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Dec. 3, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:16
QUESTIONS ANSWERED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep230
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This is a special edition of the podcast.
I'm going to talk about why I decided to do the podcast, where I'm going with it, all in the context of the strange and perilous situation we face as a country.
And then I'm just going to do Q&A. I'm a series of audio questions on critical issues.
I'm A series of wide-ranging questions.
How to survive cancel culture?
Who are our greatest presidents?
What happened to due process and equal justice under the law?
Is there a way to restore civil debate in America?
And why should Christians stay involved in politics?
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.
Here we are on Friday, December 3rd.
Hard to believe we're already in December.
And Debbie and I were just talking about the fact that we began this podcast together the 11th, I believe, of January, wasn't it?
And we are now in episode what?
230, 230 episodes into the podcast.
And I thought this would be a good kind of special edition in which I think about what we're doing, why we're doing it, why we started it, where we're going.
The country is in a very difficult place.
And so I want to think about what this podcast can accomplish as part of the other work we're doing, the books, the movies, and so on, to really advance the debate and help our side and help you.
It was actually Debbie's idea for the podcast.
She, you know, deserves all the credit for coming up with the idea.
And honestly, I was initially skeptical.
I was skeptical both because this was kind of a new thing.
I like to try to be the best at what I do, the best writer, the best movie maker, the best everything.
And so I'm like, well, I probably can't be the best podcaster also, so why do it?
It's kind of my sensibility.
Debbie's like, no, I think it's a great idea.
It's COVID. We're kind of in shutdown mode.
You're not speaking as much as you used to.
So suddenly an idea that would otherwise have seemed impractical.
In fact, I was typically on the road almost half the month.
Suddenly I realized I can pull this off and why not give it a try?
Now, we went to Salem Media.
I knew Ed Adzinger, the head of Salem, and so I just sent him an email saying, hey, Ed, you know, would you be interested if I wanted to do a podcast?
And right away, he's like, yeah, Dinesh.
He goes, I'd love to do it.
In fact, it's got me thinking, and we'd like to create a sort of Salem Podcast Corporation, bring in some other people to do podcasts.
And so Salem jumped on this and agreed to be our sort of partner and And this is important because Salem does all the...
They sell the ads.
And so they make the podcast viable.
Otherwise, literally, it would be Debbie and me selling ads on the phone, which would not be a pretty sight.
Especially not Debbie. Debbie is the worst salesman in the world.
I have to quote you, the ad rates there...
$1,500 per ad.
Ooh, that sounds like a lot. How about if we make it $1,000?
Ooh, that sounds like a lot. How about if we make it $300?
Okay, that's okay. We'll just throw in a few free ads and see if you get some customers.
So needless to say, this podcast would be flat on its back if we had approached it that way.
Now, I think an early decision we made with the podcast was, you know, Salem wanted to know, do you want to do this podcast like weekly, like on a Saturday, in conjunction with all the rest that you do?
And we made the decision early on.
We said, you know what, if we're going to do it, let's just kind of dive into the water and the deep.
So let's go with a daily podcast for about an hour.
And go the whole hog.
And Salem was skeptical.
They're like, sure, you can do this?
You think you can pull this off?
And we're like, yeah, if we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it.
And so we decided to take the bull by the horns, to go full force with it.
And we have. In thinking about what kind of podcast I wanted to do, I kind of scoped around to see what other people were doing.
And I realized that a lot of podcasts are similar, by the way, to a lot of talk radio, similar to a lot of TV shows that you get on cable channels.
I would call them affirmation podcasts.
And what I mean by affirmation podcasts is essentially people are saying things that they want the audience to affirm.
They're saying things that they believe and you believe.
And the idea is that you're happy to have somebody out there saying it.
It's a way of almost echoing what you believe, but you're maybe busy and working and not in a position to articulate your beliefs into the public square, so you're glad someone else is doing it sort of with you and for you.
But typically, with a lot of shows and a lot of podcasts and so on, you listen, but you don't learn.
You listen because you're glad to have someone doing it.
I wanted to do, well, my podcast has an affirmation element.
I do kind of my Dineshian rants or my Dineshisms, as some people call them.
But I also like to introduce a wide range of ideas.
My own work has been, over the years, very interdisciplinary.
And I've developed a pretty good knowledge of a lot of different fields.
I like to thread information together.
