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Oct. 20, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:26
UP, UP AND AWAY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep200
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The media is trying to conceal, or at least downplay, the fact that our economy is starting to unravel.
You can't get all kinds of things, they're unavailable, prices are going up across the board, and there's an easy explanation for all this, the Biden administration.
New evidence shows Joe and Hunter Biden share bank accounts.
Color me not surprised.
Darren Beatty of Revolver News joins me to talk about the Biden administration and the end of accountability.
And I'm also going to talk about Ben Franklin and how his project of the self-made man involved an elaborate program of moral self-improvement.
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.
I just came across an article in Bloomberg News that made me literally laugh out loud.
It's called, America Needs Higher, Longer-Lasting Inflation, and Here's Why.
It's written by some guy named Carl Smith.
It's actually been reprinted a bunch of places.
And it's part of an elaborate media effort to now try to, you may say, cover up or justify the failures of the Biden administration.
You might remember just a few days ago on social media, the Washington Post had an article about how, let's not complain about the breakdown of the supply chains.
Let's not complain about the fact that this or that product is no longer available.
You can't get it.
It's a week long wait or month long wait.
Their point is let's just lower our expectations.
So this is really life as lived in a country moving in a socialist direction.
You just have to get used to less.
You've got to get used to bad news.
The good news is when the bad news isn't so bad.
And this article is a perfect example of this.
The guy goes on to make a kind of crazy kook argument where he, in a sense, says that, listen, the great advantage of inflation, he says, is that, you know, right now when interest rates are really low, if the Federal Reserve needs to lower them further, there's not much place to go.
I mean, there's only, you know, you can just go down to zero.
You can't go below that.
So he goes, if inflation's higher, it gives the Fed a little bit more room to operate.
Imagine a person, a seemingly serious person, arguing for inflation on the grounds that it gives the Fed more tools to tinker with the money supply.
The Fed, by the way, the primary cause of inflation in the first place.
Why? By printing money.
Printing money, by and large, to bankroll the projects of the Biden administration.
So they're essentially imposing a silent tax on the American people.
If something that costs $100 now costs $110, well, that basically means that you're going to have to pay more for it.
Another way to look at it is your paycheck just took a cut, even without the government actually taking a literal bite out of that paycheck.
We're facing not just the prospect of inflation—inflation is actually bad enough—but inflation combined with slow growth.
Now, slow growth plus inflation is called stagflation.
Stagnant plus inflation gives you stagflation.
I don't know if you remember that term from the 1970s.
Stagflation was last given to us by another Democrat, Jimmy Carter.
It ground the economy to a halt.
This is really the main domestic problem that Reagan inherited.
On the foreign policy front, the Soviet Union, yes, but on the domestic front, stagflation a very painful problem to deal with.
And in fact, it took a deep recession to get America out of this pit that the Democrats had dug us into.
And they're doing it again.
In a way, inflation has been something that we have successfully tackled really for almost 30 years, but now it's almost as if we're back to the 1970s.
We've seen the biggest 12-month rise in prices and inflation really since August of 2008, before the financial crisis basically sent the economy into a tailspin.
The Federal Reserve, which has been predicting 2% inflation, which is, by the way, less than half of the over 5% inflation rate we're looking at, the Fed goes, well, you know, we're kind of hoping that this is going to be sort of temporary.
But it's very clear, month after month, as the numbers come in, This is not really temporary.
This is something we're going to have to live with.
And remember, that was the point of this article.
It's trying to get us used to living with inflation as a normal part of our life.
In other words, this kind of government theft of people's spending power is now supposed to be a normal.
Just get used to it.
Stop complaining about it.
Gas prices, by the way, are up 42% over a year ago.
Think about that. Think about that for people.
And by the way, this burden falls more heavily on Republicans.
Why? Because Republicans tend to live not concentrated in the inner cities, but in more rural areas.
They travel longer distances.
And so who do you think pays the price when gas prices soar like this?
Used car prices are up almost 25% from a year ago.
