All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 8, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:49
HE’S BACK Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep233
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The Biden regulatory agencies are going after, already, Trump's new social media platform, which hasn't even launched yet.
Why? Because the right is finally getting its act together and getting its act together in coordination.
Truth Social, Rumble, Locals, it's going to be a formidable combination.
The entertainment continues in the Jussie Smollett trial.
I'm going to talk about Jussie and the Joys of Victimhood.
Former Congressman Steve King will join me.
We're going to talk about how he became a supreme target of the left.
And I'll continue my analysis of tyranny in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
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.
There are some very exciting developments underway in the realm of social media.
The right is finally getting its act together.
And this is overdue.
I wish it happened yesterday, but it's happening today and it's going to continue to happen tomorrow.
Let me begin by noting the extreme censoriousness of the mainstream platforms.
I see just today that Twitter suspended an account called the Maxwell Trial Tracker.
This is, by the way, an account providing factual details of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
But evidently, Twitter decided to shut that down, I guess because too many awkward names might come up.
And so you can see, this is on Facebook, the censorship continues on YouTube, and even on Twitter.
Perhaps even more with the new CEO, Parag Agarwal, who has said, somewhat infamously, he's, quote, not to be bound by the First Amendment.
Ron DeSantis called these digital platforms the censorship arm of the Democratic Party, I guess in the same way that say Antifa or BLM is the paramilitary, the thug arm of the Democratic Party.
And for a while there, conservatives were, it seems, at the receiving end of all this, and our platforms, in that case Parler, didn't really seem to work all that well.
Parler was, in a sense, taken down in a coordinated strike.
It's now back up. But the big kahuna here is going to be the Trump platform.
If Trump can get this platform to work well, it's going to be a juggernaut.
Devin Nunes, by the way, has just announced he's going to be stepping down soon as a congressman to become the head of the Trump platform.
And Nunes is a fighter.
I think it's probably going to be a very good choice.
But the left is already sensing that something big is happening here.
And so I see right away that Trump's PAC, the PAC is the shell corporation that has taken the Trump Platform Public is under investigation by two federal agencies, the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
It's called FINRA.
Both of them have dashed off a bunch of questions to the Trump's back, to the Trump media group, to say in effect, you know, please give us a list of this and a list of that, a list of your meetings, a list of your directors, what progress have you made so far?
And now this is within the law, but you can see the political targeting here.
In fact, just about three weeks before these letters went out to the Trump platform, Elizabeth Warren demanded that a federal investigation begin into this platform.
Here's Elizabeth Warren, quote, "'Nobody is above the law and there may, may, have been serious violations of security laws during the proposed merger of Digital World Acquisition Corp and Trump's media company.'" So the relentless assault against Trump continues.
But I should say that investors don't seem to be freaked out.
The Trump media platform which launched the SPAC value was $10, I believe, when it first came out.
It's now $43, so basically a 400% gain already with probably a lot more to come when the platform actually, actually launches.
Now, to give a little bit of context for all this, it's important to note that conservatives do a lot of complaining about why the left dominates this and why the left dominates that.
And it's rare that we do something about it.
We have done something about it in two areas and we have had fantastic results.
The first area is talk radio.
When Rush Limbaugh started, talk radio was not dominated by the right.
But Limbaugh basically became the towering dominant figure in talk radio.
And of course, a number of others, not just Limbaugh.
Salem Media Corporation, which co-sponsors this podcast, has become a powerful force in radio.
Dan Bongino, Mark Levin, many others.
So we dominate talk radio.
We don't complain about talk radio.
We sort of own it.
Similarly, in cable news, you had CNN, which was the pioneer.
They went out front and they appeared to have a kind of Amazon-style dominant, invincible position.
NBC announced it was launching MSNBC. So you have a huge network getting behind another cable channel.
And it looked like conservatives couldn't possibly compete in that kind of space.
But fortunately, through the combination of Roger Ailes, the creativity of Roger Ailes, and the entrepreneurship and the money of Rupert Murdoch, we got Fox News Channel.
And now you can say our side dominates cable news.
And we don't dominate media, not by a long shot.
But in the cable space, Fox News Channel has as many viewers, I believe, as CNN and MSNBC put together with some to spare.
So this shows that we can compete in the marketplace, but we haven't been competing in the digital platform marketplace, at least not at the same level.
Think of how huge Facebook is and how huge YouTube is.
But now, finally, our platforms are getting out the gate.
The most powerful platform currently is Rumble.
I believe 40-plus million followers, which is downright awesome.
The two biggest figures on Rumble, by the way, are Dan Bongino and me, at least at last count.
And... And Rumble is huge.
Getter is getting bigger and growing fast.
Parler is back.
There are other platforms, which I'll mention in the next segment.
So I'm delighted to say that we are not just complaining about tech supremacy and the evils of big tech, which we should complain about, but we're also building alternatives, which I think have the potential long-term to be even bigger than those mainstream platforms are now.
Debbie and I are in our throes of our Christmas shopping.
We're kind of trying to get everybody what we have on our list for them.
But here's a great idea that you can't go wrong with.
MyPillow. Now, all of you know that MyPillow doesn't have their normal box stores or shopping channels.
They've been victims of cancel culture.
So Mike Lindell says, look, I'll take those savings.
The money I would normally pay to the box stores and shopping channels, I'm going to pass it straight to the customer.
And that means you. You can get the lowest price in the history of MyPillow for the classic standard MyPillow, normally $69.98, but now $19.98 with promo code Dinesh.
