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Nov. 11, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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FALLING APART Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep216
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Today is Veterans Day and I want to begin by thanking our veterans for their sacrifice and for their service to our country.
Where would we be without them?
Now, coming up, it's not just Kyle Rittenhouse who's on trial.
It's also Antifa.
This is really why the media is so obsessed with getting a Rittenhouse.
But I'm going to tell you about some of the criminals, sickos, and perverts that make up Antifa and Antifa world.
I'm going to excoriate a leftist judge who is using January 6th as a battering ram for state reprisals against political dissidents.
And Kevin Hassett, my former colleague at AEI, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Trump, joins me to talk about inflation, economic stagnation, and creeping socialism.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The, um, and the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, Kyle Rittenhouse himself was on the stand yesterday, and I think he'll be on a little bit today as well.
And after the podcast, I went home and just watched sort of riveted.
And it flashed my mind back as I was listening to this kid talk.
To the way in which he was prejudicially described by a media that was out to create a narrative long before the trial, in a sense, so that a fair trial for Kyle would be impossible.
Now here's a short clip of the kind of rhetoric that we heard ad nauseum prior to the Rittenhouse trial.
Listen. Rittenhouse is basically what you would have had in a school shooter.
He's a 17-year-old kid.
He shouldn't have had a gun. He crossed state lines to supposedly protect property.
No, he was going out to shoot people.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old vigilante.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the vigilante.
Kyle Rittenhouse. A 17-year-old vigilante, arguably a domestic terrorist, picked up a rifle, drove to a different state to shoot people.
Right about the same time Joe Biden himself weighed in, he had a picture of Rittenhouse with a gun, and he described him as a white supremacist.
There's not a shred of evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist of any kind.
But why is the left so keen to convict Rittenhouse?
Why is it such a big deal to them?
You know why? It's because this trial isn't just about Rittenhouse.
It's also about the left itself.
It's about Antifa, and it shows a window into who these people are.
Who is Antifa? What kind of person joins Antifa?
Remember Biden himself, Antifa is just an idea.
Well, no, Antifa is made up of real people, and the left wants to defend and protect those people.
In fact, even make them into heroes.
I saw Joy read, we better remember the victims of Rittenhouse.
And she read their names as though she was reading the names of the soldiers who fell at Normandy.
Unbelievably, in retrospect, virtually comic, but also absolutely disgusting.
There's so much to say about the trial, so many memorable scenes.
I mean, the one that sticks out in my mind is the prosecutor trying to get Rittenhouse for watching video games.
He goes, well, isn't it the purpose of a video game that you try to kill everybody?
And Rittenhouse goes, well, yes, but it is a video game.
It's not real life.
I mean, I gotta say, you know, when I looked at those images of Rittenhouse with his inverted baseball cap and the t-shirt, I thought, this guy's a little bit, he's gonna be an easy target for a sly, manipulative prosecutor like Binger.
But no, it turns out Rittenhouse is an excellent witness.
He knows, almost with a kind of preternatural instinct, what to say.
At one point, even in difficult questions, Binger said, well, isn't it true, Mr.
Rittenhouse, that you had your gun pointed at Mr.
Rosenbaum when you pulled the trigger?
And Rittenhouse had to say, yes.
And then he goes, well, doesn't it follow that you intended to kill him?
Tough question. You have your gun pointed at someone, not just at their toe, but at their chest, and you pull the trigger.
Didn't you intend to kill him?
And Rittenhouse says, no.
And then the prosecutor goes, no?
What do you mean, no? You pointed your gun at his chest, you pulled the trigger, you intended to kill him.
What else was on your mind?
And Rittenhouse then said, correctly, at least correctly for his own case, he said, no, I was just trying to stop him.
I was just trying to prevent him from doing harm to me.
So this kid was a very—I can see now why the defense was not afraid to put him forward, because the prosecution, I think, at the end of, what, hours of cross-examination, was not able to land a single clean blow— Now, let me turn to the Antifa people.