Food prices jumped 1.2% in September alone.
So that extrapolated out is a substantial inflation rate.
And so... All these failures can be pointed not to COVID, not to some inevitable globalization breakdown, but to the policy failures of the Biden administration.
By the way, it's kind of disgusting to see that Pete Buttigieg, who was supposed to be managing this supply chain crisis, has taken a two-month maternity leave.
So this guy doesn't show up for meetings.
He doesn't take calls.
He's really not working.
And the media is acting like, well, wait a minute, you know, shouldn't he be also entitled to maternity leave?
Well, I mean, you're the point man in...
First of all, there's an infrastructure, Bill.
You're supposedly the point man in infrastructure.
You're also the point man with these supply chains.
And you're nowhere to be found.
You're posting, you know, pictures of you, you know, doodling on a swing with your partner.
So this is an embarrassing situation that is...
That is having a real-world effect on ordinary people, pinching them, making their lives more difficult.
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But make sure to use promo code DINESH. There's absolutely nothing in the mainstream media about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
For the media, this topic has almost become like off-limits.
Initially, the approach was, let's deny the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop.
When that became impossible, let's censor the discussion of the laptop.
Digital media, of course, was active in doing that.
And now that it's obvious that the laptop is real, more and more stuff is coming out from the laptop.
The latest revelation, very interesting, and to me, no surprise, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden shared bank accounts.
Of course they did. Why?
Because this is because when Hunter collects money, remember he's the bag man, collects money from the Ukraine, collects money from China.
Remember, the big guy's got to get his cut.
And what easier way for the big guy to get his cut than to pay the bills out of a shared bank account?
That way the money flows naturally from Hunter to Joe Biden.
So all Joe Biden's denial, I knew nothing about my son's business affairs.
He did nothing wrong.
I mean, all of this is just patent lies, manifest absurdities.
And yet, you'd never know it.
Why? Not because the media is hotly denying it.
They're just not covering it.
They're just not covering it because to them, it's a non-story.
Yes, Joe Biden may be a criminal, but he's our criminal.
So we're going to let him basically get away with whatever he did before.
That's just a price that we have to pay.
I think this is, in fact, the shocking but sort of ruthless way in which figures at the New York Times, Washington Post, and so on are looking at this matter.
Now, in the latest revelation, it's very clear that these funds, there's a lawyer, a guy named Eric Schwerin, who is...
I sent a bunch of emails, and it shows very clearly that he is the connection between Joe and Hunter Biden.
He knows that their finances are co-mingled, and he's working on Joe Biden's taxes.
He's discussing the father and son paying each other's bills.
He's also fielding requests for a book deal.
So even though Joe Biden is vice president, this is not going through the official White House or the vice president's office, where presumably there would be some people looking over it.
Is this appropriate? Is this ethical?
No, all of this is being handled outside of that.
And the emails are really telling.
I mean, let's remember, by the way of background, that Hunter Biden has already said that he complained that half of his salary is going to pay his father's bills.
This is what he said in a 2019 text to his daughter Naomi.
He goes, I hope you can all do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years.
Well, of course you're paying the bills.
You're the bag man. You're the entry point for all this corrupt money, so naturally they all bill it to you.
And then separately, here is Hunter Biden saying, quote, My dad has been using most of the lines on this account.
And what he means is that most of the charges appearing on this particular bank account are not his, Hunter Biden's, but his dad's.
Now, Jonathan Turley has a kind of amusing analogy.
He basically says, he has an article called, He pointed out that Houdini, in one of his great kind of successful stunts, was able to make an elephant disappear.
But Joe Biden here has been able to make the whole circus disappear.
He's done it how? Basically because he's got a colluding media, a media that pretends that there is really no circus.
Oh, I don't see a circus. Yeah, the circus is still going on.
But you pretend that you don't see what you do see.
And Turley, I think rightly, is calling now for a special counsel because there is no way that this corruption is going to be either exposed by the media or acknowledged by the Biden administration.