These pillows won't go flat.
You can wash and dry them as often as you want.
They maintain their shape.
They're made in the USA. Queen size pillows normally $79.98, but now $24.98.
King size normally $89.98, but now $29.98.
And my pillow isn't just pillows.
They've got over 150 products.
All of them steeply discounted.
Everything from sleepwear to my new beds.
Go to MyPillow.com or call 800-876-0227.
Use promo code Dinesh to take advantage of Mike's special offers on the pillows and also on the other products.
That number again, 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use promo code DineshDinesh.
Guys, let's get ready to rumble.
You remember that phrase out of boxing.
Let's get ready to rumble.
Well, in this case, I'm talking about the video platform rumble.
And also, more broadly, about the coordinated strategy that is now emerging on the right.
Let's remember, the left coordinates.
You see the ways in which they, well, they coordinated to go after Parler, but they also coordinate to build an infrastructure that they can then use to play off each other.
They coordinate with censorship, for example.
Well, the free speech platforms need to coordinate as well.
And that's starting to happen.
Let me talk a little bit about Rumble.
Interestingly, Rumble wasn't started as something cooked up by our side.
Chris Pavlovsky, the CEO, the founder of Rumble, is a Canadian guy.
And he noticed that Google, in setting up its monetization schemes, was prioritizing the so-called big content creators, people with millions of followers.
Google could easily monetize them.
And Chris Pavlovsky said, you know what?
There's not a good platform that allows smaller content creators to monetize.
Artists, people who teach you to play the guitar, people like that.
So Rumble was created for the small content creator.
Then, when these big tech companies began to practice sort of vigorous censorship, big conservatives began to move over to Rumble.
In fact, I was invited by Rumble to come join, and I did early, and had built a big platform on Rumble.
If you don't follow me on Rumble, please go to Rumble.
And subscribe to my channel.
It's a good way for you to support my work.
And also, by the way, Rumble has acquired Locals, which is also a creator content channel.
And check me out at Locals.
I'm at dinesh.locals.com.
I remember having a conversation early on with Chris Pawlowski about free speech.
And he made a sardonic comment to me.
He goes, Hey, Dinesh, you know, I knew you Americans were fighting about the Second Amendment.
I didn't realize that you were fighting also about the first.
And I think what he meant is that, look, there's maybe a reasonable debate to be having.
This is kind of the Canadian point of view.
Maybe a reasonable debate to be had about guns, Dinesh.
But why are we arguing about free speech?
Don't we all agree in the West that free speech is a good idea?
So then I knew that Chris Pavlovsky is a good guy on the free speech issue.
And so, Debbie and I have sort of allied with him and allied with Rumble.
We've even invested some money in Rumble because we want to help build up these platforms, build up these alternatives.
Now, Rumble recently has, like the Trump platform, gone public.
They've gone public through a Wall Street group called Cantor Fitzgerald, a very sophisticated investment company.
And the beautiful update is that Rumble, which is now allied with locals, is coordinating with the Trump platform.
They're going to work together. And what that means is that the Trump platform is going to be using the infrastructure of Rumble.
And this is great because you don't want the Trump platform to be dependent upon the left.
If it's dependent upon big tech, if it's dependent upon the Amazon servers and the Google search engines and the Google advertising...
Thank you.
Now, the Trump platform is already worth a billion dollars.
Rumble, I'm happy to say, now has $400 million of cash and is valued over $2 billion.
The reason this is important is because if you look at the monetization, if you look at the market value, Of YouTube and Facebook, they are gigantic.
They're astronomical.
They rival the gross domestic product of countries.
And so you can't compete with somebody who's operating in the multibillion, trillion-dollar realm.
And do that when you have, you know, yeah, I got $4 million.
No, you need to compete by hiring the best tech people.
You need to upgrade the features on the platform.
It looks like Trump realized that, certainly Rumble realizes that.
And so we're beginning to get in the game.
We're still a long way behind, but we're beginning to do that.
Now, I was a little disturbed.
Debbie actually showed this to me at a kind of diatribe from our own side against a rumble and against Trump.
The Trump platform from, this is from Mr.
Torba, Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab.
And Andrew Torba is a good guy, by the way.
I had him on the podcast several weeks ago.
He's a Christian guy.
He set up this platform.
It's a good platform. I'm on Gab, and I want you to join Gab.
I think Gab is a worthwhile platform.
But he says in this comment, he says, quote, it's being reported that a gang of grifters around President Trump raised $1 billion from a bunch of satanic hedge funds.
Wow. And then he goes, The second big alternative grift story comes from the anti-free speech Canadian video company Rumble.
And he goes on to say that Rumble bans hate speech and bans anti-Semitism.
And he goes, quote, Gab is the only true free speech platform on the Internet.
So I just want to address these points because they seem to me wrongheaded.
First of all, it is true the Trump platform hasn't launched, but it does have a huge asset.
His name is Donald Trump.
Remember that Donald Trump on social media had well over 100 million followers.
If you add his Facebook and his Instagram and his Twitter, this is a guy with a ready-made audience.
So it's not surprising to me that there's a market value for a platform that is about to be launched, even though its product isn't yet on the market.
Its product is actually living and breathing and waiting to jump into the platform as soon as it gets going.
Now, what about this business about Rumble?
And this could be also said about Getter.
It could be said about Parler. They're sort of not free speech platforms because they do have some restrictions on speech.
Look, you know, I think on the free speech issue, we are not trying to make a point about free speech absolutism.
