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Nov. 10, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:24
THE GOOD SAMARITAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep215
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Is Kyle Rittenhouse the Good Samaritan?
It seems like an outrageous idea, but hear me out on it.
And when exposed, the role of the media in promoting the Russia collusion lie is important because not only have they never admitted it, they're still doing it.
Colorado Representative Ken Buck joins me.
He's going to talk about the outrages of the Biden administration at the border.
And I'm going to discuss a new university in formation with centrist and conservative scholars to counter the ideological indoctrination of elite mainstream universities.
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'm your host, Dinesh D'Souza.
And I want to discuss the Rittenhouse case, but kind of in the context of the biblical parable of the Good Samaritans.
Seems like a parable that has nothing to do with Rittenhouse, but I think it does.
Now, as the parable goes, the Good Samaritan is a kind of...
A big-hearted guy, and he's coming down the road, and he sees the victim who has been beaten up by thieves, and he takes care of him, and he provides first aid, and he helps him to get back, in a sense, to normal.
And the Good Samaritan is commended for providing this kind of solicitude, this kind of aid.
And it's a morally unambiguous case.
Who can be against the Good Samaritan?
But here's an interesting conundrum, kind of a thought experiment, and it puts moral reasoning to the test.
What if the Good Samaritan had come early, when the thieves were beating up the victim?
What should the Good Samaritan do?
Should he say, oh, you know what?
I'm the Good Samaritan. I can't get involved.
I'm not going to use violence against violence.
I'm going to wait until they finish beating the guy up and then run away.
Then I will move in and do my Good Samaritan thing.
Well, obviously, this would be ridiculous.
If the Good Samaritan has the ability and the means, he should intervene and prevent the violence from occurring in the first place.
Now, this brings me to Kyle Rittenhouse.
We're having a little bit of a family debate, by the way.
Not me and Debbie.
It's actually with Debbie's daughter, my stepdaughter, Juliana.
And, you know, she's at Texas A&M, and she's, you know, picking up from the culture.
Kyle Rittenhouse is a bad guy.
Kyle Rittenhouse is a vigilante.
I mean, she's echoing, really, what has been said about the Rittenhouse case for a whole year.
I'll just give you a couple of examples of what we're talking about.
Here is Ayanna Pressley.
A 17-year-old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines armed with an AR-15.
And similarly, Ilhan Omar, a domestic terrorist executed two people.
Blah, blah, blah. So this is the mood.
Let's remember to continue.
Facebook shut down Kyle Rittenhouse's page.
PayPal and GoFundMe prevented him from raising money for his defense.
So there was a coordinated effort to demonize this kid, make him into the bad guy.
And in fact, while Republicans sort of put their distance, you know, the GOP stayed away, even the NRA stayed away.
So this kid has been, in a sense, going through this virtually alone, virtually alone.
Now, The point that Juliana is making is, why was he there?
Why was he there, guys? He didn't even have to be there.
He doesn't even come from that state.
He's not from Kenosha.
Well, I mean, we grant that.
And I suppose it could be said in her defense that, you know, if I were Kyle Rittenhouse's parents, I would be reluctant to send him.
He's only 17 years old at the time, and it would seem to be sort of asking for trouble.
On the other hand, and this is important, the simple truth of it is that if you're living in a society, in this case Kenosha, Wisconsin, where you have looters and marauders, and by the way, everybody who asks, why was Kyle Rittenhouse there, never asks, they don't seem to think about, why were the looters there?
Why were the rioters there?
Why were the arsonists there?
They weren't from Kenosha.
They all came from other places.
They came, many of them, from out of state.
They came to cause the trouble that Kyle Rittenhouse was there to sort of tamp down.
And the truth of it is that if you're living in a sort of lawless environment where the authorities have sort of backed off, the authorities have stepped down either because they don't want to get involved or they don't have the means, the ability to stop what's going on, And then I would say that in that kind of environment, we do need people like Kyle Rittenhouse.
And we may not need 17-year-olds to do it, but we do need people who are going to protect businesses, are going to protect lives, are going to protect the safety of citizens.
Now, as we go into this case, and by the way, guys, I'm going to be doing tomorrow, this is at 7.30 on Locals, I'm going to go into this case like nobody's business, getting into some of the details of it because they're eye-opening at every level.
Here I'm going to touch on it because they're too juicy to leave out.
To summarize for people who were born yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse is accused of gunning down three people, killing two, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and wounding one, Gage Grosskreutz, who has actually been testifying in the trial.