Therefore, the only way, the only way, and I grant it's unlikely because why would these people want to appoint a special counsel to look into their own corrupt dealings when they know there's all kinds of corruption there?
Let's remember, by the way, not just going off of Hunter Biden's laptop, although...
That's a pretty good source.
But also the testimony of Tony Bobulinski, a business partner of both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, present at meetings with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
So direct evidence here of corruption.
There's someone in one of these articles who basically makes the point He goes, listen, if this guy was not the president, there is no way that prosecutors would not be not just looking at him, but implicating him.
So what we have here is money laundering.
We have corruption. We have influence peddling.
We obviously have the appearance of corruption.
And all of this, I think, is a defining feature of Joe Biden's career.
This is how Joe Biden has the enormous wealth that he's piled up.
He certainly hasn't done it through government office.
He's done it really by selling off American foreign policy, American domestic policy.
Essentially, he's been following the Clinton model.
The Clinton started it, renting out policy for donations to the Clinton Foundation.
For Biden, it's a little different.
You don't pay the foundation.
You basically pay Hunter.
Hunter is kind of the...
But not just Hunter. Obviously, James Biden, Frank Biden, the whole Biden family.
There's a son-in-law involved.
All these guys are filling their wallets with foreign cash, bringing it home, and apparently paying off the big guy.
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Racial hoaxes are now a defining feature of progressive culture.
This may seem odd to say you might think that progressive culture would be alert to incidents of racism, but no, there appear actually to be more hoaxes than genuine incidents.
Even when we look more closely at supposed incidents, they turn out to be ambiguous or bogus or complete hoaxes.
Now, I've talked about racial hoaxes on campus, which are, well, epidemic may be too strong a word, but let's just say widespread.
There are now literally hundreds of examples of them.
But here's the racial hoax I just read about in society, in Atlanta, Georgia.
There was a big uproar in Douglasville, one of the suburban areas of Atlanta, and it was because somebody was sending these racially charged notes.
The person was claiming to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
And they gave a self-description.
The perpetrator said, you know, I'm six feet tall, I'm a white male, I've got a long red beard, I don't live in this neighborhood.
But basically, black people in the neighborhood were getting these racially provocative messages, threatening them.
In fact, threatening to burn their houses down and kill them.
So naturally, people began to freak out.
Well, here's a more example of systemic racism.
The Ku Klux Klan is not some defunct group, but here it is, you know, still operating and operating in sort of what appears to be a kind of respectable neighborhood in Atlanta.
And then the Douglasville police apprehend the person who's doing it.
Well, yes, it's a black female.
It's a black female perpetrator.
Who apparently is not being named, and I'm really not sure why, but they always conceal the identity of these racial hoaxers as if to say, well, why?
I mean, this is essentially a hate crime in reverse.
This is implicating white people in a hate crime that doesn't exist.
This is faking it.
So... So, these notes, by the way, were disseminated in February and March.
They were received by at least seven black people in the neighborhood.
They used the N-word.
They talked about killing your kids.
And then the police noticed that, look, there's one person doing this.
They have similar handwriting, similar tone, similar verbiage.
They were finally able to identify the person.
They had a search warrant.
And boom, there's the evidence.
This is the perpetrator.
Now, what's going on here?
There's obviously some kind of pathology at work.
I think what the pathology is is this.
These are people, and this seems like a strange thing to say, who want to live in a racist society.
They want to live in a racist society because then they can point to the racism to explain their own shortcomings.
These are miserable people who are doing poorly in life, and they've been given an all-purpose explanation for it by the left.
Racism is keeping you down.
That's why you didn't get that job.
That's why you didn't get that promotion.
That's why you're behind on your payments.
That's why you owe all this money.
It's racism.
And if it's racism that's not obvious, it's racism that's covert.
So these people then become, well, where's the racism?
And not seeing it, they essentially begin to say, well, it's got to be there.
I got to... Maybe I gotta help the evidence along.
I gotta create it. It's almost like the cop who goes, you know, yeah, I bet that guy did it.
I think he did it. I think he did it.