I also like to confront the arguments that the left makes and confront them at the root level, not just superficially.
I don't like to caricature the arguments and debunk them, but say them even better than the left would put it themselves.
And then if you can refute the argument at that level, then you've really knocked down their...
You really expose the hollowness of their ideas.
When we started the podcast, I must say, for the first month or so, it was, well, how do you, what would you call it?
I mean, a little traumatic on Debbie.
And we were putting in really long days.
I think part of it was that we would just learn everything from scratch.
And also, I was kind of...
You know, I was doing a podcast that would often go 70, 80, 90 minutes.
And Debbie's like, you know, this exceeds the human attention span.
There's a reason that the classroom is 40 minutes long.
You don't want to have people like comatose and palpitating at the end because they've just been through this experience.
So over time, I've realized that the ideal length for the podcast is, you know, 45 minutes, 46 minutes.
I time it at about 46 minutes.
With the ads then dropped in on top of that.
So the podcast comes in under an hour.
And we've now kind of hit our groove.
It doesn't take us the 12-hour day or 14-hour day anymore.
By and large, our schedule is.
I think about what the issues are of the day.
And then at night, I pick an article here, a clip there.
I'll make a note or two.
Oh, but I've heard about all the papers everywhere and every Debbie has a standard domestic complaint about my strewn papers, which at times have found their way into all the different rooms of the house.
I've now imposed certain types of discipline.
I only trash about four rooms, not all of them anymore.
The podcast, look, it's the first time I've had a regular forum.
If I look back on my career, I write books, I do speeches, I've done the movies, but those are episodic from time to time.
And I haven't had a sort of daily platform.
And what's cool about the podcast is it allows me to react and to interpret things as they are happening in real time, so to speak, and on a daily basis, five days a week.
And so it's fun. I'm enjoying it.
I hope you are too.
The one thing that has made us bristle and the one thing that we are just so infuriated about is censorship.
The fact that we constantly have to watch what we say.
We constantly have to ask, is this going to get us banned?
Is this going to get us censored?
And this is just a debilitating and horrific way to have to operate.
Obviously, the longer-term solution is to build our own platforms where we can speak freely, where we can say what we think.
For me, that platform now, I'm on Getter, I'm on Parler, I'm on Gab, and I'm also doing exclusive, I would call it uncensored, content on Locals.
So if you haven't checked that out, you should.
By the way, I do a weekly Q&A, kind of an open mic Q&A. I respond in real time to questions.
You can interact with me directly.
Now, Locals is a subscriber platform where you pay a small fee every month, but it's a minimal fee.
The other thing you can do is check it out and you can be a member and decide then if you want to subscribe or not.
But check it out. That website, by the way, is just dinesh.locals.com, dinesh.locals.com.
So once again, thank you for being a listener or a viewer of the podcast.
I've got, I think, probably more of my audience's audio on Apple and Google and Spotify, but many people also watch on video on Rumble or on YouTube.
Make sure you subscribe, by the way.
Subscribe on YouTube and click on the notification so you'll be notified.
They may not always do it, but at least click the notifications button.
And if you're listening on Apple, make sure you subscribe.
Once again, my heartfelt thanks to you for being part of this podcast.
And for the rest of the podcast, I'm going to take some big questions about issues of the day.
These are questions that have piled up.
By the way, if you want to send me a question, questiondinesh at gmail.com, audio and video questions, It's actually more entertaining to play those on the podcast and for me to react to those in real time.
So send me your questions and for the rest of the podcast, I'll be taking some basic questions and answering them as candidly as I can.
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Our first question today, guys, seems to be about cancel culture.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
My name is Sydney, and I was wondering how we can survive in an era of cancel culture.
Very simple and straightforward question.
And I want to begin by distinguishing between cancel culture, so-called, and censorship.
They're not quite the same thing.
Now, the left is promoting both.
They're promoting cancellation and they're promoting censorship.
So what's the distinction between the two?
Well, let's imagine a guy who works at a corporation and the left targets him because, let's say, he went to a Trump rally.
And they try to get the guy demoted or fired.
That would be an example of cancel culture.
They're trying to cancel him.
And by cancel him, we mean here hurt him, ostracize him, demote him, harm him in some way, punish him.
For what? Really for having the views or expressing the views that he does through, in this case, going to a Trump rally.
The reason we call this cancel culture and not censorship is they're not directly stopping him from saying what he says.
