanship in the normal sense, but maybe by a clash of judicial philosophy.
So a different kind of divide, not really the same divide as we see, let's say, between blue and red or between Republicans and Democrats.
But I throw in an immediate caveat.
Is it not a fact that, by and large, and Justice Breyer's only a partial exception to this rule—his voting record actually shows that he's no exception—is it not a fact that the three liberal justices on the court are, in fact, partisan hacks?
And what I mean by partisan hacks is, is it not a fact that they vote with almost, you could call it, mathematical certainty for the liberal position on every issue?
This, by the way, is not true of the conservative justices.
It's certainly not true of the chief justice.
So our side is trying to be above the fray, and their side are, in fact, partisan hacks.
That's the problem. Now, Amy Coney Barrett says,"...judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties." And that may be true, but once again, what is the judicial philosophy of the conservatives?
By and large, it is respect precedent, it's judicial restraint, it's deferred to the legislature, it is not ultimately to vote for a particular position, let's say pro-life or pro-choice.
And Amy Coney Barrett is kind of explicit about that.
She says, quote, It's not my job to decide cases based on the outcome I want.
What? Why not?
Do we, for one moment, think that, say, Elena Kagan or Justice Sotomayor doesn't say, hey, listen, I believe in women's rights.
I believe in abortion. I'm for gay rights.
I'm going to vote this way because this is what I believe in.
And so, but Amy Coney Barrett is saying, in effect, that as a conservative, she is disarming herself at the outset of her own beliefs.
She is adopting some position of neutrality and We're good to go.
We still, even until now, cannot fully count on the Supreme Court.
We should have an 8-2 or a 9-1 majority, but we don't.
Why? Because going back to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and on through with Souter, and then Anthony Kennedy, and now Justice Roberts, we have unreliable justices.
And what I'm getting at is, this isn't just the fact that we are very poor pickers.
It's the fact that the judicial philosophy that we employ that decides who we pick, Now, McConnell, in introducing Amy Coney Barrett, says a couple of very revealing things.
One, he says...
That Barrett doesn't, quote, legislate from the bench.
Well, again, a reminder, the liberals do.
Amy Coney Barrett is acting as though she and her colleagues differ about how to read the Constitution.
Now, historically, it's true.
We've had important debates about how to read the Constitution.
Let's go right back for a moment to Jefferson and Hamilton.
They disagreed about the Constitution.
They disagreed about whether the Constitution allows, for example, a national bank.
They were arguing about the so-called necessary and proper clause of the Constitution.
But their disagreement was this.
Basically, Jefferson said there's no explicit authority in the Constitution to have a bank.
And Hamilton said, true, but there is implied authority.
So, in other words, they were arguing about whether or not the authority was there, whether it was explicit or implied, but neither of them took the position that if it was not in the Constitution at all, it could nevertheless be decided by the court.
In other words, they agreed that the Constitution is authoritative, the Constitution decides the matter.
We're arguing not about whether to read the Constitution, but how to read the Constitution.
And that's what distinguishes that debate from the debate with the liberals today, because the leftist view is it's a living Constitution.
It doesn't mean today what it meant yesterday.
And it doesn't mean yesterday what it meant a hundred years ago.
The Constitution evolves.
We can plant things into the Constitution that weren't even there, like the abortion right.
And so Amy Coney Barrett, I think, does not really grasp...
The magnitude of what she's dealing with.
She's dealing with people who aren't arguing with her over the meaning of the Constitution.
She's dealing with people on the bench who don't agree that there is in fact an authoritative text called the Constitution that is a super law that the judges are there not to invent, not to manufacture rights, but ultimately to interpret rights.
And to enforce.
So I think we see here in Amy Coney Barrett's speech, and I like Amy Coney Barrett, I think her voting record is going to be fine for the most part.
But if we lose important cases, it will not be because her heart is not in the right place, but because she has willfully, and I think unnecessarily, put her heart to one side and try to decide on the basis of a neutrality that the other side, for one, does not respect.
In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021 at 2.1%.