But no, I don't have any evidence on him, so maybe I should plant the evidence.
Not because I'm, you know, going after the wrong guy.
I think I'm going after the right guy, but I can't find the proof that I need, so I'm gonna put it there.
So this is the equivalent of that.
It's not a pathology of one person.
It's a pathology of a whole progressive culture.
And I say this because, as I say, when the person is caught, if this was really an aberrant behavior, the idea would be, this is terrible.
In fact, it's an insult to real racism.
We need to severely prosecute these people because they are making us look bad.
They're making racism itself into a joke.
But no, there's always an effort to protect these people.
It's sort of like, well, you know, Maybe racism made them do it.
Maybe racism is so elaborate that it caused some disorder in their minds.
So there's a complete refusal to give any kind of agency or responsibility to these perpetrators.
These perpetrators who, as I repeat, are disturbed not because they are living in a racist society, but because they aren't.
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Feel the difference. Here's a piece of good news on the racial hoaxer front.
Jussie Smollett, or as Dave Chappelle calls him, Juicy Smollier, is finally going to trial.
He's finally going to trial on multiple charges of lying to the police.
Now, he almost got away with his crime, with his hoax.
And he did it because of the complicity of Chicago prosecutor Kim Fox.
Kim Fox was, perhaps is, a mega fan of Smollett.
It always helps to know the prosecutor when you're in trouble.
And so Jussie Smollett was able to coax Kim Fox.
Into essentially dropping all the charges against him without any real explanation.
This is how these progressives operate.
It's like, well, so what?
We're just going to drop them.
And we don't have to explain any kind of double standard because who, after all, is going to hold us accountable?
Well, the good news is that there was a special prosecutor appointed in the case.
This was partly because of the demand of the police who were so outraged that they had done all this detective work.
Let's remember, let's recap here, you know, Smollett.
Claimed that he had been assaulted while out to get a Subway sandwich in the middle of the night in Chicago, in a kind of upscale neighborhood, by these MAGA Trumpsters who beat him up and actually were trying to hang him with a noose.
Kind of comically, when the cops got there, this is actually somewhat later, he's in his apartment, he still has the noose around his neck.
See, see, see, right here, this is what these people tried to do to me.
Well, turns out that the cops were pretty soon, they smelled a rat.
Of course, the rat was Jussie.
They smelled a rat and they're like, wait a minute.
And they found out that he paid these two Nigerians, the Osonduro brothers, to $3,000.
And they went to a store, they bought the noose.
So the cops had the goods on this whole thing.
They busted this racket.
Basically, apparently, you know, this was not a case of Jussie Smollett trying to draw attention to racism.
No. It was basically a career move.
This was, in fact, pointed out by one of the officers, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson.
He says he staged the attack to, quote, promote his career.
So think about this.
Racial hoax as a career move.
Now, even though Jussie got away with really nothing, he did some community service.
He agreed to forfeit a $10,000 bond.
I mean, think of what that means to a famous actor who's making all this money.
It's really a nothing.
But the special prosecutor has decided, no, this is too much.
And so, although Jussie went to a judge to say, basically, I can't be prosecuted again.
A deal's a deal. This is Jussie's lawyer, as of to say, No, no, no, no, no.
We made an agreement with Kim Fox and that's the end of the matter.
But the judge goes, no, that deal may apply to her prosecution of the hoax, but you are still vulnerable to a charge of lying to the police.
I believe six separate charges of lying.
And so, will Jussie Smollett finally get his comeuppance?
I'm really hoping that this is the case, because this guy is almost like the poster boy of racial hoaxes.
He's probably inspiring racial hoaxes around the country as we speak, and the fact that he gets away with it shows these lesser-known perpetrators that there are no consequences to falsely accusing people.
There are no consequences to writing racial notes against yourself.
But he's also a criminal.
And he needs to be held accountable in court for it.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast Dr.
Darren Beattie. Darren is the CEO and the publisher of Revolver News, which is for me indispensable.
They do terrific, in-depth investigative reports.