Now, the remarkable thing about this is I have to commend the video journalists who have been covering this.
And these are conservatives. And the simple truth of it is these video journalists, in my view, are going to save this kid's life.
Why? Because they have put and recorded this is what actually happened.
Because if it wasn't for them, the prosecution would be lying through its teeth.
The detectives would be lying through their teeth.
And I say this because they are doing it now.
They're lying. The only problem is that they have the video that is there to refute them.
By the way, this just shows you the importance of the video evidence.
It also shows you really why, in January 6th, the government is holding on to the video.
They're not releasing the 14,000 hours of video for exactly this reason.
It blows up their narrative, exposes their lies.
They're hoping that Obama judges and Clinton judges will basically crucify these people and do it based upon selective snippets that the government has put.
So it's all a frame-up. The whole thing is a fraud.
Now, let's look at how the fraud is playing out in the Rittenhouse case.
In the Rittenhouse case, you've got, on the video, a bunch of people, leftists, Antifa-types, chasing Rittenhouse.
That's obvious from the video.
You can see it, right?
And here comes a detective, a guy named Adatamian, and he goes, No, they're really not chasing Rittenhouse.
The way I see it, they're merely running in the same direction.
Now, if you didn't have a video, you'd be like, oh yeah, the detective was there, he saw it.
But this guy is obviously a dirty cop.
There's no question about it. And we've had dirty cops for a long time.
The only difference now is the dirty cop is busted because of the video.
Now, let's turn to the medic.
And our stepdaughter, Juliana, was like, this guy's a medic.
You know, she's like, Mom, you know, he shot a medic.
Well, first of all, let's talk a little bit about this guy, Grosskreutz.
Yes, he is a medic.
He's also a felon.
He's also a mental patient.
And he's also a medic with a gun.
Why is a medic, A, carrying a gun, B, loading his gun, C, pointing the loaded gun at Kyle Rittenhouse?
That's when Kyle Rittenhouse shot him.
So those were the circumstances that led to this.
Now, this medic goes up to testify, and his testimony has an element of comedy, because he says that at one point, he says, you know, I wasn't trying to hurt Rittenhouse.
In fact, he says he was trying to help Rittenhouse.
He goes, the reason that he was running toward Rittenhouse and the reason that he drew his gun is he was trying to prevent Rittenhouse from harming either other people or himself.
So this guy presents himself as he was not up to any trouble on the scene at all.
Yes, right. Now, here's a little clip, and this is just a short to give you a feel of what it's like inside the courtroom of this guy, Grosskreutz, being cross-examined by the defense.
Listen. Okay, so when you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?
Okay. Correct. It wasn't until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun, now your hands down, pointed at him, that he fired, right?
Correct. I mean, there you go.
Boom. There you have it.
In a nutshell, and the context of this couldn't be more clear, this guy, Grosskreutz, at one point did put his hands up.
And no, Rittenhouse didn't shoot him then.
It's only when he reached for his loaded gun and pointed it directly at Rittenhouse, that's when Rittenhouse shot him.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the, you could almost call it, textbook definition of self-defense.
So if there's any justice in the world, and if there's any justice in that courtroom, Kyle Rittenhouse will walk.
And will walk because he did really nothing wrong, as far as I can see, that day.
He was, in some respects, the Good Samaritan.
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I want to turn back to the aftermath of the Durham indictment of Danchenko and Igor Danchenko.
And I want to talk about the role of the media.
A very good representative of this is Rachel Maddow.
Now, Rachel Maddow has been caught, you may almost say with her pants down, because for years, this character has been promoting the Russia collusion line.
Now, she hasn't done it by herself.
She's had plenty of help from people at MSNBC. She's had people on like Adam Schiff.
By the way, Adam Schiff was beautifully confronted about his systematic disinformation on The View, no less.
And, you know, you could see Adam Schiff putting on his constipated look.
He doesn't expect to be confronted there.
He thought he was in friendly territory.
But they point out that your credibility is gone.
Gone. And so is Rachel Maddow's because this is the kind of stuff, if I can remind you, this was just days before Trump's inauguration.
Rachel Maddow says, she goes, I'm not quoting her, we're about to find out if the new president of our country is going to do what Russia wants once he's commander-in-chief of the U.S. military starting noon on Friday.
And she basically implies that Trump is going to withdraw troops from Thank you, President, for Putin having helped Trump win the election.
I mean, outrageous stuff. Now, in fact, Trump did no such thing.
