HOW THE GOP SAVED AMERICA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep222
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This Friday, I'm doing a special episode on the Republican Party.
The Republican Party is in a moment of extraordinary opportunity, yet it also in some ways is in a big mess.
How do we get out of it?
I'm going to review the glorious history of the Republican Party, focusing on some of its greatest leaders, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Trump.
I'm going to candidly discuss why the current Republican Party is so weak and ineffective at times, and I'm going to show how, in this time of national crisis, it can become, today, what it once was, a party that successfully represents and fights for what is best about America.
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.
Over the past nine months, the Biden administration has been out of control.
They have been not only in some ways taking the country down, America is, we have to admit, a different country than it was just a year ago. And basic liberties that we took for granted, the right to assemble, the right to speak, the right to practice your faith and go to church, suddenly all of these are questioned, are undermined.
Suddenly you find that censorship has now become a routine reality in American life, the prosecution and persecution of political opponents.
It's not even that easy to draw the line of distinction anymore between free and authoritarian societies.
There are authoritarian elements That are very much now part of the fabric of American life.
I'm not just talking about authoritarianism directed at Trump or directed at the January 6th defendants, but authoritarianism directed at all of us.
What is the Biden attempted vaccine mandate, if not an attempt to force us to do something?
Where did the government have the authority to do any of this?
Now, many of us as conservatives, as Republicans, have been trying to ask, what is it that has propelled the Democrats and the left into this war of aggression on basic American norms and liberties?
What has given them the sense that they can get away with it?
Well, I was...
Last weekend, speaking at David Horowitz's Restoration Weekend, Debbie and I made our way to Florida.
And I gave the audience there kind of a startling message.
I said, the one factor...
That propels the aggression of the left and of the Democrats is you.
By which I meant us.
By which I meant the Republicans, the conservatives.
And I'm not just talking about the so-called rhinos or the establishment conservatives.
I'm talking about all of us.
Because the Democrats, I argued, have been studying us.
You know, when they use phrases like critical race theory, what they mean is that they're going to begin with critical observation.
They're going to watch us as they have been now for 20 to 30 years.
And the Democrats, I argued, have come to the conclusion that we, the Republicans, well, we're the party of the namby-pambys, which means we are the party of the nice guys.
We are the party of the people who want to go along and get along.
We're the party of live and let live.
We are the party that, quote, stands on principle.
And my point is the Democrats love this.
Why? Because they are unprincipled.
And there's nothing more that unprincipled people love than the idea of a bunch of principled people who are too dignified and too lofty and too much on their moral high horse to respond effectively to what the Democrats are doing, to the havoc that they're unleashing upon us and upon the country.
Now, The Democrats believe that a party of principles, a party that is made up of nice guys and guys who don't want to fight, who would rather make calls for civility and unity, and they talk about, you know, one America, people who talk about, let's rally behind the anthem, let's rally behind the flag.
Part of what I wanted to say to my audience last weekend was, listen, you know, these things have become, in a sense, polite fictions.
When a country doesn't have a border, it's not really a country anymore.
When you have a bunch of people on one side of the political divide who refuse to salute the flag, well, you don't really have a national flag anymore.
When you have a bunch of people who want to take a knee, they refuse, they don't just not want to sing the anthem, they revile the anthem and everything it stands for, then what are you going to do?
Make them sing? You have to realize that this anthem has now become our anthem, but it's not their anthem.
So, these are the The left's view is basically this.
They don't say it quite this way, but they feel this, and I think we know that they do.
Their view is, listen, we'll come and knock down your monuments because we know you're not going to knock down our monuments.
It's just not even like you to do that.
And we're going to pack the court.
Why? Because we know that even if you had all the power, if you had all the branches of government, you wouldn't pack the court.
You're in love with the idea of nine justices.
You're going to try to keep it at nine.
So we can pack the court without a fear that you will do reciprocally to us what we are doing to you.
We can use the deep state against you.
We'll use the FBI to go after you.
We know that you're not going to use the FBI to go after us.
I remember when Bill Barr testified before the Democratic Senate, He basically said,
And then we'll bring in, when we come back, we'll bring in Merrick Garland and do it to you some more.
So this is the one-sidedness that now drives American politics, in which our weakness feeds their arrogance and their irredentism, their aggression against us.
And this, in some ways, I think is the crisis of the Republican Party.
We need a new and invigorated GOP. A GOP, I would say, that is more in the manner of Lincoln.
