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Oct. 1, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:50
WHY LATINX? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 187
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One of the promises of globalization has always been that it would make countries like China more like America.
Has that happened?
Nah. In fact, America, I will argue, is becoming more like China.
We're going to talk about Joe Manchin and what he did and didn't accomplish.
Debbie and I talked together about an article about multiculturalism and woke terms like Latinx.
What's a Latinx? We'll tell you.
And I'm going to conclude my series on Jefferson by looking at the question of how a man who owned 200 slaves could nevertheless affirm that all men are created equal.
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.
There's a survey just out of American Opinion, and it's a survey that tries to assess how Americans view America's standing in the world.
And the survey shows that there has been a sharp drop.
In other words, an almost 9% drop, 8.2%.
Of Americans lost confidence in America as being the leading power in the world.
This is supposed to be the second largest rapid drop that's been measured in 20 years.
So, what's the cause of it?
Well, on the front, the cause of it is Afghanistan.
The poll shows that people think that this was a debacle, the unnecessary deaths of American forces in Afghanistan and The Americans left behind to this day.
It might have vanished from the media, but it hasn't vanished from people's psyche.
They know that they're Americans still stuck in Afghanistan.
We spent a trillion dollars, all those lives lost over the years.
And what do we have to show for it?
Even our allies have been harshly critical of America, which is to say the Biden administration's role in this disastrous pullout.
And so we see a drop of confidence in America.
Coming from Republicans, to be sure, but also from independents.
11-point drop.
Also Democrats, we see a 5.3% drop.
Even Democrats think that America's position is eroding and is eroding due to the actions of the current administration.
But I think all of this, although interesting, understates the broader significance of what's been happening, not just in America, but around the world.
Let's pull back to one of the great promises of globalization.
By the way, a cause promoted by left and right over the past 30 years and more.
And the idea, going back to the fall of the Soviet Union, is we need to have this kind of neoliberal world order.
And if we do, a world order that's based upon liberal democracy, it's based upon capitalism, we're going to try to make everybody more like us.
So the effect of capitalism, and the idea here is that as the Chinese embrace, for example, capitalism, that you're going to have Chinese say, wait, now that I've got a nice apartment, now that I've got a car, I want the right to vote.
I want my own privacy.
I want the ability to assemble.
I want to be able to have a voice in the government.
So the idea is that the embrace of capitalism would somehow bring with it An embrace of democracy.
This was argued by Francis Fukuyama.
It was argued by many others.
Kind of an article of faith, and faith is the right word here, among the elites in American foreign policy, even on the Republican side.
And now, all these years later, we can look back and say, well, let's look at it.
Has China, in fact, become more like America?
I think we'd have to say no.
In no measurable respect has China become less Chinese, more American, or has embraced the wider ensemble of American institutions.
No democracy, no checks and balances, no real separation of powers, no real civil liberties.
So China has not, in fact, become more like America.
But the question that's never asked and I want to raise now is, has America become more like China?
That certainly would be a surprise.
That was certainly not predicted by the neoliberal order, that the attempt to globalize the planet would make us, our country, more like them.
Now, it would be very troubling if we were moving in that direction, and I think we are.
Let me say why.
Number one, the Chinese have state-controlled capitalism.
They have capitalism, but it's under the thumb of the state.
I wouldn't say our capitalist system is fully under the thumb of the state, but I would say it is increasingly under the thumb of the state.
Remember, under Obama, the auto companies, the banks, financial institutions, insurance companies, healthcare companies, all now operating under government regulations, government mandates.
The government, in a sense, controls them.
They can't really make any major decisions without the government.
An avalanche of state propaganda.
We see that in China.
We now see this in America.
In America, it's often conducted through with the cooperation of other institutions.
Digital media companies, the so-called mainstream media, people working in coordination with the state.
But nevertheless, it's at the direction of the state.
Limitation on speech and the restriction of dissent.
In China, we've seen that ever since Tiananmen Square in a pretty blatant form.
We're seeing it in America, the restriction of dissent.
We have mass censorship now in America.
Who would have thought? But here it is.
And all of us have to operate on some level in the knowledge that there are many things, not one thing, not two things, but many things.
The discussion of major issues that can't be had, can't be had freely, or you are off the digital public square.
You're off the major platforms by which...
Most Americans today communicate.
The prosecution of dissenters, that's gone on in China.
