There's a huge redshift going on, a movement from the blue states to the red states.
I'll tell you what it means.
Kamala Harris broke the law in trying to save the faltering gubernatorial candidacy of Terry McAuliffe.
Once the champion of free speech, the ACLU now opposes free speech.
Wow. Mark Meadows, Trump's chief of staff, joins me to talk about infrastructure, the border.
And I'm going to begin my examination of Ben Franklin and his doctrine of the self-made man.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
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 term in astronomy called the redshift, but I'm going to use the term in a political sense.
There is a redshift going on in the country.
People are literally shifting and moving from the blue states to the red states.
The Claremont Institute, in an article about this, calls this right flight.
And we see it all over the place.
People are moving out of New York to Florida.
They're moving out of California to Texas.
And this stuff comes right home.
I mean, in a sense, I lived from 2000 to 2017 or 18 in California.
And then, well, in my case, Debbie was the one who kind of reeled me into Texas.
But there were good reasons for us to want to live here in Texas and not Not in California.
This is a great migration.
A couple of other guys on our film team who live in California are both thinking and moving.
One to Colorado, admittedly a purple state, and the other one to Florida.
So this is a broad trend.
Part of this, there's been some talk over the last couple of decades about Americans kind of self-segregating, partly because of the divide in the country.
But the segregation that people talked about, the self-segregation, was kind of within places.
And so you'd have red pockets, even in a blue state, or blue pockets in a red state.
A perfect example of this would be, for example, if you're a liberal, you live in Texas, well, go to Austin.
Austin's slogan is, Keep Austin Weird.
There are lots of red places in California that you can live.
But now we're seeing the broader phenomenon of people literally leaving the blue state.
And I think this is less due to the sort of dividedness of the country.
The country is divided, and divided in a serious way.
I was talking to someone the other day about the Civil War, and he was like, well, we're going to be reaching the point pretty soon where it's going to be like it was in 1860.
But I was thinking to myself, no, we're more divided now than America was in 1860.
Think about this. Abraham Lincoln, when he wrote a letter to Alexander Stevens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, and he basically said, you, your side, the Democratic South, you think slavery is right and should be expanded.
We think it is wrong and should be restricted.
And then Lincoln says, that's the only substantial difference between us.
In other words, we agree on most other things.
So the country is divided on, admittedly, a very important issue, but on one issue.
But now, we're divided across the board.
There's pretty much nothing they do that we approve of.
There's pretty much nothing we do that they approve of.
We don't even really like them.
They don't really like us.
So this is, I think, in some senses, a deeper fracture.
Now, that being said, I think that the move from the blue states to the red states is motivated partly by that, perhaps, but mostly by differences in policy.
And what does this tell you? It tells you that red policies, conservative policies, seem to work better.
They work better. Why?
Because even liberals will leave California and move to Texas.
Obviously because they're expecting a better standard of living.
They're expecting to be able to get a better value in their home.
They're expecting to pay less for groceries and clothes and gas.
They're expecting to have better opportunities, more jobs, better chances of advancement.
So what this really means is that California, and California is a beautiful state.
I mean, I think of all its wonderful, I mean, its natural advantages.
It's got incredible topography, I think incomparable anywhere else in the United States.
It's obviously got the sunshine.
So there are sort of natural magnets that draw you to California.
But what you don't have in California is good policies.
Another way to put it is what you do have in California, the downside, is Democrats.
And not just Democrats, but a kind of Democratic majority, a Democratic stranglehold on the state.
And this means that Democratic and leftist policies pass largely unopposed.
So, look, California and Texas outwardly are pretty similar.
They're both big states.
They're large, both in terms of population and size.
They're both kind of Western states.
They were, interestingly, both, at least for a brief time, independent republics.
Even though Texas was a slave state and California not, they were largely unaffected, untouched by the Civil War.
And they have a lot of similar industries.
They have agriculture, they have energy and oil, they have big tech.
And by the way, they both have a lot of Latinos and Latinas.
Both have a substantial Hispanic population.