In June, in July, and now even in August, the actual inflation rate much, much higher, over 5%.
And the point is, inflation is here.
It's coming faster than our government is prepared for.
And their solution is to stick their heads in the sand.
So don't stick your head in the sand.
Hedge your savings against inflation by diversifying into gold and silver with Birch Gold Group.
Now, if you haven't reached out to Birch Gold to diversify...
Part of your IRA or 401k into a precious metals IRA. Do it today.
I buy my gold from Birch Gold.
They have an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Countless five-star reviews.
Thousands of happy customers.
Talk to them. Have them help you safeguard your investments.
Text Dinesh to 484848 to get a free information kit and to speak with a precious metals expert on holding gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account.
Again, text Dinesh to 484848 and protect your savings today.
Guys, we have a great guest today, Richard Grinnell, former Director of National Intelligence under Trump, also former U.S. Ambassador to Germany 2018-2020, Special Presidential Envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations 2019-21, and, I didn't know, also a U.S. State Department spokesman to the United Nations.
This was during the George W. Bush administration.
Wow, Rick, thanks for joining me.
Lots to talk about.
And let me start by asking you about this Biden disaster in Afghanistan.
It seems to me to surpass the normal definition of ineptitude.
I mean, how can it be that the U.S. gets out?
We leave a treasure trove of weaponry behind?
At the very least, you think if we couldn't take it, we would have blown it up?
And we also leave Americans behind.
So although Biden has the reputation of being a little bit of a bungler, is it really possible that the State Department and the military and the intelligence agencies were all collectively so inept that they could produce a disaster of this magnitude?
And if not, how do you think we got this so badly wrong?
Dinesh, thanks for having me.
And, you know, what a question because there's so much in there.
I don't even know where to begin.
I think what really strikes me as a former cabinet official who sat around the cabinet table when you plan big operations, it's really troubling to think that Secretary Blinken would sit at the cabinet table and allow decisions to be made to remove 2,500 American troops and 5,000 NATO troops on July 1st by closing Bagram.
And not leap over the table to say, you can't remove the troops until I close down the embassy and remove all of the Americans and local hires.
Why would you remove the guns and leave the diplomats who don't have guns in a war zone?
That would be the State Department. There's also the Defense Department.
They have a presumably decent understanding of what is going on on the ground, at least in Bagram, in Kabul.
Wouldn't you need some kind of a base to be able to extract all the people you want first, so that you don't in effect make them hostages?
I mean, is it an exaggeration to say that the Americans that are left behind in Afghanistan are now under Taliban control, and to the degree that the Taliban is a group of terrorists, a terrorist regime?
Aren't they de facto hostages, even though Biden doesn't use that word?
of course.
Whenever people are held against their will, and they're held against their will because they can't get out and they want to get out, And they haven't committed a crime.
So this is the classic example of a hostage.
Look, we have situations when somebody does something wrong in another country where the legal system in Germany, say, or the legal system in France would start to deal with this American who committed a crime in another country.
We wouldn't characterize them as a hostage because that would be a discussion with the government to say, hey, can we prosecute them here?
Can we bring the American home?
Which I've done on numerous occasions.
But when someone hasn't committed a crime and they want to get out of a country and they're not allowed because they're barred from actually getting to the airport because people with guns are telling them don't go forward, that's a hostage situation.
I don't care what Secretary Blinken says.
I talked a little earlier in this podcast in my monologue about this drone strike that the Biden people said, oh yeah, we're hitting at these ISIS people who are trying to bomb the airport.
It looks based on a detailed New York Times report that this was an innocent guy, in fact, a guy on our side, an Afghan guy with his large family of 10 people, and we blew him up.
Now, what gets me is not the fact this can happen, I understand, in a situation.
Maybe intelligence was wrong.
But the Pentagon appears to be camouflaging the situation by saying things like, you know, well, you know, our intention was to go after some guy who might have been trying to bomb the airport.
They're distracting attention from who, in fact, we struck.
Now... I think you can see how bad this is because, after all, what can do more to poison sentiment against America than when you go after people who are your friends, essentially turning your friends into enemies, right?
