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Jan. 11, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
57:21
POLITIFACT OR POLITIFICTION? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep246
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PolitiFact has done a fact check on one of my statements on Fox News, and I'm going to use this fact check to take you into the surreal twilight zone of fact checking.
New York is the first state to really allow illegals to vote.
This is the beginning of what the Democrats have always wanted.
Arizona gubernatorial candidate Carrie Lake will join me.
We're going to talk about Biden's border crisis and her solution.
I'm also going to explain why I have no interest in flying on an airline whose unofficial motto is, we put diversity first.
And I'm going to begin a series on Russian literature by asking, what is it that the Russians have to say?
Hey, 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.
The fact-checking site, Politifact, has done a fact-check on me.
Fact-checking a statement that I made on Fox News on the Ingram angle.
And the kind of back-and-forth between me and the PolitiFact writer—this is a guy named Bill McCarthy— It's very revealing because it takes you into the twilight zone of the fact-checking world.
Now, I should say, I kind of give away the result.
PolitiFact rates my statement false.
So let's go through the statement to see what in it is false.
Here's what I said, and I'm going to actually read the quote.
It's fairly short. This is what PolitiFact set out to fact-check.
I said this. If you follow January 6th at the granular level with the facts that are coming out slowly, they're coming out because the government has been very reluctant to release footage, particularly footage of what happened in the tunnel on January 6th, where you now begin to see these cops using massive amounts of force against unarmed Trump supporters, including women.
The death of Roseanne Boyland is now being called into question.
Was she the second Trump supporter killed by the authorities?
That's the statement. It might seem pretty innocuous.
It alludes to two specific facts.
One... The fact that the government has been reluctant, and in fact to this date, has not released the full footage of January 6th, and has certainly not released the full footage of what happened in the tunnel.
And two, that cops used force, massive amounts of force, to quote myself, against, quote, unarmed Trump supporters, including women.
Now, what's really interesting is how they set about trying to refute this, because these statements are both true.
Of course, I conclude the quote with just a question about Roseanne Boylan.
Obviously, a question is not a fact.
It's asking, in fact, for the production of facts.
So McCarthy writes me, and he basically says, listen, can you support the statement that you made?
And so I say, sure I can, and I send him a whole bunch of videos.
There's some video that has been released from the tunnel, and it actually shows cops using force against unarmed Trump supporters.
So he replies back and goes, in effect, he says, don't you know that there were some people in the tunnel who were armed?
And I reply this.
I'm not quoting myself again in my email to McCarthy.
I go, quote, you're misstating what I said.
I never said no one in the entire crowd on January 6th was armed.
If you read my quotation, it applies to violence in the tunnel, and I specifically reference Roseanne Boyland, who was unarmed.
And then I say, please don't use the deceptive practice of creating a straw man, no one was armed, attributing it to me, and then refuting not what I said, but what you mischaracterize me as saying.
Now, McCarthy comes back in an email to me and he says, quote, Court documents and video footage show evidence of violence and weapons among the rioters, including in the tunnel.
Now think about this for a minute.
Because notice that he's not refuting anything that I said.
I say the police are using violence against unarmed Trump supporters.
He's coming back and saying, well, there were other guys who were armed.
So I tell him this. This is what I say.
I'm quoting now. Quote, This is not refuted or disproved by showing that other protesters were armed.
And I, because I'm assuming I'm dealing with a moron, I say, this is a well-known logical fallacy.
And then I explain the fallacy to him in kind of excruciating detail.
I say, look, police officer A attacks unarmed protester B, but protester C had weapons.
And I say, look, the second clause that protesters see had weapons doesn't refute the first one.
It could still be true. In fact, it is true that the police did, in fact, attack unarmed protesters.
So, you know, I don't know if McCarthy got the point.
What I do know is I said, listen, if you want more proof...
That the police attacked unarmed people.
Contact attorney Joseph McBride.
By the way, I'm going to have McBride on the podcast tomorrow.
I said he has all kinds of court filings pointing out that his client, other clients, multiple eyewitnesses saw the police attack unarmed protesters.
And so there's plenty of corroboration for what I said.
You can disagree with what I said, but that's not the same thing as claiming that it's false.
So, to his credit, McCarthy contacts Joseph McBride.
Joseph McBride sends him a lengthy email documenting this, pointing out that his own client, a woman named Victoria White, endured, quote, an absolutely brutal beating at the hands of the D.C. police.
So you'd think between Roseanne Boylan and Victoria White, my case has actually clinched.
But he goes on to point out another defendant, Michael Joseph Foy, and then McBride makes kind of a subtle point.
He says, listen, all these men who are accused of even fighting back in the tunnel, of violence in the tunnel, he goes, these are pro-police guys.
These are pro-military guys.
A bunch of them are veterans.
Why are they going to attack the police?