Really what's happened is the two states, however, have gone in different policy directions.
They have different views, not just of economics, not just of taxes, but different views of immigration, different views of abortion, different views of social issues.
And California is proving to be a dud.
Now, California does work if you're basically really rich, because then you're untouched by the problems, you have gated communities, you're able to kind of insulate yourself from the rest of California.
In this sense, you could say California is a luxury product.
For a Silicon Valley billionaire, it's probably okay to live there.
But if you depend on ordinary social services, if you want to travel by normal means on the roads, you're basically going to have a hard time in California.
It's a mess. So who cares that California has the Getty Museum, the San Francisco Opera?
Those are nice things to have, but they are no substitute for the ordinary amenities I think it was Hayek who said many years ago that, People voting with their feet,
in this case voting not to leave one country and go to another, but to leave one state and go to another.
You can say Texas is winning and California is losing.
Florida is winning and New York is losing.
And by the way, winning here doesn't just mean attracting more people.
It also means that the number of congressional seats in places like Texas and Florida is going to inch up, creating a red political advantage that goes with the population.
So, this is a way of adjudicating, in a kind of clinical and perhaps even scientific way, whether Red America or Blue America works better.
The verdict is in and we have to award the medal to Red America.
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But before I do that, I want to talk about why she feels the need to do it.
Well, it's because Terry McAuliffe, the incumbent governor, is running neck and neck with Glenn Youngkin, his Republican challenger, in the race that will be decided very shortly.
In early November in Virginia.
An important state. Now the race is important because it's going to be the first test, really major test, of how the two parties are doing.
It'll give us a little bit of a window into what to expect in the midterms next year.
It is a test of Biden's popularity or unpopularity as reflected in Virginia.
By the way, a state that Biden carried by 10 points.
Now, we know that McAuliffe is facing some real headwinds.
This is a state that he should be able to win pretty easily, but he's not.
And so I'm just looking here at McAuliffe talking.
He goes, yesterday I had Dr.
Jill Biden here.
I've got Stacey Abrams here.
I've got Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms here.
I've got President Obama coming in.
The President of the United States will be here.
So think about it. This guy has to sort of yank in every big-name leftist, every big-name Democrat, to try to do what?
Well, what they're trying to do is something, kind of an old playbook.
They're trying to sort of rustle up the black vote.
They're trying to get blacks stirred up.
And they're doing this in a program that they call Souls to the Polls.
Souls to the Polls is the idea of essentially trying to ransack the black churches and get people to go straight from church to the ballot box.
Now, there is, this is nothing really particularly new, but what is new is that Kamala Harris gives a speech, and this is a, I wouldn't just say it's a political speech, a political speech is one thing, but a partisan speech, a speech that is a direct endorsement of Terry McAuliffe.
And I believe that my friend Terry McAuliffe is the leader Virginia needs at this moment, says Kamala Harris in the video.
Now, churches are tax-exempt entities.
They're under the IRS, and they're under a tax-exempt rule, which, by the way, contrary to, you know, conservative pastors will often say, oh, you know, I can't talk about moral issues in the pulpit because, you know, our tax status is at stake.
No, it's not. You can't talk about moral issues in the pulpit.
I mean, look at what the Democrats do.
They're crossing the line not just into political law or moral issues, they're crossing the line into naked and open partisanship.
Vote for this guy! So, by and large, the IRS rule is actually pretty clear.
It's been a rule in place, by the way, since the 1950s, and that is that not that churches cannot address theological or moral issues or even social issues, but There is a line, and the line is you cannot openly campaign for candidates in an upcoming election.
I've read the IRS rule.
It couldn't be more clear about that.
And yet here's Kamala Harris basically giving a talk that is, according to CNN, going to be played in 300 black churches on Sunday, this past Sunday.
So, this means that the churches are breaking the IRS rules and the law, and Kamala Harris is breaking the law.
Now, Kamala Harris could say, well, I just gave the speech.
Who told them to broadcast it?
So, I'm in the clear.
In that case, she'd be sort of throwing the churches under the bus.