In fact, he increased troops to the border, so it just turned out to be a flat-out false prediction.
But it was a prediction premised on the idea that there was ongoing collusion with Russia.
So what do you think Rachel Maddow is saying now?
Now that she knows that the whole thing was based on a lie, now that she knows that Christopher Steele, the guy, the former British spy who worked for Fusion GPS, this is the guy, by the way, who created the so-called dossier that Hillary Clinton paid for.
The dossier was then fed to the FBI. It became the basis of an FBI investigation.
Now, what makes this all so corrupt is that Danchenko himself, who is, by the way, the source, You know, this guy, Christopher Steele, implied that he had Russian sources.
In fact, he had none. This Danchenko guy is of Russian origin, but he worked at the Brookings Institution, a left-wing think tank.
Danchenko also implied he had other sources, including a guy named Sergei Millian.
But in fact, we now know he never talked to Millian.
So the whole thing is one lie on top of the other.
Basically, this Danchenko guy got his lies from a Democratic operative A guy named Charles Dolan, a guy with a kind of long history in the Democratic Party.
He's a Clinton guy. This is a guy who's worked for the DNC. This is a guy who's been appointed to various boards by the Democrats.
So this guy is feeding lies to Danchenko.
And Danchenko is adding lies of his own.
So, for example, this guy apparently is the source, Dolan, about the story that Trump was cavorting with prostitutes in Russia.
Apparently, Danchenko added his own details about the so-called pee tape, which he completely made up.
And all of this was promulgated in respectable media outlets.
So, you know, you see that there's been really a barrage of misinformation.
And you'd think that these outlets would now try to correct them.
But interestingly, if you look at CNN, disinformation outlet number one, MSNBC number two, the New York Times number three, there's virtually no coverage.
Even the Washington Post, which did a little bit of a mea culpa, said something like this.
The Durham indictment raises troubling questions about the conduct of media organizations, including the Washington Post.
End of story. Nothing more.
Not that we've been perpetrating lies for months, if not years.
These lies have done incalculable damage, but none of this.
And they're lying still.
And here's Rachel Maddow.
Covering now the Durham indictments, she goes, this is a Trumpian ploy by Durham.
To do what? A mission to demonize the investigation of Trump's associations with Russia.
So what you see here is, you know, incurable, I won't say ignorance, because I don't think Rachel Maddow is all that dumb.
She's pretty dumb, don't get me wrong.
This is kind of why she won't have me on her show, because it's sort of like one hand clapping.
But nevertheless, she's smart enough to know that she's been busted.
She's smart enough to know that these are lies on tape, you might say.
This is why this guy is probably going to go to jail for them.
And it's all there in the indictment.
But her point is, why admit it?
My audience wants me to lie.
No one's going to hold me accountable for lying.
I just got a lucrative contract for lying.
So I'm really going to keep up the lying because it's in my interest to lie.
And lying is kind of why I'm here.
So we are at the dismaying recognition that in a lot of these places, lying is part of the job description.
Journalism is really not about the truth.
It is about perpetrating the lies that your audience is paying you to deliver to them.
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You've got to use discount code AMERICA. What percentage do you think of American society is gay or is LGBTQ? According to Alfred Kinsey in the Kinsey Report, published in the earlier part of the 20th century, it's about 10%.
Now, Kinsey's data was all flawed.
It was essentially a giant mess.
Most people have put that number, including clinical researchers, at somewhere between 3 and 5%.
But according to a new survey by George Bonner, the survey is for the Arizona Christian University.
And it's kind of stunning on the face of it.
30% of millennials identify as LGBTQ. Come again?
30%? What?
Almost one-third of the entire millennial population is lesbian or gay or one of those other alphabet categories?
Or transgender? It seems preposterous.
Now, Barna, of course, who is an expert at collecting this data, never really seems to grasp the significance of it.
In fact, he just says something like...
With these findings come new ideas and choices regarding marriage and family.
Consequently, a social institution, he means the family, that used to be a safe harbor has now become a battleground.
And Barna says, I invite you to look upon our youngest adults as a group that we might be able to help navigate through the challenges in which we have immersed them.
So, I consider this to be utterly useless commentary, supposedly by a kind of Christian authority.
But what I want to do is try to make sense of this data, because obviously, I don't deny that 30% of millennials, and it's even higher if you look at millennials who are currently between the ages of 18 and 24, that number is as high as 39%.