There's only one conceivable reason, and that is the police are attacking unarmed protesters, and these guys rush to the defense of those unarmed people being attacked.
So all of this is pointed out to PolitiFact.
But what does PolitiFact do?
If you actually read the PolitiFact fact-check, they ignore all of this.
They set up exactly what I said they would do.
They set up a straw man.
And the straw man is they basically pretend, like I'm saying, no one was armed.
And so they then begin to set about to fact check, not what I said, but their own caricature, their own replacement of what I said.
So they set up the straw man.
They then knock down the straw man by saying, well, there's clear evidence that some people in the tunnel were armed.
So ignoring what I said and then proclaiming it on this, you know, idiotic so-called truth-o-meter, you know, false.
False. So this is just laughable nonsense.
Now, obviously, the real goal of PolitiFact here is to try to get me kicked off social media.
But of course, I'm way too smart for them because the moment I realized that they were fact-checking me on this, I pulled the clip down off of Facebook.
I pulled the clip down off of YouTube.
So guess what? They can't ban me because there's no clip.
So PolitiFact's so-called fact-check ends up going off not with a bang but with a whimper.
Poof! Because there's nothing to ban me over.
But these people are frauds.
Their fact-checks are frauds.
Bill McCarthy is a fraud.
And I think I've given enough facts...
Here to make my point that we're dealing here not with politifact, but politifiction.
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Make sure to use promo code DINESHDINESH. There are some very interesting things going on in the Democratic Party.
You would think that if the Democrats are beginning to think that their policies are not that popular, they would work on selling those policies.
They would work on pulling back the policies that the American people flatly reject.
But no, they have no intention of doing any of that.
Their solution is really simple.
Let's change who gets to vote.
Let's try to figure out how we can manipulate the voting process so that we can win, we the Democrats can win, despite our unpopular policies.
This way we can forge ahead with the policies and we can still pull off election victories.
Now, a clear sign of this is New York, where you would think the Democrats kind of have a lock.
The Democrats are going to win anyway.
But even in New York, they're very insecure about their prospects.
And so what have they done? They've actually passed a law allowing non-citizens and, quote, dreamers to vote.
Now, this is a rule.
This is a permission that was passed by the New York City Council.
It's apparently been approved by the new mayor, Eric Adams, and it will go into effect if court challenges don't succeed.
But let's look at what they're trying to do.
Now, they know, New York knows, they cannot allow illegals to to vote in presidential elections.
In fact, they can't even allow illegals to vote in state elections.
So what they're saying is, we want to allow illegals to vote in municipal elections.
And so this would be elections for local offices, local referendums, that kind of thing.
So it's called municipal voting rights.
And New York City becomes the first major U.S. city to do this, to grant widespread municipal voting rights to non-citizens.
Now, there are a few other places in the country that do allow non-citizens to vote locally.
There are some towns in Maryland.
There are two towns in Vermont, apparently, that do this.
But New York is trying to lead the way here for democratic cities.
And there are a lot of illegals in New York.
Apparently... One in nine, so close to New York has 7 million voting age inhabitants, and one in nine is obviously a substantial figure, a little more than 10%.
And this would take effect, again, if it's not struck down by the court in 2023.
Now, here's an interesting quote by a New York City council member, Yadanas Rodriguez, quote, We build a stronger democracy when we include the voices of immigrants.
Now, that's a lie right there because illegals are not immigrants.
We're talking about people who are lawbreakers.
We're talking about people who shouldn't be in the country.
Or they should be in the country, but they can't vote.
So, for example, there is a category in the immigration laws which are the category of legal aliens.
These are so-called green card holders, but they're not U.S. citizens.
So they have a lot of the rights of being a citizen.
They are entitled to work in the country, but they are not entitled to vote.
But the reason New York wants to expand the franchise here is for the same reason that Democrats are so pro-illegal across the board.
They're hoping ultimately to make up for legal voters whose support they're losing with illegals.
So Democrats are hoping to create a majority Let's call it legal plus illegal votes added together are going to presumably secure the Democrats, keep them in office, even though their policies may be unpopular with U.S. citizens.
And there's a kind of broader agenda here.
Joe Biden is going to Georgia—I'll cover this on the podcast tomorrow—to make his big pitch for changing voting laws, for essentially federalizing elections.
And what this would do is move the organization of the election process away from the states, the kind of messy state processes that occur in a decentralized way.
By the way, that's how the Constitution specifies it should be.
But they're trying, through a federal law, to essentially move the power— To a centralized D.C. bureaucracy to give the Democrats a kind of lasting advantage in elections going forward.
So New York, it seems to me, is kind of going out front here, putting out a trial balloon.
They're hoping it can survive court scrutiny so other Democratic states will do the same.
And this is part of a larger campaign here to secure power for the Democrats by essentially changing the electorate.