You should check them out at revolver.news.
Darren, thanks for coming on again.
You know, I've been reading your exposés, one on top of the other, and I'm sort of drawing a big picture out of them.
Maybe we can start with this.
It's almost as if you're depicting America as the late Roman Empire.
Things are sort of falling apart.
The wheels are coming off.
The place is overextended.
There's no accountability.
People are fiddling while Rome burns.
And the opposition, which is supposed to keep things in check, is either absent or derelict itself.
And so as a result... You've just got a system completely unhinged and out of control.
Am I going too far or am I accurately summarizing the picture that emerges from the individual portraits that you paint in your articles?
No, I think that's fairly accurate, and it provides a kind of general rubric within which to understand some of the most important trends going on in our politics in our country.
I think one of those trends, which is a consistent theme throughout Revolver's work, both investigative and investigative, In terms of the opinions and analysis is this repurposing of the national security apparatus in the United States domestically in order to silence and suppress energies associated with populism,
with Trump's victory, but also increasingly so energies even on the populist left and really anything that would seriously challenge or dare to contradict the increasingly Narrow scope of acceptable opinions within the American regime.
That's a big development.
And how does this connect to this notion that America is sort of this big, bloated empire that's on its last legs and sort of running off of inertia?
I think it connects in a number of ways.
Firstly, I think that we're seeing America's transition into a full-on ideological state, which we might contrast with something like China, which seems increasingly pragmatic.
America's in an ideological state.
And the ideology of wokeness, which is pretty close to the official ideology of the American regime, is increasingly integrated into every single institution and how those institutions function, which we can get to later in the Buttigieg article.
And I think what this means is, internally, you're going to see more and more totalitarianism domestically in order for the dying empire to maintain control over its citizens.
And internationally, you're going to see an increasing collapse in prestige and power and ability to project force, and you're going to see other emerging geopolitical powers increasingly look at the United States not as traditionally a model to follow, but as a model to avoid, which is something that we can talk about as well.
Darren, I'm just listening to you, and I'm putting your comments in a little bit of historical perspective, by which I mean, if I look at them, if you had spoken this way to me 10 years ago, or certainly in the 1980s or 90s, I would have thought that I was in a madhouse.
In other words, this would bear no resemblance to my experience of America at all, and the idea that we would mobilize the national security state against domestic citizens, parents, It would seem downright crazy.
So the question I have for you is, was there a particular fulcrum, a turning point, at which we sort of went from being the good guys fighting the bad Soviet Union, the guys who were trying to make America a prosperous society and an example to the world?
How did we become, in a sense, this monster that we now have to fear our own government?
Right. Well, that's a very interesting question, and of course it depends what dimension we want to answer it, because I think there's some extent to which now we're simply noticing the evolution and crystallization of trends and underlying currents that have existed in this country for a long time.
It's simply for various reasons we didn't quite...
I think that's an issue, perhaps, for a separate conversation.
I think, to the immediate question as to, like, was there an inflection point or so forth, I don't think there was a single inflection point, but I do think that...
There was sort of an underlying system in place, and a lot was baked into the cake.
And the major disruptive points that helped to catalyze the position that we're in now, certainly September 11, 2001.
This served as the kind of pretext upon which to build a lot of the...
Apparatus that exists today.
It served as the pretext to erode a lot of the liberties and protections that may have helped us out in this position.
And generally, I think it just served as an inflection point in terms of the scope, the power of the government, and the bureaucratic apparatus.
That's definitely one.
I think the 2008 financial collapse was another sort of inflection point that helped to sort of exacerbate a lot of those pre-existing trends toward extreme sort of More equality in society and so forth.
And then, not to be dismissed at all, and perhaps the most important, there was the rise of pop, which was a profound challenge to what they call the Rules-based order, which is of course rule-breaking mafia that controls the country essentially.
They call it the rules-based order, the international order and so forth.
And the rise of populism first in Britain as Brexit and then as the election of Trump was terrifying and profoundly disruptive.