What?! Claim to be LGBTQ. Now, you know, at the first point, I'm thinking to myself, is this a case of, like, biological evolution moving the species in a new direction?
And if so, it's clearly not a progressive direction.
Why? Because evolution is all about survival.
It's all about perpetuating your own genes.
And so if you had Darwin here to talk about it, he would say, well, this is a very disturbing sign.
This is not a sign of progress.
It's a sign of regress.
In fact, think about it. In any animal species, can you have homosexuality rates of 39%?
The species would basically start to go extinct.
So it would wipe itself out.
So is Homo sapiens wiping itself out?
No. First of all, this trend is observable only in a certain generation and only in America.
You might say you could find it, maybe you could find it in Scandinavia if you went and checked over there.
It's in the West. It's not occurring anywhere else.
And what this tells you is it's not a biological trend.
It's a cultural trend.
And so what's happening here is it shows you that with our young people, our young people always like to present themselves as independent.
Oh, you know, I think for myself, I strike out my own path.
But, you know, mom and dad, I'm taking the road less traveled.
You know, that's why I got these tattoos.
Yeah, well, there are lots of other people who have tattoos.
Many people your age have tattoos.
So I call this the herd of independent thinkers syndrome.
I call it that because these people are actually conformists, but they're conformists who are masquerading as individualists.
They're not really individualists.
They're carried by the tide.
And look, we all are. I was a little bit.
You know, when I joined the Dartmouth Review at the end of my freshman year, I realized that I was being forced to re-examine some liberal assumptions, and I thought, where did I get those?
I didn't get them from my parents.
I didn't get them growing up.
I had picked them up from...
It's almost like I was carried by the prevailing liberal current on the campus.
And being non-political, which I was when I first got to Dartmouth, I just began to kind of echo.
It was... It was important for me to know what it meant to be like an intelligent Ivy League guy, a Dartmouth guy.
I'm like, oh yeah, well. So I began to echo these slogans myself, but never having critically examined them.
And once I did, I realized that they were patent nonsense.
So what we really learned from this is that LGBTQ has become a little bit of a trend.
It's become a little bit of a cult.
And it's proof positive that young people like to join these kinds of cults.
They want to be, in a sense, with the group.
And I think what that means is that if we're able to shift the culture, if we're able to create a more conservative culture, then it will be our messages that will draw the cool kids.
It'll be our messages that young people will want to gravitate to.
It shows that cultures can't get away from orthodoxy.
There's going to be some orthodoxy, and the only question is, is it going to be a good orthodoxy or a bad one?
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You know, guys, I'm really happy to have on the podcast Congressman Ken Buck.
He's from Colorado's 4th District.
He also serves in the House Judiciary Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
And as I understand it, Ken, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
I understand you've recently made a trip to the border.
Yes. Congressman Andy Biggs and I are good friends.
And I went down to Arizona with Andy and went down to the border.
And really fascinating.
Yeah, give us an idea of what's happening down there, because from what I can see, I mean, I'm reviewing this on social media.
There appears to be these caravans that are marching through Mexico.
I mean, in some cases, scuffling with the Mexican police.
It looks like they've got a front line of, like, tough guys who fight with these cops.
And they're making their way through Mexico to, I think in this case, the Texas border.
Do you think the Biden administration has just essentially gone completely irresponsible on us and just letting this stuff come through and then just dispatch them in the middle of them?
What's really going on down there?
You know, it's fascinating. I think the Biden administration, there are two factors at play here.
One, they are incredibly jealous of the Trump administration and everything the Trump administration did, they're trying to undo, just for the sake of undoing it.
And then secondly, they're incredibly incompetent.
They see the mass of people coming across this southern border, the most ever in the history of the United States.
And they have the fence and the wall, the fence, the barrier in place.
They can put that up and they can slow this tide, but they don't.
I actually saw contractors sitting in their trailers.
I saw the pieces of the wall to be finished.
And the Biden administration has told the contractors to stand down.
They're getting paid, but they're just not doing anything because the Biden administration doesn't want to finish the wall.
Unbelievable. Now, when you say they're incompetent, Ken, do you mean by that that they don't want to put up the wall because to do so would be to concede that Trump had a point?
In other words, they don't want the images of these migrants being blocked by a wall.
Rather, what they want is the, I guess, the contrast with that is they want the humanitarian notion that these people are welcome to this country.
Because it seems like many of them feel like they're almost invited to come.
Oh, I think they are invited.
In fact, they are invited. We saw actually literature that the cartels give these people in foreign countries inviting them to come up and for a fee cross into the United States.