A GOP that recognizes that we are in a national crisis.
Lincoln, by the way, in his great Lyceum address, said, So Lincoln knew that the greatest threat to America would come from within America.
But very interestingly, Lincoln uses this generic we— And the point I've always thought reading that speech is, who's we?
Who are the people inside of America that actually want to kill America?
Well, as it turns out, it's not the generic we, but rather it's a very powerful group of people who dominate our culture.
This is the political left and a very powerful party.
This is the Democratic Party currently, in a sense, in charge of running American society.
And these are the people who think that it would be better, if you will, if traditional America disappeared.
They're not trying to get rid of America in that they're not trying to get rid of the borders of America, the boundaries of America.
They're not trying to get rid of the American people per se, but what they're trying to get rid of is the recognizable American stamp, which is to say they are at war with American exceptionalism.
They're very powerful people in America who want and are working overtime to kill America.
The only people who can stop them is the Republican Party.
But not this Republican Party, at least not this Republican Party in its current shape.
We need a stronger, more vigorous, more creative, more effective GOP that is fully up to the challenge posed by the other side.
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Ironically, the Republican Party today has, well, I think I'd have to call it a Reagan problem.
And what I mean by that is that so many on our side, and I'm not, again, talking just about the rhinos, the moderates.
I'm talking about mainstream Republicans who continue to pine for something resembling the Reagan era.
Let's say a kinder, gentler America that we used to live in in the 1980s and continued to a point in the 1990s.
And somehow seems to have disappeared.
We want that America back.
Now, look, I came of age in Reagan's America.
I was in college.
In the early 80s, when Reagan was first elected, I found myself thrillingly in the Reagan White House in the last two years of the Reagan administration.
It was such an honor for me to work there and to be up close watching Reagan.
I didn't interact daily with Reagan, but I got to stand in the back of the room and observe Reagan, his style, his sense of humor, and how Reagan's leadership in action was.
And it was a great time to be young and a great time to be alive.
And of course, the results of the Reagan administration were downright spectacular.
I remember in 1982, This is when the country was in a recession.
Sam Donaldson, then of ABC News, confronted Reagan.
And Reagan had given a speech.
And the country was in bad shape.
And Reagan had given a kind of thunderous Reaganite oration.
And Sam Donaldson said, Mr. President, in your speech, you have blamed the Democrats.
You have blamed the economists.
You have blamed the media.
Does any of the blame belong to you?
And Reagan goes, well, yes, because for many years I used to be a Democrat.
And this was great because Sam Donaldson chuckled.
He laughed. It was almost like one of those mic-dropping moments.
And you could see the camaraderie between Reagan and Donaldson, even though they were clearly on opposite sides of the aisle.
Reagan even had a pretty good camaraderie with Tip O'Neill.
I mean, Reagan would call him, you know, Reagan said that Tip O'Neill was like the government, big fat and out of control, so he would have these jibes at O'Neill, and there was political combat between the two, but at the same time, you got the feeling, I don't know if they actually did this, but that they could, in fact, go out and have a Guinness together.
Reagan had come to power by defeating Carter, and Carter was a massive nincompoop, a complete dolt, and someone who had not anticipated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
He seemed really surprised when that happened.
He didn't anticipate or know what to do with escalating gas prices.
He didn't know how to handle OPEC. Here's a guy who was completely puzzled when his lack of support for the Shah of Iran resulted in the Ayatollah Khomeini coming in and imposing a draconian regime across the whole country.
Carter was like, what? What?
He was constantly surprised by events and...
He got the feeling that you have a total buffoon.
Finally, when the hostages were taken, he didn't know what to do.
So, in a sense, the Democratic Party at that time was defined as a party of nincompoops, a party that didn't know how to manage the economy, didn't understand the Soviet Union.
But see, today the Democratic Party is totally different.
We're not dealing with the problem of ignorance.
We're not dealing with nincompoopery.
We're dealing with gangsterization.
In short, we're dealing with a trend in the Democratic Party that began with Obama, continued through Hillary, all the way through Biden, and all the Obama-ites who are around Biden.
So we are not in the Reagan era anymore, and this is the beginning of political wisdom, to recognize that we are now in a different situation.
We are in a domestic Cold War, not against an external Soviet Union, but against an implacable, in some ways more dangerous, domestic opponent.
And that calls for new approaches and new strategies.
