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Dec. 23, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
58:09
A CHILD IS BORN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep244
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Just a reminder, guys, that this is the last podcast of 2021.
It's not my last podcast ever, but it's my last podcast of the year.
It's been a really fun ride.
I hope you've enjoyed taking it with me, whether you came on board at the beginning or along the way.
I think there's going to be even better things in store for 2022.
So we take a little break, Christmas holiday.
A little bit of time off after that and back in, well, back at the wheel, you may say, on Monday, January 10th.
So January 10th, kind of mark your calendar or put a little reminder in your phone, we'll be up and running once again for an exciting big year next year.
Now, for today's episode, I'm going to talk about the significance of the events that happened 2,000 years ago in a manger.
Like, why does that matter now?
What does it mean for us today?
Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to do a freewheeling conversation.
We want to talk about the Chilean election, why we believe in God, secrets of a happy marriage, all kinds of stuff.
I'm going to discuss the corruption of the military, as indicated by the comments of three former generals commenting on the 2024, the next presidential election, and former hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.
He's going to join me. He's going to talk about how he became a victim of political persecution, prosecution and persecution, at the hands of a man who I happen to be very familiar with.
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.
Two thousand years ago, a child was born in a manger in Bethlehem and that singular event, that historical singularity, you could call it, changed the world.
It created, of course, the Christian religion.
But Christianity is not a religion in quite the same way as other religions.
Now, if you look at the great religions of the world, they have things in common.
They have a common morality.
And that's very significant.
If you look at the monotheistic religions, they believe in one God, and I think it has to be the same God, even if that same God is described or even named differently.
And yet in other ways, religions are not the same.
Christianity, for example, has the concept of the martyr, of martyrdom, which goes right to the early Christians.
And This is a concept that you find in Christianity and in Islam, by the way, but you don't find it in Judaism.
You don't find it in Hinduism.
You don't find it in Buddhism.
And if you look at the Christian and Islamic concepts of the martyr, they're very different.
I mean, for a lot of radical Muslims, a guy A Muslim 23-year-old who blows himself up in an Israeli cafe and takes like 10 Israelis with him is a martyr.
Why? Because he's doing a jihad.
He's striking a blow, if you will, for Allah.
But the Christian concept of the martyr is totally different.
In the Christian concept, the martyr voluntarily gives up his or her own life rather than renounce or rather than reject the God and Jesus.
Now, Debbie and I watched, gosh, this was a few weeks ago, a documentary on C.S. Lewis, a very interesting documentary.
In many ways. But one comment jumped out at me.
Lewis was talking about just sitting outside in a cafe and watching people kind of mill about.
And this is me talking, not Lewis, but when you see people walking on the street, there are kind of different ways to look at them, right?
One way, if you're kind of a radical materialist, is you go, hey, there's a bunch of carbon life forms.
There's a bunch of molecules and That have essentially assembled themselves into arms and legs and neurons.
And all we're looking is at material objects that have somehow sprung to consciousness through some kind of blind evolutionary process.
That's one way to look at it. That's the materialist outlook.
Another way to look at it is these are human beings.
And what we know about them is that they're born, they live, and one day they will die, and that's what we're looking at.
We're looking at temporary beings who inhabit the world for a short period of time.
But the Christian view, and this is the view that C.S. Lewis was expressing, is he goes, when I see people walking around, I see eternal beings.
I see eternal beings that are here, you may say, on earth on a sort of pilgrimage, but it's not their ultimate destination.
And Lewis's point is that looking at people that way gives you a totally different outlook.
And I think what Lewis is talking about is a phrase I've used before on the podcast.
It's subspecie eternitatis.
It's the idea of looking at things from the perspective of eternity.
And this is a kind of, well, Nietzsche called it a revaluation of values, a kind of transformation of perspective.
And so, for example, if you look at a guy who's incredibly successful, but, you know, deep down he's kind of a mercenary, he's kind of a crook.
From the earthly point of view, this guy's a winner because he's figured out the rules of life, he's playing them really well.
But from the Christian point of view, you can't but be skeptical.
For the Christian, the poor peasant who crawls to the altar on his knees, Who is a failure by the world standards, is nevertheless someone who's preparing to receive a heavenly reward.
So, success is defined differently, subspecies eternitatis.
Christianity offers you, through this concept of eternity, an experience of the sublime.
Now, if you're not a Christian, you can still experience the sublime, but it's very rare and it's very episodic.