But clearly, this is a coordinated campaign between the Democrats and the black churches to say, okay, listen, We need you to make a speech, which we will then play during our Sunday sermon time in church, and this will get people all fired up and ready to vote right after the service is over.
I think what's striking to me is two things.
One is conservatives need to learn from this.
that first of all, there's excessive timidity on our side, which is ridiculous.
These guys are out there openly campaigning and there's nothing to stop you from addressing moral issues as forthrightly.
I'm not saying to cross the partisan line, but I am saying that there's nothing to stop you from talking about moral, social, or even political issues.
But the second point is just the lack of accountability.
We all know nothing's really going to happen.
Is the IRS going to do something about it?
Probably not. And so it is the absence of accountability, the one-sidedness of the way that these laws are applied, that emboldens the Democrats to think, yeah, of course we can get away with it.
Who's going to do anything? This is, after all, the Biden administration.
This is our administration.
We control the IRS. You think they're going to go against us by filing some kind, by taking away the tax-exempt status of a black church?
Are you kidding me? So what you have here is lawlessness.
And this is being knowingly done.
They're knowingly breaking the law and daring us, daring America, to do something about it.
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Feel the difference. The name ACLU stands for the American Civil Liberties Union.
And there is no civil liberty more fundamental than the right to free speech.
And the ACLU, for many years, was in fact a defender of the free speech principle, and a pretty consistent one.
They would defend it even when the speech was something that they not only disagreed with, but found hateful.
And let's think about it.
This is really when you need free speech to be defended.
No one needs to defend speech if you agree with it.
The issue of tolerance only arises when it's speech that you find objectionable.
That's when the principle kicks in, you might say.
The ACLU, in a sense, acquitted itself in a very honorable way when they defended the Nazis.
In marching in Skokie, by the way, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, Skokie, Illinois.
But the ACLU's point is the Nazis, too, have a right to speak.
But that was then, and this is now.
And in what I think is a kind of first, the ACLU of Virginia has filed an amicus brief in the case.
Well, they're basically now saying that the court is allowing too much free speech.
The court actually needs to repress speech.
And not only does the court need to repress speech, but the court needs to compel speech.
I mean, think about what this is doing.
To compel speech is to make someone say something.
Even if you don't want to say it, you are forced to say it.
And this is just as much, by the way, a violation of your free speech rights.
As you being prevented from saying what you want to say.
So, you want to say something.
You can't. That's a violation of free speech.
You don't want to say something.
They're going to make you. That's an equal violation.
And the ACLU now can, I think, accurately be called an anti-free speech organization.
How ironic.
So, this case in Virginia involves a teacher, a fellow named Mr.
Cross. Who was suspended because he refused, as the Lownden County School Board requires teachers to use gender-affirming pronouns.
So you can't use the old pronouns, I guess.
You've got to use the new pronouns.
In fact, one of the organizations that is pushing this is called He, She, Z, Z-E, and We.
So, this is all about using the kind of woke pronouns.
Well, this guy, Mr. Cross, said, I'm not doing it.
It violates my free speech rights.
The school suspended him, but he went to court and the court ordered him reinstated.
They appealed it to the Supreme Court of Virginia and Mr.
Cross won. So Mr.
Cross is back teaching, but now he's suing along with some other people to attack the policy itself, the policy that essentially forces teachers.
And the policy is really clear.
Tell teachers, you can disagree with it if you want, but that doesn't matter.
You have to use our speech.
In other words, you have to say it our way.
And this is the issue.
This is the question, whether or not teachers have a free speech right.
Not to be compelled to speak in a certain way.
And so the ACLU, which has, by the way, been moving away from its kind of forthright, full-throated, defensor-free speech to what you could call an ambivalent position.
But I'm not aware of a single case where the ACLU literally goes to court and says to the court, you're allowing too much speech.
You need to allow less. And second, you're not forcing people enough to say what the state, what the authorities, want them to say.
So this is compelled speech, as I mentioned a moment ago.
And I think it really shows that the ACLU has come full circle.