So they are invited.
And certainly the message from the Biden administration is we're not going to stop the cartels from bringing you in.
But the tragedy here, Dinesh, is that so many of these young women who are being brought up are raped along the way.
We actually saw, you know, day after birth control that they are forced to take so that they don't get pregnant as they are leaving the cartel's custody and are turned over to the Border Patrol.
It's absolutely terrifying in terms of its humanitarian disaster that's being caused at the border.
One thing that puzzles me is I thought that there was a court decision out of Texas that was affirmed by an appellate court that in effect said that Biden has got to return to Trump's Remain in Mexico policy.
Is it that the Biden people are flagrantly ignoring that?
Are they slow walking it?
What happened to Remain in Mexico?
Well, I think they're ignoring Remain in Mexico.
There were agreements with Guatemala and other countries to return citizens.
Those agreements are being ignored.
And frankly, I've talked to the leaders in Guatemala.
They don't want this migration.
They're losing the best and brightest in Guatemala, and they don't want these people coming north either.
It's really not just America's problem.
This is a problem that Latin America feels just as much as we do.
But yes, I think the Biden administration has made a decision that they want these people in this country and they're going to ignore the things that the Trump administration did that were successful and they will slow walk whatever the courts tell them to slow walk so they can continue this pattern.
What is the politics of this, Ken?
It seems to me, I mean, you have...
Let's take the simple fact that the Justice Department is negotiating with a group of illegals to pay up to $450,000 apiece to these illegals.
These were supposedly families separated under Trump.
And this is more than some of the 9-11 families got.
It's more than military families get when you lose a loved one.
So just leaving aside the sheer kind of preposterousness of this...
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, and I have to agree with you, Dinesh.
This is an issue that is really simmering.
It's an issue that I hear as the number one issue in my district and in the state of Colorado.
When people are coming to me and talking to me after public events, this is the issue they raise.
The Afghanistan crisis and really debacle was publicized and people debated the merits of We're good to go.
So, part of what you're saying, I think, is that they've got a window.
It's a little bit like what's going on with the infrastructure bill.
It seems like their point is, listen, we've got a narrow window of opportunity between now and the midterm.
Let's just push, push, and push, and get as much of it as we can.
Even if we take a beating next year, we're going to give these policy considerations priority over the political calculations.
And it's one of the things that the Democrats do really well.
And I say, well, I don't like it, but they do it well.
When they're in power, they push their agenda through knowing that they will lose power.
And then the next time they get in power, they push it through again.
The Republicans, and I'm part of this, refuse to take back the ground that we lost while the Democrats are in power.
So we won't cut spending, even though the Build Back Better program and the infrastructure bill and all the other programs are We won't cut spending when we're in power, and we won't deal with this other than stopping more migrants from coming here illegally.
We won't start a deportation process to right the wrong that's occurred during the Biden administration.
That's fascinating. What you're saying is the Democrats know that these things become a fait accompli, a done deal, and that they'll be secured for the future.
When we come back, I want to ask Ken Buck about what should we do about these giant digital corporations?
Some pretty monumental news.
I was just looking this morning and inflation is now over 6%.
The government knows it's bad.
In fact, they just announced that Social Security benefits in January are going to go up by 5.9%.
So this is all an admission that the government is...
doesn't know what to do about inflation.
It's out of control.
And yet they're trying to push through more spending.
Wow.
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I'm back with Congressman Ken Buck of Colorado, Colorado's fourth congressional district.
We've been talking about the border.
I want to turn and pivot to another topic that you've been involved in, Ken, and that is the issue of big tech.
We've got these giant tech corporations.
Now, they didn't start out that way, but they started out in the promise that they were going to give us sort of a free internet, a kind of open public square.
In fact, many conservatives kind of felt that This would be a refuge from the bias that we see in mainstream media.
And then as these companies like Twitter, like Facebook, Google, YouTube became quasi-monopolies, they began to not only practice digital censorship, But all kinds of other nefarious practices, harvesting data, getting information that people don't really necessarily want them to have, selling that data. And it seems like it's the Wild West out there with regard to these guys, and they've got the field all to themselves.
So can I have you kind of weigh in and define the problem as you see it?
Because some people have said, hey, look, these are private corporations.
They can do whatever they want.
But... While private corporations can do kind of whatever they want, that doesn't apply to monopolies, does it?
So what do you think the problem is?
And then we'll talk about what we should do about it.