Another way to put it is that in the 1980s, and you could say that this is true all the way going back, certainly as far back as World War II, Republicans and Democrats in the past agreed on goals.
But disagreed on means.
If you had said to Republicans or Democrats, let's say in the 1950s or 60s, or even in the 1980s, I want an America that's strong.
Sure. I want an America that's prosperous.
Sure. I want an America that's an example to the world.
Sure. I want an America that respects and takes pride in its founding and in the historical unfolding of the extension of the franchise and liberties to more and more people.
Sure. And I want to raise young people with civic knowledge and civic virtue.
Sure. So the disagreement might be, how do we split the pie?
And there were disagreements about how to go about confronting the Soviet Union.
But as I say, those are disagreements about means, not about ends.
What's different now is that the Democrats and the left want to take us to a different place.
It's almost like, we want to go to Florida, they want to go to Maine.
And so, in this sense, this is not an argument about how to get there.
This is an argument about where do you want America to go.
They don't like the idea of American strength.
They don't like the idea of American prosperity.
They don't like the idea of America being an example to the world.
So they are out to dismantle and undo and remake America.
And they're willing to use force.
They're willing to use all kinds of tactics to make us succumb to their America.
The only question is, will we do it?
And if not, how will we fight it?
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As the holiday season quickly approaches, there's never been a better time to give the gift of relief I want to talk about the origins of the Republican Party because we can see how the Republican Party was formed.
In combat was formed out of a great crisis and a great struggle.
And you might think that I'm talking about the Civil War, but oddly enough, I'm not.
I'm talking about the Revolutionary War and the war for the creation of a new society and ultimately resulting in the Constitution.
Now, it may seem odd since the Republican Party was started In the 1850s, to talk about the American founding, which occurred 80, almost 100 years prior.
But when Abraham Lincoln, who was in a sense the founder, certainly the first founding president of the Republican Party, was asked what the Republican Party stands for, what are its principles?
He answered very simply, its principles are the principles of the American founding.
And Reagan emphasized, we are conserving that.
Lincoln understood and said frequently that he was a conservative, and the progressive effort today to say, oh no, no, he was really a progressive, relies on a kind of meaningless and nonsensical definition of progress that Lincoln himself never accepted.
For Lincoln, it was all about conserving the original wisdom of the American founding.
And the question is, what is that wisdom?
Because that is the anchor of the Republican Party.
Even today, that is what we are trying to conserve.
That from Lincoln, through Teddy Roosevelt, through Reagan, through Trump, by and large the Republican Party has stood for a single, consistent set of principles.
Now, obviously the circumstances have varied enormously.
The agricultural society of the 1770s and 1780s is totally different from the society that Lincoln, Lincoln was in the middle of, you may say, a burgeoning industrial revolution that was bringing sweeping change across the country.
It was opening up the West.
So nobody's saying that the America, let's say, of Lincoln's time was the same as that of the founding.
Nobody is saying that the America of the early 20th century, which is Teddy Roosevelt's America, let alone Reagan's America in the 1980s, was unchanged from the old days.
No, but what conservatism is all about and what the Republican Party has consistently stood for is taking the same principles and applying them in different circumstances.
Now, let's look at the American founding itself because America began, you might say, with a problem of Foreign occupation.
We don't think of British rule, but that's what it was.
Foreign occupation of the United States.
America was being ruled, you may say, from abroad.
And so the American founding was a war of national liberation.
A war to give Americans control of their own country.
You could almost call it the original America First Movement, circa 1776.
Why? Because Americans basically said, we don't want to live...
For the benefit of Englishmen.
We don't want Englishmen to be able to tax us and keep the benefits of those taxes for ourselves.
Who moved to settle to America?
We did. Who ultimately is tilling and growing the land?
We are. Who is building America?
We are. So why shouldn't we keep the fruits of our labor?
This was the motivational principle of the...
American Revolution. And then as the Americans got to sit around a table in Philadelphia and talk about what kind of society they wanted, we see certain defining elements and we see how those elements are completely continuous with what we as conservatives and Republicans believe today.
First, the idea of self-government.
Which is to say, the idea of a society in which we govern ourselves.
But we don't just govern ourselves collectively through a democratic process.
Self-government has a double meaning.
It also means government of the self.
In other words, this is the idea of virtue.
This is the idea of imposing restraints, in a sense, ruling yourself.
Now, how do you rule yourself?
This may seem like an antique or odd idea, but no, it's simply the idea that you subject your passions, your desires, to your rational and moral faculties.