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Liz Cheney seems very content to play the role of the Democrats' front man, or should I say front woman, in attacking Trump over January 6th.
So very often these days when you turn on the media, social media, you don't see Pelosi.
Pelosi has made some statements.
In fact, she said the Republicans are Everything they do every day is a kind of continuation of January 6th.
What's funny about Pelosi, I couldn't even really hear her because if you look at her, her eyebrows are sort of like nine inches above her eyes and they're just like this and motionless.
She looks good for us.
Debbie goes, she looks good for a hundred years old, which I guess is true.
Anyway, Liz Cheney is the one who's sort of carrying the spear, carrying the water for the left.
I guess she figures her career is finished in Wyoming, so why not angle for some different kind of job?
University president, foundation president, CNN anchor, who knows?
So here's Liz Cheney.
I'm now going to quote her. Imagine if President Eisenhower had summoned a mob to Washington and sent them to march on the Supreme Court during arguments in Brown v.
Board of Education. Then, imagine as the mob invaded the Supreme Court, President Eisenhower watched and did nothing.
It's unthinkable.
It's unthinkable.
So I want to, this analogy on the surface appears kind of convincing.
Yeah, wow, that would be very disturbing.
But let me note a few things at the outset.
First of all, let me note that there's a big shift here in the kind of culpability that Liz Cheney is trying to assign to Trump.
For a while there, in fact for months, Trump instigated the insurrection.
Trump made it happen.
Trump was behind it.
Now they've moved from Trump did it, Trump started it, to, in effect, Trump didn't do anything in reaction to it.
That's a whole different kind of allegation, right?
Because it's one thing to say, you know, the bank manager robbed the bank.
The bank manager was the guy behind it.
He's the one who set off the burglars.
And it's a whole other thing to say, when the bank was being robbed, the bank manager stood by and did nothing.
Well, even if true, that's a whole different allegation.
You're essentially now alleging a certain kind of lassitude or passivity or negligence.
It's a whole different thing from instigating the crime or crimes in the first place.
Let's probe the Liz Cheney analogy.
First of all, she says that Trump summoned a mob, presumably to attack the Capitol.
But that's not true. Trump organized a rally, a rally that was held in a legal spot, on the green, on the mall.
He spoke at the rally.
There's nothing illegal about that.
So that's what Trump summoned.
Number two.
There's a whole difference between walking into the Capitol, the so-called People's House, and, quote, invading the Supreme Court.
Why? Because the Supreme Court is an institution deliberately insulated from the will of the people.
The court is supposed to be independent of popular opinion, and it's completely different from elected officials who are supposed to be chosen by the people, reflective of popular opinion, and answerable to the public.
So, in other words, marching on Congress is a whole different thing than, quote, taking over the Supreme Court.
And number three, unarmed citizens walking in the Capitol with cops standing around, in some cases actually chatting with them and taking photos of them, hardly constitutes a, quote, invasion.
This is just a misuse or an abuse.
So, this Liz Cheney analogy is flawed from beginning to end, but it's precisely the kind of claptrap that this horrible woman, who apparently now considers knifing her fellow Republicans, has now become an art form for her, but even then she's doing it ineffectively, clumsily, and, as I tried to just point out, illogically.
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Feel the difference. Hey guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Carrie Lake.
Carrie is the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of Arizona.
She had a long and successful career in journalism, in fact, in TV media.
I've actually been trying to get her on the podcast for a little while, so Carrie, I'm delighted it's finally worked out.
Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Let me begin by asking you to say a little bit about your career in television and also how Why you made the pivot from journalism to running for governor.
Wow. I mean, I'm so excited to be on your show, first of all, Dinesh.
So let me get that out of the way.
I worked for 27 years covering Arizona as a journalist, a television journalist and a news anchor.
22 at the local Fox station.
Number one for 22 years in people's homes for almost three decades here in Arizona.
And I absolutely love and adore this state.
But it really, you know, obviously journalism has changed.
It's no longer journalism.
It's activism. It's liberal leftist activism.
People in the newsroom and in newsrooms around this state and around this country are Democrats and activists for the Democrat agenda.
And, you know, I always felt I could work with people, even we had different ideologies, as long as what I was doing was on the straight and narrow.
But during COVID, I really felt that it became impossible to give truthful information because the corporate media had zero interest in helping people navigate the pandemic, navigate treatment that would help them. It was really only an interest of keeping people isolated in their homes with the virus, afraid, and at each other's throats. And when I realized that there was no interest in putting out news and information of full truth and fact on treatments that were
working, etc., I realized that it was not just unethical to stay in that job, it was immoral.
And so I walked away and did not plan, Dinesh, to get into the dirty, grimy world of politics, by the way. Well, let me ask you, why do you think that this kind of dramatic change occurred within I mean, the media, I suppose, if you were to take a poll even 30 years ago, the majority of reporters were Democrats.
