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Jan. 21, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:05
MISREADING CHINA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep254
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As the United States gears up for a long struggle with China, it's important to understand China, to see China not just through Western eyes, but to the best degree possible through Chinese eyes.
I'm going to take a start at trying to do that today.
Lawlessness has become so normalized in the Biden administration that DHS Secretary Mayorkas freely admits to it.
I'll talk about that. I want to explore the larger significance of this NPR made-up story about the Supreme Court and masking up.
James O'Keefe of Project Veritas is joining me.
We're going to talk about his new memoir and the idea of the muckraker.
And finally, I'm going to introduce the Russian writer Gogol, who came after Pushkin, but before Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and his macabre humor that looks at the nefariousness of the devils behind our human faces.
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 United States is gearing up for a long struggle with China and Interestingly, this may end up being a struggle that is more important than the struggle with the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union was always an economic basket case.
And its ability, even though it could have good scientists, it could build dangerous weapons, it had to allocate a giant portion of its economy to that.
And the economy itself was constantly crumbling.
They kept blaming it on the weather and on factors beyond their control, but it was really the communist system of government.
Now, in China, we do have a communist system, but we have a communist system weirdly wedded to a market economy.
And China has become a gigantic economy.
As of last year, they have a $14 trillion economy.
That's smaller than the US economy, but not by that much.
It's the second largest economy in the world.
And our economy has become, I think in some troubling ways, dependent upon their economy.
They have more leverage over us than we have over them.
They've also become a technological marvel, a global leader in artificial intelligence, in biotech, and in space exploration.
So one has to say that their economy works.
But the bigger question is, does their society work?
Or is it somehow rent with internal contradictions?
Is it bound to collapse?
Is it going to go the way of the Soviet Union?
And there is a school, well, really two schools of thought in the West, both of which I think are wrong.
The first one is that the Chinese economy is destined to implode.
That you cannot wed market systems to a totalitarian government.
That's a recipe for automatic failure.
The Chinese started this in the 1970s.
Here we are almost 50 years later.
It hasn't failed. I don't think it's going to fail.
And so this automatic collapse theory, although comforting to China's competitors and adversaries, is, I think, pie in the sky.
The other view of the Chinese economy is that the Chinese will start becoming more like us.
And this is the theory I want to focus on a little bit more.
It's the idea that as China gets more prosperous, its citizens will automatically start demanding more political rights.
They won't be content merely with economic abundance.
They won't find it satisfactory.
Hey, I have a bigger apartment.
Hey, I have a nicer car.
Hey, my kids are not going to college.
They have a better future.
No, the Chinese are going to say, wait a minute, I want free speech.
I want the right to cast a vote.
I want to choose my own leaders.
And the big question, it has been an article of faith.
It's very tempting for us to believe that liberalism and democracy and modernity and scientific development and economic progress, these are all so tightly linked that they cannot be disentangled.
But the Chinese are challenging this idea, and they're suggesting, they're showing, that not only can it be challenged, but that these facile equations are not true.
Now, I want you to think about a Chinese person living in, let's say, the 1970s when I first came to the United States.
I had kind of a good image of China.
Why? Because India is really close to China.
India has a virtual common border with China.
And the Chinese people lived a lot like the Indians.
A typical Chinese person lived in a completely tiny hovel, a kind of shack.
They had no washing machines.
They had no modern contrivances.
They, in a sense, would have to wash their clothes in dirty water.
They ate rice with chopsticks.
And they had a paltry, miserable life.
So it was Hobbesian in every sense of the term.
And these Chinese might have fanatically cheered for Mao's revolution, the Cultural Revolution.
Maybe they got disgusted by it toward the end.
They were maybe sympathetic in the 80s to Tiananmen Square.
But that Chinese person of the 1970s is now older.
And what do they see? What they see is, written and enlarged, what I see in India in a much smaller way.
What I see in India every time I go back, every couple of years, is India's better.
The roads are cleaner, they're smoother, the airport is better, it's more modern, there are more skyscrapers, they're all new.
I see all that. The Chinese see all that times 10.
Why? Because the Chinese level of growth has been faster than the Indian, and it has created this gigantic, China has a huge population, gigantic middle class, upper middle class, and wealthy class.
You have all these Chinese billionaires.
You have lots of Chinese millionaires.
And you now have Chinese who are prospering in a way quite comparable to people in Singapore.
So the interesting thing here is that a lot of people, libertarians especially, expected that the Chinese were using in a bigger way the same model that brought Singapore and the so-called Asian tigers, the small countries of Asia, to economic success, countries like Taiwan.
But no, the Chinese, I think, have a different model.
It is a model of wedding close and powerful state control, state control over all aspects of your life with a kind of market liberalism.
In Chinese capitalism, the state, far from basically saying, you capitalists make us prosperous and we communists will run the country.