You bring your passions under rational and moral control.
Second, the idea of individual rights.
In other words, the idea that our rights come from God and we have them as individuals, and these are unalienable.
Unalienable here meaning that you can't give them up.
You can't even sell them.
So that the rights are not given by the state.
In fact, the state exists to protect those rights.
It is not, in fact, the grantor of rights.
And think of how relevant that is today when the state is trying to appropriate our rights, claim that it is the source of our rights.
No, it's not. We are the source of our rights.
We get them directly from God, and we need to protect them against the state.
So protecting rights against the state requires a third principle.
Limited government, a limited state whose area of authority is defined in advance, and the state can't go beyond that.
And it doesn't matter if you have a majority that wants to go beyond it.
They can't. This is what the founders call the tyranny of the majority.
In other words, in the name of the majority, the state wants to trample your rights, but the founders, no less than us, believe, no, the state can't do that.
And then the American founders wanted to create an entrepreneurial republic.
They wanted to create a society based on commerce, a society in which people ultimately can trade with each other, can come up with new things, new inventions, new patents, new copyrights.
And this, they believe, would create a prosperous and abundant society.
So their idea was not a leveling of society, not redistributing, let's take this farmer's corn and give it to that guy.
No. The idea was that you get to keep the corn that you grow.
Lincoln would say later, the hand that makes the corn has the right to put the corn into its own mouth.
And finally, America, a republic.
Remember Ben Franklin? I'm giving you a republic if you can keep it.
And the Republican Party gets its name from the idea of a republic.
So not a pure democracy in which the people have a sort of direct role in deciding policy questions, but a republican form of government in which we do have majority rule, but majority rule is checked by minority rights,
and we have an entire constitutional structure of separation of powers, checks and balances, all kinds of ways in which government creates oversight, Of itself, to make sure that government serves the citizens and not the other way around.
This is the origins of America that were incorporated into the platform of the Republican Party in the 1850s and 1860s.
So the roots of the Republican Party, yes, formally they go back to the middle of the 19th century, but intellectually they The roots go back all the way to Washington and Madison and Jefferson and Hamilton and Adams.
In some sense, they were Republicans, even without knowing it.
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Feel the difference. I want to talk about America's first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.
And I do it in full recognition that we are living through a Lincoln moment.
In some ways, not so much even a Reagan moment, because I think if Reagan were alive today, he would be a fish out of water.
He'd be very bewildered at the America that we see today.
But Lincoln, in a way, wouldn't.
Why? Because the waters were even more roiled in Lincoln's time.
When Lincoln left Springfield, Virginia, and I'm going to play at the end of this segment a clip about this, he took a very roundabout journey to get to Washington, D.C. He didn't go the straight route.
He jogged up, and he went south, and he made apparently some 80 stops.
Everywhere there were groups of Americans there to see Lincoln.
And historians puzzle over why he did that, and they think that the reason Lincoln made all those stops is he wanted to show himself.
I don't think so.
I think it was the opposite. Lincoln was checking them out.
He was checking to see if they were ready for the storm that was coming.
Many states, by the way, had already seceded.
More would secede.
And Lincoln was facing, as he put it in his own words, a crisis greater than that faced by Washington.
So this is our man.
It is our man because today we're facing similar threats from within the country.
And by the way, they're coming from the same people, from the same party, from a gangsterized Democratic Party that is into, well, I'll say bluntly, enslavement.
The difference, of course, was that in the Civil War, they went to enslavement of Blacks.
And by the way, this was the shared theme of Democrats in the South and the North.
The Democrats in the North were helping the Democrats in the South enslave the black population and sustain the massive network of slave plantations that stretched across the South.
And I know that to this day, there are people who deny this, and they deny the fact that the Civil War was even about slavery.
They're denied that the Confederate government set up by the Democrats was a slave regime.
But here is Alexander Stevens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, speaking right upon the start of the Confederacy, March 12, 1861.
This is called the Cornerstone Speech.
I just want to read a line or two from it because he makes it more than clear what the new government, the Confederacy, is about.
He says, quote,"...our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea." Opposite to what?
Opposite to the Declaration of Independence.
And what is it founded on?
He says, So what could be more clear about the defining issue between the Republicans and the Democrats?
And Lincoln understood this.
Lincoln understood that enslavement was the democratic game and that these were guys who would bend every rule in order to try to achieve it.