We saw that in Tiananmen Square.
You know, I wonder in retrospect of January 6th will be seen historically as our Tiananmen Square.
Why? You've got desperate protesters seeking to have their voices heard.
You've got a vicious government crackdown and prosecution.
And then the incident itself serves as a pretext to We're good to go.
China has a one-party state informed by Marxist and sort of leftist ideology.
We have, I wouldn't say we have a one-party state, but we have a one-party government that operates like a one-party state.
It's certainly trying to become a one-party state.
It wants only token opposition.
Yeah, but We want Romney to raise a kind of quibble every now and then and maybe Murkowski, but we don't really want Republicans who act like Republicans.
We don't want an active, vigorous opposition.
No, no, no. We actually want to have our will untrammeled to succeed.
The only real difference between China and America that I can see is that the Chinese are affirming nationalism.
They're trying to whip up patriotism.
They're trying to mobilize and unify the country behind a kind of Chinese pride and Chinese, and you don't even have to ask them if they're putting China first.
Of course they are. Here in America, however, we seem to be divided.
We seem to be fractured.
Far from pursuing a kind of common purpose, the only purpose that I can see that our government is pursuing is taking the country down.
So, weirdly, here's where American objectives and Chinese objectives converge.
They're trying to take us down, and evidently, the Biden administration is trying to take us down.
So, even on this one area where the two countries seem to be far apart...
Nevertheless, in a strange way they are operating towards, you may say, a unified objective.
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Let me start with the bad news.
Joe Manchin is evidently okay with a second infrastructure bill as long as it is capped at $1.5 trillion.
Now, what this means is that with the other, the so-called small infrastructure bill, that's around $1.5 trillion, and a second bill of $1.5 trillion, if you put the two together, That's a wastage of $3 trillion.
Well, it's not entirely a waste, but it is largely a waste.
We're basically a country that is heavily in debt, that cannot afford this, is nevertheless tossing $3 trillion down the drain.
And Joe Manchin is evidently okay with that.
That's a disappointment.
Now, the good news is that Joe Manchin, almost single-handedly, is getting some support from Kristen Cinema, but nevertheless, the two of them have taken this Democratic boondoggle, this $3.5 trillion bill, and lopped off $2 trillion at one blow.
The progressives are hopping mad.
You can see op-eds all over the place.
Joe Manchin has sunk the progressive ship and so on.
The Democrats also look at this as a sinking of a vote-buying scheme that they were hoping would save them in the midterm election next year.
So Manchin might have sunk them on that score also.
But evidently, Manchin has been sort of straightforward He told Schumer, and they even signed a paper on it.
Manchin signed and Schumer signed.
But weirdly, Schumer seems to have kept this to himself, because even Pelosi just said she seemed to be surprised that there had been this sort of signed document by Manchin and Schumer saying, Manchin saying, Senator Manchin is not going to go above $3.5 trillion.
Otherwise, he reserves the right to vote against the entire bill.
And so, we now have a stalemate.
We have a stalemate. Why? It's really a failure of leadership, I think, on the part of Biden and Pelosi and Schumer.
Why? They should have sat down the progressives and said, listen, you want $3.5 trillion.
It's not going to happen. We don't have the votes for it.
But the $3.5 trillion is just not in the cards.
But instead, Biden said and Pelosi said and Schumer all said, they told the progressives, listen, we're not going to sign the $1.5 trillion bipartisan bill If we can't get the other bill also.
In other words, they were implying it's an all or nothing package.
And so the progressives all dug in and said, well, fine.
Well, that means we'll vote against the $1.5 trillion bipartisan bill unless you can live up to your promise to deliver the other bill also.
So a beautiful prospect begins to emerge out of all this.
And that is that the Biden administration might get Nothing.
This would be great.
This would be ideal.
This would be if the progressives move in and sink the bipartisan package.
Great! And then Manchin and Sinema vote with the Republicans.
Now, it's kind of funny. I was reading Bernie Sanders tweeting today and he goes, you know...
This is outrageous. Two senators are holding up what 48 senators and 200 plus people in the House want.
And I'm thinking, no, no, no.
It isn't just two senators by themselves.
The two Democratic senators are joined by 50 Republican senators.
And if you add that, there's a 52-48 majority against.
The $3.5 trillion boondoggle.
So no, this is not a subversion of democracy, Bernie Sanders.