Well, Dinesh, I think you really summarized it in a really interesting way because I can remember President Bill Clinton talking about the internet being a source of freedom for people across the world.
The reality is that when Apple and Google, Facebook interact in China, they accept the censorship practices of China.
And in this country, the liberals in Silicon Valley who are running these companies Except the censorship of conservatives.
And it's really a one-sided monopoly.
And we have to understand that it is a monopoly and it doesn't allow competition.
In fact, it actively crushes competition in the marketplace.
And I can give example after example of how these companies see a startup and they either acquire the startup.
Sometimes putting it on the shelf because they just don't want the competition.
Sometimes integrating it into their companies like WhatsApp and YouTube and Instagram.
Or sometimes they just decide that these companies are a threat and so they crush the competition.
And the result is that we don't have an open, honest internet.
We have choices in cable news.
We don't have choices in Facebook or Twitter or the social media platforms.
We have choices with newspapers.
We don't have choices when it comes to the way Amazon conducts its business in an e-commerce marketplace.
I mean, we can testify, and Debbie, my producer, is here.
I mean, we deal with this issue almost every day.
Just today, I was going to talk about that, and I did talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.
So there's all this video footage that's been taken by videographers that shows you what's happening on the ground, and sometimes it contradicts what the detectives are saying in the courtroom.
And yeah, Debbie goes, well, you can't post that on YouTube because that's Antifa violence, and YouTube will strike it because it's, quote, violent.
Now, of course, YouTube doesn't care about the violence per se, they're protecting Antifa.
Antifa is the one that's doing the violence, so in the name of sort of, we can't be violent, what you really have is censorship and it's one-sided.
Because if somebody were to pose violence on the other side, no problem, no one's being checked on it.
So, this is a daily problem.
Not again, we're not talking about hate speech, we're not talking about extremities, we're talking about covering the normal issues and routines of American public life.
And when it comes to the mainstream platforms, and I'm speaking particularly about Facebook and YouTube, a little less so about Twitter.
Twitter seems to have gotten a little bit better in terms of banning.
They still ban people, but they don't seem to me, anyway, to be as bad as the others.
So what do you think...
I mean, clearly the Democrats are okay with this, so they're not going to legislatively go along with the legislative solution.
But let's just say that you had, let's say Republicans have majorities in both houses and the presidency.
What is the law that you would craft that would address this problem and how?
Well, actually, Dinesh, there's a fascinating political occurrence that's going on right now, and it is that the Democrats hate big.
And these four companies, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, are the biggest companies in the history of the world.
They have a revenue, an annual revenue, that is larger than all but 18 countries' GDP in the world.
And so these four companies are despised by the left.
And on the right, we have conservatives who recognize if we had a free market, we would have a choice in information, where we would get our information from, and it wouldn't be easy for one company to censor us.
So there's actually a meeting of the minds on using antitrust laws to rein in these big tech companies and to create competition in the marketplace as part of the solution.
Certainly Section 230 is part of the solution, and certainly there are other parts of the solution, but antitrust laws have to be used to make sure that we give consumers, that we give conservatives the opportunity.
So often in this country, we have been wrong about a particular argument.
And that's okay because the correct information comes out and people are able to make an intelligent choice.
What these companies are doing is saying, we're not going to give you the various viewpoints.
We're only going to give you one viewpoint, which heightens paranoia.
Do you think, Ken, I mean, when I've seen these digital moguls come before the Democrats in the Congress, it seems like they're being blasted for not censoring enough.
The Democrats are like, well, there's all this misinformation.
You're not doing enough.
So it almost appears like the Democrats are saying that they don't want Mark Zuckerberg doing the censorship, even though he may be trying to protect them.
They would rather have, in a sense, Biden doing it.
They want the Biden administration to have the direct control of Do you think that even though there may be this bipartisan antagonism toward the big tech corporations, that the antagonism is coming from different directions and therefore it might be difficult to form a kind of bipartisan coalition?
Are you hopeful that you can find common ground with, say, an Elizabeth Warren to break up these companies or is that a quixotic, unrealistic expectation?
It's not unrealistic at all.
I never thought I would say that there would be common ground between Ken Buck and Elizabeth Warren, but in this particular situation, we have passed six bills out of the Judiciary Committee in the House.
We have bipartisan support on four of the six in the United States Senate.
One has passed the Senate, one is out of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, and two more have been dropped in the Senate.
And these six bills do exactly what we're talking about.