Yeah, and what really bothers me about this situation is that, of course, we all know that mistakes happen and intelligence is an estimate and we don't always get it right.
Sometimes we underestimate, sometimes we overestimate.
It's a situation where public policy officials have to use the best information, the best estimates they can get from intelligence.
And we also have a responsibility to come clean and be transparent.
When I was acting director of national intelligence, I constantly tried to declassify everything that wouldn't reveal one of our sources or the method in which we got the information.
And I think that we need to recognize, and those in Washington, D.C. don't recognize, that the public doesn't trust government.
We don't trust DOJ. We don't trust the FBI. We don't trust intelligence officials.
And we can fight that all we want from inside the government.
When I was a government official, I can push back on that.
But the best way to do it is to be transparent, is to show mistakes, and to not pretend like we are perfect.
In this situation, Dinesh, it is incredibly important to come clean.
Reporters in Washington have a responsibility to be much more aggressive when the Pentagon wouldn't release the names of the two ISIS You know, planners or people, whatever, when they wouldn't release the names, we knew then that we did not have high or the right people.
Because when you actually target somebody successfully, you know exactly who you targeted, you know their name, you can release their name.
When we come back, I want to talk about, with Rick Grinnell, what Trump might have done differently in organizing the pullout if he were the man in charge.
We'll be right back. We seem to be just weeks away from yet another American travesty, one that could lead our country even further down the road to tyranny.
I'm talking of course about court packing, the far left's radical plan to rig our entire federal judiciary system by adding four new liberal justices to the Supreme Court Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
100,000 patriots like you have joined their coalition.
Franklin Graham, former Attorney General Ed Meese, Dr.
James Dobson, plus organizations like the American Policy Association, Americans for Prosperity, American Family Association, Debbie and I have signed.
Now it's up to you.
Sign your name by September 15th.
Go to SupremeCoup.com, that's SupremeCoup.com, to sign First Liberty's letter.
That's SupremeCoup.com, and may God bless America.
I'm back with former U.S. Intelligence Chief Rick Grinnell.
Rick, we're talking about Afghanistan.
And of course, Biden says, I'm doing pretty much what Trump agreed to do.
So he's sort of binding himself to the Trump-Taliban agreement.
He's saying, in effect, that he's wrongfully getting blamed that Trump presumably would have gotten had he been organizing the pullout.
So my question to you is, how would Trump— If you were advising Trump, you're around the table.
How do you think this would have gone differently?
Well, we know exactly how it would have gone differently because under the Trump administration, for four years, Donald Trump wanted to bring our troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq.
That was the goal. And I can tell you, Dinesh, I was in the Oval Office on multiple occasions when the president was frustrated that it wasn't happening fast enough.
But here's the key.
Every single time That Donald Trump heard generals or military experts or intelligence and State Department officials give him real-time information from the ground, from where the information was being developed.
He would adjust if he needed to.
He listened to people on the ground.
Now, make no mistake, he was frustrated.
He would say, we got to get out.
Why is it taking so long?
And they would say, you know, Mr.
President, we're trying to get there.
We're lowering another 100.
We're doing another 300.
We're getting there.
But we have to make sure that the Taliban hears exactly the consequences if they make a move to reconstitute.
And that's the last point that I'll say here.
It's not a problem to talk to the Taliban.
We should always go directly to the source when we're trying to communicate.
The difference is, what does the Taliban hear when they're talking to Donald Trump or Joe Biden?
And clearly, what the Taliban heard when they talked to Donald Trump was, we better not reconstitute or we're going to get wiped off the map.
If we take over a city, we're in trouble.
Under Biden, they didn't hear that.
They kept taking city after city.
They took over the whole country.
And this, in a nutshell, boils down to there's a difference between a credible threat of military action and a threat of military action.
Rick, I think you're making a key point I want to make a little more explicit, and that is that when you're fighting against gorillas and they're in the mountains, they're a little bit harder to find and a little bit harder to target.