This is not an attempt to silence him directly, but it's an attempt to make him pay a price.
And I'm using him generically, obviously, him or her pay a price for their convictions.
Cancel culture is really about power.
And the left says no. They go, cancel culture, Dinesh, is about accountability.
People should be held accountable for their beliefs.
And I'm not against accountability.
If someone takes a position, let's say a controversial position, they should defend it.
And if the controversial position has consequences, they should be willing in general to endure the consequences.
If you say something outrageous, if I go to a cocktail party and start making outrageous statements, let's say insulting the people there, they're going to get very angry at me.
That's the consequence of what I said, and that's accountability.
But the left never imposes accountability on itself.
The accountability is a one-way street.
And so what they call accountability is nothing more than a vindictive form of punishment, of exercising power.
And interestingly, they do it.
We rarely do it. I've never heard of a conservative saying, I've got a business, and you know what?
I try to discover which of my employees are leftists, and then I fire them.
I get rid of them. The only example I can think of in this area, it's kind of an amusing example, is Debbie and I know this guy.
He's actually invested in one of our movies.
He's a powerful sort of investments guy, equity, finance, or hedge funds, that kind of thing.
And this is a guy who's a super fan of my movie, 2016 Obama's America.
And he loved that movie so much that every year he would do interviews with people who came looking for jobs.
And he said at one time he got this Chinese guy who was a brilliant young man and wanted to work at this hedge fund, but he wasn't sure what the guy's politics were.
And so he said, hey, listen, I got to go to the bathroom.
But in the meantime, I'm going to play a video and I want you to watch it.
When I come back, tell me what you think about it.
So he actually then puts on my movie, Obama's America, at least a part of it, and he lets the Chinese guy watch it.
And then he comes back and he goes, well, what do you think?
And the guy's like, well, it made me very uncomfortable.
I wasn't very happy with what I heard.
And so my friend goes, thank you very much.
I appreciate your interest in our company.
We'll get right back to you.
And then the guy was not offered a job.
So this is actually a little bit of cancel culture practiced by our side.
Now, normally, I would talk my friend out of it and say, well, listen, it's a hedge fund.
So in the old Dinesh, the Dinesh of the 1980s would have said that, you know, it's fine.
It doesn't matter. But we are in a different environment.
And I feel that in today's environment, we have to teach the other side a lesson because they're not going to learn.
If they're able to do it to us and we can't retaliate, they don't feel the pinch of it.
Then they're going to go, we can do this with impunity.
So once they realize that two can play at this game, conservatives run companies too, conservatives are in a position, and in fact, if they develop the backbone, our side can start teaching their side a lesson.
Not because we believe in cancel culture, but because we are using it as a retaliatory tool in order to stop them from doing this kind of nonsense.
Let me talk about censorship for a moment, because censorship is not limited to the First Amendment.
This is a very important point.
If you read John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, the kind of classic diatribe against censorship, Mill makes it really clear that censorship isn't limited to what the government can do to you.
Yes, that is maybe the most odious form of censorship.
But Mill says that censorship can be practiced by, let's say, a church saying, you shouldn't come here.
Or it can be practiced by a corporation.
It can be practiced in a family.
Think of a small community where there is so much small-mindedness that anybody who dresses different or acts different is immediately ostracized.
Well, that's a form of censorship too.
So what Mill is saying is that ultimately...
Our views are part of our individuality.
Our views are part of our identity.
We hear a lot about identity politics these days, but your genuine identity is your identity as an individual.
It's the package of what you look like, how you dress, how you present yourself in public space, what you think, what you believe, what you articulate.
That is you.
And so censorship, this is Mill's point, is a form of mutilating or suppressing who you are.
And it's bad for that reason, too.
Now, what do we do about it?
Number one, the moment we have our hands on the three rungs of government, by which I mean the House, the Senate, and the presidency, we repeal Section 230.
Number two, we have ongoing lawsuits.
The Trump lawsuit may be the most prominent, but there are many others.
Number three, we need to expose and humiliate the censors.
And here the classic example is Laura Loomer accosting Jack Dorsey at the Bitcoin conference and basically calling him out and having all the Bitcoin guys cheer and then jeer at Jack Dorsey.
And I think it had an impact.
Jack Dorsey was a little shocked To feel that kind of pressure in an audience that he valued.
We also need to set up at alternative platforms.