We're not trying to say, hey, listen, we want every form of porn to be available on the internet.
Hey, we want people to freely be able to use the N-word and all kinds of racial epithets.
That's not what we're fighting for.
We're not fighting for the restriction of obscene speech on the margin.
And we're not talking about the banning of epithets.
What we're talking about is the restriction of legitimate debate, the kind of debate that must occur in a democratic society.
We wanna have a debate about climate change.
And we wanna have a debate about the trans issue.
And we wanna have a debate about voter fraud.
We wanna have a debate about all kinds of issues, but we can't have that kind of debate.
And that's why these platforms exist.
So this seems to me to be a bogus point.
Yeah, if Gab wants to say, well, we allow all that.
We're going to be the true free speech platform.
You know, be my guest.
I'm not opposed to that.
But neither am I opposed to platforms that restrict racial epithets and restrict pornography, but allow all kinds of legitimate argument to occur.
That's the kind of argument that we're fighting for.
That's what we mean. And I think that's what the founders meant when they stood up for free speech.
Aches and pains, we hate them.
I mean, they have a way of just ruining whatever you're trying to do.
It's just such a distraction.
It's dispiriting, really.
But aches and pains come to us all, whether it's from the normal wear and tear of time or from some sort of injury.
But now, there's a 100% drug-free solution.
It's called Relief Factor.
Relief Factor supports your body's fight against inflammation, and inflammation is the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of customers who try Relief Factor order more.
Why? Because it works for them.
Debbie's been suffering with frozen shoulder for a couple of years.
She said, let me try Relief Factor.
She found it works amazingly well.
The pain just disappeared.
Debbie knows if she doesn't take it regularly, the pain's gonna come right back.
So she's like, hey, I'm not gonna be without Relief Factor again.
Being able to lift her arm, exercise, this is super important to her.
Relief Factor's a tool she needs.
She's glad she's got it.
You too can benefit.
Try it for yourself. Order the three-week quick start for the discounted price of just $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com or call 833-690-7246 to find out more about this offer.
That number again, 833-690-7246 or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. I want to talk in this segment about the Omicron variant and the politics of fear.
Ever since the announcement of this new variant, so we had original COVID, then we had the Delta variant, now we have the Omicron variant.
There have been a couple of other variants, but they haven't But from the moment the Omicron variant was announced, global panic.
All kinds of hysterical commentaries all over Europe.
There are new lockdowns.
There are police going to people's doors to check things out.
There are people being evicted from restaurants.
Really a kind of rhetorical and political madness.
And of course, all the articles, the media plays a big culpable role in this.
The articles all stress this is much more infectious than the Delta variant.
This is the most infectious, most contagious COVID yet.
Well, from what we know, and we don't know a whole lot, because there have been actually a fairly limited number of cases and therefore very limited data.
From what we know, there are two things to say about Omicron.
The first is, yes, it does appear to be more contagious.
But here's the second fact that is also worth noting.
Quote, I picked this actually up from an article in Slate, but it's not the headline.
It's actually dropped way down in the article.
None of the cases so far in the U.S. have resulted in serious illness, and the World Health Organization has said that no Omicron cases which have been detected in at least 38 countries have resulted in death.
So the Omicron death rate is currently zero.
In fact, not a single fatality.
And this, of course, is completely in line with what the South African medical establishment, and particularly the South African medical director, Dr.
Coetzee, whom I quoted on the podcast, have been saying, the South African researchers say, listen, patients infected with Omicron are much less sick than those treated before.
Hospitals are seeing the same thing.
Now, the media is starting to report this, but they always add this, quote, it's early to say definitively that the variant is less severe.
And what they mean is we don't have the data.
We can't say for sure that it's less severe.
Well, wait a minute. You've been saying that it's more contagious, and you're using the same data.
So if you've got very limited data, and the limited data shows two things, A, it's more contagious, and B, it's less lethal, Why don't you share both things?
Or why don't you hedge both statements with the appropriate qualifications?
So what you see here is the sensationalism of the media.
They highlight the contagion.
That's known. But then when it comes to the lethality, oh, we've got to be really careful because we don't have a lot of data.
Even though you're using the same data, the same body of information that pertain to both statements.
It's a very interesting interview with a Yale epidemiologist, Dr.
Harvey Risch, professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health.
And he generalizes from all this and he says, look, quote, it's been a very selected pandemic and predictable.
It was very... Distinguished between young versus old, healthy versus chronic disease people, so we quickly learned who was at risk for the pandemic and who wasn't.
And Dr. Frisch's point is that this was known early on in COVID, and yet he says, quote, the fear was manufactured for everybody.
And he goes on to say that the propaganda from governments around the world, the U.S. is not alone in this, Everybody is at risk.
Everybody can die from the virus.
Everybody needs to find protection.
Everybody needs to stay in their homes.
Everybody should not socialize with other people.
Stringent lockdowns.
So all of this has been the defining rhetoric of COVID. And what Dr.
Frisch is actually calling for is a more, you may say, discriminatory or targeted approach that says, listen, we've dealt with these kinds of things before.
I remember, by the way, going back to the 1980s when I was in the Reagan...
A young policy analyst in the Reagan White House.
There was a slogan that was being used all over the media to describe AIDS. AIDS is an equal opportunity killer.
You might even remember those from a few decades ago.
But it was a flat-out lie.
AIDS was not an equal opportunity killer.
It never was, and it isn't now.
AIDS struck certain populations, but not others.
It could be transmitted in certain ways, but not others.
So it was a very dangerous disease.