Some people feel that when Listening to a symphony or sitting by the lake with someone you love, you have that momentary experience of the sublime, but it's there and then it's gone and then it's only recoverable through memories that themselves become more dimmed over time.
But the beauty of Christianity is that it introduces the sublime into, it makes it an experience of ordinary life.
And it does so because you begin to realize that everything, your work, is a form of prayer.
Your marriage is a weird kind of menage a trois.
Why? Because God's a part of it.
He's the third party in a successful marriage.
And you begin to experience what Milton talks about.
His phrase is,"...a paradise within the happier far." And what Milton means is that paradise isn't just simply a destination of the next world, some place that we're headed that we may get to someday, but paradise is a condition of the human soul that can be tasted, at least a foretaste of it, even in this life. And Christianity allows us to endure suffering
and difficult circumstances, which are not avoidable in life, but nevertheless do them with a sense of joy, without losing your joy. I remember years ago, there was a woman whose life was destroyed. I mean, Essentially, her family, her home was knocked down in a hurricane.
One of her best friends had died in a brain tumor.
And she's quoted in the paper saying this, Now, it's that last phrase that really gets me.
I haven't lost my joy. Well, humanly speaking, how is that possible?
The sources of your joy appear to have been squashed, appear to have been taken away, and yet your joy remains.
Why? Because your joy is ultimately coming not sort of from the world, but from the author of the world.
It's coming really from God.
It's coming from God.
It's coming from Christ.
Christianity helps us to remember that when we're called not just to success, not just to happiness, but also to holiness.
And holiness is really a state of mind.
It is the way that your heart is oriented.
It isn't simply what you do.
It is sort of how you are.
What counts for God isn't just our external conduct, but also our inward disposition.
There's a phrase that is used by John the Baptist in the Bible.
He's talking, he's standing waist deep in the river and he says of Christ, he goes, he must increase and I must decrease.
Now, on the face of it, this appears to be strange, this idea that here we are in the world and we're trying to somehow make ourselves decrease and we're trying to increase the empire of Christ in our hearts.
But this counterintuitive advice turns out to be the best advice of all.
Why? Because it substitutes God's plan for our plan.
As we give Christ a greater and greater domain in our hearts, we begin to experience God's love and God's peace.
And this is, for me, the true message of the child in the manger.
In this Christmas season, I have a real appreciation for Mike Lindell's big heart.
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He makes you kind of want to give back or at least support him.
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Debbie and I thought we would do our last roundup for the year.
And cover, well, some political stuff, but also maybe some stuff that's a little bit more in the personal domain.
But let's start off on the political front.
We were talking about the...
The election in Chile, because I think it's something that maybe signals a larger trend in South America.
So the leftist, this young guy in his 30s, kind of student protest leader, is elected pretty decisively by the people of Chile.
People who have benefited over a generation of free market policies.
So why would people who have had it good, one of the most successful economies in South America, I want to move in a leftist direction that, they must know, jeopardizes the goose that kills the goose that made the golden eggs.
Yeah, yeah. Well, as you know, I don't think it's an isolated incident, really, in South America or North America, to be honest.
Why would anybody vote for a Democrat, right?
Same thing. People are fooled by these people.
This young guy, of course, as you know, in Chile, a lot of Venezuelans and Colombians and everybody has been immigrating there illegally.
And so he's been kind of having an open arms, stance, policy towards them.
Oh, come on over, it doesn't matter if you're illegal, who cares?
This guy that's running against me hates illegals and he's going to stop you, he's gonna close the border.
So this has kind of that, oh, this is the nice guy image, right?
And really, truly, the people coming from Venezuela are running away from the exact same policies that this guy advocates for.
And so don't they know that they're going from the frying pan into the fire?
Yeah, but let me look at it from their point of view.
The way they look at it, they're fleeing a terrible situation in Venezuela.
Yeah. Which, by the way, kind of came about the same way, right?
Exactly. The Venezuelans thought, oh, Hugo Chavez, let's give him a chance.
He seems like he's independent.
Yes, he's on the left, but we think we can live with him.
Your grandparents thought that.
They did. So now the Venezuelans are running over to Chile.
And again, what strikes me is the similarity between the Democrats over here and the Chilean left in both cases.
Exactly the same. Their motives are cynical.
Exactly. But for the Venezuelans coming to Chile, they think, well, this guy's welcoming.
And even if Chile eventually goes downhill...
For a while. For a little while.
For a while there, I'll be okay.
Yeah. I don't know.
I just really pray for Chile because, you know, you see it as a metropolis of prosperity.