Parler, Getter, CloudHub, Gab, Locals.
Check me out at Locals.
But in all of this, we need to exercise prudence.
There are people who say to me, well, Dinesh, why don't you just get off Facebook and get off YouTube and get off Twitter?
Well, there's no reason to do that.
And also there's no reason to say things on those platforms that will automatically get you banned.
That is not a measure of your courage or your bravery.
I remember Bill Mitchell, a prominent Trumpster who was on Twitter, a very, in fact, influential figure on Twitter.
Bill Mitchell said something about hydroxychloroquine.
He knew it was likely to get him banned.
It got him banned. And then Bill Mitchell went, whoops, I shouldn't have done that.
He goes, I should have realized I'm playing in their sandbox.
And so if I don't play by their rules, I'm just going to get kicked off.
Now, Bill Mitchell is currently, by the way, on Getter.
He's doing a great job on Getter.
So he's found an alternative platform.
But he, in a sense, allowed his own voice, a very important voice, to be shut off on Twitter, and all for the HCQ hashtag that seemed to him to be harmless at the time, but cost him dearly.
So censorship is something that we have to live through.
We're dealing with it.
It's a terrible situation.
It, in some ways, doesn't allow America to call itself a free country.
I think we will eventually get out of it.
But we get out of it because we are prudent in the way that we deal with it, and we build the alternative platforms that will make this censorship, in the end, irrelevant.
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Our next question is about the presidency.
Listen. Who would you say are the three greatest American presidents and why?
And if there are no Democrats in this group, who is the best Democratic president?
Okay, good one. Let me start with the three greatest presidents.
The greatest one, in my opinion, Abraham Lincoln.
Now, I know there are a lot of people who would put Washington in that category.
And I think that Washington, obviously, the father of the country, deserves enormous credit.
I would put Washington probably in the second place.
But Lincoln, for his philosophical statesmanship, for, in a sense, realizing the promise that was implicit in the founding but could not be realized in the founding era itself.
Which is the deep idea of equal rights under the law, equal dignity, all men are created equal.
The founders thought of that, Jefferson articulated it, but Lincoln implemented it, and implemented it under extremely challenging conditions.
So I'm a huge fan of Lincoln.
I, by the way, do not agree with the view that Lincoln became some sort of a dictator or that Lincoln plunged the nation precipitously into a war that could have been avoided.
No, it was the Southern Democrats who provoked the war.
They started it. And their beef was what?
They didn't like the results of an election.
And because they didn't agree, they agreed that Lincoln had been freely elected, but they didn't like the outcome of it.
And so they decided, let's pack up our bags and essentially break the country into two.
So Lincoln, number one.
Washington, number two.
And I would say Reagan, number three.
Now, some people go, what about Teddy Roosevelt?
And what about Trump?
Well, with Trump, I'm not going to count him in the mix, partly because I think that Trump's, let's just say his engagement with America is incomplete.
Here's a guy, I think, who is likely to run again.
And if he runs again, then we will have to look at the Trump story in its full context.
Well, it's easier to be able to look back at history, to look at presidents who have served their one term or their two terms.
And so I'm limiting myself to presidents who are in that category.
Teddy Roosevelt, by the way, deserves to be considered.
I have a higher view of him than I used to.
I used to think of Teddy Roosevelt as this kind of unfortunate Republican progressive.
Somebody who had, well, some rather questionable views about social Darwinism, who seemed to have an anti-capitalist streak.
He denounced big corporations.
He fashioned himself as a kind of grand slayer of these corporations.
But I think, again, looking back and reconsidering my earlier view, I now see Teddy Roosevelt as having exposed cartels and monopolies.
And we're living in an age of cartels and monopolies.
And our monopolies are worse than the monopolies that Teddy Roosevelt confronted.
Why? Because our monopolies are shutting down our basic civil liberties.
It's one thing to have a telecommunications monopoly that, let's say, for example, controls the telegraph, but isn't censoring the content.
Of the telegraph. Or you have a single phone company, but it isn't censoring what is said on the phone.
That's completely different from some of our monopolies, like Google, which use their power to shut down or censor you or to propagandize you.
And so Teddy Roosevelt's old antagonism toward monopolies, I think, is something that's more admirable to be now than I might have thought before.
Let me turn to the Democrats.
You might expect me to say that the best Democrat is Thomas Jefferson, but no, Thomas Jefferson was not a Democrat.