But once they take cities, and let alone once they take Kabul, they're going to move into the court offices, they're going to have a parliament, they're going to take over all the official buildings.
We know exactly where to find them, so the idea that they are now somehow unlocatable is not true.
So, and the Taliban knows this, but I think what you're saying is that under Trump, they would fear that, let's just say they took all our weaponry.
I think Trump issued a statement to the effect that, hey, listen, we got to tell the Taliban, give us all that equipment back, or guess what?
We might be paying you a visit very shortly.
So you get, I think, here a window into Trump's sensibility versus the Biden sensibility.
Now, you know, you mentioned earlier- Can I make one point on that?
Yeah, for sure. It's really important here because- What you're getting at is the implementation of the policy.
And make no mistake, and the media is not doing a very good job of this, the same people are in charge at the Pentagon.
General Milley, General Milley worked for Donald Trump.
General Milley now works for Joe Biden.
What is the difference between the disastrous implementation under Joe Biden and the implementation under Donald Trump?
It's the same guy. The difference is that the political people, the politicians, demanded that there be no adjustment to the policy.
They didn't listen to the people on the ground.
They made political calculations and drop dead dates and didn't move.
That's the difference. Now, I think this is important.
I've done more than one tirade against General Milley because of his comments about reading about woke literature and white racism and so on, but you're making an important point here, which is that the same advice that General Milley was giving to Trump It's probable that he gave to Biden.
The Defense Department probably told Biden that this is a little precipitous.
This is a little bit hasty.
And I think what you're saying is the difference was the political.
Biden probably overruled him and said, hey, listen, I want you to get out.
I'll worry about it.
These are consequences I will be responsible for.
Do you think this was actually Biden's decision made over the objections of the Defense Department?
For sure. I know that General Miller, Scotty Miller, who was running Bagram, absolutely did not want to shut down Bagram.
The people above him, General Milley, Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden, said, no, this is the deadline.
I'm going to blame General Milley, too, here for not speaking up.
I mean, we've had too many generals, and I'm going to put General Milley flat in this group.
We have too many generals who are kiss-ass generals, who want to get promoted, want to keep jobs in Washington, so they do what the politicians tell them to.
And I think that, you know, we could have a debate about, should the generals do exactly what the president says?
Should they speak up and should they, you know, push back, even publicly, to say, here are the consequences?
And whether or not You agree with one way or the other.
I think General Milley had two different strategies.
Under Trump he did one thing, under Biden he did another.
And to me, that is the problem.
General Milley was so focused on being political that he forgot that he was supposed to be giving honest, raw advice, and sometimes that raw advice needs to go public.
When we come back, I want to talk to Rick Gurnell about the wider orbit of foreign policy and also a little tidbit about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Time is running out on these historically low mortgage rates.
Now, don't miss out on your chance to save up to $1,000 a month.
You've just got to call American Financing, America's home for home loans.
Take advantage of a free loan review from a salary-based mortgage consultant.
No pressure. No obligation, no upfront or hidden fees.
Just a simple conversation around which loan program can fit your budget better.
And rates are still near all-time lows, and there's a good chance you can benefit.
Their custom loans really are saving people up to $1,000 a month.
Why not see what they can do for you?
What are you waiting for?
Call 888-528-1219.
That number again, 888-528-1219.
Or visit AmericanFinancing.net.
American Financing, NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org.
I'm back with former Director of National Intelligence, Rick Grenell.
Rick, let's talk a little bit about the kind of wider orbit of American foreign policy.
In the aftermath of this Afghan disaster, I see that North Korea is kind of firing up its nuclear reactor a little bit.
We see that China is making more aggressive statements.
They got into a little bit of a skirmish with the U.S. Navy.
I don't know if you saw talking about, you know, You want to send ships over to the South China Sea?
We're going to be sending ships over to the Caribbean.
How would you like that?
Iran, obviously, is feeling emboldened.
So, some people have called the Biden policy not America first, but America last.
And the question I want to ask you is, do you think that this is driven by just a fact that Democrats tend to be weak-kneed in the Jimmy Carter mode?