Less dangerous, by the way, than it is now, because there are medications that contain it, even though there's no cure yet for AIDS. But the idea that AIDS was an equal opportunity, anyone could get AIDS, this was an exploitation by the left.
The politics of fear.
Fear is a weapon that the left uses frequently.
The earth is running out of food.
The ozone layer is dissipating.
Climate change is part of the same atmosphere of generating fear in order to have policies that lead to increased government control.
I think we're seeing this with COVID even more in Europe.
But quite clearly, the Biden administration wants to push this envelope in the United States as well.
And what I'm calling for is not a suspension or an abandonment of fear, but only an application of rational fear, rational caution, and an appropriate response rather than a politicized response to this very genuine epidemic.
How did you choose which internet service provider to use?
Well, the sad thing is most of us have very little choice because service providers operate like monopolies in the regions that they serve.
They use this monopoly power to take advantage of customers, data caps, streaming throttles, the list goes on.
But worst of all, many of these service providers log your internet activity and sell that data to other big tech companies or advertisers.
Now, to prevent service providers from seeing my internet activity, I protect all of my devices with ExpressVPN.
ExpressVPN keeps all your information secure by encrypting 100% of your data with the most powerful encryption available.
Most of the time, I don't even realize I have ExpressVPN on.
It runs seamlessly in the background.
It's so easy to use.
All you do is tap one button, boom, and you're protected.
ExpressVPN is available on all your devices.
Stop handing over your personal data to service providers and other tech giants who mine your activity and sell off your information.
Visit my exclusive link, expressvpn.com slash Dinesh.
You'll get an extra three months free on a one-year package.
That's expressvpn.com slash Dinesh, expressvpn.com slash Dinesh.
The Jussie Smollett trial now goes to the jury.
And I will be absolutely shocked if this guy isn't convicted.
He really needs to be.
In fact, his defense has been just laughable, preposterous.
He'd been better off going with the insanity defense.
I was nuts.
But, you know, I went back and looked at some of the comments that people made.
People like Kamala Harris, who called this a modern-day lynching.
Nancy Pelosi, Eric Swalwell, all of them were right on the Jussie bandwagon.
And here's a very kind of illuminating Tweet by Joy Reid, quote, Now, it's very easy to sort of chuckle at this in retrospect,
but I also want to capture, if you read carefully what Joy Reid is saying, It's the opposite of what she's conveying on the surface.
She's trembling with terror.
Oh, the noose has this sort of talismanic historical significance.
And so when she sees a noose, she is filled with real terror.
But see, I think this is a fake emotion.
She's not really filled with terror.
It's really clear that she's exulting.
She's exhilarated.
She's really happy to discover this.
Why? Because it confers on her, and pardon the pun, the joy of victimhood.
It's kind of like when you go to a horror movie.
Notice when you go to a horror movie, you want to be scared, right?
You like to be scared. You're not in actual danger yourself, and that's the point.
Because you're not in actual danger, you can enjoy the entertainment of feeling these emotions of fear and terror.
So this is what Joy Reid is after.
She wants there to be nooses in the public discussion for the simple reason that she can then continue, even as she draws a big, fat salary, even as people fawn over all over the place, she's still oppressed, and she can cash in on the benefits of oppression.
Now, let's turn to Jussie's latest machinations.
First of all, it's really interesting.
Jussie sent all these messages using the N-word.
And yet when the prosecutor, Dan Webb, began to read Jussie's own messages, Jussie was like, stop, stop, I can't listen to this.
It's almost like Jussie claimed to be terrified by the N-word that he was using.
And so he stops the prosecutor and he says, you can't read that word.
And so the prosecutor actually very cleverly says, well, okay, well, you know what?
You read it. I'm gonna hand you your messages and I'm gonna make you read them aloud in court.
Now, the reason Jussie has no defense is that not only does the prosecution have all the goods on him, they've got the two Nigerians testifying that he paid them.
They've got the cash, $3,500 check.
They have video of the two Nigerians buying the rope.
Jussie gave them extra money to buy the rope.
And Jussie even organized a rehearsal, a drive-by, so to speak, to check out the location.
It's all on tape, and the jury has seen it.
But Jussie is now trying to pretend like the Nigerian brothers.
And just think about the sort of sickness here.
He's basically throwing these guys under the bus.
He's trying to send them to prison.
And he's claiming that they're part of their motive for going after him.
They beat him up.
Now, they did beat him up, but at his instigation, he was doing it, quote, for the media.
Jussie wanted his career to go to new heights.
He wanted to be the poster boy for racial victimization.
I think he knew that that would mean oodles of cash in Hollywood.
But now he's claiming that he had a homosexual relationship with this guy Bola Osundera, one of the two Nigerian brothers, and that the Nigerian brothers are kind of homophobic.
Homophobic. And yet this guy's going to a bathhouse with Jussie.
The whole thing makes absolutely no sense.
And really, my interest here is not so much in locking Jussie up.
In fact, knowing Jussie and his description of what goes on in bathhouses, he might actually like that.
My point is really this, that this lie needs to be exposed.
This actually was a hate crime.
But it wasn't a hate crime against Jussie because he's black and because he's gay.
This was actually a hate crime that was perpetrated by a black gay man, Jussie Smollett, against who?
Against whites and against conservatives and against patriots.
Think of what Jussie was trying to do.
He was trying to stage this incident, not just for his own benefit, but to pin the racist tail on MAGA people.
Yeah, it was a bunch of guys shouting MAGA slogans.