And I give it maybe five to ten years before it looks just like Venezuela.
Very scary. Very sad.
And let's turn to something closer to home.
Here's a news article.
Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon carjacked in Philadelphia's FDR Park.
So right away, I'm like, let me see if she's a Democrat.
Of course she is. Not only is she a Democrat, she's like Black Lives Matter.
She's like defund the police.
Now, I'm not saying that Philadelphia has completely defunded the police.
No. But someone who's an advocate of this...
Well, tell everybody what you were going to tweet and what I didn't let you tweet.
Well, I mean, I was just going to tweet a jubilant, you know, kind of karma.
Like, listen, it's very, I mean, and it's true.
It's very hard for me to work up the emotion to feel sorry for someone who's advocating for defund the police.
And then it's like...
Hands up. Turn over your purse.
I know. Get out of your car.
I mean, I guess we should resist the temptation.
But you were like, it made you uncomfortable.
It did make me uncomfortable. Now, not that I don't agree with you.
I do agree with you. You agree on the merits.
I do agree on the merits. And I do agree that their stance and their policies lead to this kind of crime.
So in a way, you know, you get what you pay for or whatever.
Don't pay for it. But I also feel like, listen, we're Christians and we're the light and people see our tweets and they see what we say.
And I'm guilty of it, too.
I've kind of gone off on people.
But at the end of the day, we do have to remember that even though we hate what they do and their policies, We don't hate them.
Well, I mean, let's look at the Jesus model, because the Jesus model is not exclusively turn the other cheek, right?
When the guards came up to Jesus to arrest him, when the guard pulled out his sword and struck Jesus, Jesus is like, why did you strike me?
He wasn't, hey, you got me over here, get me again.
And what about the money changers in the temple?
I mean, Jesus took a very stern...
So, if you look at the left as misguided, right?
Then I agree with you.
Then I would say, look, it is not a good rhetorical strategy to come to people who don't understand and beat them over the head.
It's going to push them away.
But if you're dealing with people who are malevolent, who are bad guys, who know full well what's going on, but are doing this in order to exploit us or in order to take advantage of us...
Why not call them out? I mean, why not express a certain even glee, schadenfreude, at their miseries?
But I mean, do you really think that by doing that, she's going to not be Black Lives Matter, not be like social justice warrior, not be like, oh, let the criminal out of jail?
One, it's encouraging to our side because it's a little bit of a, listen, you get what you pay for.
You know what I mean? If you invite these policies, you have to live under them.
And these are the people, look, she's not just an ordinary citizen who happens to be, like, she is actively putting these policies in place.
She votes for this policy, for this very policy.
And she can't tell the carjacker guy, hey, hey, please don't do it.
Remember, I'm the one that is letting you do this.
I'm on your side. I got you out of prison.
I got your back. I got your back.
Right. Yeah. I don't care about victims unless it's me, right?
I mean, that's the hypocrisy that gets me.
And so this is kind of why I want to kind of, you know, turn the screw in a little bit because I think it couldn't be more than well-deserved.
All right. We'll be right back.
Ever since I was a kid, my mom would tell me, hey, Dinesh, you've got to eat fruits, you've got to eat vegetables.
She was kind of fanatical about that, and there were certain fruits I liked, but veggies, not so much.
And over the years, I kind of fell off the wagon with regard to eating the right amount of produce every day, and most Americans don't.
But this is when Debbie and I discovered Balance of Nature.
We met the guy who runs the company.
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This today is our last podcast, and I say our, because this is a joint enterprise in every way.
In fact, it was your idea for the podcast.
You might have had some regrets during the year.
You're like, dude, what did I... That crazy idea.
Oh, what was I thinking?
But tell them your somewhat sly motive for the podcast in the first place.
Yeah, so, you know, I think most of you know by now that I'm a complete germaphobe, okay?
I'm very much a germaphobe.
And I was always very, even before COVID, you know, Dinesh would shake hands and I had the Purell at hand and I'd Purell him and all of those things.
So when COVID, you know, came into our lives, and it did, and I'm sorry to say, but it's a real virus, I was actually a little bit relieved that Dinesh wasn't out and about doing events.
So, but, you know, this is part of our livelihood.
So I was like, you know, I mean, maybe a podcast would be a really great thing to do because it'll keep you home and you won't have to go out and that kind of thing.
And I'll produce it.
Little did you know. Little did I know.
Well, I mean, you're now in the groove, and so it's a few hours a day, but in the beginning...