It's now really not the American Civil Liberties Union.
It is now the American Anti-Civil Liberties Union.
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Hey guys, I really want to welcome to the podcast President Trump's former Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows.
Mark Meadows was a former congressman from North Carolina's 11th District.
He also chaired the House Freedom Caucus.
He's the author of a new book called The Chief's Chief, a kind of a window into the leadership of President Trump.
Mark, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
Let me start with your book, because we're going through a time of what appears to be just incompetent, disastrous, failed leadership on every front.
Talk for a moment about what you think, what's wrong with Biden?
Is it just Biden?
Because there are people around him.
And then perhaps say a word about how you would contrast Trump's leadership style, as you saw it close hand, with Biden's.
Well, I appreciate it.
It's great to join you and all those that are tuning in today.
Obviously, you've been a voice for freedom and truly for the American way of life that we all get to enjoy.
So thank you so much for doing that.
I can tell you in the Chief's Chief, we actually do contrast that.
I talk about the Biden administration and the way that they don't make decisions.
And I think that's a key component is that they They not only do not make decisions, but they have paralysis around making any kind of consequential decision.
So if it's a comment more than what flavor of ice cream are you eating, Joe Biden, he has a hard time actually weighing in on that.
But the other, so to give you a little bit of a glimpse, and that's what the book does, is kind of brings you in the Oval Office the way that President Trump actually made decisions.
He did what I call creative chaos.
So, for example, we're going to be talking about some issues today.
He would get someone that has a strong opinion in favor of Let's say infrastructure and then he would get somebody that has a very negative opinion about the infrastructure bill and then he would put the two of them against each other and kind of just sit back and watch them.
He would watch the fight happen right there in the Oval Office and then once they had passionately made their case he would make a quick decision.
I've never seen anybody that was more decisive And someone who ran back to what is best for America, that forgotten man and woman that you and I talk about on a regular basis.
And so for him, I share a whole lot of the private stories that, quite frankly, you would only get if you actually were in the room where it happened.
So many of these other authors are writing these books trying to talk about what happened.
And I find them fascinating.
Half of them I read, I said, well, they weren't even in the meeting and yet they're talking as if they're an authority there.
So the President Trump was really someone who would take action.
You ask another specific question, so let me answer it.
Some of the people around Joe Biden want to move him so far to the left that it is unrecognizable.
So moderate Joe Biden, he doesn't exist anymore.
I don't know that he ever existed other than when he was in the Senate, but once he started being a candidate for the highest office in the land, What I found was is that he literally is being influenced by so many other people that we've got to find a way to hopefully get back on making the main thing the main thing.
Mark, in our younger days, we, of course, had an experience with President Reagan.
I was in my 20s, and I was, you know, a low man on the totem pole, but I got to stand in the back of the room, and I noticed some similarities.
Reagan would have these roundtable meetings.
You'd have passionate arguments going on back and forth with the Labor Department on one side, Pat Buchanan on the other side, and Ed Meese on the third side, and Reagan would sort of take it all in And I think if these debates went too long, sometimes I noticed that Reagan would tune out and sort of reach for the jelly beans.
But he had something of the same style of listening to people who vigorously disagreed and then stepping in to chart a course of action.
Take a moment to do so.
I don't know if you do this in the book, but I think of Trump and Reagan as the two important figures in the Republican Party in the last 50 years or so.
Spend a moment kind of comparing and contrasting the two.
They were different in certain ways, weren't they?
Well, they were definitely different in certain ways.
And obviously, when you look at Ronald Reagan and what he was able to do, he connected to the American people.
That's the one thing that they have in common, is Ronald Reagan connected to the average American in a way.
And I tell this one story in the book.
I was up in Pennsylvania and there was a pipe fitter there, this guy, a union worker, and we were there at a rally and I said, well, what is it that you like so much about Donald Trump?
And he thought for just a second, he goes, he's just like me.
Now, that's interesting because you've got a billionaire from New York and a pipe fitter that's a union worker in Pennsylvania, and yet they connected.
But here's the other thing that you just mentioned.