They were on the left.
But there was at least, it seemed, an attempt to To keep the lid on, to maintain at least the appearance of balance, to have different points of view.
But now it appears that they have gone full-blown ideological, and they not only actively suppress dissenting voices, but they lobby for digital censorship that will throw people off their platforms.
What I want to ask is, how do these journalists move from being maybe biased one way to being fanatics?
Well, Donald Trump got in their heads and they just couldn't handle it.
I mean, Donald Trump really was the tipping point, I think, where you started to see people who could hold it together and people who just were losing their minds over the guy.
But I also think of some of the more reasonable people, Dinesh, got out of it because they saw that it was pushing so far to the left.
If you were middle of the road or conservative, you just said, you know, I'm going to find a different line of work.
I don't want to work in a newsroom where I don't have a voice or the stories that I pitch that are Middle of the road or conservative leaning are just shot down every single day.
So a lot of people got out.
And then they were replaced with younger people coming fresh out of journalism school where they're indoctrinating these kids.
And I think that had a lot to do with it.
Kerry, there's a clip on social media I was mentioning to you right before we turned on that there was a reporter kind of tormenting you, answer a question, answer a question, and you turned very graciously and said, listen, I'd be happy to talk to you, but your network, your newspaper, never provides even a modicum of balance.
You're full-blown ideological on the other side, so we're not getting news or reporting out of you.
Now, was it your background in journalism that gave...
Because very few Republicans do this kind of thing.
They just kind of run away or they won't be interviewed.
But they rarely call the reporter straight to her face, in this case, and say, listen, why don't you cover our side fairly?
Why don't you treat America like there are two legitimate political parties which have different takes on what to do about problems and reflect both so your audience and your readers can decide?
You know, I take on the media all the time.
And if you go to my Rumble page, Kari Lake, K-A-R-I-L-A-K-E, you'll see other examples of what you just described.
They immediately, when they're interviewing a Republican or a conservative, they immediately take a stance that we have to have A slanted piece.
We have to go after them rather than just say, hey, look.
And I even said this to some of the reporters covering me.
This is a good story.
I'm somebody who left the news, walked away from a comfortable lifestyle, and threw my hat in the ring to run for governor.
And I'm leading in the polls.
I'm doing this because I love the state.
That's a great story.
But no, they have to cover it with an angle where they're trying to tear me apart, turn me into something I'm not.
They're calling us racist, Nazis, all that jazz.
And it's unfair.
And they always do this with conservatives, but they don't ever do it with people on the left.
And I called that reporter out, by the way, the one you're referring to.
But a week later, I thought, you know what?
I'll give her a statement.
She wanted an interview.
And I said, you know, I'll give her a chance.
and it was a hit piece they were doing on me.
I gave her a short statement.
And because my statement basically made her whole hit piece look ridiculous, it turned it on its head, she only ran a half of a sentence of my statement because she didn't want me to shatter her narrative.
So I don't know.
I think it's a lost cause, Dinesh.
I think we're moving into a place where the Corporate media as it stands is gone, finished, done.
And they're losing viewers and readership is going down really rapidly.
And we're seeing actually people tuning into podcasts and you and many others out there to get their information and it's more reliable.
So what you're saying is that the answer is, in a sense, to diminish the credibility of this sort of fanatical media and replace it with a kind of new ecosystem that people can genuinely trust, right?
In other words, and I think that's actually very good because a lot of times conservatives will do critiques of the media, but it's one thing to critique an institution and yet be reliant on it.
We critique digital media, but we're largely reliant on it.
It's not until you can develop your own alternatives that you gain true independence, don't you?
Yeah. Well, look at Joe Rogan.
Here he is a podcast. He has so much viewership, I guess, listenership, I'm not sure how you word it, way, way higher than even someone like a Tucker Carlson at Fox News, who is incredibly popular.
So we are finding people we trust and we're going to them for our information.
And it's not the corporate media.
The corporate media, the station I worked at, the market I worked in, Phoenix, is a massive market that covers pretty much 85% of Arizona.
I think we've had the reach of six and a half million people, something like that.
And I got the ratings a few months ago.
A friend slipped me the overnight ratings.
And the number one 5 p.m.
newscast was only reaching 6,000 people.
Out of six and a half million.
So people aren't watching.
They're walking away from the corrupt media.
And now you know why.
You know how bad it is when the corrupt media is begging these liberal politicians to help Fund them now because they're not making enough money.
They want us taxpayers to subsidize them because they have driven the press into the ground and they want us to now come in and save them.
And that's where I draw the line.
We'll never, ever wonder if I can help it, be giving taxpayer money to the corporate corrupt media.