And insofar as the free and open internet was a vehicle to allow this to happen, the internet had to be crushed and censored, which we've seen so forth.
And we just saw a profound backlash and a profound consolidation of power across every institution in order to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
I think it is very important to understand that the national security apparatus from the very beginning perceived the populist energies as a profound threat.
And if I might even introduce something somewhat controversial, I do think it's somewhat contingent, somewhat not contingent that Russia played a big role in all of this.
Because there was the invasion of Crimea in 2014, I believe, This was a profound threat to NATO, or perceived as a threat.
And then just a year after, you had the Brexit and populist phenomenon, and they decided, well, you know what?
These are both profound national security threats.
We can kill two birds with one stone by linking the Russia issue with the populist issue in people's minds, however divorced this is from reality.
And a byproduct of that is the generalization, which is to say that any expression of populism, whether it be Immigration restriction and so forth.
These are framed not simply as things they disagree with, not simply as white supremacist, racist, the usual terms.
They're recategorized in this context as national security threats.
And when opinions are national security threats, that means there's no more room for discussion, which I think is essentially the point that we're at now.
When we come back, I want to look at a couple of Revolver articles and exposés that illustrate the themes we've been talking about.
We'll be right back. If you ever browse the internet in incognito mode, well, it's not as incognito as you think.
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Thank you very much.
Now, you're quoting philosopher Hannah Arendt, but it's a very interesting take on this absence of Pete Buttigieg, which I referred to earlier in the podcast.
Where he essentially disappears for a couple of months, all kinds of problems on the horizon.
And most conservatives, their take on it was Pete Buttigieg is neglecting his duties.
But you have a completely different take.
Tell us what that is.
Right. Well, it was sort of foreshadowed by that, I would say, pretty apt quote from a rant.
I'm glad I had some occasion to use it.
And it's essentially that, is that Buttigieg could be gone.
He could be gone indefinitely.
And Basically, it would have no difference on the functioning of government.
And this really underscores kind of the nature of what our government actually is.
We call it a democracy, and to some extent this presupposes that the elective officials make a decisive difference.
And I think we can kind of exaggerate the effect of this.
And far from simply Buttigieg, I think basically all cabinet officials could go on vacation, including perhaps especially Biden could go on vacation, and we wouldn't really know the difference.
And to some extent that speaks to their ineffectual nature as political operatives, but I think more so it speaks to just the overwhelming force of bureaucratic inertia and how that determines how things really function.
Some people, Darren, might interpret what you're saying that we have a non-ideological government that is bureaucratic at its core.
There are political appointees who kind of surf in at the top, but that's actually not what you're saying.
I think what you're saying is that the ideology is baked into the bureaucracy itself, isn't it?
Absolutely, yes.
So just because it's a entrenched government, a bureaucratic government does not mean that it's sort of neutral and technocratic.
No, it's profoundly ideological.
The ideology extends throughout the bureaucratic apparatus.
Which is also a relevant feature here with respect to our Buttigieg analysis.
Because the case of Buttigieg, he and basically any Democrat elected official is swimming along the same strong current determined by the political direction of the bureaucracy.
So if he's swimming with that current and the current is profoundly strong...
He can, you know, he can get out of the water and the water will go in the same direction.
Whereas for Republicans, it's precisely the opposite.
And to some degree, this underscores the importance of Republican political appointees, but it also underscores their dilemma.
Because, you know, there's this typical thing that libertarians used to say, which is, You know what?
I'm not really for Democrats or Republicans.
I'm simply for divided government because that means nothing can get done.
Well, the reality, given the direction that the bureaucracy is in, is that a Republican-controlled White House Congress and judiciary, for that matter, would still be a profoundly divided government because of what the bureaucracy is.
And in fact, it would still be an unfair fight simply because of the profound asymmetry involved in just how big, how powerful, what a behemoth the bureaucracy is.
And so it's one of those things that points to one of the bottlenecks to progress and it points to just how important it is if we get into the White House again, when we get in again, to just have the political appointees ready on day one to do whatever is in their power To bring that bureaucratic control under heel.