This is actually an exercise of democracy.
So there's good news, there's bad news, but what might come out of all this, and this is kind of what we have to pray for, is that the whole thing goes down like the Titanic, and that would be great news.
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There are some 14,000 hours of footage.
On the January 6th protests.
And this is footage taken from all different angles in the Capitol and right around the Capitol.
And the government has all this footage and they are desperately eager not to release it.
Now, in a piece of, in a good development, Judge Beryl Howell, U.S. District Chief Judge, and this is in a particular case, she has ordered the government to release some footage that they didn't want to release.
And what does the footage show?
We now can see those videos.
They're short. But they're telling.
Because actually the significant thing about the videos is not really what's on them, but what's not on them.
What you see in the videos is just a bunch of people milling around.
They're looking as if they're unfamiliar with the place.
They're kind of like they're in a museum and they don't know where to go.
And there are all these officials standing around.
And the remarkable thing, again, the dog that didn't bark...
The officials aren't telling them to leave.
The officials aren't saying, hey listen, you don't belong here.
You gotta get back out there.
There seems to be a kind of pleasant indifference on the part of these officials.
And so think about it.
You're in a museum. You walk down a hallway.
You see a sign, let's just say, that says closed.
But there's a security guard.
You see other people walking by.
The security guard nods at you.
Maybe even takes your picture.
Um... So if you're not told, don't enter here, and you enter, are you really breaking rules?
Or are the rules themselves, in this case, ambiguous, and are there no clear instructions being provided?
So this is kind of why the government doesn't want to release these videos, because in fact, they undercut not only the government's case against these defendants, but the whole narrative.
Now, it's very interesting to look at the Biden administration's rationale for not providing the videos.
They say, quote, that providing these videos would, quote, compromise the security of the United States Capitol and those who work there.
Yeah. So they go, let's give them their due.
This footage, when combined with other footage from nearby cameras, could be used to track individual riders moving through the building, thereby creating a visual pathway which other bad actors could use in planning their breach point and pathway for future attacks.
So the idea is we can't give you the footage.
You'll see what's in the Capitol.
And all these bad guys can plan future insurrections.
Well, the judge saw right through this.
And basically, Judge Beryl Howell said, first of all, This case would be a little more plausible if you were talking about secret sections of the U.S. Capitol to which there is normally no public access, but you're talking about areas of the Capitol that are normally on the Capitol tour.
In other words, the public can walk in with permission at any given time and see these areas and this whole idea that you're protecting the security of the Capitol is just nonsense.
And now the government continues, however, to fight this.
And now what they're trying to do is block even defendants, not just the public, but even defendants, from getting the body-worn camera footage.
Let's remember now that the Capitol Police don't have body cameras, but the D.C. Metro cops do.
And there's a bunch of body cam footage.
And so here's the government.
They're saying that it has come to our attention that there are sensitivities...
Sent keyword. Sensitivities that must be addressed prior to large-scale disclosure of body-worn camera footage.
Let's think about it. What do they mean when they say there are sensitivities?
Here's what I think they mean. I think what they mean is, we have footage from these body cameras of our own cops mercilessly beating unarmed and non-violent protesters.
We don't want the public to see this.
We don't even want the defendants to see this because they can use it.
They can say, wait, look, you're saying that we pushed back, but who fired first?
Who shot tear gas into someone who wasn't really disrupting anything?
So in other words, then you need the videos, obviously, to see the context of what happened, and yet the government is trying to prevent defendants.
From having access to material entirely relevant to their own defense, but more importantly, they're trying to prevent the American public from seeing what really happened on January 6th because it might disrupt a narrative in which a whole lot of very powerful people have a very big stake.
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A great Dante scholar, Robert Hollander, one of my professors at Dartmouth died this year.
He actually died a few months ago, but I didn't know about it until I just saw something on it.
Robert Hollander, preeminent Dante scholar, pioneer of the digital humanities, dies at 87 on April 20th.
Now, it flashes my mind back to the summer of 1982.
When I took Hollander's Dante course at Dartmouth.
Now, Hollander was a professor at Princeton, but in the summer as he liked to come up to New Hampshire, he's kind of an outdoors man, he loved Dartmouth, and he would teach Dante in the summer.
And it was a little demanding, reading all three books of the Divine Comedy, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, the Paradiso, all in ten weeks.