You were there watching those kinds of decisions.
It actually made me a little uncomfortable, and I highlight that in the book.
When you get there and you've got cabinet members arguing with other cabinet members and the voices get raised, and yet if they get too off track, You're right that whether it's reaching for a jelly bean or, in President Trump's case, reaching for a Starbucks or a Diet Coke, it really is all about trying to make sure that the argument's clear.
The other thing that is fascinating, the common We're good to go.
When he was in office, I mean, everybody else had a better idea and a better way to do it.
And President Trump ran into the same things, oftentimes within his own administration.
And so it's key that personnel is policy.
And I think both of them recognize that.
You know, you're so right about that, because I remember a Republican saying about Reagan, oh, we can't let him meet with this guy.
We can't let him meet with that, as if to say that Reagan would just fall for the latest thing that he heard.
So there was this desire to manage Reagan.
Now, very interesting.
When we come back, I want to talk to Mark Meadows about some of the current issues that are swarming around us, infrastructure, the Biden commission on the court, and perhaps also the border.
We'll be right back. We're good to go.
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I'm back with Mark Meadows, former Chief of Staff under President Trump, also the author of a forthcoming new book.
It's called The Chief's Chief.
It's actually out at the beginning of December, but you can pre-order it now.
Mark, we're talking about Trump and Reagan.
Let's talk a little bit more about Biden, because you've got this massive infrastructure bill, well, sort of the small bill and the big bill, What do you think is going to happen here?
Is the small bill going to go through small, of course, relatively speaking?
Or do you think we're going to get two giant bills?
Where is this headed?
Yeah, great question.
And I think everybody on Capitol Hill, even including senators and House members, want the answer to that particular question.
So let me put kind of my perspective on it.
Here's what I see happening ultimately, is they'll start moving towards a smaller bill, both on infrastructure and this huge budget bill that they're talking about.
They mention it's reconciliation, but I see reconciliation as a good thing.
This is one of the rare opportunities where reconciliation's a terrible thing, and it's hard to believe when we're talking about billions of dollars or trillions of dollars, if we can say big and small, and you were right to put it in relative terms.
But here's what I see happening.
The Biden administration is going to put unbelievable pressure on a couple of senators, obviously Senator Sinema and Manchin.
But then what they're going to do is they're going to move that number lower.
They're going to try to say, okay, this is our compromise.
Here is the Trojan horse and all of that, and that's why the people that are tuning in need to put pressure on their senators.
What they're actually going to do is just lower the amount for many of these social programs that will live on forever, and they will fund them for six months instead of funding them for four years or five years.
And the number will come down, but the policies will be enshrined forever.
and do not count on Congress ever saying no, whether it's Republicans or Democrats, to ever say no to a program that actually passes and gets signed into law.
So that's the big fear.
So here's what those that are tuned in need to do.
They need to call their senators, whether they're on the Republican side or the Democrat side, and say, "'Listen, they're all for infrastructure.
"'Here's the problem is, "'we all want good roads and bridges.
"'The problem is none of this money, where very little of this money actually goes to roads and bridges.
It goes to special projects.
It goes to special interests.
And roads and bridges will not see a dime of this money for up to six years.
Now you may get a new bus in a city because on these infrastructure bills they all go to six cities None of which are really in any Republican area.
But in terms of roads and bridges, it'll be such a long time before it ever hits.
So what we'll get is bad policy, but we won't get the financial benefit.
Very interesting. Let's turn to what appears to be relatively good news coming out of the Biden Commission.
I felt pretty confident that they were putting the commission together to recommend packing the court.
And yet it appears that while endorsing some form of term limits for justices, which probably may not be a bad idea if it's uniformly and evenly applied, they nevertheless seem to be opposed.
Even some of the progressive legal scholars on the commission appear not to have endorsed the idea of packing the court.
Now, was this a surprise to you?
You think that Biden sort of bungled this because the progressives were looking for him to deliver a court packing, and it looks like court packing may be perhaps dead in the water.