And in that sense, the Republican political appointees matter far more than the Democrat ones because they're swimming against that profound current.
I mean, many people probably don't realize we have 2 million civilian employees from your article, more than 1.3 million active duty military, and you've got 4,000 or so political appointees who are trying to sort of run this giant operation.
But you're saying the operation runs itself.
They run the political appointees as much as the other way around.
And so for Republicans, you have people who are singing out of a different sheet music, and it's a constant battle to get them to sing your tune.
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Speaking at a dinner honoring Nobel laureates from around the country, the president at the time, John F. Kennedy, said, This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
Now here, from an earlier time, when a Democrat could praise Thomas Jefferson, Kennedy was talking about the sort of Jefferson as a Renaissance man.
Here's a guy who's a writer.
He's a scholar. He's an inventor.
He's a farmer.
He's a diplomat. He is the author of the Declaration of Independence.
He becomes president. All in one man, Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most remarkable man of his era, at least in the United States.
But then we turn to George Washington.
He was another remarkable man.
He was a farmer, a whiskey entrepreneur, a military leader, a statesman.
And then we turn to Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, who was a publisher.
He wrote an almanac.
He was an inventor. He was a civic organizer.
He was a diplomat. He was a philanthropist.
So with the founders, you've got people of varied genius.
All concentrated together in one place.
It's very hard to think of how we could do that if we ever tried to again.
Now, I've been doing a series on the founding, which is kind of coming to a close.
This is part of my PragerU video series, five videos on the five leading founders.
It's called The Making of America.
You can watch it on PragerU.com.
And PragerU, by the way, does great work.
They put out terrific videos on a wide variety of subjects, typically releasing them one a week.
And... What I want to talk about today is Franklin's project of self-improvement.
So self-invention for Franklin wasn't just, hey, I've got to invent myself, and I've got to produce a kind of character that is kind of interesting for the world to see.
No, for Franklin, it's, I've got to produce an improved version of myself.
Now, how do you get from here to there?
How do you get from who you are to a better version of yourself?
That is your, quote, character.
Well, for Franklin, he had a kind of interesting strategy.
His strategy was to make a list of all the virtues.
And in the end, Franklin came up with 13 virtues.
They're virtues like temperance, which is moderation, a classical virtue.
Interestingly, silence is on that list.
And silence here means, I'm quoting Franklin, speak not but what may benefit others or yourself.
Avoid trifling conversations.
So don't engage in petty gossip, and sometimes the best thing to say is nothing.
Order. Resolution.
Courage. Frugality.
Quote, Industry, which basically means effort, hard work, creativity, sincerity, which is to say don't put on the camouflage, don't be deceitful, and then justice.
So here you've got Franklin. He's got this list of 13 virtues.
I haven't named all of them.
And what he would do is he would kind of make a column with all the virtues running down one side of the list.
And then he would list the seven days of the week, Monday through Sunday.
And his idea was to take a single virtue and emphasize it.
So he's trying to practice all the virtues, yes, but let's say this week it's going to be silence.
This week it's going to be order.
And at the end of each day, he would do a mental review to see if he had actually implemented the virtue and made progress in achieving this virtue.
His goal here, through repetition, and the idea of doing this for a week, is that if you can somehow master a virtue over seven days, it then becomes part of your character.
It becomes embedded in you.
Aristotle famously said, habit is second nature.
So you take your nature, but you can create second nature through habit.
And that's really what Franklin is trying to do.
So each week he focuses on a single virtue, trying to make it his own.
And at the end of the 13 weeks, he kind of takes stock, and then he looks to see how he is faring, not just on any particular virtue, but on all of them put together.
He's very whimsical and amusing about all this.
In fact, he talks about combating what he says is his great errata.
Errata is basically his mistakes.
When he falls short, he's trying to reduce his errata.
Now, he says that virtues are important, not merely to do them, but also to display them.
And here you get a little bit of the self-promoting character of Ben Franklin.