But it was an opportunity to study with one of the truly great living Dante scholars, and so I loved the idea of doing it.
So I enrolled in the course.
I should say that Divine Comedy is arguably the greatest epic poem of all time.
I think it is. But even for people who would disagree, they would put it, well, it's probably one of the two greatest poems about Christianity.
Greatest epic poems, I mean.
The other being Milton's Paradise Lost.
And even if you were looking at epic poems in any language, certainly across Western civilization, you could think of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, you could think of Virgil's Aeneid, maybe one or two others.
But Dante is in that company.
I think no one would disagree.
And sometime on the podcast I'm going to do a series on Dante and on the Divine Comedy.
And you might say, what Dinesh, you're going to give a course on the podcast based on taking one course?
Well actually no, I've been, that course was an introduction to a topic that I've actually pursued my entire adult life.
I've read the Divine Comedy maybe 30 times.
I've read commentaries on it, listened to lectures about it.
It's an astounding poem.
It's based upon this guy, Dante Alighieri, Who is, by the way, not saying that in a dream or in his poetic imagination, he wonders what it might be like to go to the underworld and hell and what it might be like to ascend the mountain of purgatory, what it might be like to imagine heaven.
No, Dante says, and this is part of the ridiculous audacity of the poem, he says he actually went.
Dante says, I'm giving you an account of what I saw.
And you can choose not to believe it, but it's part of the power of the poem to make you believe it.
So that when you're in the poem, you get the sense and you begin to believe that this guy is actually there.
He's actually talking to people who are in the circles of the damned and so on.
Now Hollander brought Dante kind of alive.
And I have to confess that I had a particular affection for him because he would bring out these – Dante lived in a world in which he took for granted a deep knowledge of the Greeks, which I did not have at the time, but also a knowledge of the Bible. A number of his images and ideas and phrases are lifted directly out of scripture. And so there would be a scene in the Divine Comedy. A man, for example, comes
out of a tomb and rises up erect. And Hollander would say, where do you think Dante got that?
What is he alluding to?
What is the biblical invocation here?
And once or twice, I would say, is it this?
Could it be Christ rising from the dead?
Could it be, in the case of someone, let's say, coming down from the mountain of Perk?
Could it be Moses coming down from the mountain?
And Hollander would say nothing.
And after the class, he would pull me aside and he would say, well, how did you know that?
And I would say, well, I don't know, but, you know, I'm just drawing on my kind of childhood catechism.
I'm drawing on readings from the Bible that I heard in countless masses that I attended when I was a kid.
And he would say, well, he once observed, he said, you know, the ordinary student in America, even at the best schools, Could 20 years ago, and he's talking about 20 years back from the 80s, be counted on to have a decent familiarity with Scripture, but no longer? He goes, the Bible is not simply read for theological insight and revelation.
He goes, it is intellectually indispensable to understanding Western civilization.
So even the non-believer needs to know the Bible because this entire corpus of Western philosophy and Western ideas and Western literature is based upon, to a large degree, this one book.
At the end of the course, I got something that I was very proud of and remember to this day as kind of an academic citation.
Basically, Hollander says, Dinesh is one of the best students I've taught Dante to either here, Dartmouth, or in Princeton over the past 20 years.
And I cherished that a lot.
And Hollander had approached me about becoming a Dante scholar.
I decided in the end not to.
And part of the reason was simply the enormous demands on language.
In other words, to be a Dante scholar, you not only need to know Italian.
Dante wrote the poem in a kind of vernacular Italian.
But not today's Italian.
The Italian, obviously, of the late Middle Ages.
But you also have to know Greek.
You also have to know Latin.
And I thought to myself, wow, I have to learn three new languages to read one poem.
And I thought better of it.
I decided ultimately to go into politics.
But I've retained my affection and interest in Dante's work, as in Milton, another one of my favorites.
Great teachers are really rare.
I was privileged to have more than one, three or four.
And this represented, for me, Dartmouth at its best.
I'm really sorry that that Dartmouth that I attended a generation ago no longer exists.
That Dartmouth is now gone, and sadly so is Professor Hollander, and we are poorer for it.
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I want to conclude today my series on Thomas Jefferson, one of the five subjects of my Prager University series on the making of America.
And I want to begin by talking not about Jefferson, but about Martin Luther King, because in his famous 1963 speech, the I Have a Dream speech, Martin Luther King talks about submitting a promissory note, and he says, I want this note to be cashed.