And by that, I mean the so-called victims of this case.
We're talking here about Joseph Rosenbaum.
We're also talking about Anthony Huber.
And we're talking about this guy, Gage...
What's his last name?
Grosskreutz, I guess it is.
Yes. Now, these guys are not exactly nice guys.
In the case of Joseph Rosenbaum, this is a convicted sex offender.
This is a pedophile.
This is a guy who has been convicted of inappropriate sexual activity with five boys ranging from 9 to 11 years old.
How often have you heard about that in the media?
The media has done a lot to sanitize, to bury the records of these guys.
Anthony Huber, a domestic abuser, someone who had drug paraphernalia in his possession.
By the way, this is a guy who, armed with a butcher knife, told his brother that he would, quote, gut him like a pig.
He threatened to burn down the family home.
Now... How do I know all this?
I know all this not from the trial.
In fact, it came up in pre-trial.
And the question was, should it be introduced in the trial?
And the prosecution realized this was very damaging because it shows that these guys are criminals and sickles and perverts.
This is Antifa, by the way.
These are the kind of disturbed individuals who join Antifa.
And the judge decided to leave Antifa.
I think that, from a judicial point of view, is a correct decision.
But from the larger framework, from our political attempt to understand Antifa, this is so revealing.
And what's even more insidious, it's not just that you've got some mental patients and some crackpots who show up in a riot.
It's that the left Loves these guys.
The left sees these guys as their foot soldiers.
And this is why they do everything they can to clean up their records, to make them look good, as Joy Reid, in a sense, performing the kind of sanctimonious function of almost memorializing them, almost like a clergyman delivering a eulogy.
And so it's really what you see here is the dementia of the left.
And I think what is troubling for them about Rittenhouse is that he's busting their narrative.
Because now you have the left-wing cover-up, the media cover-up, the one-sided reporting, the presumptive judgments about Kyle Rittenhouse.
He's this, he's that. And now people can see Rittenhouse.
And they can see what he's really like.
And what they see is a kind of bewildered, frightened...
And maybe somewhat irresponsible kid, but one nevertheless who didn't do anything irresponsible that night and certainly doesn't need to be locked up for life for defending himself.
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Scott Fairlam is a former MMA fighter who was one of the protesters on January 6th.
Now, he was, I will have to say, a protester who got into a fight with the police.
I'll come to, in a moment, what he did, but he has just been handed down a sentence A very severe sentence.
41 months in prison.
This is the most severe sentence that has been given to a January 6th defendant.
He pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer.
But the question is, what did he do and in what sense is his penalty proportional to that?
I agree that there were some violent protesters.
They should be held accountable for it.
I'm not arguing that they should get off without penalty.
But let's put this in context.
We remember Antifa and BLM rioters who did much, much worse and got little to nothing.
So justice is a matter of proportionality.
Equal justice under the law.
I should get the same thing as other guys who did the same thing as me under similar circumstances.
Remember the opening scene in The Godfather where the undertaker comes to the godfather and says, my daughter was abused by these boys.
And the godfather says, well, what do you want me to do with them?
And he whispers in his ear, essentially, I want you to kill them.
And then the godfather, Don Corleone, says, well, that's not justice.
Your daughter is still alive.
And this is the point.
In a rough sense, obviously, we're dealing here in the movie with criminals.
But nevertheless, they have a kind of idea that justice is proportionality.
That's its definition.
You have to measure the penalty to the wrongdoing.
And unfortunately, in America today, when we look around, we don't see much of that.
Here's a case I just saw on social media this morning.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, remember the NBA great?
Well, his son stabbed another guy with a hunting knife.
They got into a big fight.
And this is a penalty that carries six, seven years in prison.
It's essentially inflicting grave bodily injury on somebody else.
But because the guy is connected to this basketball player, essentially he obviously had a very good lawyer.
What does he get? Six months.
Six months in jail for essentially a deadly assault, using, in a sense, what's called a dirk or a dagger against someone else.