His party was called the Democratic Republican Party.
Later, it split into the Democratic Party and then the Whigs.
So Jefferson is sometimes claimed by leftists.
Well, he was the first Democratic. No, he wasn't.
The first Democratic president was Andrew Jackson.
Now, Trump apparently has a liking for Andrew Jackson.
I don't know who talked him into that, probably Bannon.
But Jackson is not a good Democratic president.
Jackson is a very bad guy.
If you read a book called Jacksonland, you'll see why he was a complete crook.
Now, he was a patriot, and he did fight for the country.
There's aspects of Jackson I do admire.
But overall, this was a guy who did terrible crimes against the blacks and against the Indians.
And it was also a thoroughly corrupt boot, setting up, if you will, the corruption later of Hillary Clinton and now of Joe Biden.
The best Democratic president, in my view, is someone you may not even have heard of.
It's Polk. It's James Polk, who was in the middle of the 19th century.
And I admire him for a single reason.
Yeah, he was a slave owner, and that was bad.
But what Polk did was he won the Mexican War, the Mexican War that took place between 1845, I believe, and 1848, a three-year war.
He then brought large parts of California and also large parts of Canada.
Into the United States.
So the United States and territory doubled in size.
Unbelievable. And all of this happened within a single term.
James Polk served only one term.
So this unheralded, in some cases, unknown Democratic president is my candidate for not one of the best American presidents, but in very low company, the best of the Democrats.
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Our next question is from somebody whose voice we recognize.
Debbie and I, we kind of laugh when we heard this question.
It's young Caitlin, and we've had her on the show.
So this is Caitlin's question about a due process on January 6th.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
I was reading the Bill of Rights the other day, and I was very shocked when I read Amendment No.
5, which reads,"...no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." Of course, I immediately thought of the January 6th defendants, some of which have been locked in solitary confinement for months on end.
Considering that the next amendment reads, in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy a speedy and public trial, it seems to me that their treatment is shockingly unconstitutional.
If so, why is no one talking about that, and if not, what am I missing?
Thanks! Well, Caitlin, first of all, I love your opening phrase, while reading the Bill of Rights the other day.
This is so great, Caitlin.
You're a great learner, and what I like about it is you're not just learning things in the abstract.
Your mind immediately applies them to events going on, and you test these propositions against actual empirical experience.
And no, you're not missing anything.
You're actually quite right.
And I would elaborate your question even further by adding a kind of Dinesh element to it.
So you mentioned two things, the Due Process Clause, the Fifth Amendment, the right to a speedy trial, and then read on to the Fourteenth Amendment where you will discover the phrase, equal rights under the law.
Equal rights under the law.
Now let's apply these phrases correctly.
One by one. Let's start with the concept of a speedy trial because there's no question that the January 6th defendants are not being granted anything resembling a speedy trial.
Now, the term speedy trial obviously has an element of elasticity or discretion A speedy trial is speedy compared to the ability of both sides, for example, to go through the discovery process and to have a sharing of the evidence available to both sides so the trial can actually be a real and comprehensive trial.
But see, what happens in reality is that the government pretends like, well, we haven't built a database.
We haven't really got all the evidence.
We're still interviewing people.
We're still conducting our investigations and judges.
I would say too deferential to the government and basically saying, well, okay, in that case, let's move the trial and it gets moved back three months, six months.
In some cases, you've got defendants whose trials aren't until the middle of next year.
So I think that this is taking the concept of speedy trial and twisting it beyond all recognition.
So you, Caitlin, are onto something here.
This is a violation of a constitutional provision.
There's no... A meaningful interpretation of speedy that can be matched against what's happening to at least some of the January 6th defendants.
Now, let's talk about due process.
The due process clause is, on the face of it, not being violated because the government will say, well, listen, we take these January 6th defendants.
It is part of the law that if they pose a danger to the community, They're not going to be released pretrial.
So they're going to be held because they might pose a danger to the community.
Now, do they in fact pose a danger to the community?
No. I think in virtually all cases, they don't.
But what's happening is that these judges are apparently being convinced that because they questioned the election, they stormed in the Capitol, that these are somehow dangerous seditionists who cannot be let out prior to their case, prior to their trial.
And this is the rationale for holding them. It's a bogus rationale, I grant you.
But they're not being denied due process in the sense that the government isn't saying, well, listen, we're not going to give you a trial. We're not going to go through any process.