And I've often thought to myself, what note?
What's he talking about? Did somebody give him a note?
Did the southern segregationists sign a note that King is now demanding that they live up to?
And the answer is no. King is actually not talking to them.
They didn't give him a note. He's referring to the Declaration of Independence.
That's the promissory note.
And ironically, that promissory note was written not by some civil rights activist, not by some black guy fighting for freedom.
It was written by a white guy, a Virginia planter, a fairly large-scale slave owner, Thomas Jefferson.
And this raises, if you will, the Jefferson conundrum.
The Jefferson conundrum is just this.
How is it the case that a Virginia planter, how is it the case that a man who owned a couple of hundred slaves nevertheless insisted that all men are created equal?
For the left, this is blatant hypocrisy.
For the left, it shows, if you will, the inadequacy of Jefferson.
Didn't that man even recognize what he was saying?
And how blatantly it contradicted what he was doing?
And how would he allow an America to get started?
And this would be an indictment of all the American founders who condemned slavery while at the same time supposedly, apparently, allowing it.
Now, of course, the puzzle of Jefferson is that Jefferson did condemn slavery, and he did it in the cadence of a biblical prophet.
He said things like, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.
He said the Almighty has no attribute, no attribute, which can take side with us in such a contest, meaning the slave owner and the slave.
And he even said that he was hoping for conditions to provide for what he called a total emancipation under the auspices of heaven.
So here's Jefferson really demanding and longing for the end of slavery, and yet he, to some degree, allows it, and is in fact also a practitioner of it.
How could the man, and here's Jefferson, by the way, writing from the summary view of the rights of British America.
This is 1774, two years before the Declaration.
This is Jefferson speaking for himself, not speaking for the country.
But he says, and this is a phrase that Lincoln loved to quote and was very influenced by, Jefferson says, the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, meaning all the colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.
So here's Jefferson using the word abolition, and he's saying the colonies want to get rid of slavery.
You might say, well, why don't they just get rid of it?
Well, Jefferson's point is that slavery came to America, and we're sort of reminded of this by the 1619 Project.
Slavery begins in 1619, but Jefferson goes, think about it.
We've had slavery from 1619 to 17, that's 150 years.
That's the distance.
If you work your way 150 years back, and we would be close to the American founding itself.
So Jefferson's like, this institution has become embedded in American life.
This is why Jefferson says, in a famous phrase, we have a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.
Now, In studying the Declaration of Independence, a lot of times people focus on the first part of it.
All men are created equal.
And they stop there. As if the sentence ends there and there's no sentence that follows it that is intricately connected with the sentence.
But there is. There's a second phrase.
And when we focus on the second phrase, we begin to understand the tension between the two.
So the second phrase is that governments derive their legitimacy from, quote, the consent of the governed.
This is the democracy principle.
So if all men are created equal is the equality principle.
There's an equality principle in the Declaration.
There's also a democracy principle.
Now, here's the question.
What happens when the two contradict each other?
Or to put it differently, what happens when a majority of people in a society democratically refuse to give their consent to the idea that all men are created equal?
What do you do then? And the progressives will say, well, no problem.
We just run roughshod over them.
We just ignore them, and we pass laws that outlaw slavery.
And Jefferson's question would be, wait, what?
We're trying to establish a democratic country.
Are you telling me that we should kill democracy in its cradle?
We should shut down democracy before it even gets started?
We should take the majority of the will of the American people and disregard it and...
Create a constitution that then has to be ratified by the states that they're not going to ratify.
But leaving that aside, the point is we are going to try to establish a universal principle of equality while undermining the democracy that is also an expression of equality and of the will of the American people.
So Jefferson's point is no.
What we actually have to do is something more complex.
This is the philosophical statesmanship of Jefferson.
We have to reconcile Now, Lincoln understood this, and Lincoln, in a sense, realized that his was the time 80 years later, when this could in fact be done.
And that's why Lincoln says very famously that the founders declared the rights that could not in fact have been implemented at their time.
Why? Because there was no popular consent for them.
So the founders declared the right whose enforcement must follow, Lincoln said, as soon as the circumstances permit.
I'm obviously quoting from memory, but it's very close to the original.
Lincoln found a way in his time To reconcile equality with popular consent.