Now, back to Scott Fairlam and January 6th, when you look at the video, which I've seen, The judge kept talking in the sentencing that he assaulted.
He, quote, punched a cop.
No, he really didn't.
When you look at the video, what you see is that he shoves a cop.
It's not obvious who he's even shoving, and he kind of slaps away a face shield.
That is all he does.
So, I mean, what does this guy do?
He shouts a bunch of nonsense, admittedly.
He's talking about taking over the Capitol and so on.
He carries a police baton that he has on him, but he doesn't wield it or use it at any point.
He throws a punch that ends up hitting not an officer, but the officer's face shield.
Well, 41 months in prison for that?
Is that what a BLM guy would get for doing this?
I think we know the answer to that one.
Another guy who's coming up for sentencing is the shaman guy.
This is Jacob Chansley.
And you might remember this is the guy with the ridiculous outfit with the feathers.
And let's look what he did.
He's essentially there on trespassing charges.
No violent offenses, no weapons, no assault.
And guess what the Biden administration wants him to serve?
They want him to serve 51 months.
And this is a guy that you can tell also has some mental problems.
So you have a guy who probably was there for the entertainment, is maybe a bit of a kook, but being a kook is not illegal.
So he was trespassing in the Capitol.
He should get a sentence proportional to that.
But the vindictiveness of these people, the viciousness, this is something that is going to be seared into my soul, and I hope into yours, and I hope into the soul of the Republican Party, because these offenses, and what I'm talking about here, are the offenses of the Biden administration.
Cannot go unanswered.
Cannot go unpunished.
There will be a time when we will have the reins of power.
And I think we're going to have to hold these people accountable for their abuses of power.
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Feel the difference. Here's some good news out of Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Association of School Boards has voted to withdraw from the National School Boards Association.
Why? Because the National School Boards Association, you might remember, was the instigator of a letter to the Biden administration, to the Biden Justice Department, basically saying that parents are domestic terrorists, basically saying that teachers are facing danger to their lives, school boards are facing danger to their lives.
From who? Well, from outspoken parents.
And the National School Board Association was demanding that the Biden administration act on this immediately and, in fact, use the Patriot Act, use the RICO statutes, essentially mobilize the full power of the U.S. government against Parents!
Against parents. Now, it turns out that there was a corrupt element to this as well.
The head of the National School Board Association was in line for and got a coveted position from the Biden administration, raising the possibility that the Biden administration put her up to it in the first place, said, hey, listen, you send us a letter, we'll then mobilize the task force, and by the way, we have a cushy appointment for you at the end of this road.
Now, the good news is that parents around the country have not been cowed.
In fact, they have gone to their school board associations and screamed about it and said, listen, what is this?
Are you really saying that parents can have a role, in fact, a considerable role, in their own children's education?
And so, not just the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, that's the latest.
Ten Many states have discontinued their membership in the National School Boards Association, and 25 state school boards have basically said, that's it, we're out of here.
So this is actually very good news, and of course the best news of it was the election in Virginia.
The election in Virginia was a sort of referendum.
One of the key issues that propelled Glenn Young into victory was the issue of schools and school choice and parental involvement in education and racial indoctrination and all the kind of trans nonsense that's going on in the schools.
And the outcome of the election shows that parents are not going to back down.
I guess one can say that when it comes to your kids, parents become very ferocious indeed.
And they're not going to back down at the school board.
They're not going to back down in their dealings with teachers.
And just as important, they're not going to back down at the ballot box.
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Check it out. Hey guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast Kevin Hassett.
Kevin Hassett is a, well, he's a heavyweight intellectual.
And a former colleague of mine from the old days at the American Enterprise Institute.
Now, Kevin is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
He's Managing Director of the Lindsay Group.
Now, he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Trump.
He started the Columbia Business School.
He's also the author of a new book, which I've just been reading, and it's awesome.
It's called The Drift. Stopping America's Slide to Socialism.