It's not like that. The state is like, we're going to be a huge investor.
And we're going to be a regulator.
We're going to own all the intellectual property.
The corporations are sort of doing our bidding.
But we, the state, maintain tight control even over them.
We maintain tight control over our millionaires and over our billionaires.
So this is, well, I suppose you could call it a communist model.
It's actually, in some ways more accurately, a fascist model.
Fascist, why? Because the essence of fascism is centralized control, but centralized control that weds the state to a private sector, in which the private sector operates semi-autonomously, but is nevertheless in the end at the behest and control of the state.
So what I'm getting at, and I'll talk more about this in future podcasts, is just that our ideas about China are Western ideas.
They are projected onto China.
They don't reflect the real China.
I don't think they reflect Chinese psychology.
And while they might reflect Western history, they don't necessarily reflect world history.
The Chinese are attempting modernization without Westernization.
And so far, they're getting away with it.
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I want to talk about immigration and the open border.
And sometimes when we confront immigration, we feel a sense of, well, almost hopelessness because what can we do?
We don't seem to be effective in being able to block what the Biden administration is doing, even though what they're doing is flagrantly lawless.
But I think a recent interview that I read with Secretary Mayorkas, this is the Secretary of DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, suggests that he is in many ways pretty frustrated because his hands are being, even if in small, nevertheless significant ways, they are being tied.
So it's, I think, important for us to register our victories, even if they are modest victories, even if they are victories that have to be ultimately solidified by us taking control of the House and the Senate and the presidency and then reversing all these atrocious policies.
So I want to talk about three small wins, and I also want to talk about a very telling admission by Mayorkas himself.
So here's the first win, and that is that the big uproar about all those Haitians who were descending on American shores, obviously these are not people at the southern border, they're showing up from Haiti.
And they're showing up because, yes, there's poverty in Haiti, but there's poverty in many parts of the world.
Our immigration policies are not based upon your poor.
Therefore, you have a right to come to America.
So here were the Haitians, and they were basically being seen en masse coming across the southern border.
Huge public relations scandal.
Horrific images for Americans.
Who are these people? And even though the Biden administration tried to turn the tables, look at these Texas Rangers rounding them up on horseback cowboy style things.
Nevertheless, the Biden people realized this is a very serious problem, and so they began to then deport the Haitians, expelling thousands of them and sending them back home where they, of course, belonged.
Victory number one.
Here's victory number two.
The Biden administration, as I mentioned on this podcast a couple of times, was getting ready, was on the verge of making gigantic financial settlements to families that said, oh, we were families who were separated at the border.
Even if the separations were brief, even if they were temporary, oh, they were so traumatic.
We're not used to this at all.
This is emotional hardship and pain.
We need to be paid $450,000 each.
Not even per family, per person.
And the Biden administration was like, oh yeah, this sounds reasonable.
Yeah, yeah, I think giving families, taking taxpayer money and giving Mexican families a million dollars here, a million dollars there, so they can basically go hit the Mexican casinos.
They thought this was kind of a fair settlement.
Well, once again, the public outrage over this made it impossible politically for them to go forward with this.
And so they have ended those court negotiations over these financial compensation.
Victory number two.
Victory number three is a court victory coming out of Texas.
And Texas, I have to say, has been the center of the resistance to Biden's immigration policies.
Just a flurry of lawsuits filed by Texas, really, by Attorney General Ken Paxton, who's been on the show.
And this has forced Biden to...
Reimpose, even though not fully, Trump's remain in Mexico policy.
It's even forced Biden to continue some border wall construction, which is to say to close some gaps in the wall, not to build new sections of the wall, which they flatly refused to do, but at least to patch up the wall in places where there were sort of gaping holes.
Now, let me turn to the Statement by Bayorkas.
We have fundamentally changed immigration enforcement in the interior, quote, Now, this, I think, is really significant.
You've got a top Biden official basically saying, it is our stated policy that we will not enforce the law.
If you've got a guy in the United States, illegal, you know he's illegal.
He admits he's illegal, but he doesn't have other violations.
He's not a gang member.
He doesn't have a criminal record.
He's just an illegal.
That, by itself, is not sufficient to initiate a Return or deportation proceedings.
So what we have here is a truly lawless administration in the clinical sense of the term.
There is a law. Our system says if you don't like a law, try to change it.
They can't change the law.
They're using the technique of, quote, enforcement to say we're going to enforce it here but not over there.
In effect, what they're saying is we're going to, at least in these important respects, ignore the law.
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I'd like to talk about the larger significance of this NPR story about the Supreme Court and masking.
I wasn't going to cover the story.
I thought it was kind of dumb.
But Debbie's like, no, people are talking about it.
You should cover it. And I want to do it in a way that draws out what's really going on here.