Or do you think that there is a sort of ideology of unwinding American power in the world?
And in a sense, weakness is a matter not of temperament, but of policy.
I'm going to jump to an assumption that people who watch the Dinesh D'Souza podcasts are intellectual and smart.
And so I'm going to encourage everybody to go to Carnegie Mellon's political website, where I wrote a very long piece on this exact question.
In summary, I'll say this, Dinesh.
I think that the opposite of America First is consensus.
Joe Biden loves consensus.
He loves to be accepted by global leaders.
He believes in the UN and the UN Security Council, 15 members issuing a statement.
And what that really means, if you want to push this to the edge, Consensus means that 14 other countries at the UN Security Council or big power brokers in the Middle East or in Europe get to veto our policy and what's best for us.
What Donald Trump tried to do with America First is articulate why America First was good for the rest of the world.
Why, when you have the superpower, Thinking about what's good for itself, it means that all of these other agreements that we have, like NATO and other treaties, get implemented.
And so what we have to do as diplomats is articulate America first in a better way to show that the rule of law, capitalism, All of those great things that come from America are good for other countries.
And I think that what Joe Biden does is allow other countries to get to the lowest common denominator of the policy.
Isn't it true, Rick, that every other country puts its own national interest first?
I mean, if I think of the Chinese so-called transactional model in dealing with Africa, Asia, and so on, the Chinese go in and say, listen, we want something out of you.
It could be minerals. It could be we want to build a railroad running right through Afghanistan all the way to Pakistan.
So that's what's in it for us.
But what's in it for you is you're going to get a railroad and you're going to get some development and we're going to put money in your country.
So the Chinese are, it seems very explicit in declaring that they've got something in their own interest that will also be in other people's interest.
Isn't America First nothing more than an application of that universal principle?
100%. I spent eight years at the UN, and I can tell you, out of 193 countries at the UN, there's only one country that gets in trouble when they put themselves first, and that's America.
This idea of putting America first by Americans is not controversial around the world.
Everyone assumes, of course you have to do that.
No one in another country is criticizing America first.
They say, of course you should be doing this, but they love it when Joe Biden doesn't do it because it gives them the power.
Chancellor Merkel, she loves to have a weaker US president.
That will give her the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
She wants to have a situation where she gets to influence the policy because you know what she's doing when she influences the policy?
She's putting Germany first.
That's a great point. I remember years ago, I was speaking to some diplomats in India.
This was in the Bush years.
And I was echoing George Bush's idea that, you know, America and India are the world's largest democracies.
And I noticed the diplomats were kind of talking among themselves.
They were virtually uninterested.
And then I changed gears and I said to them, China is the big boy in this neighborhood.
China would love to, if not be a world superpower, at least dominate Japan, South Korea, and India.
Isn't it helpful for a country like India to have powerful friends outside the neighborhood that can help us check the growing power of China?
And suddenly I noticed these guys, you know, I got their immediate attention.
Why? Because they understood the language of power politics, whereas the bloviating language of the common democracies to them meant nothing at all.
It's such a great point and I saw it play out at the UN that countries are going to act for themselves first and when you can articulate why it's good for their country.
And by the way, capitalism, the rule of law, respect for human rights, all of that, of course, is accepted.
Even in countries that don't do that, they want to strive to that.
They want to pretend like they're going towards that.
It takes a really powerful voice, and I would argue like a Donald Trump voice, that is going to unabashedly just say, I'm going to put America first and here's why.
Don't forget that when you put America first and you demand that others pay their fair share at NATO, you're strengthening NATO. You're not undercutting NATO, as the Europeans would say.
You're actually making it more useful.
I mean, now it seems I have such a sinking feeling when I see a Jake Sullivan or a Blinken because they seem to say things like, we're very concerned about the girls in Afghanistan and the fact that they may not get the same rights that they had before.
We're going to be working on trying to get a statement signed by 35 countries calling on the Taliban to be more inclusive.
And I'm thinking to myself...
Am I living in a different world than you are?
Do you really think that this is the way to get that done?