We're simply going to give you three years or five years.
That would be a flat-out denial of due process.
The due process clause is about process.
It's about having to go through a legal process.
Now, there is a wrinkle here or a complexity I want to mention.
I'm not going to discuss it, but I'll mention it.
That in the history of Supreme Court jurisprudence, people have talked about and judges have talked about procedural versus substantive due process.
Procedural due process means simply going through the motions or going through the procedures.
Substantive due process is a way of saying the due process isn't just about procedure.
It's not just about going through a process.
It is about actually making sure that the legal system works in your case.
Substantive due process is a way of interpreting due process in a more, you can say, thick or meaty way than a mere procedure.
Now, let me turn and conclude my answer to your question by looking at the equal protection of the laws, because it seems to me here is where the Constitution kicks in big time.
Because the one expectation we have, if you think about justice at its basic level, justice doesn't just mean, did you break the law?
You can break the law by, let's say, jaywalking, but if somebody gives you five years in prison for that, that would be outrageous.
Why? It'd be outrageous because you're the only guy who got that penalty.
This is not a serious offense.
The penalty doesn't fit the crime, and it's not being equitably applied.
Everybody else who jaywalks has to pay a $50 fine.
Or isn't even prosecuted at all.
So, justice to be meaningful goes beyond breaking the law.
It also involves measuring the penalty to the offense, and it involves making sure that people in similar situations...
Now, you can't make sure that you have identical penalties that apply, particularly when you have different juries.
This is occurring in different states.
There's going to be some variation.
But it seems to me that when you look at what was handed out to the BLM protesters, I mean, you're talking about looters and rioters and arsonists, and you compare their plight to nonviolent January 6th protesters, you see that the January 6th defendants are being grossly deprived of equal justice under the law.
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Our next question concerns the possibility for a return to civility and even-handedness in American political life.
Listen. The Democrats are really willing to go to extremes, knocking Marjorie Taylor Greene and Gozar off committees.
What is the way back from all of this?
Is there a way back to a more collegial political environment?
Very good question. And in my opinion, yes, there is a way, but it's a slightly counterintuitive way.
The obvious way to think about this is, and there are many conservatives who are singing from this choir, is that because the Democrats are going to extremes, we should not go to extremes.
We should not do what they do.
We should stand on principle.
We should appeal to the better angels of their nature.
We should say, hey, Democrats, don't go to extremes.
Don't do this to us.
This is actually lowering yourself.
Well, they don't mind luring themselves.
They are trying to teach us a lesson.
They are trying to essentially make us recognize that we are subordinate to them.
and they are doing it because they have the power to do it.
They have the majority, the majority does have the power to throw people off committees.
They pick the people who are really threatening them, who are really speaking out, the people who are really effective at what they do, and they go, let's get Marjorie Taylor Greene, let's get Lauren Boebert, let's get Gosar.
And what is the Republican leadership doing?
Well, so far, not a lot.
Now, in my view, the way to get civility back is to do the same thing to them.
Because if you do the same thing to them, then they suddenly go, ooh, well, you know what?
We don't like this.
And we recognize that two can play at this game.
So we are going to be a little more moderate or restrained in the way that we deal with the opposition because the opposition will have its turn and then they will do the same to us.
So, I was very happy to read in The Hill an article, GOPIs booting Democrats from the seats if the House flips.
This is Kevin McCarthy, and he says very clearly, he goes, listen, the Democrats are going to need the approval of us if we get the majority to keep their positions in the future.
And McCarthy says, if we get in, we're going to restore Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene's committee assignments.
And here I think the GOP needs to play hardball with these guys, and that is we need to make it really clear right now that if we get the House, we're going to be throwing tons of Democrats off their committees.
I would start with Maxine Waters, Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and AOC. Now, I can obviously give reasons for all these people.
If we're talking about Eric Swalwell, we have an obvious reason.
This is a guy who has ties to suspected Chinese spies.
And this is a guy, by the way, who's serving on the House Intelligence Committee.
So, do you need further explanation for why he should be kicked off that committee?
Or take Adam Schiff.
Here's a guy who's been on the Intelligence Committee, and yet he's been putting out himself knowingly disinformation.
He's one of the chief public sort of authors and expostulators of the Russia hoax.
And even as it became really clear that this is a hoax, this is a democratic plant, Schiff has continued to dig in, continued to put out lies.