The problem is, and the real threat that I see is, if we don't do something with the antitrust laws, the liberals, the Elizabeth Warrens, the socialists, will decide that government should determine what is good speech and what is bad speech.
And when we take that out of the marketplace, we have a real problem in America.
And it's something that I am opposed to.
I don't want regulation. I want consumer choice.
That's excellent. Ken Buck, thank you very much for joining me.
me. Love to have you back sometime.
Thank you.
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It is hardly a secret that American universities, and the more elite the university, the bigger this problem is, have become factories of indoctrination and of cultural and intellectual repression.
They talk about diversity, but one diversity you'll never find Welcome to my show!
And this may seem like, oh, Dinesh, you've become suddenly a Hun, you've become a barbarian.
No, I'm not. I actually am a protector of civilization in doing this.
These are anti-civilizational institutions.
Here's a small example that stands as a kind of synecdoche, a metaphor for the whole thing.
Recently at MIT, a geophysicist, a world-famous scholar named Dorian Abbott, was invited to give a lecture.
This was the prestigious John Carlson lecture, and it was about a subject in his field.
But on Twitter, leftists began to complain that this is a man who has been critical of affirmative action.
Why? Because he wants things to be judged on the basis of individual merit.
And so even though you have a world-class scholar giving a lecture in his own field, the pressure begins to mount to cancel him.
And MIT does cancel him.
So think about it. MIT is not even, in a sense, the most leftist of universities.
It's identified as a more scientific or technical university, one of the leading ones in the world, along with Caltech.
And even MIT submits to pressure, and MIT basically caves.
Recently, the faculty chair Lily Tsai at MIT sends out a survey to professors asking them two questions.
Do you feel on an everyday basis that your voice or the voices of your colleagues are constrained at MIT? 60% yes.
Are you worried, given the current atmosphere in society, that your voice or your colleagues' voices are increasingly in jeopardy?
83% yes.
Now note that these are liberals.
These are not conservative faculty at MIT saying this.
The liberals are being constrained.
Why? Because what we're dealing with is not liberalism, not the problem of liberalism on the campus, but the problem of illiberalism.
Now, A group of centrist and conservative and liberal in the classical sense, scholars, a very impressive mix of people, want to start a new university.
They're calling it the University of Austin.
And the idea is for this university to be launched in 2022, master's programs, and an undergraduate program starting in 2024.
They're looking for land in Austin.
You may say, why Austin?
And they give kind of a funny answer.
One of the spokesmen, well, on the website, they say, if it's good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it's good enough for us.
So I take that to be a witticism.
But I think they believe that Texas is a hospitable intellectual environment.
Of course, Austin is a vibrant intellectual place.
So they're seeking accreditation, and they're looking to be a real university.
And in fact, they would be perhaps the only real university in the mainstream in the country.
I say in the mainstream because there are conservative and Christian universities, but those don't have influence on the larger mainstream of academia.
I think that the University of Austin intends to do that.
According to Peter Boghossian, a philosopher who's affiliated now with University of Boston, he goes, the moment we announced it, literally hundreds of professors from colleges around the country have essentially come running to our doors saying, I'm ready to get out of there.
My place has become a cesspool.
My place has basically become a nightmare.
Please hire me.
I'll work for less because I just can't stand the suffocating environment that I'm part of.
Who are the people who are part of this university?
Well, there's the former Harvard president, Larry Summers.
There's the former ACLU president, someone whom I've debated and actually get along very well with Nadine Strawson.
Arthur Brooks from Harvard.
The Harvard historian, Neil Ferguson.
And then there are also some journalists and writers, Andrew Sullivan, Barry Weiss, the MIT and Harvard scholar, Steven Pinker.
So this is a first-rate group of people who are part of this operation.
Now, what's kind of funny is that the leftists who are sort of trying to discredit this, and here's Julia Eoff, who's a writer, who's She goes, a serious question about everyone tweeting rapturously about U of Austin.
Would you send your kids there if it was between, say, Harvard and the University of Austin?
And I reply, are you kidding?
I went to Dartmouth, so did my daughter, who graduated in 2017.
But today, without hesitation, I would choose this group of scholars and this university in a heartbeat.
I know Danielle would as well.
Why? Because Harvard has become a woke madrasa.
Harvard is as close-minded as some Islamic-funded institution in Pakistan, which is getting all its money from Saudi Arabia and is taught by people with kind of long beards who beat their wives.
So Harvard is no more open-minded than a madrasa today.
And I think people at Harvard who are trying to speak up would testify to it.