Do you think that they believe it, or do you think that they just believe that this is a formulaic way to proceed, recognizing that it's essentially meaningless?
It's nothing more than a kind of strongly worded op-ed coming out of a group of countries.
Look, we see it as a poor way to actually get something accomplished.
But I go back to the idea of consensus.
If you believe that consensus is going to make the world better, and you see how many times Blinken or Jake Sullivan or Joe Biden used the term international community, right?
Joe Biden loves this phrase.
He's constantly, it just means his friends who are world leaders, and he wants them to like him.
So diplomacy to them Is meetings where we throw around a piece of paper and we come up with the language.
We fight about a verb or something.
We come up with a language that we all get to sign off on and it's the statement from the international community.
They actually believe that that consensus, that unity, We'll get something done.
Now, those of us who have worked at the UN for eight years and who know what's happening, everybody is fighting for themselves in that statement.
They're not looking at the altruistic world.
Every single move that a country makes to sign off on that statement is putting themselves first.
Maybe it's about jobs.
Maybe it's about a conference that they're going to get later on.
But this is the work of diplomacy.
I think that we diplomats have to recognize that meetings and statements are tactics.
They're not the solution.
And we have to hold ourselves to account and benchmark.
Are we making progress? Did the statement work?
Did the meeting work?
If it didn't, let's try something different.
Absolutely right. Rick, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it. What a window into the mind of a diplomat, and I hope you'll come back so we can have this discussion and more some other time.
Absolutely. Thanks, Dinesh.
If you're thinking of replacing your carpets due to pet stains and odors, you must try Genesis 950.
You should read the reviews.
They're incredible. This is one product that actually works.
With water, it breaks down the bonds of stains and odors so they are gone for good.
Its antibacterial component removes pet odors from carpet.
And padding, it can be used in a carpet cleaning machine, and it's green, so it's safe for your family and pets.
Genesis 950 is made in America.
One gallon of industrial strength Genesis 950 makes up to seven gallons of cleaner.
But Genesis 950 is also great for bathrooms, floors, upholstery, and grease stains.
Debbie uses it to clean the entire, well, the kitchen, everything.
When I got one of our white chairs kind of dirty, Debbie sprayed the Genesis 950 and took care of it.
Genesis 950 has great customer service.
Order one gallon direct at Genesis950.com.
You'll get a free spray bottle, free shipping, and a $10 coupon using the code Dinesh.
That's Genesis950.com.
Coupon only available for one gallon purchase.
Genesis 950 is much cheaper than replacing your carpets or your furniture.
We often talk about America as a very divided country, more divided than before.
But how did that happen?
Why are we so divided?
And why? Debbie and I were talking about this just over the weekend, the 20th anniversary of 9-11.
It seemed that there was this kind of glorious moment, and it was really no more than a moment of unity.
Why can't we have that back?
Who is the propeller, the engine of this deep divide?
Well, There's a very interesting article by a guy named Kevin Drum.
Now, this is a left-winger.
He's a former writer for Mother Jones.
And what he says is that when you look on key issues at the Democrats and the Republicans over the past 20 years, what you see is that the Republicans have barely moved.
The Republicans have moved only slightly to the right, approximately five points on average when you look at a range of issues.
He says the Democrats, and he's talking specifically, are not about Latino Democrats or Black Democrats.
He's speaking about kind of the progressive, upwardly mobile, college-educated, white, liberal community has become dramatically more left-wing on key issues.
They've moved 15 to 20 points to the left.
So what he's really saying is that unity obviously depends.
Now, unity doesn't require the two sides to have agreement on all issues, not at all.
We've never had that in American history.
But unity means that you have certain core issues that you do agree about.
And then, even on issues that you disagree, it is possible to find compromise, middle ground, common ground, and make progress at least to some degree.
And what Kevin Drumm is saying is that the obstacle to that progress is coming not from the Republicans, not from the right, but from the left.
And he has charts in which he looks at a series of issues.
He looks, for example, at abortion.
He says on abortion, for example, take the two most extreme positions.