Kerry, let's take a pause. When we come back, I want to talk about some very interesting ideas that you have for how to fix the problem at the Arizona border.
Inflation is at 40-year highs.
It doesn't look like it's going anywhere.
Now, why is that? Well, here's the government's dirty little secret.
They want inflation.
Think about this. Right now, inflation rates are higher than the interest on Treasury bonds.
And so, with every day that passes, the government owes less on its mountain of debt.
Imagine if your mortgage had a negative interest rate, would you be in a hurry to pay it off?
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I'm back with Carrie Lake, who's running for governor of Arizona.
She has the endorsement of President Trump.
We've been talking about media, but Carrie, I want to pivot to a position paper that you've just released on the border.
Now, I should say, you know, I'm kind of reading through it and I see that you refer to Nogales.
I don't know if you know, but when I came to America at the age of 17 as an exchange student, I lived in Arizona in the small town of Patagonia on the way between Tucson and Nogales.
So I know that area.
And at that time, it was a kind of quiet and quite safe area.
But I understand now, and I see also from your paper, very dangerous fentanyl seizures that are occurring across the border.
So talk a little bit about How, as governor of Arizona, you would take this problem that the Biden administration has completely ignored and do something about it at the state level?
What would you do? Well, Patagonia, first of all, is a beautiful, one of the most beautiful parts of our state.
I love that area. Joe Biden took a policy that President Trump had in that was working beautifully.
President Trump's border policy was the best I'd seen in 27 years covering this state as a journalist.
Joe Biden comes in on day one, tears that away.
And now we have narco-terrorists controlling our southern border and parts of Arizona as well.
So I worked with some experts and we came up with an amazing policy.
It's called Defend Arizona.
And most politicians kind of give you just a little bit just to appease people.
This goes all the way.
This will solve our problem on the border, but we're going to have to take on the feds.
The feds are, the federal government is required in the U.S. Constitution, Article 4, Section 4, To protect us.
It's the guarantee clause. And they are failing to do that, Dinesh.
And so we have a remedy in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 10.
And we have a remedy to go in and take back our border and defend our state.
And that's what we're going to do. And we're going to start by declaring, basically issuing a declaration of invasion, which we have.
An invasion at the border.
More than 2 million people apprehended at our border.
And that doesn't count the people that haven't been apprehended and the ones that got away.
There's probably more than a million that got away.
So we have a serious issue with fentanyl pouring in.
We just had 1.2 million fentanyl pills confiscated in an apartment in Scottsdale.
They're coming into our neighborhoods, and this is a problem.
We are going to form a state pact with other states that are like-minded, interstate pact, and we are going to work and share resources to protect our border.
And the government's going to fight back, but we have the right to do this.
We are free. We are not serfs.
We are actually sovereign and not serfs.
And we're going to do this. And we're actually going to empower our Arizona National Guard to arrest people coming across the border for trespassing, process them, and we will send them back across the border.
They're not going to stay here.
Not under my watch as governor.
And we have a governor right now who sat back and waiting for Joe Biden to do something.
And now he's starting to talk like he wants to do something, thank God.
But we've got to get very active.
And that's where my policy stands.
It's 11 pages. The National Border Patrol Council president has endorsed it.
One of the best he's ever seen.
President Trump was impressed with it.
So we've got to get tough.
And we're going to have a fight with the feds.
And I think you know this, Dinesh, they left all hundreds of millions of dollars of materials to build President Trump's wall, just laying there in the desert, rusting.
We are going to finish President Trump's wall and we're going to use that material.
And all we need to do is have the Arizona legislature redefine what abandoned federal property means.
And I don't know how you want to cut it and slice it, but if you've left hundreds of millions of dollars of materials laying in the desert and you've canceled all the federal contracts, that seems like abandoned federal property.
And so when we have our legislature redefine what that means, we will then take that abandoned federal property and use it to finish President Trump's wall.
I mean, what I like about your statement is it's not just strong, but it has a lot of specificity to it.
So it talks about the fact that each state doesn't have to go it alone.
There's no reason Arizona can't work with Texas.
And so the states together will be much stronger in resisting the federal government.
You actually talk not just about sending people back.
But invalidating federal restrictions and regulations on border enforcement by groups like the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management, I mean, I suppose these people are acting in concert with the Biden administration, not so much to enforce the law as to not enforce the law or make the law difficult to enforce.
And you're saying, listen, if the federal government isn't doing its job, the states can just actively step in and do these things.
We need to just go right back to the Constitution.
The Constitution doesn't call for the EPA and all these layers of bureaucracy to control us as states.
As I said, we are sovereign.
We're not serfs. And the one thing that the government is supposed to be doing, that the federal government, per the Constitution and the Guarantee Clause, is protecting us from invasion.
They're not doing it. And that's why we then refer to the Constitution for our remedy.