It's available now.
Kevin, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
I, of course, fondly remember our old days at AEI. I mean, we passed in the hallways, but we had such a great crew From Judge Bork to Gene Kirkpatrick, Charles Murray, Michael Novak.
Jim Lilly. And of course, Jim Lilly, absolutely.
And I'm sorry to say that I think AEI has sort of lost that luster that it had in not just the 80s, but the 1990s.
Yeah, and you know, I know that one of the frustrating things for anyone who has a podcast and then the guy who has a book comes, that everything keeps going back to the book.
But it's really almost what the book is about.
Because the drift is basically the tendency for the liberal elites to control media, the socialist totalitarian elites control media.
They controlled the universities. They controlled the media.
And according to Schumpeter, I go into like a very visionary guy back in the 20s, he said that they're going to control respectability and they're going to withhold respectability from anyone who defends capitalism.
So Schumpeter thought that capitalism was going to die because of, you know, the complex that went after you, the complex that you see.
But one of the things that Schumpeter wrote, which is, you know, generalizes from, you know, our old institution, Is that he thought there'd be nobody left to defend it because they didn't want to lose their respectability.
And so capitalism would die just because there was no one courageous enough to defend it.
Now, first, I don't think he anticipated guys like you and maybe me.
But also, he certainly never anticipated Donald Trump.
And that's really what my book's about.
My book's about how Donald Trump basically won a battle in a war against totalitarian socialism.
And then there was this massive backlash, which makes complete sense if you look at the early political philosophers' ideas of what America would look like precisely now.
And so the prescience of guys like Hayek and Schumpeter and even Marshall McLuhan, it sort of gives me tingles because they saw exactly the world we live in.
And finally, I know I'm not supposed to go out for too long.
The basic point is that we have to understand the drift if we're going to fight against it.
Yeah, let's talk about Schumpeter for just a minute, because as I understand it, what Schumpeter was saying, this is the Harvard economist, Joseph Schumpeter, was saying that capitalism will produce an abundance that will then create a class of people who become habituated to luxury,
to leisure, will sort of lose interest in, almost like lose interest in the process of making the pie, become obsessed about splitting the pie, take the pie for granted, Isn't that almost a clinically accurate description of the millennial generation?
If you ask them to give up the accoutrements of capitalism, they would look at you as if you were nuts.
They take capitalism for granted, but then they all vigorously pronounce themselves to be socialists.
Yeah, you got it exactly right.
You know, I know you're a very erudite guy.
But I got to say, one of my favorite chapters, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, is, you know, like this thing, right?
It's a really thick book.
And if you want the greatest hits of it, go to The Drift, because I really did go through it a lot and try to take the ideas there.
But one of my favorite segments of the book, the whole chapter, is why faculty members at universities always end up being socialists.
And again, you know, he wrote this 100 years ago, right?
100 years ago, he said, okay, we're going to get rich.
The kids aren't going to be in the fields.
We're going to be able to send them to colleges and universities, and the colleges and universities are going to indoctrinate them to be totalitarian socialists.
And then the smartest guy from Harvard It's going to control the New York Times.
And then anybody who doesn't basically spout, you know, the socialist wisdom from the higher ed institutions is disreputable and should be canceled by society.
That was Schumpeter's view.
But the idea about why professors always end up being socialists, it was really interesting.
Basically, professors, like, what's the first word that comes to mind for you when you think professor?
For me, it's arrogance. What is it for you?
Would you say arrogance? I would say it's, well, I mean, I think that professors see themselves as the smartest guys in society.
And so the way a professor thinks is like this.
I'm a professor at Bowdoin College in Maine, and I make $120,000 a year, and that's...
You know, that's a decent wage and I can drive a nice car, maybe a secondhand BMW. But there's a guy living in my town who's this overweight Rotarian with a gold chain on his chest and he owns seven Denny's and he's making like $700,000 a year.
So the professor's like, something has to be wrong with society.