Oh, the beginning was like 14-hour days, five days a week.
We were learning along the way.
Yeah, we were learning a lot, and it was overwhelming.
And for a few days there, I was like, I think your producer's quitting.
Please fire me, please.
Well, interestingly, we went to Salem, which is a media corporation, and we asked them, hey, would you like to partner with us?
Because we need someone to sell the ads.
They do all that side of things.
And they were like, okay, guys, what do you have in mind?
Kind of like a once a week podcast.
And we thought about it and we thought there's no point doing this kind of halfway conversation.
If we're going to do it, let's do it daily.
And they were literally in disbelief.
They were in shock. They were in shock.
And their inside joke, they told us later, was like, this is going to last about a week.
They got to realize this is way too much work.
And I think it was because they expected us to write out the entire copy, which I guess is what a lot of people do.
They teleprompter it.
So even though they appear to be delivering content, they're reading.
But we don't do it that way.
We actually do it on the fly.
Right. Well, you do it on the fly.
And the really funny thing about this guy doing it on the fly is that, you know, we do it in segments, right?
Sometimes five minute segments, six, seven minute segments.
And Dinesh doesn't like it when I start flagging him down that he has a minute left.
He hates it. And he gets really bent out of shape when I get bent out of shape because I'm making all these faces.
He's like, honey, that's so demoralizing.
It's a little hard for me to continue my content while I'm getting the zip.
Yeah. Yeah, so that's kind of been a little bit of a frustrating thing here, you know, because...
Well, your point is the podcast can't be an hour and a half long.
A lot of people listen in their car when they're going to work.
So as a matter of fact, while we're doing this segment, I'm actually keeping time and I'm looking and we've already gone three minutes.
So we have just a few more minutes left.
So, but anyway, so yes, but it's been a joy.
It really has. And getting to know people that have like...
Listen, when you email Dinesh on the website, I see the emails.
They're overwhelming, so it's really hard for me to answer back.
But we're not going to some third or fourth party.
It comes pretty much straight into our orbit.
Yeah, and so this is kind of a two-man operation here, so you have to kind of bear with us.
But it has been...
Very fruitful and a lot of fun.
Not only is it a daily forum for me, which I've never had before, but I think with each kind of format, whether it's speaking or the books or the movies, brings out a different side of my personality.
I operate in a slightly different mode.
Yeah, oh, there have been times.
Oh, boy.
All right, let's talk about a couple other things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's another year now.
I mean, we...
We crossed our five years of marriage and we couldn't do our anniversary getaway that we planned because of COVID. But we're closing in on six years of marriage in March.
And I think one of the things about it is that I think, and this may be a distinctive feature for us, is that we're sort of joined at the hip Almost 24-7.
And that's probably rare.
I mean, even in happy marriages, probably people have a fair amount of time apart, right?
I'm off to work, honey. I'll see you at 6 p.m.
We don't actually have that.
We're pretty much...
You know, you wake up and you see my face in the morning and then we're together.
Oh, I love your face.
Well, what do you think makes our marriage...
Special. I think we both think it is very special.
What makes it special for you?
Well, I love the fact that we are very grounded in the Lord.
We pray, we do read our Bible, and I think that that has been something that's been really important to me because of that.
You keep me laughing daily, nightly.
I mean, you know, there are things that, again, you don't, there are things that sometimes that people say, oh, you know, they irritate me, they, you know, they leave the toothpaste out, they do this, they do that.
Really, nothing that you do irritates me, really.
In fact, I think that a lot of what you do makes me chuckle.
And even if it is slightly annoying, like, for example, just one little thing, is when you come back from the grocery store and I ask, did you wash your hands?
And I usually have that, like, guilty look on my face, like, I'm about to do it.
Yes, yes, just the little germophobia thingies.
But, you know, but even then, you know, not severe, you know, nothing like that.
But yeah, I mean, we laugh a lot.
Well, I gave Debbie a little bit of a shocker the other day because we were talking about marriage and so on.
And I actually brought up a point that was made by the philosopher Rousseau.
And he says that sexual happiness is, in fact, the greatest joy, not just of marriage, but that human beings can experience ever.
And I was telling Debbie, I said, I actually disagree with Rousseau.
And she was like... What do you mean?
And I'm like, I think that the greatest joy ever experienced by a man was experienced by the medieval peasant after an extremely long and excruciating day of work when he basically, at the end of the day, sat down on his cot and took off his shoes.
Just a simple sense of overwhelming relief.
I think that's got to be number one.
Sexual happiness, a distant number two.