Lincoln, by the way, also suspected and said that he thought that it was the plot of the Democrats to extend enslavement from just the blacks and just the South to the whole country.
In other words, the Democrats wanted to enslave all of America.
And to this day, historians sometimes wonder, was Lincoln exaggerating?
I think Lincoln was actually being prophetic, because if we follow the tracks of the Democrats, they've gone from initially a plantation reserved for blacks, To now a plantation which extends to many other groups.
In fact, they have one pretty much for every ethnic group, and I think if they could have their way, they would convert all of America into a kind of plantation, obviously with certain modifications that I will talk about in a minute.
Here are Lincoln's principles, which I think you'll recognize as distinctively Republican to this day.
He recognized that the Democrats were trying to impose the same type of slavery in America that the British had tried to impose upon America.
So there was a link, if you will, between the enslaving principles of the crown, an external threat, And the enslaving principles of the plantation masters that the Democratic Party supported.
Against the Democrats, Lincoln articulated equality of rights.
We all have equal rights under the law.
All men are created equal, which is to say that there's a divinely implanted moral equality.
Not an equality of outcomes, not an equality of intelligence, not an equality of industry, but an equality that came out of a shared human dignity.
Lincoln celebrated the entrepreneur.
He said the hand that makes the corn has the right to put the corn into its own mouth.
So for people who think that somehow the Republican Party switched sides and became something the opposite of what it was, I ask you, wait a minute, aren't these Lincoln principles that we get to keep the fruits of our own labor exactly what the Republican Party stands for today?
Isn't it true that the Democrats stand for the opposite principles, which is to say that using the power of government to confiscate your earnings is Appropriate them.
So something that was practiced narrowly in slavery in Lincoln's time is now being practiced through government on a much more massive scale.
Lincoln also realized that the gangsterization of the Democrats called for a very tough response.
I have a scene in the movie, Trump Card, where Lincoln is on a train.
He signs the so-called Order of Retaliation, which basically says this, for every black Union soldier killed by the Confederacy, One Confederate captive will be shot.
And people sometimes, you think today, wow, I mean, why would a moderate man like Lincoln issue an order of such barbarity?
Well, the answer is he knew that if he didn't do to the Democrats what they were doing to him, They would never stop.
This is a principle, by the way, that couldn't be more relevant.
We need to keep in mind that if we don't show toughness against the other side, the kind of Lincolnian toughness that came at a critical time, then we're going to prove unworthy and unable to deal with the savagery of our opponents.
Let me close this segment with a clip right out of my movie America.
It's a very poignant clip, very touching.
Debbie and I can't even watch it today without being moved by it, but it's a recreation of the great scene of Lincoln leaving Springfield, Illinois.
It's kind of his farewell speech as he went to a destiny unknown, but one in which he realized that he was, in a sense, putting even his life on the line.
Watch. No one who is not in my situation can appreciate the feelings of sadness I have at this party.
To this place, and to the kindness of these people, I owe everything.
Here I have lived for a quarter of a century.
To you, dear friends, I owe all that I have, all that I am.
I leave now, not knowing when, Or wherever I may return.
With a task before me that is greater than that which rested upon Washington.
Without the assistance of the Almighty who attended him, I cannot succeed.
With that assistance, I cannot fail.
Forward!
Trusting in Him, who can go with me and remain with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well.
Be well.
Amen.
♪♪♪
Through His care, commending you, as I hope that in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.
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I'm going to fast forward from Lincoln to another hero of the Republican Party, one in our lifetime, Reagan.
And I want to talk about Reagan because of the magnitude of his accomplishment.
It shows you what a fired up Republican Party can do.
But it's hard to talk about Reaganism without thinking of just Reagan the man and his sparkling sense of humor.
I remember in the 84 campaign, one of the reporters came up to Reagan and they said, what do you think of Mondale's charges?
Reagan goes, well, I think he should pay them.
This was very much Reagan.
He had this ability to sort of deflect and come up with the shining witticism that just sort of put the other side on the defensive.
But behind that sparkling manner was a real prescient sense of insight.
Here is Reagan, actually at a younger age, before the presidency, talking about whether it's possible that fascism might come to America.
And here's what Reagan said.
Listen. You know, someone very profoundly once said, many years ago, that if fascism ever comes to America, it'll come in the name of liberalism.
Whoa. If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.
Now, Reagan meant, I think, two things by this.
One is that the fascism would be disguised.
It's not going to call itself fascism.