When it's organized this way, I should be the one at the commanding heights of power.
So I see the resentment of the professoriate as driven by this envy of the success of the capitalist class.
Exactly. And so Schumpeter just logically thought it through.
He said, okay, so now those guys control the media.
And then the media controls the dialogue.
You know, what we say. What happens to capitalism?
And the thing that he didn't see coming, and this is really about my favorite part of the book, except for the gazillion stories about Donald Trump being in the Oval with Donald Trump, but the thing that he didn't see coming was something that Marshall McLuhan saw coming.
Because Marshall McLuhan, another great genius of the 20th century, already in the 50s and 60s saw the internet coming.
And he said that right now we live in a sort of curated society where the CBS Evening News tells us what to think and the sort of smarty pants from the universities can control our telescope into the world and that the internet is going to be much different from that.
It's going to be a competition for attention.
And in the competition for attention, there's no saying who's gonna win, McLuhan wrote, but it's definitely the case that there are gonna be a lot of people who are outrageous, shocking, that win the competition for attention.
And when that happens, then it's gonna be a fundamentally, it's a big change for society.
And the thing that is chilling about McLuhan's writings, that again, all this is in the book, The Drift, is that he saw this precise moment that we're living in, which I think is perhaps the most dangerous moment that we've had, short of Pearl Harbor or something like that.
So, you know, you don't want to go too extreme with most dangerous moment.
But he basically said, so what's going to happen is that the liberal elites that control the universities, that control the media, they're going to see that because of the internet, there's a competition for attention and they've lost control.
And then what they're going to do is, that's a direct quote, they're going to organize their inattention.
So they're going to decide who to cancel, who to take off the internet.
Wow. Kevin, let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to pull back to Trump and look at Trump as someone who tried to stand against this socialist drift and what happened to Trump and why there was a kind of backlash against him.
We'll be right back. Here's some pretty monumental news.
Inflation is now over 6%.
And by the way, the government just said that Social Security benefits are going to increase by 5.9% in January.
That's the highest increase in 40 years.
So this is the government admitting inflation is out of control.
And yet the left, the Democrats, are still pushing through trillions more in spending.
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I'm back with Kevin Hassett, my former colleague at AEI, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Trump, author of a terrific new book called The Drift, which is about our drift toward socialism.
Kevin, you talk in the book about the fact that, and you describe the process of how this came about, the battle over Trump's economic plan, the battle over the tax plan, And then you just lay out the consequences.
Family income shoot up.
Americans get approximately $8,000 increase in yearly income.
The number of people on food stamps plummets.
More people come out of poverty.
Economy creates millions of new jobs.
So you've got this success story.
And then you say that it wasn't just COVID, but the success itself...
Bred a backlash, which seems paradoxical, right?
Why would success breed a backlash?
You think success would breed cheers and calls for more.
But your point is that there is a kind of socialist power force that doesn't want this kind of success because it indicates that the free market economy is doing its job.
And so what they have to do is kind of move in and you may say, strangle that success.
Talk a little bit about the people who look scowlingly on success and why they saw Trump as such a threat.
Right, you know, Dinesh, if I think about it, other than climate change, what does the left, have they been preaching to us since you and I were close friends at AEI 20 years ago, stayed friends over the years?
But it's, I would guess, actually want to hear what your answer is, but is they've told us the number one plague on society is income inequality.
Would you agree that that's other than climate change?
Yeah, I would say inequality more broadly because I would include, you know, the kind of triangle of racial inequality and gender inequality and all those sort of cultural forms of inequality.
But nevertheless, yes, I agree.
Inequality is their mantra.