Well, I think it is great news, and this is where I will actually give a little bit of credit for those around Joe Biden.
I think the commission became the group that could do the Heisman and say, we're not actually going to pack the court.
It's very rare that you would get a Sam Alito and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the same issue that believes that packing the court and what a lot of people don't understand.
It's just increasing the number of people on the court so that you can get the desired outcome that you want.
And so for this commission to come back with that recommendation, it's extremely good news.
The progressives are going to rise up and just say that Biden has bungled it.
Hopefully it's some of the more rational minds that may be in and around the president where they can blame the commission and Joe Biden can take...
The center road saying, well, I was all for packing it, but the commission is suggesting that you don't do that.
It's the typical way in Washington, D.C. that you can be against something and claim to be for it or for something and claim to be against it.
And hopefully what we'll see is that this is dead in the water.
It's a terrible idea.
We have the ability to affect the courts.
It's called an election every four years, and it's called Senate confirmation, and that's the way that it should stay.
Let me just ask you one more question.
We're about nine months into the Biden administration.
It seems like he's not doing all that well in the polls.
Is it too early to give him a report card?
But if you had to give him a report card, what would it be?
And then how are you feeling as we move toward the end of the year into a midterm year next year?
Okay, two of those.
It's not too early to give him a grade.
Obviously, they gave President Trump and President Reagan grades when they were only in for the first hundred days.
And so I'll give him a nine-month grade, which is an F. And it's even worse than that.
From a listening standpoint, if there was a number below last, that's what he would get.
Or a letter below last, that's what he would get because he doesn't listen to the vast majority of Americans.
Well, How does that translate into 2022 in the midterms?
I'm very bullish that the Republicans will pick up major seats in Texas and Florida and North Carolina.
Not quite as bullish on the Senate side of it.
It's a very difficult map, but we'll see what happens in New Hampshire and North Carolina to see if we hold the seat in one and pick up New Hampshire, hopefully hold the seat in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Awesome. Mark Meadows, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast.
It's great to be with you.
Thanks. Take care, Dinesh.
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I want to talk now about, well, I guess I'll call it the reconversion of Glenn Lowry.
So Glenn Lowry was a liberal who saw the light in the 1980s and became a neoconservative or a conservative.
He was one of the leading black conservatives, along with Thomas Sowell, in the United States, and was in fact kind of a mentor of mine and of many others.
Many of us who were from the younger generation looked up to people like Sowell and like Lowry.
And then Glenn Lowry broke with the conservative movement.
In fact, his reason for doing it had something to do with me, as I'll explain in a moment.
He quit the American Enterprise Institute over my book called The End of Racism, published in 1999.
He developed, well, you could only call it an Ahab-like hatred of that book.
He wrote, I think, five book reviews denouncing it in all different places.
And so he was on a maniacal quest to overthrow my book, and it was really puzzling to me because most of what I said in that book, Glenn Lowry, at least the Glenn Lowry I knew, would have agreed with.
And not only that, but I had sent Glenn Lowry the book before it came out and never received a word of criticism or dissent.
Dinesh, you shouldn't do this.
None of that. This was a complete surprise.
And Glenn Lowry took with him to leave, to quit AEI, a sidekick, a fellow named Bob Woodson, a pretty good guy, by the way.
Bob Woodson has been someone who helps blacks to, you know, balance their checking accounts and build homes.
He's kind of a self-help guy.
And I realized later when I did a debate with Bob Woodson that he basically only did it because of Lowry, because we were talking about issues in my book, and I realized he didn't have a clue about what I had even written about.
And so Woodson was really not the issue.
He was a sycophantic devotee of Glenn Lowry.
Glenn Lowry was the guy who was doing this kind of very public break.
And by the way, of course, Glenn Lowry got all these accolades on the left.
He got prominent teaching positions at Harvard, at Boston University.
And so he became a sort of cause celeb on the left.
Now, what's interesting about all this, fast-forwarding, by the way, at that time, I was very relieved that Thomas Sowell, who was, if anything, the preeminent black conservative scholar, came to my defense and said, basically, that not only is Dinesh's book fine, not only is it not, you know, insensitive or racist, but it is the most comprehensive and searching look at the race issue since Gunnar Mordahl's classic work called An American Dilemma.