In fact, as we know from Antifa, it calls itself anti-fascism.
So it doesn't wear the fascist label.
You can't do that. You have to market it another way.
But the second thing that Reagan realized is that liberalism, and he's talking here not about classical liberalism, not about John Stuart Mill, but the liberalism of FDR, of LBJ. This was a...
This was a liberalism that was deeply infected with the fascist sensibility.
I've shown in my movies FDR's fascination with Mussolini, that there were leftists like W.E.B. Du Bois who even admired early Hitler.
They talked about the efficiency of Nazism, and Du Bois has this embarrassing...
A section about how Hitler did all these wonderful things out of necessity and he's being criticized for no good reason and so on.
This is the great African-American sociologist, W.E.B. Du Bois.
But Reagan saw that we might be dealing with a full-blown fascism in America.
And I think if you look at some of the things, look at Biden's vaccine mandate.
What is Biden doing? He's using the power of the state to coordinate through private...
Employers basically saying you can't get a job unless you force people to get vaccinated.
Well, that's fascism.
That is the marriage of industry and government toward a coordinated purpose.
So look at the fact that the Biden administration supplies to Facebook and to YouTube.
Hey, you need to censor this guy.
You need to censor that guy. So in a way, we're operating under a constitutional framework.
The government itself can't censor directly.
So what does it do? It recruits These massive private quasi-monopolies and it carries out through them the unconstitutional things that it itself is forbidden from doing.
Again, this is a sort of signature fascist move and Reagan anticipated it.
Now, I remember when I came to America in the late 70s, America was a mess.
Part of it was on the foreign policy front where the Soviet Union had gobbled up all these countries, I mean, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua.
So, literally 10 countries had fallen into the Soviet orbit within a short space of time.
But by the time Reagan was gone, the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
Eastern Europe was free.
The Berlin Wall came down.
Margaret Thatcher, I think, accurately summed up what even today we think of as Reagan's main legacy.
He won the Cold War without firing a shot.
True. But what we tend to forget is the other side of Reagan, and that is that he was facing a domestic fight In other words, for Reagan, it wasn't just about fighting Soviet communism abroad.
It was also fighting collectivism at home.
Under Carter, there was something called the misery index, which is to say this was the sum total of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate.
And we're beginning to see a misery index that's starting to creep up now under Biden.
And Reagan realized that what the Democrats had in common with the Soviets was was collectivism.
Collectivism advancing even on the domestic front.
What really happened is that the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, never really changed its stripes or its spots.
The Democratic Party recognized at the end of slavery that you can't have the old type of plantation, the old kind of agricultural plantation where you force people to work.
That's not going to work.
You have to recreate the plantation on a new basis.
In this case, it's not about forced labor.
It is ultimately about bribing people with benefits in exchange for their votes.
But you get something very much resembling the old plantation, and let me prove it by looking at, there's a study of slavery by the historian Kenneth Stamp, and he talks about the old slave plantation, and he says it had five signature kind of features.
Dilapidated housing, which was called slave quarters.
Broken families, which were the product of slave rules in which the institution of a marriage essentially didn't exist.
A high degree of violence to police the plantation, because after all, you're forcing people to work, the people are going to try to run away, you have to chase them down.
No opportunity for decent education or advancement.
In other words, even though the Democrats like to call slavery a quote, school of civilization, it was not a school from which anyone was ever allowed to graduate.
And finally, a pervasive atmosphere of hopelessness, despair, and nihilism.
Now, what I ask is, isn't it true that if you go not just to inner cities in America today.
I'm not just talking about Baltimore or St.
Louis or Oakland or Detroit.
Go to some of the Hispanic Barrios, go to some of the Native American reservations, and you will see all these exact same features, dilapidated housing, Broken families, a high degree of violence, no opportunity for decent education or advancement, and finally an atmosphere of despair and nihilism.
So see the way in which what the Democrats created on the old plantation is still with us.
It's still with us right now in the 21st century.
So the beauty of Reaganism is that Reagan fought both on the foreign and on the domestic front.
And Reagan even said himself, I'm not just fighting for individual rights.
I'm fighting for the individual.
I'm fighting for the family.
I'm fighting for the church.
I'm fighting for the local community.
I'm fighting for the country.
And those are the five principles, I would say, of modern American conservatism and modern American republicanism.
So we are very much in the Lincoln tradition.
We're also in the Reagan tradition.