Federal statutes do not supersede the U.S. Constitution.
And I think we have all the answers right there in that beautiful document that our founding fathers put together for us.
And that's where we really went.
And when I put this together, we really went to the Constitution and said, how can we constitutionally make this happen?
And of course, there's going to be a battle, but we're willing to take that battle because this is costing us as a state more than $2.8 billion to deal with this lawlessness here in Arizona that Joe Biden has caused.
The whole world knows our borders open and they're sending people.
We have, I think, over 187 countries around the globe.
And we're seeing people coming from 140 of those countries across our border.
The world says, wow, you want to become a U.S. citizen or sneak into the U.S.? You can do it under Joe Biden.
And that's what's happening, including some really bad actors, terrorists, drug dealers, Smugglers, human smugglers, child traffickers.
We don't want any of it in Arizona, and we're done with it.
Kerry, what I like is, you know, you speak in a kind of a calm and even tone, but there's a lot of strength behind what you're saying, and I think that this represents, I think this is why Trump endorsed you.
You reflect the new Republican Party that is not, like, going to take it anymore, but is going to do something about it.
Let's close by telling people where they can find out more about you and about your campaign.
Where should they go? I appreciate that, what you said.
That's really nice. I've covered this state for a long time.
I'm doing this. I'm putting myself through this and my family through this because I love Arizona.
And Dinesh, I don't want to see us being kind of taken over by the blue states surrounding us, California, Colorado.
They've gone full on socialist and we got to save Arizona.
And even if you don't live in Arizona, you can help us.
Because we got to keep our state red or we will lose, I think the whole country goes.
So you can go to karilake.com, K-A-R-I-L-A-K-E.com and you can make a donation.
You can get more information on where I stand on the issues.
And of course, we have a big rally coming up this weekend He's going to be in Florence, Arizona, Saturday.
So if you're watching this from Arizona, make a road trip down to Florence.
We want this to be his biggest rally yet and show the world and this country that we stand behind President Trump.
We had a really shoddy election here and we stand behind President Trump, what he stands for, and he is somebody who motivates us to get involved and do better for our state and our communities.
Awesome stuff. Thank you, Carrie Lake, for joining me on the podcast.
Thank you, Dinesh. I appreciate it.
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Debbie also swears by this.
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She says, well, it's making me really regular.
Hmm. Well, our technical director, Brian, is an outside confirmation of what I'm talking about.
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Brian, we introduced you to Balance of Nature.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751. That's 800-246-8751. Or just go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'd like to talk about United Airlines and a new policy that the airline is instituting of training as pilots more women and more persons of color.
Now, I guess in these depressing days of today, you should be glad that they aren't adding all kinds of other groups.
We're going to try to make sure that there are more trans pilots and so on.
They seem to be limiting it to women and persons of color.
Let me say a few things about United.
Debbie and I fly on United all the time.
I used to be a Delta medallion member, and that was when I lived in California.
And I mainly took Delta flights.
But since I moved to Texas, I'm now a United 1K member because I fly a lot.
And it's really cool. Very often, I'll say often, I'm on the airline with Debbie.
One of the pilots will come up to me or stewardesses or stewards will come up to me and they'll be like, wow, we really like what you have to say.
And they usually say this in kind of a Soto Voce, kind of a low voice.
Why? Because they know that United is kind of woke as an airline, but there is a strong movement of conservatives in United, and apparently there's even a kind of patriotic group that has been formed inside of United, and it's kind of funny, they have little signals that they can make to each other, so they know that they're all members of the group.
I guess sort of like gay signaling in the old days.
In any event, Debbie's like, where did that analogy come from?
But yeah, in the old days, when there was a kind of atmosphere of intolerance, gays had their own sort of signals, which they were able to do.
And apparently in these days, it's conservatives at United who have to do this kind of, you know, signaling.
Maybe it's the movement of one eyebrow up and down.
I don't know if I can do it myself.
I'm attempting it. I'm actually failing.
Let me try the one eyebrow.
I can't do the one eyebrow.
Both my eyebrows move in unison.
They give me a note. Yeah, they give me a note.
They're very nice about it.
It's really great. But in any case, I don't really know how to think about this because, look, United is apparently going to be training 5,000 pilots.
And they want to make sure, this is where the affirmative action element comes in, that half of them, 2,500, are women or persons of color.
Now, affirmative action, which was, by the way, intended originally to kind of expand the franchise of applicants to colleges, has now become clearly a sort of preference program.
Unquestionably, colleges give preferences to blacks and Hispanics who apply over whites and Asian students who are turned away with much better, not just academic test scores or standardized test scores, but extracurriculars, the whole merit package.
So what does it mean when you have an airline?
And we're not just talking about stewards.
I guess it doesn't really matter if you're a steward.