Right. Okay. So, so I, as you know, because you know, my work for a really long time, did all this work that basically said, if you want to reduce inequality, if you want to lift blue collar wages, if you want to reduce racial inequalities, then you need to have really pro business policies of deregulation and tax cuts. And that's why, you know, this globe behind me, I had in the White House to sort of take a jab at my friends like Bannon and Navarro, the president who called me a globalist, you know, I was kind of a globalist, the president
convinced me I'd trade at the end. But I was really about deregulation and taxes and what it would do for poor and middle income people. And if you go back and look at the success, which is documented excessively in the book, as is, you know, President Trump's own ideas about what the success would look like. Because I was in the Oval Office for hundreds and hundreds of hours, became very close friends with him, had dinner with him last week in Barra Lago.
The fact is that African-American unemployment rate went to the lowest ever.
Millions and millions of people came off of poverty.
Real income growth happened in the year before COVID. There was more real income growth than in the previous 14 years.
When we passed the tax cuts, we promised there'd be $4,000 in median income growth for the typical worker.
In fact, they got $6,800.
Income inequality dropped sharply.
In fact, the income decile, the percentage, the first 10%, that grew the fastest was the bottom one.
And it grew the slowest was the top one.
And so this thing they call the GD coefficient actually improved a lot.
Wealth inequality declined by more than it ever has.
And so the wealth of people at the bottom went up a lot too.
I think that was partly because a lot of people at the bottom owned homes in distressed communities that we made opportunity zones and real estate prices went up so much there.
And, you know, we had a prison reform that lots of nonviolent prisoners out of prison.
And so if you're a social justice warrior guy who's going to go beat up Dinesh D'Souza at a college campus when you're going to speak, then You would think that, okay, I'm going to think about what it is that made him such a success for the things I care about.
But instead, it's like, deny, deny, deny, don't even talk about it, and reverse the policies, which is what they're doing right now under Build Back Worse.
And so if they're reversing the policies, then it means it's not about Income inequality.
It's not about social justice.
It's about raw Marxist political power.
They want the government to own the means of production.
They want the government to distribute that to the people without using the price mechanism to distribute it the way capitalism does, because they want the political power.
That's what they're after. And this has revealed the drift.
That's what the drift is.
This very, very powerful assemblage of people at the media and at universities that want to control you.
They want to take over your life.
You know, in the I'll stop right after this thought.
In the Build Back Better plan, they're building millions of homes.
Joe Biden wants to be your landlord.
And he can't be your landlord if capitalism works.
Wow. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about Trump's style.
You talk about how Trump, in a sense, deals with experts.
And I also want to talk about the clashes that you had in the Trump White House over trade, because we came out of that AEI, very much pro-free trade background.
You ran headlong into a bunch of guys who were all for tariffs.
And I want to talk a little bit about how that battle was carried out and how it was also adjudicated.
We'll be right back. Want to do something kind of smart this month?
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I'm back, guys, with Kevin Hassett, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Trump, my former colleague at AEI, author of the new book, The Drift.
Kevin, I'm going to read a line from The Drift.
You say, you know, one of the things about being a president, you say, quote, is that you've got to make decisions every day about things you have never thought about before.
You need to have advisors who know the details intimately, but since they know the issue better than you do, you never know if they're lying to you.
And you talk about how Trump solved this problem of expertise, you might call it.
How did he solve it?
And then let's talk about trade a little bit as a case study of how this conflict might play out.
Yeah, you know, what he did is that he made sure that he always had people that, you know, thought that we should have a tariff and thought that we shouldn't have a tariff in the room to argue the case.
And then, you know, what you probably saw if you ever watched his TV show, he was really, really good at inducing, you know, very heated debate.
You know, I... Became very close friends with Peter Navarro.
I think he's got a new book out and somebody said that I'm almost the hero of his book.
But we did become good friends, but we disagreed a lot on some of the tariffs, not on China.
And, you know, he would induce arguments in the trade meetings where people in front of the president would be swearing.
At each other. Wow.
But the fact is that the president would watch that.
And it's really hard to sustain like a groupthink lie when people are disagreeing so much.
And then he would say, oh, well, Kevin says we shouldn't do it because of this.
Peter says we should do it because of that.
You know, and then Gary Cohn, he came in over here.
I kind of see the whole constellation of possible beliefs here.