And in that sense, Lincoln realized the Jeffersonian vision.
And think about it. From the civil rights...
All of this has been based on the original Jeffersonian principle.
He was a flawed man, but this in no way undermines his greatness, which is not in dispute.
It was Jefferson's note that Lincoln cashed And Frederick Douglass cashed, and Martin Luther King, too.
And what these men did together, the men who implemented Jefferson's vision, is that they knew that Jefferson created the pathway for America to become a better country in these respects than it was at the beginning.
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You gotta use promo code Dinesh.
Debbie and I are here because we've been chuckling about an article that's from NBC News.
and it's called, um, Bicultural Latinos Embrace Dual Identities, Shun Pressure to Assimilate.
And so, the underlying premise of the article is that, um, in the old days, Latinos, and I think one could say this about minorities generally, were under pressure to become American, to dissolve their old identity, and to sort of take on this American identity.
And now, evidently, and there's a bunch of interviews with different types of people, and we'll talk a little bit about this, what they say, but the idea is that they say, well, we don't have to do that.
We can actually preserve our own identity intact.
And that's the question I wanted to explore because it seems to me that even this dichotomy of assimilating versus preserving your identity is misleading.
And I wanted to kind of tap into both of our experiences, especially yours.
You fit the Latino, Latina label.
I don't.
Talk a little bit about just your own family history.
Well, first of all, you have a dual Latina heritage.
Talk about that.
I do.
I do.
I was, as most people know by now, I was born in Venezuela to a Venezuelan father and a Mexican-American mother who is a Texan.
She was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas down in the very tip of Texas on the border.
And so, yes, I have two different, basically very different cultures, very different Latino slash Hispanic cultures.
Explain what that means, because obviously, by and large, when people think Hispanic, they think this is people who speak Spanish.
And yes, your mom and your dad both spoke Spanish, but even then, not exactly the same Spanish, right?
And second, but Venezuela and the Rio Grande Valley, Two different cuisines?
Oh, well, two different worlds apart.
So talk about that. How are those two worlds different?
Very different. Well, first of all, the Mexican culture is quite different than the South American culture, even though they do share the Spanish-Spain roots.
So, let me kind of go back to the Hispanic slash Latino terms.
And I don't even go with this Latinx because that's so dumb.
But anyway, Latina, right?
Since you brought up Latinx, let's just say a word about Latinx.
Yeah. Latinx, quite honestly, we've got to be candid about this.
Latinx is a coinage of the gays.
We know why? Because if you look at Asian or you look at black, those are gender neutral, right?
You can be black, you can be black man, black woman.
Asian, the same. But in the case of...
Latino, you have Latino and Latina.
Right. Ends with an O is a dude, ends with an A. Right.
So all these sexual revolutionaries, these trans people, they're like, you know, we can't, there's no distinction.
So we need to put the, that's where the X comes from.
But can you imagine, I mean, think about this.
How did the gays get to name an entire race?
Well, I don't know. I don't want to talk about that.
But anyway. Okay. Let's return to...
Let's not talk about that.
But let's return to this.
So basically, the reason that I'm Hispanic and Latina...
I am from Latin America, and that's where the term Latino-Latina comes from.
So let's say a Mexican-American from Texas is not typically termed Latino because they're not from Latin America.
They have the Hispaniola, Spanish, from Spain, but they don't have the Latin American language.
Right? Whereas, since my mother is a Texan, and she always says she's a Texan, she never says she's a Mexican-American.
That's a whole other story.
But anyway, but because of that, I'm both Hispanic and Latina.
Now, what you're not mentioning, not because you're holding it back, but because we're focusing on Hispanics, you are also 10% African in your DNA. I was, yes.
When you got your ancestry, you were a little bit shocked.
Yes, yes. Well, you know, I am literally, I represent almost every race, if not every race in the world.
So I am about as multicultural as you can get.
Right, right. This is the face of someone that has 12%.
African black roots from Nigeria, from Senegal, Cameroon, all over, right?
And so that's that. And then I also have American Indian.
My grandfather was part of the Apache, I guess, tribe.
Well, he wasn't, but, you know, his ancestors.
So I have that plus that.
Then I have Spanish, Portuguese, Italian...
I mean, on pretty much everything.
Now, this is worth noting because these percentages of Native American and Black, just talk about those for a second, those are not small because by and large, even in tribal membership, they use a 6% rule.