And even though our circumstances, again, differ, they're very different from the Reagan era, that Reaganite spirit and that Reaganite leadership, Reaganite resolve, those are things we very much need today that can help us build a stronger Republican Party that is equal to the challenges that not Lincoln face, not Reagan face, but that we face.
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Donald Trump and how Trump has carved a new path for the Republican Party, but again, a new path anchored in old principles.
Trump discovered the situation he was facing was different.
It wasn't that there wasn't a foreign adversary.
There was an unrecognized foreign adversary, no longer the old Soviet Union, but now China, except that the sort of ruling classes, the sort of American elite, didn't see China as a threat at all.
America had done a good deal to strengthen and enrich China over the previous 30 years, and Trump realized that China needed an America that was going to meet it on a level playing field, meet it with some resistance and some resolve.
Now, on the domestic front, Trump was facing a very different situation, and that is, Democrats who had become radicalized, who were moving toward Not just socialism, but toward outright tyranny.
And Trump realized that you needed a Republican Party that began to fight.
And this is really what distinguished Trump from so many other Republicans.
First of all, he was a cultural figure.
He came out of American popular culture, and he recognized that the left had taken over the culture.
The left didn't just dominate culture.
They had a virtual monopoly.
On institutions of culture, from academia to the media to entertainment.
And they were extending this monopoly by pushing into, we want the NFL, we want the Boy Scouts.
And we see today under Biden, they want the military, they want the police, they want all the institutions of government to take a knee, to bow to them.
And they want not so much, I would say, even to abolish the police as to redefine the police and make the police into a kind of extension, a gang, a That represents, if you will, the police arm of the Democratic Party.
This is what socialist states do.
They don't abolish force.
They recruit force to their own benefit and they use it against the citizens to force them to toe the line.
Trump realized that in Antifa, the left now has a paramilitary.
Wow, exactly like Mussolini did, exactly like Hitler did.
The black shirts and the brown shirts of the old days are now back.
And not only are they roaming and marauding the streets of America, they are supported by the media.
The media is, if you will, the protector of Antifa.
We see this, for example, very clearly in the Rittenhouse case.
They don't want you to know that you're dealing with a bunch of criminals and pedophiles and weirdos.
And these are the people who were causing riots and looting and arson, and they set upon Kyle Rittenhouse.
No, the media wants you to think that it was Kyle Rittenhouse who set upon them.
These are some innocent guys that were just going about their business.
And so this is the big lie, if you will.
That Trump knew that he was dealing with.
So Trump was fighting on all fronts.
Reagan, in a sense, could almost pick and choose.
I'm going to focus on the Soviet Union.
I'm going to focus on tax cuts.
But that's about it.
But for Trump, there was an attempt.
I've never seen this kind of coordinated attack that we saw on Trump.
Trump is truly a colorblind guy.
I mean, the weird thing is they keep calling him a racist.
He couldn't be less racist.
In fact, to the degree that he shows a partiality, he likes blacks.
He seems to, again, this may be part of his background in popular culture, where blacks actually have a, I would say, a dominant role in American popular culture.
Trump is into boxers and he's into comedians, and so he loves people like...
Herschel Walker, a sports star, or Terrence Williams, a comedian.
So the idea that Trump is anti-black just doesn't even work.
Trump is also a billionaire, but he likes ordinary people.
He likes working-class people.
I think the great insight of Trumpism is that the Republican Party, no less than the Democratic Party, moved away from the working class in embracing abstract principles, originalism, global free trade.
In a sense, even Republicans were a little blind to what was happening in terms of jobs.
Not just jobs, but jobs affect families.
Families affect communities.
And so the ruin of whole communities across America...
That was caused not just by unemployment but also by all kinds of cultural pathologies that set in in their aftermath.
Trump knew this. And Trump recognized that any political party that claims to speak for the people must embrace These forgotten Americans.
And he did that. And I think in doing that, he's given not just new political hope to the Republicans, because I think that these working class Americans, and by the way, we're not just talking about white guys.
We're talking about white guys and black guys and brown guys.
We're talking about a multiracial coalition of working class people who can become the backbone of We're good to go.
Now, I do want to qualify this statement.
I think Trumpism is the essential path forward, the essential base of the Republican Party.
But one thing we learned from the Youngkin race in Virginia is that we need Trumpism, but we also need Trump+.
And what I mean by Trump +, is if you think of the Youngkin style, he was basically Trump in a kind of warm sweater.