Now, all of this has sort of come back now because Glenn Lowry recently did an interview.
I saw some clips of it on social media.
In fact, he put it out himself. He's talking to another black conservative named John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute.
And Glenn Lowry basically says, well, you know what?
Let's go back to the days of when I broke with the conservatives.
Now, he doesn't mention my book in particular, but what he implies is he said, you know, I kind of knew it was an opportunistic move.
I kind of knew that if I did that, I would get major accolades from the left.
The liberals would love it.
They would welcome me home.
I would become essentially okay once again.
Now, it's important to realize a little bit of a backdrop of all this, which is that Glenn Lowry, for reasons unknown to me and of no relevance to me directly, Glenn Lowry got into a whole bunch of destructive behaviors.
He got into drugs.
He became sort of an addict.
I guess he fired up his temper.
At one point, he was accused of flinging a woman he was involved with down the stairs.
By the way, I'm not speaking out of turn here.
Glenn Lowry has himself talked about these things.
But I think Glenn Lowry realized that if a black conservative does this, they are going to be crucified by the left.
And so his point was, what if I orchestrate a strategic break with the right?
Then the left will go to bat for me.
Then they will cover for me.
Then my drugs, they won't matter.
Threw some woman down the stairs.
Who cares? This guy's now come over to our side.
We've got to protect him. Glenn Lowry knew that.
And what I'm getting at here is that Glenn Lowry is bringing all this up now to show that, you know what, at the end of it all...
After spending a good 15 or 20 years on the left now, it's too much for me.
I can't stand it. It's like a frog in my throat.
I've got to spit it out. And so to be authentic, he goes, I've got to come out again as a conservative.
So he's having moved from the left to the right and then having moved back to the left, basically from 1995 to now, he's now kind of, quote, coming out as a conservative again.
But I think what I find particularly tragic is This guy is just a sly self, an opportunist.
He even admits it.
He admits that his reason was not honest.
It was not really intellectual.
It was not ultimately a principled break.
It was a cunning move that he made to advance his career, and it did advance his career.
So where does that leave us?
I mean, I think Glenn Lowry's instincts are conservative, and I'm glad he's back, if you will, with the team.
But who can trust this guy?
I mean, I'm willing to sort of forgive and forget, and I rarely mention these matters.
In fact, I'm bringing them up after so many years, I had to kind of almost go into the storehouse of my memory to call them back up.
But I'm only mentioning them because, you know, hey, I'm happy to forgive and forget, and I'm sure Debbie and I would be happy to have Glenn Lowry over for dinner, but if we do have him over, we're going to be sure to count our spoons.
By now you've all heard me talk about MyPillow, but now Mike has done it again by introducing his new MySlippers.
Mike has taken over two years to develop these slippers.
They're designed to wear indoor or outdoor all day long, made with MyPillow foam and impact gel to help prevent fatigue.
They're made with quality leather suede.
I get out of bed and I go right into these MySlippers.
And for a limited time, Mike is offering 50% off his new MySlippers.
The MySlippers are so comfortable, you're gonna wanna get some for the whole family.
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I'm beginning today my discussion of the fifth and final founder that I cover in my Prager University series on the American founding.
It's called The Making of America, five videos, five minutes each.
If you haven't seen them, go watch them at prageru.com.
But I've talked about Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison and Adams, and now I turn to Ben Franklin.
But a little bit by way of a preface to Ben Franklin.
I really like Ben Franklin.
I think it's partly because, to me, Ben Franklin represents the self-made man.
The self-made man.
That's a phrase, by the way, that was the title of speeches that Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave, gave.
He identified with this idea of a self-made man, someone who had to sort of make himself anew after he became a free man when, for the first time, his destiny was in his own hands.
And that's kind of the way I felt when I came to America, because I felt that suddenly I am in a society in which my destiny is not so much given to me as it is built or constructed by me.