But if you're a pilot, This is, you have the lives of the entire, not just the crew, but all the people on the plane in your hands.
This is a, you would think you would want a strict meritocracy.
Now, so I pointed out, I did a post on social media where I go, you know, this is actually giving me a little bit of the heebie-jeebies.
Who wants to fly on an airline whose unofficial motto is, we put diversity first?
Now, of course, a few guys on social media push back, you know, from the left, and they go, Dinesh, you're exaggerating.
One guy goes, you know, it's not like they're making all their pilots women and persons of color.
He goes, quote, only 50%, only 50% of the new United pilots are going to be in the sort of affirmative action category.
I'm thinking, well, only 50% is a huge number.
I mean, think about this. Imagine if you're going into a hospital for important surgery, have your appendix taken out, or to have some sort of heart transplant or liver transplant, and you're told that you're going to be assigned a doctor at random, but only 50% of the doctors who are the surgeons have been chosen by the hospital's magnificent Affirmative action program that, by and large, gives special consideration to women and persons of color.
I mean, I would turn around and march right out of that hospital.
So, look, I'm not quitting United.
I'm not against the idea, obviously, of having a diverse pilot force.
It's not that I'm saying women can't fly an airplane.
No. But what I am saying is that when airlines...
That should have a rigid set of standards.
Basically say standards are going to kind of go out the window.
Why? Because we're introducing this new criteria in race and gender.
We're going to be hiring pilots on that basis to fit our quota.
This is a quota. I mean, when you say I want 50% of all my...
Pilots to be in this special category.
That's the quota. So we have a quota system for pilots at United.
I hope other airlines don't follow suit.
And let's hope that United, which has had an excellent safety record, can keep it up even in the face of piloting affirmative action.
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I want to begin today a series of short segments.
Well, Debbie goes, not that short.
But short in the sense that I'm going to stretch it out over probably a week or so, maybe even longer.
But I want to focus on kind of an introduction to Russian, yes Russian, literature.
Why? Because Russian literature is really among, if not, the greatest literature in the world.
And it's great for complex reasons, but if I had to sum it up, I would say that Russian literature has enormous psychological depth.
It probes the interior, not just of the human heart and the human mind, but also of the human soul.
And it's that depth, the way that the Russian writers can kind of burrow to the bottom, that gives their literature an enduring interest, and an interest to believers and sort of unbelievers, religious believers and unbelievers alike.
Now, I usually take on these kinds of topics as part of an expedition, so I've got a decent exposure to Russian literature, but not a comprehensive one.
And so what I do, and this is kind of what I did over the break, people ask how I spend my time.
Well, one way I spend my time is I have a little more free time not just to focus on my work, and by work I mean preparation for the podcast and then Also, the movie that we're working on for this year, it's huge.
I'm going to say a lot more about it as we lead up to it, but I'm also keeping a lot of it under wraps because it's so powerful and so, well, I have to say, explosive.
And that's going to come out later in the spring.
So I've got book project, movie project, I've got podcast, I've got...
So normally I have limited time to be able to do forays into sort of general landscapes of ideas, whether philosophical or literary.
But over the Christmas holiday I listened to a series of terrific lectures on Russian literature.
Some of it covering figures that I was more familiar with, like Dostoyevsky, one of my favorites, and Tolstoy, but also other figures in Russian literature.
What I want to introduce you to is what may be called the golden and silver eras of Russian literature.
Russian literature kind of came into its own in the 19th century.
Prior to that, there are some notable works, but there's nothing that we would consider of sort of world class.
But suddenly in the 19th century, and this is similar to Germany in the 19th century in the areas, for example, of philosophy, Or ancient Greece in the 5th century BC in a number of areas, including plays and philosophy.
Sort of out of nowhere comes a series of great figures, one kind of greater than the other, and they provide a kind of constellation of genius that is very hard to explain.
Why then?
Why there? So, let me talk a little bit about some of these key figures in Russian literature.
The first one is Pushkin.
Pushkin, the author of a number of great poems, but also Longer works.
I'll talk probably about one of them.
It's called Eugene Onegin, or in Russian, you know, Evgeny Onegin.
This is Pushkin.
And from Pushkin, we move to the somewhat grotesque work But also very interesting and over-the-top, very Russian, the Russian writer Gogol.
Gogol is most noted for his short stories.
I'm probably going to focus on one somewhat amusingly called The Nose.
Then we move to Dostoevsky, known for a number of works, notes from The Underground, The Possessed, a work called The Idiot.
We'll come to what that means, The Idiot.
But his two most famous works, Crime and Punishment, one of my kind of favorite novels of all time, and then a very deep spiritual and psychological novel called The Brothers Karmas Of.
Some people think that's Dostoevsky's Kind of magnum opus is a masterwork.
I would put Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov in kind of the same category.