And then we can talk about three and four.
But anyway, this is the kind of thing that Debbie's like, where do you come up with this stuff today?
Oh my goodness. And you know what?
Speaking of that, you know, I know we're kind of out of time, but...
We do locals, and it's a lot of fun because we do a Q&A on Tuesday night, every Tuesday night.
And so this one person asked us, what made you, what convinced you that God exists, right?
And so you go first.
Well, I mean, I was thinking a little bit in terms of apologetics, and I remember that the philosopher Kant once said that there were two things about the world that really amazed him, the starry heavens out there and then the moral law in here.
So he was talking about physical laws, which is to say natural laws, the laws of the universe, and then he was talking about moral laws, the law that in a sense God has implanted in every human heart.
And I think that it's very easy to see that both those types of legislation, both the legislation of the laws of the universe and the moral laws inside of us require some sort of a legislator.
I mean, we clearly didn't make our own conscience and clearly someone made the universe or something made the universe.
So I was just using those as two separate pointers to the existence of God.
But you gave a completely different answer.
I did because I feel like yours is more intellectual and philosophical and mine is more spiritual.
I won't really go into it because we don't have the time, but I will say that it was a spiritual conversion for me to be born again, and I've never been the same since.
I love reading the Bible, and one of my favorites really for Christmas is Luke 2, verses 11 through 14.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you.
Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was the angel, a multitude of heavenly hosts, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill toward men." Now that Debbie and I are well into, well, let's just call it middle age, we get a little bit accustomed to, you know, aches and pains.
And in fact, sometimes when I work out, Debbie's like, did you stretch?
Because if you didn't, you know, things could go out of joint.
And we take these aches and pains as just part of the normal process of getting older, or of course, sometimes injuries.
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Feel the difference. Three former generals have written an article in the Washington Post that is very disturbing in what it seems to suggest about where the military is headed.
Now, the generals themselves claim to be disturbed, and they're disturbed as they look forward to the 2024 election.
Let me summarize a few of the things that they say.
They say that if there is a disputed election in 2024, and if the Trumpian candidate, whether it's Trump or someone like Trump, loses, they say this would divide the country.
And they say it would obviously also divide the military.
And they say, quote, in this context, with our military hobbled and divided, U.S. security would be crippled.
Any one of our enemies could take advantage by launching an all-out attack.
And so the generals say that the lesson of 2020 and of the violent insurrection, they're on board with all the leftist rhetoric here.
And I also, by the way, point out that when they are talking about the 2024 election, they're assuming that the Trumpian candidate loses.
They don't consider the opposite possibility.
Which is that Trump or Trumpian candidate wins, and then the left refuses to accept the result.
To them, that's not really something worth discussing.
So there's a one-sidedness baked into this analysis.
But nevertheless, what they're saying is that we've learned from 2020 that what we need to do is, they say, make preparations for what could come in 2024.
And now let's see what are these preparations that they think should be made.
They say, quote, Now, what worries me about this is that this appears to be, if you think about it, Essentially, a recipe for a military coup.
These are people who, in the name of protecting democracy, and this is kind of the left's game.
The left is always saying, democracy is under attack.
Well, how's democracy under attack?
Isn't it under attack from the kind of people who don't accept majority verdicts as recently with the Build Back Better?
Oh, you know, Manchin won't respect the will of 48 other Democrats.
What about the 50 Republicans that are allied with Manchin on this?
Or who are the people who want to pack the courts?
Who are the people suppressing civil liberties?
Who are the people who want to get rid of the filibuster?
So if constitutional democracy, the full arrangement that we have of our political system, is endangered, it would appear to be endangered from the left, not from the right.
But in the name of protecting democracy, what these generals are seemingly calling for is a kind of plan for the military to jump in and take over if there is, in fact, a dispute among the two parties or among the two sides.
Now, these are retired generals, but they're people who have had an important role in the military, and I'm wondering if they speak for an increasingly corrupted and woke military, a military whose corruption began under Obama going all the way back to 2012.
The idea that you take these police agencies and you take the military and you begin to make it partisan.
This is kind of a socialist recipe.
Make the police agencies of government do the bidding of the left so that when the left controls the state, they're able to deploy these agencies in a partisan manner.
And so I think that it is of the greatest importance for Republicans to be keeping a very close eye on the military.
And if a purge of the Trumpsters and the patriots is underway, there needs to be a remaking of the military as power changes hands.
Of course, what these generals are trying to do is prevent power from changing hands at all.