Because you see the essence of fake news.
And it started out with Nina Totenberg, the kind of longtime court reporter of NPR. Nina Totenberg reported that Justice Roberts, understanding that, quote, in some form asked the other justices to mask up.
And then, says Totenberg, they all did, except Gorsuch, who, as it happens, sits next to Sotomayor on the bench.
His continued refusal to do so has meant that Sotomayor has not attended the Justice Weekly Conference in person, joining by telephone.
Now, this article was just picked up because it suggested this kind of Wow, even at the Supreme Court, you've got all this insider kerfuffles going on over masking.
So, right away, CNBC was all over, MSNBC, CNN. And then, of course, all the pundits began to weigh in.
Here's Mehdi Hassan.
Why is it that the public figures on the right who claim to be pious Christians and believers in morality and decency turn out to be awful, awful people?
So... So you got the statement and then all the speculations on top of the statement, presuming, of course, the statement to be true.
And then Justice Roberts put out a statement basically saying, I never asked the other justices to be masked.
Boom. And after that, this is even more unprecedented.
There was a statement that came out from Sotomayor and Gorsuch.
Sotomayor says, I never asked that Gorsuch be masked.
I never made that requirement.
And Gorsuch said, I never heard anything of this sort from the Chief Justice.
There's never been any such rule.
The whole story was made up.
The whole story was lies.
Now, the killer.
Here's Nina Totenberg tweeting, after all this, after three statements, think of how unusual it is for three justices of the court to come out and directly dispute all of them, saying the same thing and saying Nina Totenberg's reporting is false.
You'd think she'd be, like, eating crow, right?
No. Quote, NPR stands by my reporting.
In other words, the three justices are liars.
Either that, or some analysts have tried to cover her by saying that in her original report, she said that Judge Roberts, quote, in some form, asked the justices to make up, as though in some form means he didn't really.
He just sort of implied it.
And therefore, there's nothing inconsistent with him denying it because she didn't say he explicitly said it.
So this is the kind of verbal pyrotechnics.
It's what any liar does if a kid is caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Well, my hand wasn't in the cookie jar.
It was only on the cookie jar.
It's not in the cookie jar.
It's just on the cookie jar.
True, there were cookies sticking out of the jar.
This is the kind of three-year-old BS that we're being subjected to.
Now, the remarkable thing about all this is, no Twitter warnings.
Nina Tottenberg isn't being banned, even though she's putting out clear misinformation.
Some odd misinformation of this sort, Twitter doesn't mind.
Social media doesn't mind.
They never censor it. They don't fact check it.
So, this stuff just goes on and on.
And here's an interesting comment by Sernovich at the end of all of it.
He goes, the question isn't whether the news is fake.
That's already been decided.
Clear example right here.
He goes, it's whether it was always this fake and we didn't know it then.
And that's an interesting question.
Was it the case that even in the older days, when there was a kind of simulacrum, a kind of outer patina of objectivity, Did you have the same group of fakers?
Maybe these guys aren't so unusual.
Maybe these guys are just more blatant, more open, and those guys had a little better sense of camouflage.
They were con men, just as these are con men.
The difference is that those con men were able to get away with it.
They were like, well, we're not really con men.
So the difference, in other words, is one of style, not really of substance.
I won't try to answer that question now.
I simply think that what's revealing about this NPR... A lie is their willingness to stand by the lie.
And so what you've got here is liars who think that telling the lie, you can hang on to it because, after all, the lie is congruent with the ideology, not the truth.
And so it's more important to hold on to the lie than to succumb, even if unwillingly, to the truth.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast James O'Keefe of Project Veritas.
He has a new book out, and I just finished reading it.
It is awesome. It's called American Muckraker.
James, welcome. Delighted to have you.
I thought it was very interesting that even though I think in American culture you're doing something that is genuinely novel, what you do in this book is you place yourself in a tradition, the tradition of the muckraker.
Now, some people may not know what a muckraker is.
Obviously, the image of a muckraker is somebody who kicks up mud and puts it into people's faces, and it seems like, why would any sane person want to do that?
So, Why don't we start by talking about who is a muckraker and what is the tradition surrounding that name?
Well, thank you, Dinesh, very much.
And I'm glad to be with you.
And we have so much to discuss in such a short period of time.
Muckraker, people may not know what that means.
It was a term coined by Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 or thereabouts to describe these people.
Most of them were actually progressives.
You know, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle.
Many of these were actually socialists.
But they wanted to produce exposés and journalism, written word accounts of what was going on, taking on these big Leviathan organizations, the big trusts from the early 20th century.
So I would define a muckraker in contemporary times as one who makes public what powerful people want kept secret for the wrong reasons.
And today's journalists, if you want to even call it that, whatever you want to call them in the media, work in a kind of harmony.