Make America great again!
Beat up Jussie! And then, of course, Jussie, being an actor, goes on TV. They beat me up!
I just wish they would find him!
And so on. So, it is delightful to see this exposed.
But we want the public lie to be now ratified by the jury.
And the media can pretend to ignore it.
They're really trying to...
This is very awkward for them because they know that they went all in with Jussie just as the Democratic left, the politicians did.
And so it's a vindication for our side to see that, first of all, that hate crimes come in all directions.
And the real hate crime here was not perpetrated against Jussie Smollett, but by him.
Don't you sometimes get sick of the news every day?
It's the left trying to make another money grab, whether it's spying on your accounts, taxing your unrealized gains.
There's no shortage to their creativity when it comes to taking your hard-earned money to fund their expensive, radical agenda.
I want to make something clear. You're making a big mistake if you're not diversifying your savings.
Hold gold in a tax-sheltered account or just hold gold at your home in your safe.
I buy my gold from Birch Gold, the only company I trust and recommend.
When you buy gold from Birch Gold by December 23rd, they'll send you free gold for every $10,000 you purchase.
It's the first time they've ever offered free gold.
With thousands of satisfied customers, An A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
You can trust Birch Gold to protect your savings.
Text Dinesh to 484848 to claim eligibility for their free gold with purchase offer by December 23rd.
Again, text Dinesh to 484848 and protect your savings today.
Guys, I'm happy to be joined on the podcast by former Congressman Steve King.
Steve King was for 18 years the Congressman from the 4th District of Iowa, and he's the author of a new book called Walking Through the Fire, My Fight for the Heart and Soul of America.
Steve, welcome to the podcast.
I've actually found the book.
I can't say I enjoyed reading it because it's a difficult book about a kind of constellation of factors, almost a ganging up, if you will, on you for...
Speaking up on a whole series of issues, I kind of want to get into it, but let me start with a little bit of your background.
It seems like you started a construction company, you made it successful, you then ran for local office, the Iowa State Senate, and then you vaulted your way into the US Congress.
You were a congressman from 2003 to 2021.
So, the point I want to make here is, and you make this point in the book, is that you are kind of a known quantity.
Your colleagues knew you as somebody who would stand up and speak your mind and fight for issues.
And then you became kind of a Trumpster.
And you talk a little bit about your convictions and also why you think it's important to be able to speak up.
Well, yes, and I could see what they were doing to manipulate the language for a number of years.
For example, people got called racist five and ten years ago, and everybody didn't get called racist.
Today, everybody is a racist.
And I saw them bring down the language the Sunday after Trump was elected president, and Soros and company were at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel in Washington, D.C., And out of there, they planned what they were going to do to resist the Trump presidency.
One of them was to implement new language to attack with.
And there, they launched white supremacist, white nationalist, Nazi, as a language that they would use to attack anybody that didn't agree with them.
And so, for example, the term white nationalist had been used virtually not at all from when we did Alexis Nexus back to the year 2000.
But after that meeting in that hotel, it got used 10,000 times.
This is the LexisNexis number.
And between the middle of November and the end of that year and the following year, it went on up to 30,000 times, from virtually nothing to 30,000.
That's how they weaponized the language.
It's one of the things that I had seen coming for a long time.
Well, I mean, let's pause for a moment to savor the irony here.
You've got Soros, who when he was a teenager, was in the company of another guy confiscating Jewish treasures and Jewish art, doing, in a sense, work for the Nazis.
And this is a known fact.
Soros himself has talked about it.
You also have the phenomenon, and you mentioned this in the book, you say that the Democrats were the party of slavery, they were the party of the Ku Klux Klan.
Of course, I've shown this theme in my movies.
So, you know, isn't it a remarkable chutzpah?
How does a party that has essentially committed all these crimes, and you may say patented the word racism, how does it successfully pin the racist tail on the Republican donkey?
How does that occur?
It's interesting you use the word chutzpah as well, Dinesh, and I think that's apropos for what we're talking about here.
I was attacked because I had targeted Soros, and I had been critical of Soros, so they turned that all around on me and made me an anti-Semite.
Into this bargain because Soros has now cloaked himself with the shield of being Jewish, which, according to the Jews I've talked to, say he's not.
So how do they turn this language is a real question.
And what we see often is people from the left, well, their standard practice is to accuse the people on the other side of the aisle of doing what they are doing.
And so that's what they do, and they just flood the zone.
And we are just innocent and honest, and we accept things the way they are.
And then we've got this squishy, moderate rhino, globalist, elitist, Republicans, that they just think that you can appease the left.
And so I guess I'll say the ranks at the top of the hierarchy of the Republican Party, almost all of whom turn on me, they are the Neville Chamberlains of our ideology, and they're thinking appeasing the other side is somehow going to get them to quit.
And I've always said, never back up, because if you do, then they'll push you again and again.
They'll ratchet you against the wall, and you'll have no place to plant your back foot in order to fight.
I mean, you note in the book, and I think this is quite true, that the left protects its own.
I mean, I remember Ilhan Omar had made some comment that was deemed, it was dubbed anti-Semitic.
She talked about the Benjamins, referring to the $100 bills and the Jews and the Benjamins.
And of course, she had to issue a perfunctory apology.
But at no point did the left think, we're going to throw her off the bus.
And in fact, she's kind of an influential member of the squad to this day.
Now, let's talk about, let's follow the anatomy of the hit against you, because it looks like it always starts with the media.
They do a profile.
They take something that you said.
So let's start with what happened to you.