That's why they have the built-in assumption that the Trumpian candidate is going to lose.
But all of this, I think, is a sign of...
Of the kind of thinking that we're beginning to see on the left in which even something like a military coup becomes defensible in the name, paradoxically enough, of protecting democracy.
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In 2017, President Trump, with a Republican majority in the House and the Senate, very narrow majorities, but nevertheless majorities, passed a significant tax law, a tax reform. And this tax reform has been under attack from Democrats ever since.
Democrats, in fact, have condemned it from day one.
Biden campaigned against it.
He said, I will undo the Trump tax cuts.
He said, I will undo other provisions in the tax law.
And what's really interesting is that as we now look one year into the Biden administration, we realize that, A, not only have the Democrats not done that, We've been unable to do that, but it doesn't look like they're going to be able to do it in the future as well.
And this shows the great importance of putting things into the law.
Get them into the law because you might think, well, wait a minute, when the other side comes in, it's no, not necessarily.
It could be that they can't undo things even though they're trying to do it.
Let's look at some of the provisions of this tax law.
Democrats basically said, Number one, we're going to raise the top individual rate from 37%.
Trump had brought it down to 37%.
We're going to take it to 39.6%.
Have they done it? No.
And interestingly, it wasn't even in the final version of the bill that the Democrats presented.
They realized they can't do it.
And so they've decided, let's live with what Trump has done.
Number two, the Democrats said, we're going to drive up the corporate tax rate.
We're going to kick up the corporate tax rate.
To 26.5%.
But in the final version of the bill, no change in the corporate tax rate.
So the Democrats, having sort of flirted with the idea, dropped the idea, decided we're not going to do that.
Trump, by the way, had brought the corporate tax rate down to 21%.
And then Democrats said that the Trump law established a ceiling, a $10,000 ceiling of deductibility for state and local taxes.
And this, of course, hits the blue states more.
Why? Because they have higher state and local taxes.
So that deduction, which people had become used to, Trump sort of took it away.
And the Democrats go, we're going to put it back.
But this was a problem because progressives on the left said, you can't put it back.
This is a provision that benefits the rich.
And so the Democratic Party was divided over this provision.
And once again, it didn't make the provision was essentially subtracted or taken away.
So as you go down the list of the key elements of the Trump tax bill, you begin to realize that even though Biden said this tax bill is history, there are many Republicans who thought there's a A scholar at AEI quoted in this article on The Hill, and he's like, I thought it was a done deal that Democrats would do these things and the Trump tax bill would sort of go into the trash heap.
Now, the Trump tax bill is not permanent.
In fact, it just goes until, I believe, 2025, and then Congress is going to have to go back to the drawing board and fight over it.
But the interesting thing is that from 2017, when it was enacted, the Potentially until 2025, it shows you that when you make legislative changes passed by the House, passed by the Senate, signed by the President, those tend to have a longer life and sometimes even endure when the other party comes to power.
Breaking news, and it's not good.
U.S. consumer prices soared 6.8% compared to last year, biggest increase since 1982.
We need to really protect our investments from this out-of-control administration, or we're not going to have a whole lot left for the future.
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Raja Raja Ratnam was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
He studied in England, then came to the United States.
He got an MBA from the Wharton Business School.
And in 1997, he founded the Galleon Group, which became one of the largest technology hedge funds in the world, with over $7 billion in management.
And then Rajaratnam got into trouble.
He was arrested. He was prosecuted.
He was convicted of insider trading.
And the whole story is incredibly fascinating.
And I think a real window into...
Welcome, Raj.
Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining me.
I want to begin the story with your success.
You're a South Asian boy, if I can say, who came to America and made good.
Talk a little bit about what attracted you to America and what was your American dream?
Well, after graduating from England, I wanted to come here to do an MBA and some of the best MBA schools were in America.
So after doing my MBA at Wharton, I majored in finance, and so I came to Wall Street.
At that time, there were very few South Asians on Wall Street, and so I worked really hard.
I worked every Saturday, and as a technology analyst initially, I visited Silicon Valley once a month for about a week and met with 25 companies each time.
And then you created a hedge fund, which is essentially a vehicle for investing in these technology companies.
You were enormously successful.
Now, the 2008 crash came about, and it was essentially driven by mortgage lending.
This was a crash involving the banks.
It involved foreclosures.
A lot of Americans were hurt by it.
They lost a lot of money.
You had nothing to do with the 2008 crash, did you?
That's right. American households lost about $7 trillion and people were looking for heads on Wall Street.