Then we move to Leo Tolstoy, again the author of two unquestioned masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenna, but Tolstoy was also a tremendous short story writer, wrote a number of other works, in some ways the grand old man of Russian literature, and he lived all the way into the early part of the 20th century, so he spans a giant space of Russian literature.
There was also another figure in the Russian Golden Age who today we would rank as one notch below Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but at the time was considered their equal, if not their superior.
In fact, many contemporary writers would put this man first and then Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky kind of side by side and kind of shared second place.
And I'm speaking here of a man named Turgenev.
The writer Turgenev, best known for a work that I want to discuss, at least briefly, it's called Fathers and Sons.
And Turgenev was, I think, what at the time made him seem superior to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is he's a man of very sort of moderate or balanced sensibility.
You would never call Tolstoy or Dostoevsky balanced.
They have, you may say, the fanatical temperament.
They dive into things differently.
They are strongly attached to what they believe.
They generally believe people who are on the other side are completely wrong and should be sort of put away or ignored.
But here you have Turgenev, by the way, grew up in a rich family.
His family had a whole bunch of serfs, which are virtual slaves, working for the family.
And Turgenev had this remarkable ability to sort of experience things from the point of view of the serf, depict, if you will, how the serf sees things.
And so here you have an overlord who somehow has sufficient empathy to be able to depict and portray the serf's point of view.
I'll say more about Turgenev later.
And we move then from the golden era of Russian literature into what can be called the silver era.
The silver era is kind of the era that comes right after the late 19th century and the early 20th century.
So the greatness of Russian literature spans from about the 1830s and 40s.
Here we're talking about Pushkin.
On through the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, but then on to the 1890s and the 1910s.
So now we're talking about a new group of figures with a completely new style.
You'd never think that they were really the offspring or the direct offspring of the golden era.
I'm talking about Chekhov.
Who was both a playwright and a short story writer.
Chekhov's work, The Seagull, very important not only in literature but also in drama, very important in the modern stage.
Chekhov also wrote unforgettable short stories but very different types of stories than you'd get from say Tolstoy.
Then we move into the sort of Soviet era, and here things become really interesting because how do you survive as a writer?
How do you even write in an era that is trying to not only control writers, but in some cases harass them, lock them up, and execute them?
And make writers tow the party line.
What's remarkable is that some of the greatest Soviet writers are either writing ironically against the party line, or they were originally enthusiastic about the party line, but later became disillusioned.
And in one notable case, the case of a guy named Sholokov, you have a guy who towed the party line, who actually was a devoted communist, and yet managed somehow to produce one great work We'll talk about that also.
So in the silver era of Russian literature, it begins with Chekhov.
It continues with Maxim Gorky.
It continues with Boris Pasternak, who wrote Dr.
Zhivago. The poet Anna Akhmatova, I think, comes from the earlier era, but she's sometimes lumped in with this gang.
And I think the greatest Russian writer, perhaps, of the 20th century, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I could do probably a whole series.
I've been a huge fan of Solzhenitsyn, could do probably a whole series on him.
I'll close with a kind of funny anecdote from the Russian golden era about the relationship between Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy.
Apparently, Turgenev was on good terms with Dostoyevsky until he lent him money, and then Dostoyevsky began to hate him.
This seems kind of crazy, but it's really very Russian.
Dostoyevsky thought Even though Dostoevsky was in desperate straits and needed the money, he thought the fact that Turgenev, who was a rich man, was helping him out, was an attempt by Turgenev to establish Turgenev's superiority over Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky never wanting to repay kindness with kindness in this case.
He creates a character like Turgenev, a kind of opportunistic novelist who has relatively limited talent, but goes around helping people financially, basically to get a higher literary standing for himself.
So poor Turgenev was not well treated, even though he tried to help.
And then Turgenev got into a fight with Tolstoy, and Tolstoy began to put out the word.
In fact, Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel.
Turgenev was wise enough to refuse and skip town, but then Tolstoy began to put out the word that Turgenev was a coward.
Finally, Tolstoy, years later, realized that he had acted badly, called upon Turgenev to reconcile their differences, which Turgenev, again, very charitably and very happily did.
But the moment they reconciled their differences, Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a game of checkers.
Tolstoy lost and apparently cut off dealings with Turgenev after that because he couldn't stand the I mean, this seems insane.
You have people behaving like five-year-olds, at least Tolstoy in this case.
So you have the paradox, the very Russian paradox, of a man of unquestioned genius and greatness with deep insight into the human soul who can't forgive a man for beating him at a game of checkers.
This is the fascinating landscape of Russian literature.
Tomorrow I'm going to introduce the subject.
I'm not even going to get into any of these writers yet.
I'm going to introduce the subject by just talking about the three main rich currents of historical and moral themes that provide the varied and complex and highly interesting foundation for the golden and silver eras of Russian literature.
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