He was an entrepreneur who not only wanted to do good, but to look good.
And so he says, for example, that he's industrious and frugal, but he wants to look frugal.
So he says for this reason, he avoids all appearances.
To the contrary, he says, I dress plainly.
I'm never seen at a place of idle diversion.
I never go out publicly fishing or shooting.
And he even says that to show that he was a humble guy who was like ready to do menial work, he says that, that I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores through the streets on a wheelbarrow.
So he doesn't really need to do this, but he puts all this paper in a wheelbarrow.
He wants to show that he's not some highfalutin publisher.
He's an ordinary guy kind of going to work the same way a carpenter might take the tools of his trade.
Franklin always said that the one virtue he had trouble with? Humility.
He said he was proud.
In fact, he says in his autobiography that a Quaker once confronted him and said, you know, you're generally believed to be a very proud man.
And Franklin comments then in his autobiography, he says, quote, I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, meaning humility.
He's having trouble really being humble.
He must have a fairly high opinion of himself.
He says, quote, So in other words, what he's saying is that if you can't achieve the thing itself, the next best thing is to at least look the part.
The next best thing is to at least appear humble, even though you're not really humble.
So for Franklin, this was the virtue that gave him trouble.
There was a kind of, perhaps, vanity based upon Franklin's recognition of his own abilities, which were, in fact, considerable.
But here is a man, and I admire him at the end of it, because here he is trying to make a better person of himself, trying to reflect a country, America, that is not just ingenious and creative and inventive and entrepreneurial, but also honest and also just.
Today, guys, is the 200th podcast for me.
I'm very excited. I've been enjoying this.
It's a lot of fun. I hope you're having as much fun as I am.
And remember, please subscribe to the podcast.
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Let's take today's question.
It's actually from one of my number one fans, I can say, Caitlin.
And so, listen.
Hi Dinesh, this is Caitlin.
My question is, why are so many rich people and celebrities leftists or even socialists?
Do they realize that a big socialist goal is to impose heavy taxes on the rich?
In other words, what's in it for them?
It seems they should be rooting for conservatives who believe people should be able to keep most of what they earn.
Thanks. Caitlin, that's a really good question, and I think I've got a couple of ways to answer it.
The first one is just this, and that is that for a lot of rich people, once they've made a certain amount of money, or if they have inherited money, Well, if they've inherited the money, they often don't know the value of it.
We all know a number of examples of wealthy people who have just gotten it from their parents, and so they are more likely to be leftists.
But even some people who earn a great deal of money become leftists because, well, it's the diminishing marginal value of the next dollar.
So think about it this way.
Middle class and your income goes up, let's just say, by $20,000 a year, it's going to make a real difference for you because now you can afford a nicer car, you can make that addition to your kitchen that you've been thinking about.
Or if you're upper middle class and you get a raise, it means something to you because you can do things with that money that you otherwise would not be able to do.
But you've got a lot of people in this country now, quite a large number, who have hit such a big number in terms of their net worth.
That that additional dollar means nothing to them.
It doesn't change their lifestyle in any way.
They've already got more, not just enough, but more than enough.
And so what happens in those situations is that they pivot and they start voting not based upon their economic interests, which have become, in a sense, tangential to them, but start voting based on their sort of, you can say, liberal social values.
So then they begin to think things like, well, you know, we've got a...
The earth is in trouble!
Or we've got to stand up for the forgotten man.
They develop all these ideas.
Some of them, by the way, that they've picked up in college or they've been propagandized through the media.
So they begin to now seek civic recognition and a perception of civic virtue.
They want to think of themselves not as greedy, selfish people who kind of grubbed their way to the top.
They want to think of themselves as noble philanthropists who are willing to set their financial interests aside.
So it's ultimately a form of moral self-gratification.
I think this is... I can't say I'm doing full justice to this topic, but this is part of the reason why there's a good number of rich people today who, at one time, you could safely predict That people who are in the upper tier of society are going to lean or vote Republican.
But you can't make that prediction anymore.
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