When the new administration came in, they encouraged the prosecutors to take a hard look at malfeasance on Wall Street.
I had, as a long-shot equity manager, mortgages were the last thing on my mind.
Yeah, but let's talk about, I mean, you say that there was a public appetite to go after the bad guys, but it would seem on the first glance that there were two groups of bad guys.
One was obviously, well, to some degree, Congress, because Congress had pushed these banks out.
And to making these sorts of loans.
Hey, listen, every American deserves to own a home.
You banks have got to bend the rules.
So the banks go, well, okay.
So you've got bankers, you've got Congress.
And you make the point here that none of those guys ever got prosecuted, ever got indicted.
Never had to pay personal, even fines or penalties.
And instead, they pick you and you don't fit this picture.
You're, in fact, investing in technology assets.
So you became, didn't you, a kind of a scapegoat for ambitious prosecutors who wanted a scalp.
So the die has been cast.
High-profile cases are a stepping stone for ambitious prosecutors.
Now, let me make it clear. I don't think the entire prosecutorial profession is corrupt, but there are few people who bend the rules because winning is more important than justice.
And that's the focus of my book.
Now, you talk about the fact that if you listen to these prosecutors, and in this case, we happen to have a prosecutor in common, Preet Bharara, a fellow South Asian, if you will, Asian Indian in Bharara's case.
And if you listen to their rhetoric, it makes it seem like they are, everybody else is motivated by greed.
Wall Street is motivated by greed, but they are motivated by greed.
Selflessness. They are trying merely to achieve social justice.
They're trying to bring the bad guys to account.
One of the things you bring out, I think, beautifully in this book is the enormous ambition and greed on the other side.
So let me start by asking you this.
When they mount these prosecutions, they go after a high profile guy like you, what's in it for them?
Well, it's career advancement.
Greed is not just monetary greed.
It's also power greed.
If you look at some of the high-profile U.S. attorneys from the Southern District, you see Comey, you see Giuliani, Mr.
Barara, and there's a playbook.
They go after high-profile guys, it's winning at all costs, and they don't care too much about actual justice.
In my case, They came and arrested me with guns drawn.
Normally, for a white-collar case, they would ask you to come with your lawyer.
I was on CNN. I was on media.
Mr. Bharara learned his trade as a general counsel to Schumer, and he knew how to work the media.
And the FBI threatened me in front of my children, told my children, you'll never see your dad again for 25 years.
They wanted me to be a cooperating witness, which I refused.
They gave me some inducements.
And the whole barrage of things at their fingertips, they threw at me, including cooperating witnesses that then recanted in subsequent cases.
So this system is not just.
All I ask for is tell us what the rules are and play fair.
Is that too much to ask, Dinesh?
No, absolutely. I'm quoting now from the FBI agent who arrested you.
He looks at your wife and he says, your wife doesn't look to be that upset.
She must be thinking about all that money she can spend now.
So I want to get at here the mentality of these guys.
They seem to take a certain vindictive pleasure in sort of bringing the big guy down.
And in your case, it's your American dream.
It's your success that made you the kind of target of opportunity, didn't it?
Just to take a step back, Dinesh, we had about 180 to 200 employees at that time.
These employees paid taxes of over $200 million to America, but they don't see that.
I wish they had a discussion with me.
I could have explained why I did the trades I did.
But this was tried in the media.
They made me do a perp walk, which is reserved for mafia and murderers and so on.
They lied in court many times.
It was this win at all costs.
And none of them ever get sanctioned.
That is the crime.
Raj, let's take a short pause.
When we come back, I want to delve a little further into some of the details of the case because I think it reveals the way in which this operation is carried out.
We'll be right back. We're good to go.
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I'm back with Raj Rajaratnam.
We're talking about his new book, Uneven Justice.
Raj, when you're looking at a prosecution of a case like yours, you've got some fairly...
Vague laws that are against insider trading.
But since it is the job of your firm to do research into what's happening with companies, who's going up, who's coming out with new products, the line between insider trading and legitimate research would appear to be a somewhat fuzzy one.
Part of what I get out of your book is that what the government was able to do is take things that on...
That on examination are quite legitimate, but portray them to a jury that doesn't know how Wall Street works and make it look like, whoa, we got a smoking gun on this guy.
And you give example after example of this.
So it looks like what the government is doing is preying on the ignorance of the jury to create a false picture.
Right. Absolutely right.
Let me remind you, Dinesh, in 2020, 10 or 11 years after my arrest, Mr.