Abortion should never be legal, and abortion should always be legal.
He says the Republican support for the extreme position, abortion should never be legal, has gone up about two points since 2000.
So, basically unchanged.
Among Democrats, the most extreme view, always legal, has gone up 20 points.
Huge change.
Gun laws. The conservative point of view on guns for Republicans has moved 10 points.
For the liberal point of view, 20 points.
He shows this is true of taxes.
Let's look at religion. He says among Republicans, religiosity over the past 20 years is the same.
Hasn't gone up, hasn't gone down.
Among Democrats, it has gone down nearly 15 points.
So the Democrats have become a kind of radical secularism, now defines the Democratic Party.
He talks about issues like defund the police.
He goes again. Are you serious?
You're taking away the money of the very people who are going to protect our communities?
Are you joking? So, what Kevin Drum says here is that there's a radicalization on the left.
Quote, And he goes on to say, And this is a guy writing from the left.
He's saying, I just want you to know that you Democrats are basically blowing away the middle.
You're giving large numbers of Americans who are in the middle of the spectrum the middle finger.
And you're going to pay for that at the ballot box.
So... So, it's not, if I can sum up, it's not that we don't want them to live in our America, but they don't want us to live in their America.
And this is exactly why they're trying to silence us, they're trying to get us fired, they're trying to get us deplatformed, arrested, prosecuted, they call us domestic terrorists.
So, the frightening truth is that the other side doesn't see us as fellow citizens.
We might see them as fellow citizens.
We might want live and let live, but they're not willing to live and let live.
This is the root of the culture wars, and this is why I argue there has to be an escalation on our side for the simple reason that as long as we are passive, they will continue to try to make us into worms.
They will continue to try to get us to take a knee, if you will, before their woke orthodoxies.
They demand the right to bully us, to indoctrinate our children, to make us go away, to make us submit to them.
The only kind of political opposition that they're willing to tolerate is the kind of Romney opposition that basically makes token resistance and then gives in.
This is the opposition they like.
So they really want a one-party state.
And their problem with us is that we are not going to give it to them.
Worried about the future because of politicians who wreck our economy?
Don't worry. The real America, the innovators, are hard at work.
Despite the Joe Bidens of the world, Alex Green, the editor and chief investment strategist of the Oxford Club Investment Research Company, has been accurately predicting and guiding readers for 20 years, precisely demonstrating how to generate massive wealth for anyone willing to listen, learn, and share in the potential profits.
Long-time subscriber of Alex Green, Bill O'Reilly, recently sat down with Alex to talk about the bright future of investing in America over the next two years.
And truly, the best is yet to come.
That's despite whatever nonsense is happening in the nation's capital.
So see for yourself. Go to messagefrombill.com.
Watch this interview and sign up for the Oxford Club's free e-letter to receive a free report on how to invest in top 10 innovative stocks right now.
See how to claim your copies of two best-selling books, The Gone Fishing Portfolio by Alex Green and O'Reilly's latest Killing Crazy Horse without paying retail or shipping.
Get everything at messagefrombill.com and learn how to prosper from the real America and its innovators today.
What is the value of a college degree, of a master's degree?
Not just an undergraduate degree, but a master's degree.
And not any master's degree, but a master's degree from an elite institution like Columbia University.
One of the eight Ivy League schools.
And the answer to that, it turns out, is not a lot.
The Wall Street Journal did a very interesting report And it is about the amount of money that master's degree candidates borrow in terms of loans, the kind of debt that they end up with at the end of these master's programs, which are typically two years following on the four-year undergraduate degree, compared to what these graduates earn when they get out of college.
Now, it's been a rule of thumb for a long time that, by and large, you can borrow money to go to college.
That's not by itself a bad thing to do.
But you shouldn't borrow more than you're going to earn, let's say, in your first year of employment.
If I think back to my own case going back now to the 1980s, I had about $25,000 in college loans, a lot of money at the time, and that was about the salary of my first job.
Actually, my first job paid a little bit less, but I was doing some freelance writing, so I made about $25,000, and so my first year salary roughly equaled the amount of my entire college debt over four years.