It seems like you had a guy from the New York Times, Trip Gabriel, who did this sort of article on you that portrayed you as a white supremacist.
Talk for a moment about that.
Well, yes, and we all know the New York Times and what reputation they have earned as far as their lack of honesty.
My communications fellow, John Kennedy, excellent individual, and they had been trying to open up this interview with the New York Times throughout the month earlier before I did the interview.
And then I had texts come in sometime in, I'll say early January, from Tripp Gabriel.
The press got a hold of my cell number and passed it around.
That happened.
And so he texted me and I texted him and he wanted to do an interview.
He said that his chief editor had directed him to do an article about how I had been the one who had laid out the immigration agenda That Trump had adopted it, and how was it that I, this congressman from Iowa, was able to get my immigration agenda being utilized by the President of the United States?
Well, that's kind of flattering, if that's what the story was about.
I knew, though, that they were going to use it to attack Trump.
And I also, though, I texted him back, and that's a matter of record, and I said, I may be open in the morning about 8.30, but run this through John Kennedy.
And so that morning I got up and I went into the shower, and when I came out, The phone rang at exactly 8.30.
It was Trip Gabriel. And I had an email that I did not get a chance to see from John Kennedy, my communications fellow, that said, don't stay away from Trip Gabriel.
They're trying to trap you.
It's a trap. Well, so in that little flux of time, I did a 56-minute untaped interview, standing there in a towel.
And he had no notes either.
But Kevin McCarthy insists that Krip Gabriel wouldn't make a mistake.
He could type as fast as I talk and punctuate with perfection.
Which is, of course, what is he?
Nobody can do that.
It's impossible. Even the stenographers down on the floor of the House, where I have, at the time, more words in the congressional record than anybody else, they will say that they can't type as fast as I talk with their magic keyboards.
So we know that that's a lie.
Let's take a pause, Steve.
When we come back, I want to follow this story and follow the response to it on the part of the Republican leadership.
We'll be right back. Hey, I've been hearing since I was a kid, you gotta eat more fruits, you gotta eat more vegetables.
Well, fruits, I like most of them.
Vegetables, I don't like most of them.
But I know I gotta eat them.
And in fact, very few Americans actually eat the recommended servings of produce every day.
I guess it's not so easy to prepare that much produce daily.
Now, by taking balance of nature, you solve the problem.
You give your body the nutrients it needs to increase your cells' vitality.
Get the nutrition that can only be found in whole natural fruits and vegetables.
Debbie and I take 10 daily servings of fruits and veggies.
Take a look. All in six small capsules.
There are absolutely no trouble swallowing.
Always fresh. Nothing artificial.
They smell great. And Debbie swears by the fiber and spice.
I was finally convinced to take it.
We are really liking it.
Invest in your health. Invest in your life.
Join me and experience the Balance of Nature difference for yourself for years to come.
For a limited time, all new preferred customers get an additional 35% discount and free shipping on your first Balance of Nature order.
Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751.
That's 800-246-8751.
Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with former Congressman Steve King.
He's author of the book Walking Through the Fire.
By the way, you can go to steveking.com, find out more about the book.
Steve, we were talking about this New York Times reporter, Tripp Gabriel, and Do you think in retrospect it's a mistake for someone like you to talk to a guy like that?
Because these people are, I mean, they're snakes.
You can see even from what you described that he tried to flatter you.
Oh, you're the architect of the Trump immigration policy.
This was probably a hit plan from the beginning.
Would you say in retrospect that you made a mistake by sort of walking into the trap?
Well, I would say in retrospect that that time with my communications director was The Shield, and I trust him.
And to this day, he's a good friend, and I appreciate him.
I presume that he had given the green light, and I trusted that green light.
But they were going to use something as a trigger.
And the people that read the book will learn who they were going to send to President Trump to try to get President Trump to send out a negative tweet on me.
That would then be the trigger that launched this national barrage that they thought that they could use to force me to resign.
And those are quotes. That's just an expression.
So they were going to use something.
And I had blocked them, preempted it at the White House.
I had blocked the messenger that I anticipated they were going to use.
The very next day, I had a primary opponent, and the following day, the New York Times story came out.
So the sequence of events says they were going to use something, whether I did the interview or not.
And by the way, Krip Gabriel said in a phone call right during that moment of time, and a couple, three days after this came down, he said he didn't think that quote was going to be the one that did it, which tells you he knew he was assigned by his chief editor to set me up, to attack me.
And that was going to be the trigger that they would use to do an all-out national attack on me.
And it launched the elitist Republicans immediately.
The never-Trumpers today unloaded on me the quickest of all.
And I didn't care what the left did.
I'd been fighting them for years.
But when the Republican Party pulls something out like this...
And by the way, I just want people to know this was not organic.
This was planned, it was strategized, and it's proven in the book.
So, Steve, what you're saying is that the left by itself, although the left has a lot of cultural power, they would not have been able to get you on their own.
This was ultimately a strike that was an inside job, you would almost call it.
And I think one interesting thing about your book, and what I like about it, is you don't hesitate to name names.
I mean, you named the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, for example.
This is a guy that you say was part of the architecture of the attack on you, along with many others.
Do you think Kevin McCarthy, whom you name in the book, was Kevin McCarthy simply the weak invertebrate who gave into this, or was he part of the conniver from the beginning who wanted to get rid of you?
I think he had to be one of the connivers from the beginning, Dinesh.
And I put that up this way, that going into the November election in 2018, we had Steve Stivers, the chairman of the NRCC, whose only job was to get Republicans elected to the House of Representatives.