But my point is this, a true exercise of power is even more effective if it doesn't have a rationale.
You don't need a rationale. The Democrats have no real rationale.
What? Paul Gosar put out some information in a kind of anime cartoon, and the cartoon is then interpreted as somehow promoting violence.
Why? Because in the cartoon, you have a Gosar-type animated figure who's knocking out AOC. I mean, this is absurd.
You don't need a reason.
It's better without a reason.
So what I would do is, step one, I would boot...
These five, Maxine Waters, Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and AOC. But that's not the end of it.
That's to warm up. You start up with the five, and then you go to the next five.
So, in other words, you escalate on the Democrats.
They always do this to us.
So, the idea here is not just, they did two, so we're going to pick two.
No, they did two, so we're going to do 10.
And that's as long as we're in a good mood.
If we're in a really bad mood, we might do 20.
So, and the same principle applies to other things.
You want to pack the court by adding four people to the court because that's going to give you a majority.
Well, when we have the power, we will add 37 seats to the court, and it's going to take you 40 years to be able to get those seats back.
So, the idea here is ultimately, and it seems like an escalation, but it's an escalation with a point.
It's an escalation to tell the Democrats that they're dealing with a new, invigorated, and tough-minded GOP that won't put up with their nonsense.
And that is going to respond to them in kind.
Why? Because if we want to get to a more decent, even-handed, civil, less extreme America, ironically, the path to do that is to teach the other side, which is the initiator of the extremism, a lesson that they won't quickly forget.
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Feel the difference. Our next question concerns term limits.
Listen. Hey, Dinesh.
Really enjoying the podcast? Haven't missed an episode yet?
Don't plan to anytime soon.
Keep up the great work. Thanks for answering my question.
I'd like to know, what is something U.S. citizens can do to help get term limits implemented for Congress and the Senate?
I know Senator Cruz has brought forward an amendment for it, but to no avail.
It just seems like the best way to drain the swamp of these career politicians.
And do you think the pros outweigh the cons if it ever were miraculously passed?
Thanks again. Question is about term limits and how can we get them?
Well, the way to get them would be to amend the Constitution.
And A, that is very hard to do, because to amend the Constitution, you need supermajorities of both the House and the Senate.
You also need the President, and then you also need the states.
So this is why constitutional amendments are rare, because they're very difficult to do.
The second thing is that, and this is ironic, but to get term limits, you actually need the very people who would be term limited by the term limits to sign on to term limits.
So you can see why this makes it an extra difficult task to do.
I don't think it's realistic that we're going to get term limits.
And so, you know, I'm practical when it comes to politics.
I say, let's put our energies in things we can actually accomplish.
And so, when people say, you know, we need a constitutional amendment for school prayer, we need a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion, it's very easy to come up with that, but you're ultimately offering a recipe that leads, as a practical matter, nowhere.
So, that's worth keeping in mind.
Now, I like the idea of term limits.
Why? Because it seems to me that it supports the idea of a citizen population.
Politics is not supposed to be a lifelong career.
The model is George Washington.
I serve two terms. I then go back to my farm.
I'm a gentleman farmer. And so I've served my country.
I'm now going to return and I'm going to retreat to private life.
This is the opposite model of, say, Biden.
This guy has essentially lived in Washington his entire life.
I don't think he's really had another job outside of politics.
Pelosi came as a young staffer in, what, the 1960s or 70s?
And she's still around, you know, 85 years old.
So this is kind of a disgusting and disgraceful model.
But, you know, let's remember that the principle of limiting people and sort of booting them because we want to limit the harm that they can do, the harm that Pelosi or Biden can do, also applies to our side.
Now, there are good guys who've been around a long time.
Hard for me to think of one right now, but if I think back to, like, the 1980s and 90s, I mean, think about a guy like Jesse Helms.
He was a longtime Republican senator from North Carolina, and he was a massive thorn in the side of the Democrats.
And I was glad he was there for a long time because he caused them a lot of heartaches and a lot of headaches.
And he blocked a lot of their appointments.
In fact, I think he was called Senator No, because this was his...
What do you think, Jesse?
No. Tax increase?
No. Democrats of a U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union?
No. So I love that.
So my point is, yeah, I would term limit the other side, but not our side.
So the problem I'm trying to get at here is that the problem isn't the tenure by itself.