Okay. You know? I mean, Elizabeth Warren is far less than, she's got a tiny, tiny percentage, but you've got, you qualify by tribal standards.
as being Native American, if you were chosen to say, you know, if you identify as Native American, also your percentage of black actually matches many people in this country who are mixed race and who call themselves black. So what we see here, I mean, the reason I mentioned this is the complete fluidity. If someone tried to classify you, it's not easy to do it.
It's not easy to do. It's easy to do it for me.
Yeah. Well, you're 100% Indian.
100%. I'm not 100% anything.
Right. So I'm a little of this, a little of that.
But I want to first focus on my Mexican-American heritage from my mother.
So I just want to mention that, and this article basically says that people that I grew up Latino or Hispanic, wanted to assimilate immediately.
My grandmother, who graduated high school, Donna High School in 1927, she was salutatorian of her class.
Very, very smart.
She probably was valedictorian, but there was a lot of discrimination.
back then. They didn't want to give her any. Exactly. And so, so, um, so we think that the reason she got the second, you know, it was because of that, but anyway, very smart woman, but she wanted her kids to speak English to fully assimilate because she didn't want them to be called out.
And back then when my mother was in elementary school, if they spoke Spanish, they were reprimanded.
And so a lot of that stemmed from the fact that they wanted to become fully American. Right?
So when my mother after college, my mother went to Venezuela to teach at an oil camp.
That is where she met my dad, who was Venezuelan and spoke only Spanish and all of that.
So they married, had kids.
So I was born in Venezuela.
I lived there till the age of 10, spoke only Spanish, did not like English, didn't like the sound it made.
I just thought, oh, I just don't like it.
I didn't want to learn it. When my parents unfortunately divorced, my mother decided to come back to the Rio Grande Valley to live with her parents.
So in I come to Harlingen, and I was...
I'm speaking only Spanish, but the Spanish that I spoke was very different than the Spanish my mom's family spoke.
They had more of a text mix, and they would have a little bit of a mix of...
They would speak English, and then they would speak Spanish, and then they would mix it up.
It drove me nuts.
So maybe we'll leave it at this for this segment.
Let's take a pause. But yeah, when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about whether it's possible...
To be 100% American and at the same time 100% affirm your own ethnic identity.
In other words, is the idea of hyphenated American good or bad?
We'll pick this right up.
Debbie and I are back. We're talking about this issue of ethnic identity.
So here's a guy, Ricardo Sebastian.
He's the founder of a New York talent agency.
And he says, I want to be 100% American and I also want to 100% reflect my Hispanic heritage.
He goes, but... He goes, I'm non-binary.
So he's apparently, he doesn't want to be male or female.
And he goes, to be honest, I've received a lot of discrimination from Hispanics because I'm non-binary.
And I'm thinking, you know what?
You want to affirm these ethnic cultures.
Well, these ethnic cultures are not woke.
Right? If somebody goes, I want to affirm my Indian culture 100%, but my dad's a little unhappy because I'm...
It's because they're very traditional.
They're very traditional. But how can you...
Here's my point. If they are very traditional, is it not a fact that in a diverse society...
You want to have room for these traditional cultures.
And you can't claim to simultaneously affirm a traditional culture and a woke culture when they contradict each other on basics.
I mean, traditional cultures have respect for the elderly, right?
In my traditional culture, at least not in my family, but right around my family, arranged marriage.
Traditional cultures have no tolerance for a lot of the permissiveness that we see all around us.
Right, but that stems from traditional cultures specifically.
Especially the Hispanic culture, very Catholic, very religious.
So my mom's was not Catholic.
She was Protestant. My father's family was Catholic.
So that was also a difference in their culture.
My grandmother founded a Methodist church in Harlingen.
So my grandmother was a very, I guess, anomaly.
In the Hispanic culture, because most Hispanics are Catholic, but my grandmother was Methodist.
So there's that.
But yeah, I mean, it's hard, I think, for some of these, like, wokesters to claim, well, why am I getting so much backlash from my grandparents?
Your grandparents think, you know, that you shouldn't be doing that or whatever.
Now, you go off to college, you know, Texas State, now called Texas State.
Don't bobcats! And when you're a student, you're approached by these LULAC. LULAC is the League of Latin United Citizens or something like that, and they want to recruit you into Latino or Chicano activism.