Preet Bharara assembled a task force With my judges, some of the prosecutors, and their conclusion was insider trading laws are murky and there's incredible confusion among the market participants.
Now the question I have for him is if you felt it was murky in 2020, in 2009 when you were the U.S. Attorney, why did you indict 80 people?
Have you ever reflected On the human cost, the cost to the family, the cost to the defendants, the cost to their dependents, it just seems very callous.
And there was another South Asian gentleman who was indicted and he committed suicide, right?
Now, when we talk about accountability, very few people dwell on the human costs.
And therein lies The old axiom, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I mean, toward the end of the book, I found this very revealing.
You show how many of the people who use this playbook against you were in fact rewarded for it.
And I think this is probably why they didn't care a whole lot that they were exploiting murky laws.
One of the prosecutors becomes a law partner at Gibson Dunn.
So he goes into a big partner salary.
The FBI agent who had lied He becomes promoted.
He's off to Washington, D.C. Big office, big promotion.
In fact, this is the funniest part, or at least funny in a certain level.
The Judge Holwell, he leaves the bench and he sets up a private practice as a kind of consultant on insider trading.
And his sole experience of insider trading is your one case.
So suddenly this guy becomes a kind of, you know, he's raking it in now as a kind of consultant on the subject.
So... The ambition on the other side, it looks to me, is the real payoff, and this is why these people do what they do.
Dinesh, you couldn't make this happen, really.
I mean, it's just so amazing that they get away with this.
And then they called the defendant greedy when I didn't make a single penny.
All the money, even if I was guilty of everything, went to the investors.
And I have given more to charity than the entire 60 or 70 million that they alleged the fund made.
And also... They themselves admit it was 0.01% of my trades over a five-year period.
All proceeds from this book are going to charity to fight for justice.
I think every American should be concerned about the FBI lying on the wiretaps because tomorrow they could wiretap you by lying on an affidavit or anybody else.
And that's why I feel compelled to speak out.
Now, one tactic that the prosecutors use in these cases is that they try to get people that you have dealt with to turn against you.
In the book, you describe this fellow, Anil Kumar, who was arrested around the same time that you were.
And this Anil Kumar then meets with a couple of friends of yours, and he makes the following point.
He says, hey, listen, I can fight this case, but it's going to cost me $25 million, or...
I can cooperate with them, in a sense, against Raj.
And then I'm going to basically get off scot-free or close to scot-free.
And so what happens is that there now becomes an incentive by getting these other guys to turn against you.
And I assume that that truth is not going to be a constraint.
In other words, they're not going to hesitate to feed the narrative because that's the price that they pay for not being prosecuted themselves.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
He was a star witness in my case.
In another case, in the same district with the same stocks, and he recanted his testimony, saying that I called Raj to find out what was going on because he was a savvy tech investor.
Now, I got 11 years sentenced.
I spent seven and a half years in prison.
Dinesh, I slept so well every night when I was in prison.
Anil Kumar called my wife in tears and said, I'm sorry, I sent an innocent man to prison.
And we have court records where he recants what he said.
But then the courts say, oh, after three years, his memory may not have been that sharp.
But they were willing to listen to his memory of something that happened 10 years ago.
So this system is stacked.
Raj, what I find moving about your book and powerful is that you conclude by saying, and it would be so easy for you to say, you know, this shows me that I should never have come to America.
I should have made my fortune somewhere else.
But you're as pro-American today as the day you came to America looking for opportunity.
Explain how someone's patriotism like yours could remain intact despite this horrific experience.
Dinesh, I truly believe this is the greatest country in the world.
300 or 350 million Americans live here, and that's about 5% of the world's population.
I can speak out if I see injustice.
I can't control everything that happens in my life, but what I can control is how I react to it.
I love this country.
I feel that what happened to me in the last 10 years has given me a passion to fight for something that I think is far more important than Raj Rajaratnam, which is the uneven justice and the lack of any accountability for the prosecution.
You know, before I got arrested, I thought the FBI was good.
Only bad people went to prison.
The prosecutors were good.
And I was so naive.
Now I think a certain sliver of people who bend the rules should be held accountable.
This doesn't mean that America is not as great a country as it was when I came here.
And I am so grateful to be here.
Raj, thank you very much for joining me.
This is a convincing book from start to finish, and it was a pleasure reading it, and I felt very bad.
And of course, I identified with your story tremendously.
I wish you all the best, and thank you for joining the podcast.
Thank you. Happy holidays, Dinesh.
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