And so I know what I'm going to want to do.
That's fascinating. And he did that on every single policy that we had.
And you, Kevin, it sounds like you came in as a, you know, as we all were in those days, kind of across the board, free traders pretty much, with some qualifications for national security and so on.
But it seems that your position, you say, did move in the Trump years toward a recognition that certain tariffs were in fact helping trade get to a better place.
Yeah, and the bottom line, and this is something the president convinced me of, and he really took great pleasure in having convinced me of this, too, because, like, in the sense that, well, that's not what you used to say, Kevin, right?
But, you know, China is stealing us blind.
They really are, you know, and at the Council of Economic Advisors, I put out a report about the hundreds of billions of dollars a year of intellectual property that China's stealing, and so if you look at the Really, really strong, dishonest misbehavior of the Chinese in the trade space and the fecklessness of the World Trade Organization, which is supposed to be the cop on that beat, then I think terrorists make complete sense on China.
Interesting. You say toward the end of the book that you're looking for a solution.
And what is the solution when you have this powerful constellation, which I think we would both agree now controls major institutions?
They control the media.
They control academia.
The entertainment industry, largely digital media, and increasingly we see these woke corporations that seem, if not converts to the cause, then kind of willing to play along with the cause.
And so, where does the opposition to this come from?
Are we looking for another Trump, per se, or is it possible to have a wider range of resistance?
And where will that come from? Right.
Well, I think that what people need to do is, you know, read the drift.
I don't care, you know, how you do it, how you get it.
Read the drift so that you understand what's going on, so that you know who the enemy really is.
And once you do, like, I remember that their first weapon is bullying and withholding respectability.
But if you go back and look at the Trump policies, like you were a leader, I was a leader in saying these policies are actually going to help the little guy.
Okay, so who should control respectability?
The Harvard professor who said that Trump's a disaster, he's going to cause a recession, and it's going to lead to an explosion of income inequality?
Or Dinesh and Kevin, who actually got it right?
I think that we have to start to have confidence and courage that they don't control respectability.
We control respectability.
But the second thing is that we have to all stand up and call out the bullies and call out the people who pretend to control respectability because they really are organizing against the right.
You know, at the America First Policy Institute, this new think tank, it's the fastest growing think tank in the country.
I think they've had more than a million donations since they started in January.
It's affiliated. Sort of loosely with the president's policy ideas.
They've launched a lawsuit to try to get the former president back on social media.
And in the lawsuit, they created a website, which people could Google and find, where they asked people to put up their own little story about whether they've been canceled by social media.
And they're up to almost 100,000 stories.
And I was at a meeting down at Mar-a-Lago last week where we got reports about the stories, and probably about 60% of them are legitimately shocking.
Legitimately shocking. And so the point is that in the end, they're not going to be able to cancel us all, but there needs to be enough of us so that we can overwhelm them.
And it can't be just left to Kevin and Tedeschi.
I spoke yesterday on the podcast about a group of sort of centrist and conservative scholars from Steven Pinker on through many others who are trying to create a new university, the University of Austin.
And I mentioned that there were a bunch of people on social media saying, well, yeah, but you know, Kevin, you know, Dinesh, you're still going to want to send your kid to Harvard rather than to the University of Austin.
And I jumped in and said, no, no.
Not anymore. I felt that way when I was 19.
I'd rather go to an Ivy League college.
My daughter went to an Ivy League college.
Same one as me. But my point is, today, a lot of these prestige schools are like woke madrasas.
I mean, they're They're not that different from a kind of radical Muslim indoctrination camp in the remote village of Pakistan, except their ideology is different, but they pursue it with the same relentless closed-mindedness.
Would you agree that we should be open, even as parents and as citizens, to new options that take down the respectability of institutions that no longer deserve it?
Yeah, I totally agree. And I remember you and I talked about this before the left organized this sort of ridiculous assault on you that was a distraction for you for a little while.
And I remember right before then, you were going to start a university, right?