He unloaded on me a week before my general election.
And attacked me for being racist and apparently out of sync with his woke knowledge.
And that validated all the Democrat attacks on me.
Three and a half hours later, his communications director unloaded on me too.
And it's what they wrote was a lie.
But it raised a million and a half for my opponent, just going into that.
And when I went to call Stivers out in conference in front of everybody, now remember this is when Liz Cheney had just taken the gavel to chair the conference, I had Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy both tried their best to talk me out of calling Stivers out in front of the other members.
And they told me they didn't know anything about it, and there's no part about that that I believe.
So I believe that McCarthy was one of the driving forces.
I'm not sure whether Ryan was a driving force, but he had to know something about what was going on at the time.
And then it unfolded after that.
After I was re-elected, in that period of time, about, it was a week after the election, remember it was maybe two weeks, but it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I got a heads up from a presidential campaign manager who said they're going to try again.
All of this can't unfold.
And then also in the book you'll know that I have multiple sources from the White House that inform me that within two weeks of my primary election, which I lost, Kevin McCarthy was lobbying President Trump to endorse my opponent in the primary.
That stuff doesn't happen unless it's a planned strategy.
He wasn't reacting. Do you think, Steve, that the reason for all—I mean, why you?
Do you think it's because you were such a firebrand?
And to project forward a little bit, do you think that today people like a Lauren Boebert, a Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Matt Gaetz need to watch their back because they themselves could be vulnerable to the same kind—I mean, the left is certainly trying to attack them, and leadership appears to be nervous about them.
Do you see more kind of— Well, the most effective conservatives have been targeted.
And by the way, I'm the only one who has been taken out of his committees by his own party other than three convicted felons.
That's how bad this is, Dinesh.
But they're targeting the effective conservatives.
And so I believe that Kevin McCarthy...
I don't think it was the Democrats doing it against the will of our leader in the House.
And I think also it was tacit, but Paul Gosar, same way.
And I think they're setting Boebert up to do the same thing.
They want to weaken them.
They want to take them out because McCarthy's driving principle is he salivates at the thought of becoming Speaker of the House.
And he never believed that I would vote for him as Speaker.
I was one of about five of us that took John Boehner out of the chair because he was cutting deals with Pelosi and selling us out into the bargain of that.
So he pretty well knew if Steve King's there, and I chair the Conservative Opportunities Society for 16 years, our 48 members or so that are there, you know, I can start the conversation in any Wednesday morning, and you never know where it's going to go, but it might go to decide Kevin McCarthy should not be Speaker of the House.
And I would say that here on your podcast, Kevin McCarthy does not have the character to be Speaker of the House.
What you seem to be saying, and this maybe is the bottom line, and what I like about your book, as I say, is the chapter and verse of it.
You don't hesitate to...
I feel like I'm in the middle of all these controversies.
You don't hesitate to say what you exactly said, what they described it as.
So it's a kind of anatomy of how, not just the left, but in this case, the Republicans, too, plan their own hits.
And I guess your message is that a lot of Republicans, too, are part of the swamp.
Well, they are, and I think it's important for people to understand that we probably can't get to the meat of this, but how it is that new members come into Congress, how they get co-opted into becoming part of the establishment, they become dependent upon leadership.
They're fundraising, K-Street's controlled right now by McCarthy.
Committee assignments are, chairs are ranking memberships, subcommittee ranking memberships, all controlled by McCarthy.
And so they're afraid to stand up and defend.
And I would say that one of the members whom I revere, and I'll not use his name publicly right now, sat down with me last December, a long conversation, two and a half hours.
And finally, I asked him, he's very astute on the politics of what goes on, and a veteran member, I said, what should I have done differently?
He put his head down like that for a while, and he lifted it back up again, and he said, he looked me right in the eye, and he said, nothing is what we should have done differently.
And that tells me that leadership has to be called out when they let their own members or push their own members out of there.
What they did is they denied the Iowans in the 4th Congressional District the choice for who was going to represent them.
And that carried out all the way through the primary in some of the ways that I've described here and many of the ways that I've described in the book.
But, Dinesh, I want to say that I'm not in sour grapes here.
Maybe it sounds like that from the tone of this interview.
My book isn't sour grapes.
It is facts, it's chronological, and it's got end notes on it that show you that.
And there's a couple of uplifting stories in there, too.
The one about the Tanzanian Miracle Kids that I thank God I had the privilege of being involved in that.
But I wanted to make sure there was one that could be read objectively and the chronology is there so people can understand what was going on at the time, what people knew at the time, and the decisions that they made and the things that they did within the context of reality.
And so I'd say the breadth and depth of the swamp is still stunning to me.
And I still think that there were a dozen or so people in there that were tied into this.
One statesman of them could have stepped up and put an end to it, but none of them did.
And I just wish that, you know, they would come to grips with this and go back to being the decent people I thought they were before this began.
Very interesting, folks. Check out the book, Walking Through the Fire.
Go to steveking.com.
Steve, thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Thanks a lot, Dinesh. We're good to go.
Shop for the plan and phone that's right for you.
Then enter promo code SAVEHALF and you'll save 50% off your first month and you'll save on a new phone.
That's puretalk.com promo code SAVEHALF. Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless.
Some restrictions apply.
See site for details. I want to continue my discussion of tyranny in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar because the type of tyranny that we are dealing with there It's not the obvious form of tyranny.
It doesn't fit the classical distinctions and definitions supplied by political science.