Turns out that the median debt of a Columbia University master's student is $181,000.
And, compare this to their income.
Half of the borrowers, the Wall Street Journal says, getting out of Columbia were making $30,000 a year.
Now you might think, how can somebody graduate from a master's program of an Ivy League school and make $30,000?
Well, the answer is, it's what you choose to get your degree in.
And see, what these colleges have been doing is they've been offering a plethora of programs, things like sociology, education, Film studies, speech-language pathology, marriage and family counseling.
Now, the reason the colleges offer all these programs is because they know that the graduates have massive access to loans to be able to study in these programs.
And these loans, by the way, when you take out loans from the government for undergraduate education, there are limits.
As a Pell Grant, it's only so much.
But for a master's degree, There's no ceiling.
You can borrow as much as you need.
And so what these colleges realize is, yeah, let's let the guy borrow $100,000, $200,000.
And then when you get out, you're like, I'm a master's degree sociologist, but nobody wants to hire you.
Or I'm in film studies.
Well, I've got an idea for a documentary film, but I have an investor who's willing to put up $1,500 today.
To make it, I mean, I'm very familiar.
Debbie's laughing because she knows this world as well as I do.
And so what these guys are finding is that when they graduate from programs, including history, social work, architecture, by and large, their salary prospects are dismal compared to the amount of debt that they have accumulated.
Here's a student, Zach Morrison, from New Jersey.
He's 29 years old. His graduate school loan balance is $300,000.
He's been earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year.
So think about it. He has to live. He's, by the way, kind of a Hollywood assistant.
He does side gigs like commercial video production and photography.
So here's a guy. He has to live on his salary.
So think of how little of his loan he can pay back, and the loan is earning interest in the meantime.
And listen to this. Fellow talk, because you get an idea of how out of it he is.
He goes, there's always those 2am panic attacks where you're thinking, how the heck am I ever going to pay this off?
So apparently, once in a while at 2am, he wakes up and thinks, how am I going to...
If it were me, I'd be thinking about this all day.
This would be the dominating issue on my mind.
The fact that I've got a debt escalator that's rising faster than my ability to pay it off.
But this guy, and these are the kind of guys who become leftists, oh yeah, loan forgiveness, free college, because they've made bad decisions and they don't want to face the consequences of their own bad decisions.
Admittedly, bad decisions that have been exacerbated by very cunning colleges that have been looting their, essentially taking advantage.
They're not looting the student, they're looting the taxpayer, they're looting the government that often puts up the money.
Now, this is not, as I say, unique to Columbia.
At NYU, graduates with a master's degree in publishing borrowed a median $116,000.
Their annual median income, $42,000.
And that's two years after they graduate.
At Northwestern University, if you graduated in speech-language pathology, your average debt, $150,000.
Your median income, $60,000.
University of Southern California's Marriage and Family Counseling Program...
Average income, $50,000.
Median debt, $124,000.
So what's happened here is that the commonsensical idea that you may not have enough money to go to college, but you can borrow money because what you're really doing is borrowing off of the substantial earnings that this education is supposed to add to your salary.
All of this is turning out to be kind of utopian.
It's turning out to be a myth.
People just borrow money.
They don't think, how much am I really going to earn?
You know, if someone's going to be a doctor and they accumulate debt, well, they're going to be having a decent income over a long period of time.
They're going to be able to pay off that debt.
It took me several years to get rid of my debt.
But I remember the just feeling of relief when I was like, wow, that's my last check.
My loans are now all paid off.
This is just an albatross that's not going to be hanging on my neck any longer.
These are people who are putting lifelong albatrosses around their neck.
And what's even worse, they don't even seem fully aware of it.
It's only at 2 a.m.
that they go, oh, I guess I'm dealing with some debt.
This is a responsibility carried, I think, to a very bad level.
And the one thing that we can conclude about these students, graduates, though they might be from elite universities, and perhaps this is the one thing that they've also learned when they really look at their debt balances, they're not as smart as they think they are.
▲
Export Selection