He was basically Trump who won over the working class, but at the same time didn't scare off the suburban moms.
He was essentially a guy who said, listen, I'm going to have school choice.
I'm going to stop this racial indoctrination in the school.
So Youngkin, in that sense, was sensitive, as Trump is.
To the issues in the culture, issues that go beyond public policy or taxation or foreign policy.
They have to do with what your children learn.
They have to do with what the left is trying to do.
Introduce all kinds of cultural and sexual depravities in the schools.
And Youngkin is like, I'm not on board with any of that.
But... The key for Youngkin was to use a style.
And this is particularly important in a swing state.
It's not important, of course, in Utah.
It's not important in Alaska.
But it is important in states like Colorado and Arizona and Virginia.
You can say purplish states.
And Republicans have a good chance to win those states.
And I think the way you do it...
In the aftermath of Virginia, some people said, well, is the lesson that we should go with Trump, or is the lesson that we should go away from Trump?
And the answer is no. The lesson is that you want to mobilize the base, but you also want to be able to make the case.
To people who are otherwise in the middle.
So the Republican Party isn't just the party of the rural areas.
It isn't just the party of the working class.
It's the party of the rural areas plus the suburbs.
It's the party of the Hispanic working class guy plus the soccer mom.
And in doing this, we have a Republican Party that can be an enduring political majority.
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In his annual message to Congress, 1862, Abraham Lincoln said,"...the fiery trial through which we pass will light us, in honor or in dishonor, down to the latest generation." And I think what Lincoln was saying is that we need to toughen up because we're undergoing a fiery trial.
This is our challenge, no less than his.
And it means we need a Republican Party that is smart and tough, a Republican Party that recognizes we're up against some very bad people, not just stupid people, wicked people.
And we ought to recognize that they need to be met with firmness.
I'm not talking about us going and knocking down their statues.
I'm talking about us holding them accountable to law.
I'm saying that if they use gangster tactics against us, when we are in power, we have to check them.
We've got to show them, listen, we too can play in this game.
In my study of the American Founding, I was thinking to myself, why haven't the American founders protected us against these moves toward tyranny by the Democrats?
And I realized as I studied Madison and Jefferson and Franklin that underlying the whole American experiment, underlying the architecture of the Constitution, is a hidden assumption.
And the hidden assumption is that the majority and the minority in any society, in a democratic society, should have a rational fear of each other.
Even the majority must have the fear that the minority cannot be trifled with, that you cannot oppress them because beyond a certain point, they're not going to put up with it.
I think we've got to show the Democrats, even while they're in charge, that we're not going to put up with it and that our turn will come.
And we will teach them a very bitter lesson, not of revenge, but of justice, if they keep this up.
We need to be creative and create our own institutions.
And I mean our own schools, our own universities, our own movies, our own comedy channels, our own digital channels.
And I hope you realize the importance of being on alternative digital platforms.
Get on Parler. Get on Getter.
Follow me on locals, dinesh.locals.com.
Why? Because we're trying to build up free speech platforms.
There's a sword hanging over our head on the mainstream platforms.
Who knows what our future will be there?
Ours is a party with a great history.
It's a party that has again and again come to America's rescue.
The founders came and rescued America from the British.
Lincoln rescued us from the pro-slavery Democrats.
I haven't talked too much about Teddy Roosevelt, but he played an important role.
Reagan rescued us from the Communists and from the Soviets and also resisted collectivism at home.
So, we've got a party.
We don't need a new party.
All this talk about creating a new party is nonsensical.
It is true that the Republican Party itself came in as a new party and displaced the Whigs, but notice the key word is displaced.
The Republican Party didn't come in and have a three-party system in which the vote would be divided between the Whigs And the Republicans and then of course the Democrats would win every time.
So similarly now, if you create a new party, say a Patriot Party, it'll mean that the conservative vote gets divided between the Patriots and the Republicans and that's very bad news for us.
We have a great party.
It has a great history.
We have nothing to be ashamed of.
We're not a party that made any kind of a big switch.
We're a party that has stayed true to its principles.
Even in changing circumstances, and in this circumstance, more than ever, we need a strong conservative movement.
We need a strong Republican Party because we are the best hope of the country.
This is a beautiful country.
This is a country that is currently in grave danger.
But together, with creativity and fortitude, We can strengthen the Republican Party that is the hope of America.
We can show Americans that it's not too late and that we have a country very much worth fighting for.
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