Now, obviously, if you agree with the madrasa ideology, you're not going to see the assault on free speech.
You're going to be like, yeah, madrasa thinking is all there is.
So this is what has happened to our universities, and it's happened to a lot of our institutions, and I'm really happy to see that someone, somewhere, is trying to do something about it.
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Feel the difference. I want in this concluding segment of the podcast to talk about corruption in Los Angeles.
But before I do, it's funny, in the in-between of these segments, Debbie has been kind of needling me, which all started when I walked in.
See, what happens is...
Debbie leaves before I do to come to the studio.
She's the producer. She's got to do some of the administrative details.
So she gets here first. I get here a little bit later.
So she doesn't see what I put on.
So when I walked in, she was like...
What are you wearing? I'm like, what?
What? And Debbie's like, you may have to give some explanation of your outfit on the podcast, because otherwise people are going to be raising an eyebrow.
They're going to be like, Dinesh? I think Debbie's a little worried that she'll be blamed for...
People will think, Debbie, didn't you check this guy out before you walked out the door?
So Debbie's trying to basically get an immunity card.
It's so valuable! Debbie's saying that the audio audience might need to look at Rumble preferably, but YouTube if you have to.
All right, let's get back to corruption in LA. It's a case that by itself is insignificant, but it's telling because I think this kind of corruption is endemic in democratic-run cities.
And it's almost endemic.
And what I find amusing is that when you see the corruption, everybody pretends to be shocked.
Everybody pretends to be shocked until they themselves are caught.
With their hand in the cookie jar, and then everybody else around them pretends to be shocked.
So this is a ritual. We're shocked.
We're disturbed. As if to say, this is outside the norm.
But alas, it is the norm.
Now, federal prosecutors have filed a 20-count indictment against an L.A. city councilman.
This is Mark Ridley Thomas, career politician.
Guy, by the way, has been in state and local offices for 30 years.
So he's been living off the public purse.
And by the way, L.A. councilmen are well-paid.
I was kind of surprised to see...
That they make $300,000 a year.
That's even more than a congressman.
And they all have staffs, and staffs of about 24, and those guys are pretty well paid.
Now, the job of a councilman is to, and this is a guy, by the way, was previously the head of the Board of Supervisors.
So think about it. He is in charge of supervising the integrity of the public purse.
He's watching over the public wallet.
And what is he doing?
Evidently rating it.
How? Well, Here's a small example of what he's doing.
He's charged, by the way, with conspiracy, bribery, mail fraud.
There's a raft of accusations, but here's a small one.
Essentially, what happened is the University of Southern California awarded a scholarship to Ridley Thomas' son, Sebastian, and appointed Ridley Thomas a professor of social work And all of this at a time when Ridley Thomas, who was at that time heading the Board of Supervisors, was funneling campaign money to the university through a non-profit that was run by his son.
So he's raised money for the campaign.
He's bribing the university to not only admit his son, give him a scholarship, but also to hire him as a professor.
So this is just rot.
And it's obviously an abuse of power.
And then here's where the comic element comes in.
Councilman Joe Buscaino tweeted he was, quote, shocked, upset, and disgusted by the indictment.
Now, usually I think when these indictments come down and the kind of ingenuity of the corruption scheme is revealed, most of the other Democrats are just envious.
They're like, man, I wish I thought of that.
So their first thing is like, man, why did this guy get to do it?
How did he get a big house?
So they're actually envious because they wish they thought of it.
Now the second reaction, of course, is they're really glad the guy got caught because since he thought of it and not them, they're really happy to see that guy get his comeuppance.
By the way, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti has not said one word about this case.
Many of these guys, of course, all know each other.
They go to the same parties.
They're protégés of one another.
So this is... This is corruption.
And the LA Times is sort of in on it.
Not in the sense that they condone the corruption, but when this guy Ridley Thomas was running for office for re-election, the LA Times endorsed him.
There was a young woman challenging him.
She said, I'm going to clean up the place.
There's a lot of corruption. The LA Times goes, quote, No other candidate in the race can beat Ridley Thomas' experience, knowledge, and long list of accomplishments.
So, part of the reason that the rackets go on is that you have media.
In Philadelphia, it's the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In Boston, it's the Boston Globe.
In LA, it's the LA Times.
In San Francisco, it's the Chronicle.
And these media outlets have become cheerleaders for democratic corruption rather than vigorous exposers of it.
And as long as that continues, the corruption itself is likely to go on.
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