People have been in office too long.
That is a little bit of a problem.
But the main problem is ideology.
The main problem is the destructive ideology of the left.
So you can see this by imagining this.
Let's say we had an 80-20 Republican majority in the Senate.
And our guys have been there, and they were in there for a long time.
I would argue that there would be some bad effects.
There would be some sort of a swamp.
These Republicans would have been too long in Washington.
They would be maybe too receptive to lobbyists.
They would have their own swamp, but it wouldn't be as bad a swamp as the Democrats have created.
In other words, it would be, let's call it a cleaner swamp.
A lesser evil.
Why? Because while Republicans are part of the swamp, Republicans didn't create the swamp.
Republicans don't thrive in the swamp.
Republicans sometimes make their peace with the swamp.
So to me, the issue isn't the term limits per se.
It's the leftist ideology that's the most destructive thing.
If I could get rid of one thing, it wouldn't be tenure.
It would be this destructive ideology that is taking down the country.
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Our last question, I'm going to read because it came in over email.
It's Susie from Florida.
Dinesh, we always hear that we need to be involved in politics, but as Christians, shouldn't our hope just come from Jesus?
Now, I think that the underlying idea behind this question is the notion that, hey, look at Jesus.
He came into the world for 33 years, but he wasn't a political figure.
He didn't try to overthrow the Roman regime.
He was all about personal holiness.
He was all about take up your cross and follow me.
He was all about the life to come.
So another way to put it is that Jesus, reading the Bible, if you're looking at Jesus as a model, Pointing to the city of God, not the city of man.
And orienting our eyes toward the city of God.
Now, While that's all true, and it's all true of Jesus himself, it is also true that Jesus came to redeem man.
And redeem man, not just individually.
Jesus just didn't die for you and you and you.
Jesus died for mankind.
He died for all of us, which is to say that he died ultimately to redeem the city and Our city, our lives here and now, end to open the door to the next life, to the life to come.
Now, what is the relationship between the city of God and the city of man?
What is the relationship between our life now and the next life?
That's really the question that...
Christians have had to answer.
And I will say that we have to answer it in some ways differently today than Christians had to answer it for many, many hundreds of years.
Why? Because for many, many hundreds of years, certainly within Europe and within America, you had essentially a Christian culture.
Christians were operating inside of a Christian environment.
And so it's very easy for someone to say, well, listen, I'm just really going to focus on my personal holiness.
I'm just going to focus on living a better life because the culture will take care of itself.
There are many other people.
There are Christian parents and Christian pastors and Christian lawyers, and they are preserving the integrity of the society around me.
And my job ultimately is to focus on my own personal salvation.
But... We today are in the peculiar predicament of being Christians in, well, I won't just say in secular culture, because I want to go further.
We are Christians in a culture that is today actively hostile to Christian principles and Christian beliefs.
And I don't just mean actively hostile to Christian theology.
It's not. If you think about liberal culture, the liberals don't spend a lot of time denouncing the resurrection.
They don't spend a lot of time denouncing the sacraments.
They don't spend a lot of time denouncing heaven or hell.
But they do spend a lot of time attacking Christian morality.
So here, their target isn't theology.
It's morality. So, morality is the link between this world and the next world.
Why? Because while God inhabits, you may say, the next world, God is super intense directly over heaven, God does supply us with conscience and morality here and now.
And as Christians, we're called, the Bible is kind of explicit about this, to be salt and light in the world, which is to say, to use our influence to make our world better.
We're not just fighting mere ignorance today.
We're fighting evil.
We're fighting active forces that want to undermine the propositions of Christian belief and Christian morality.
Another way to put it is that we have a political debate, but under the political debate is a moral debate.
And underneath the moral debate is a spiritual debate.
There's spiritual warfare going on.
It's perhaps invisible to us, by which I mean it is spiritual warfare that has to be discerned or detected.
Why? Because the devil isn't somebody who just shows up.
We can't see him any more than we can see God in a kind of material sense.
But I believe, and I think you believe, or many of you believe, that That evil is no less real a force in the world as good.
And so as Christians, I would say that even while following Jesus and even while anticipating the life to come, even while living subspecies eternitatis, which is to say, under the perspective or in the shadow of eternity, at the same time, We should make sure to be salt and light in the world.
We should make sure to take those principles, if you will, from the city of God and apply them as best we can to the city of man.
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