I don't know if you've talked to your people about that, but I think that it was a brilliant and courageous idea.
And I think if you read the drift, you can see how much more necessary than we ever thought possible it is to start to create these alternative institutions that legitimately control respectability and defend people who are willing to defend free enterprise and capitalism.
Not because we're religiously committed to them, but because we look at the data every year and every time we do, it looks like those things work.
Those deliver prosperity and help people at the bottom the most.
Kevin, you've written a great book.
I've enjoyed reading it. I recommend it to people.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Love to have you back on again.
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I haven't talked previously about the Alec Baldwin situation on the set of the movie Rust.
But it got me thinking about it, oddly enough, in connection with Kyle Rittenhouse.
Because I just saw that LeBron James tweeted that Kyle Rittenhouse, when he broke down during his testimony, was essentially putting on a show.
Kyle Rittenhouse wasn't really traumatized.
He was acting.
He was putting on an acting performance.
Now, I don't think so.
I don't think you can feign that kind of thing that way.
And I don't think most people who watched the trial thought so either.
Bye.
But it crossed my mind, well, let's say he was.
I mean, let's say that Kyle Rittenhouse was acting.
Well, I mean, this is like an Oscar-worthy performance.
This would be unbelievable.
This would be an acting performance so good that it's probably going to get him off.
And it would be an acting performance, moreover, that would make him eligible once he gets off.
For Hollywood agents to look at.
Why? Because there's all these action movies being made, and Kyle Rittenhouse could play in one of these action movies.
And then this thought crossed my mind.
Unlike Alec Baldwin, this kid does know how to use a gun.
Now, let me turn to Alec Baldwin.
I'm trying to make sense of this bizarre situation.
Alec Baldwin himself isn't helping.
He just put out a bizarre tweet to the effect.
I'm just going to quote it.
Every TV and film set that uses guns should have a police officer on the set.
What? That's the solution?
Well, initially when the story broke, I thought, this Alec Baldwin, I mean, these actors, you know, they're actors.
They don't know how to do anything.
And Debbie's pointed out to me, she goes, I watch these actors in movies, and Debbie, by the way, does know how to use a gun.
She goes, the way they hold their guns, they don't actually know how to handle guns.
And I assume that was true of Alec Baldwin.
But, of course, the big question about what happened on the set was, how did a live bullet get in there?
Was it done by the so-called armorer, the person in charge of taking care of the weapons?
Now, this was a 24-year-old, a woman named Guterres Reed, Hannah Guterres Reed.
She's only 24. She's apparently in charge of weapons on the set.
So, was she negligent in somehow depositing a live round?
It seems almost crazy.
And now, her attorney apparently says, he was on a television interview, and he says that the live round could have been maliciously planted by someone who Who was disgruntled with the movie.
Now, we do know that a half dozen crew members walked off the set of Rust just hours before this incident.
So giving a certain, not, I wouldn't say plausibility, but at least possibility that this could, in fact, be the case.
And the police department is just maintaining a kind of silence on this, saying they're investigating, they've not ruled out charges against anyone else.
Not even against Baldwin.
And you may say, Baldwin, well, he's obviously not responsible.
Well, he is in a way, because let's remember that Baldwin wasn't merely the actor on the set of Rust.
He was also producer.
Now, when you're a producer, you have managerial responsibilities for the conditions on the set.
And so I would argue that there is at least a case to be made that the producer does bear some responsibility for negligence, if there was negligence that led to this particular episode.
I don't know how it's going to come out.
In fact, I was maybe musing is the wrong word, telling Debbie that this is like a whodunit all to itself.
I would almost make another movie about what really happened on this set that caused a live round to go off.
And the cinematographer, her name was Helena Hutchins, to be killed.
And the bullet went right through her and hit the director, a guy named Joel Souza.
No relation, I guess I should point out.
So, I'm no fan of Alec Baldwin, but I don't want to gloat at his misery.
I think his remorse over what happened is certainly genuine.
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