Talk about that. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I was approached by some people that were in LULAC, and And I would look at it and I'd go, what is Lulac?
Well, Lulac is, you know, La Raza and we're like very proud of La Raza.
And so for me, a part of when I came to America, I wanted to learn English, of course.
I know I said I didn't like it, but I wanted to learn it.
More importantly, I wanted to become a patriot.
I wanted to assimilate.
So I felt like making an issue out of my ethnicity was a little counterproductive because I was trying to become American.
And by American, I simply meant embracing the language.
Embracing the culture.
Now that doesn't mean that I'm going to...
And these LULAC people were like, oh yeah, you think you're Anglo.
No. In fact, I spoke more Spanish than I did English.
And I bet you these LULAC people did not.
So that was not it at all.
And you struggled in college.
And I struggled in college because I had a lot of difficulty with reading comprehension.
I would have to read...
A novel in Spanish to then understand what I was reading in English.
And so it was very difficult for me because my comprehension level was still not that great.
So I was very disturbed that these people thought I wanted to be Anglo because I embraced my Spanish heritage and my Spanish language.
I minored in Spanish, majored in political science.
But I couldn't understand why they wanted to be so divisive.
Why? Again, I think that, in my opinion, if you are constantly saying, I'm different, I'm different, I'm different, how are you going to be treated the same?
Right? Well, I think in both our cases, you know, this idea that by becoming American, and we both...
Very consciously sought to do that.
But we don't see this as a rejection in any way of our ancestry, of our background.
As you know, we were going together to India before COVID on a regular basis.
You, I think, to be honest, would probably move to Venezuela if the place were restored.
I mean, you loved it so much.
I love Venezuela.
I really do. And it breaks my heart that it's the way it is.
But yes, exactly.
So I don't reject it.
I don't reject it. I'm in America and I love American culture.
I love the way this country was founded.
All of those things. Why am I going to trash?
The very country that gave me the opportunity to be who I am today.
Now, together we have, we know some Venezuelans, friends of yours, over the years.
And now, the observation you made, which I think is true, these are lovely people.
They're fighting for freedom in Venezuela.
But they are truly Venezuelans in America.
Which is to say that they don't...
They don't belong to America.
And they don't see themselves as belonging to America.
They're in America, but not of America.
And that's not true of you.
You are of America. You're an American.
You're interested in Venezuela, your native country.
But I think there's a chasm between you and them.
To them, it's all about Venezuela.
And I think for you, it's as much we in America need to learn the lesson of Venezuela so we don't...
That is primarily why I started really talking about Venezuela and about what happened in Venezuela because I saw what happened there through the eyes of my family, through the eyes of my friends, and I knew that it should be a wake-up call for us.
But unfortunately, a lot of my Venezuelan friends really only see what's happening in Venezuela.
And they want help.
They want us to do something about it.
But I always tell them, listen, it's like being on an airplane, being the mother, right, of a child.
And the oxygen mask comes down.
And what do they say?
The mother needs to put the oxygen mask on herself first, right?
So... So we need to put the oxygen mask on America so that we can help Venezuela.
Because otherwise...
It's not going to happen? It's not going to happen.
So guys, we're going to do our audio question today.
And the question, as it turns out, is not for me.
Listen. Hi, I have a tough question for Debbie.
Based on my experience as an exchange pilot in Venezuela with their navy, I've certainly sympathized with them on the corruption and problems with their government and understand why Chavez was so appealing.
But what can the Venezuelan people do, even if they oust Maduro and the present socialism, To keep that from happening again.
Thank you Well, that is a really tough question because the answer is not probably what most people want to hear.
But unfortunately, they have gotten to the point where it's very difficult to overthrow a government that controls everything.
It controls the media.
It controls elections.
It has the Supreme Court on its side.
So it has all of the laws on the side of the regime.
So unfortunately...
What happened in Venezuela, it happens to a country that loses control of all of those things, especially the elections in Venezuela in 2004.
That is when they started losing elections by fraud, and they were never able to recover from that.
They demonized people for talking about it.
In fact, they even incarcerated people for talking about it.
And in 2013, when the people had just about had enough, they jailed them for inciting an insurrection.
So it's a very sad scenario, and it can happen anywhere, any democratic country, any republic really, that loses control of those things.
People need to be more alert, more awake, and And make sure that you don't let it get to that point because I call it the point of no return.
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