And I realized that I would be able to do things with my life that I couldn't do in India.
And so being the architect of our own destiny, being in the driver's seat of our own future, this idea of the self-directed life, I think is quintessentially and exceptionally, to use that phrase, is exceptionally American.
Now, the American founding is the transformative event that made self-made men, self-made persons, possible.
Of course, before the American Revolution, you did have some self-made individuals, male and female, but they were very rare.
After the Revolution, their number grew exponentially.
And the man who kind of helped bring about the shift, and the man who embodied the shift, a self-made man before the founding who became the patron figure of the Constitution that multiplied his type of person, this was Benjamin Franklin.
Walter Isaacson, in a pretty good biography of Franklin, says he was, quote, the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.
So then that raises the question, well, what kind of society?
Well, we can see this by looking at Franklin himself.
This guy conveyed this indomitable spirit of invention, but not just invention, but also self-invention.
And I think these are the two ideas, the inventiveness of America and the self-inventiveness of Americans that makes Americans recognizable all over the world.
They're distinguishable. Isaacson talks about Franklin's varied career.
He was America's leading scientist.
He was an inventor. He was a diplomat.
He was a writer. He was a publisher.
He conducted electrical experiments aimed at lighting Philadelphia streets.
He devised bifocal glasses.
He designed a new type of stove.
He organized lending libraries in Philadelphia and a volunteer fire department.
He founded the American Philosophical Society.
He became a printer.
He became a publisher.
So this is Franklin.
He concocted all kinds of plans for uniting the colonies into a new type of society.
And at a critical time in the Philadelphia Convention, this was, by the way, the debates had frayed everybody's nerves.
They were not able to find agreement.
Things were breaking down.
Tempers were flaring. And people turned to Franklin to sort of save the day.
And Franklin basically said, you know what?
Let's pray. And so he summoned, and Franklin, by the way, not an exceptionally devout man, a little bit more of a deist, as was Jefferson.
In this sense, they were not like the majority of the American founders, who were actually quite devout.
And Franklin's prayer sort of calmed things down, and things were able to then move forward.
Now, Franklin viewed America itself as a great invention, an invention of philosophical statesmanship.
And yet, says Isaacson, concluding his book, he goes, quote,"...the most interesting thing that Franklin invented and reinvented was himself." And this is why I like reading Franklin's autobiography.
It's a very short book.
I mean, it's probably less than 100 pages long, very slim volume.
But you see a man in it who springs to life.
He's endlessly curious.
And he's not just curious in the sort of, well, you know, curiosity killed a cat.
Some people you'll find, and kids are like this, they're curious about everything.
But it is a kind of idle curiosity.
And it's a little bit like, well, why does this dog have a bushy tail?
And, you know, that's not Franklin.
Franklin's curiosity is practical.
It's aimed at sort of getting things done.
So he sees construction workers with axes.
They're building a fort. And so he goes, let me time them.
Let me see how long it takes them to get something up.
He's told that Native Americans, the Indians, are very good at concealing their fires.
And so he studies, well, how is it that they conceal their fires?
How is it that they prevent the smoke from being detected?
He investigates the cultural and matrimonial practices of the Moravians.
He does experiments on electricity.
And when a French pedant scholar challenges him and says, you know, what kind of experiments are coming out of America?
Franklin refuses to reply.
He just says, listen, my time is better spent, quote, in making new experiments than in disputing about those already made.
So in other words, my study, my published results speak for themselves.
I'm going to go on and do some new experiments.
So, here we see a restless man in a constant quest for improving things and also improving himself.
This is the notion of the self-made man, not just that you deserve credit for you, but in Franklin's case, it was all about making yourself into a better version And how Franklin did that, I'm going to take up next time,
but I want to just say here that Franklin embodies this notion of the self-directed life, a life that stretches from Franklin's In the 18th century, all the way to mine in the 21st.
This part of America, I think, remains alive.
Whether it will remain alive forever, I don't know.
But it's still alive now.
And for that, we owe Franklin a debt of gratitude.
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