And yet, I think in eerie ways, it resembles the tyranny that we're facing or that we're moving toward today.
Think about it. What is the tyranny we're facing today?
Is it the tyranny of the monarchy, the kind that the American founders faced with the British?
No. Is it tyranny that's coming exclusively from abroad through some foreign conqueror?
No. Is it the tyranny of pure aristocracy, an unelected group of people that have no political legitimacy imposing their will on us?
No. Is it the tyranny of the people themselves or the American people to blame because they themselves have a tyrannical mindset?
No. So what is a clinically accurate description of the alliance or coalition that's producing tyrannical ideas?
Policies and behaviors in the country now.
That's what we want to get at, and we're going to look at Julius Caesar to help clarify this.
Now, Caesar, as I said yesterday or the day before, is not a tyrant, at least not yet.
He doesn't do anything tyrannical.
When the play begins, we see Caesar, and he's in a procession, a victory march, if you will, that is after one of his great military conquests.
And yet, the enthusiasm of the people, their excitement over Caesar, convinces some of the members of the Roman Senate, notably two important figures in Rome, Cassius and Brutus, that Caesar is becoming a tyrant.
This is a preventive overthrow, a prophylactic murder, an assassination to avoid tyranny rather than to defeat it once it has already been established.
And the murderers in this case say that they are liberators.
And it's very interesting through history, Dante, for example, regarded Brutus and Cassius as having committed unforgivable sins of disloyalty, treachery, and he puts them in the very bottom of hell.
But that is not the impression that you get of Brutus and Cassius in this play.
This is a play that to some degree appears to celebrate the freedom-loving assassins who kill Caesar in an attempt to, you may say, restore the Roman Republic, and yet in the end are themselves defeated, although even in defeat there's a kind of heroism, especially to Brutus, whose death is almost the sort of culmination of the play itself.
Now here's what a one of the aristocrats, a guy named Flavius, says about Caesar.
These growing feathers plucked from Caesar's wing will make him fly an ordinary pitch.
Who else would soar above the view of men and keep us all in servile fearfulness?
Now, What he's saying is that we've got to pluck Caesar's feathers.
We've got to take him down a notch, because otherwise it will go to his head.
The power will make him drunk with authority, and all of us would be reduced, in a sense, to a kind of servile...
Now, as I said, although Caesar himself is not a tyrant, at no point does Shakespeare in this play imply that the threat of tyranny is not real.
In fact, the threat of tyranny is realized because in the end, Brutus and Cassius are The Roman Republic is not restored.
Now, Caesar is dead.
It may seem that Mark Anthony will be his natural successor, but no, Mark Anthony is himself defeated by a third man, Octavian, who then establishes, if you will, Caesarism to be passed dynastically down from one generation to the next.
And so, the Roman Republic never rises again.
Now, the philosopher Aristotle once spoke about three types of regimes.
The regime of the one, that's monarchy.
Of the few, that's aristocracy.
And of the many, that's democracy.
But Aristotle recognized that tyranny can come from any of these.
The monarch can oppress everybody else.
The aristocrats can use their power, the power of the few, as a gang to oppress everyone else.
And the people, too, can become tyrants in that the majority can use their power to oppress the minority.
Very interestingly, if you think about the American political system, it combines all these three elements.
The president, the head of the executive branch, is sort of the monarchical element.
The The support and other unelected branches of government function as a kind of aristocracy.
In other words, these are people who are appointed to perform certain tasks of power.
And then, of course, elected representatives reflect the will of the people.
Now, for Aristotle, the best kind of regime is not a regime that gives absolute power to any of these three, but that, in a sense, mixes the power so that each group, each system is a check on the other.
I think the American founders, by the way, took this wisdom of Aristotle and tried to put it into the architecture of the American founding.
But what we see in Julius Caesar is a remarkable phenomenon, which is the one guy, Caesar, allying with the people against the Senate, against the aristocrats.
And what Shakespeare is implying is that that can be actually just as dangerous, a form of tyranny.
Let's call it Caesarism.
So what does Caesarism mean here?
It really refers to a single person or an elite at the top, Think here, for example, about the democratic left.
They constitute a political and cultural elite.
And what are they trying to do?
They're trying to use the rhetoric of democracy.
Oh, yes, we've got to do this for the people.
We've got to do this in the name of the people.
They never stop talking about the people.
But the point is that they don't really care about the people.
They're Their deference to popular will is tactical.
Now, notice that when I talked about Coriolanus a few episodes ago, I mentioned that Coriolanus was an aristocrat who refused to succumb to the people.
He's like, we don't care about the people.
We hate the people.
And at least Coriolanus was being honest about it.
What you see with Caesar and what you see with Mark Anthony is something far more cunning, something far more Pelosi-like, something far more Schumer-ish.
And that is a kind of abasement that pretends with low cunning to defer to the people.
Even though they regard the people as trash, they regard the people as a group to be easily manipulated.
And Shakespeare, by the way, is very clear-eyed in showing that the people can be easily manipulated.
But that's what Marc Anthony does in his infamous or famous speech where he has the body of Caesar.
He's stirring the people into a frenzy, recognizing that ultimately the people are not doing their own will.
They're doing the will of a demagogue.
They're doing the will ultimately of Anthony.
So Anthony here becomes the person who carries Caesarism forward until ultimately Caesarism, the name itself, comes to embody tyranny and dictatorship, comes to embody a reign of Roman emperors, by the way, who become subsequently more and more tyrannical.
▲
Export Selection