They work in concert.
With their sources in government.
They represent the people in government.
They act as ombudsmen for the people in power rather than challenging them and rather than being skeptical.
So there's very few actual journalism going on.
And this book, American Mockmaker, is really, it's kind of like a John Grisham novel meets Dostoevsky novel because it's simultaneously thrilling and terrifying and requires suffering and struggle.
This is a handbook, Dinesh, for how to do journalism in clown world.
Hey, James. In the early 20th century, and then through much of the 20th century, if you think of modern American conservatism, and we look back at the mock-rakers, we would say, hey, they were focusing on big business.
They didn't focus enough on big government.
Of course, there wasn't that much of big government in the early part of the 20th century, and conservatism has focused on targeting big government.
But would you say that we're in an era today where we again have this nasty combination of big business, and I'm thinking here of big tech companies working hand in hand with the government for nefarious ends?
Well, yes, and an example of that would be the letters that we exposed from the Judicial Watch just a couple days ago that showed Pfizer pharmaceuticals talking to the FBI about me.
Or, Within minutes, and I know that you've been through some version of this, Dinesh, and as all truth-tellers tend to be these days, within minutes of the FBI raid on my apartment for a source sending me a document, that's ironic because that's the paragon of investigative journalism.
Within minutes of the handcuffs being taken off my wrists, I got a text message from a national security reporter at the New York Times.
So this is a rhetorical question.
But it kind of answers the question that you're asking.
Why is the paper of record cooperating with, coordinating with, and acting in a symbiotic relationship with The FBI, shouldn't they be investigating these people?
So yes, whether it's pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer, who powerful people tend to be more honest and private, you want to question them.
And in journalism, there's always been this tension between what I call access and autonomy.
Do you want to bite the hand that feeds you?
Do you want to just... Take the information that you're given and relay it to the masses.
So you often have to dig deep.
A muckraker has to use disguise.
Upton Sinclair in 1906, he sort of used disguise when he went into the meatpacking organizations.
He pretended to have a lunch bucket like all the other workers took off his tie.
You have to do things to get the information, and oftentimes they accuse me of being deceptive, of lying.
Well, you have a choice to make.
You can use deceit with your subject to extract the truth for them to tell the truth to the masses, Dinesh.
And it's not an easy thing to do, but it's often up to us, the citizens, to do it, again, in a world where our media, our government, and our pharmaceutical companies are united.
But the truth is that the images and the videos that we release, we call it cinema verite, are much more powerful than the mendacious innuendo and linguistic contortions that our newspapers have to do in their written word, and we can talk about that a lot.
Video and images transfix, and oftentimes rock beats scissors, and you can expose the reality which will overpower the manipulation in the newspapers.
You say some very, I think, poignant things in your book.
You say that outsiders feel a combination of wonder and fascination with the muckraker.
You say that the muckraker, over time, becomes a little alienated even from his own side because he realizes that he has a different psychological makeup.
Now, I think this is an important point because a lot of conservatives wouldn't dream of doing the kind of, let's insinuate myself into a leftist organization.
Let me pretend to be one of them.
Let me secretly record them.
It doesn't seem to be our temperament to do that kind of underground type of investigation.
Talk about what it is...
Do you think that you were just born with this kind of personality that's like, hey, listen, you know what?
It reminds me almost of somebody in a James Bond movie where you're going into a dangerous territory.
By the way, if you get caught out, it's probably not going to be all that good for you.
You've had the FBI at your door.
What makes you that kind of a guy who doesn't flinch from doing this kind of stuff and isn't scared away from it?
Well, thank you, Dinesh. That's very kind.
But it's not like James Bond, I can assure you of that.
There's no the Omega watches and the fancy cars.
Although we have rented a Ferrari, I think, or a Mercedes undercover.
But it's actually counterintuitive.
And there's a whole chapter in this book called Character, which you are inferring.
And In that chapter, I talk about the characteristics of someone to do this.
I actually grew up quite an introverted kid.
I was a young man, and I went to college, and you were at the Dartmouth Review, I think, and you guys did this sort of gonzo, satirical, sort of muckraking journalism on campus.
I actually read a book about what you did, believe it or not, and it kind of partially inspired me to do something similar at Rutgers when I was 19.
Started in a newspaper there called the centurion and I went and tried to get lucky charms banned on the grounds They're racist against the Irish myself being an Irish American Of course, it was a form of satire and now satire is dead and irony is now dead But at the time some 15 years ago, I put them in a bind I put the bureaucrats in a bind to quote Tom Wolfe's radical chic and Mao Mao in the flack catchers They were either going to ban lucky charms on the grounds They're racist or they're going to violate their own campus
speech codes that you can't offend anybody And it was very difficult for me to do this, Dinesh.
I was uncomfortable.
My heart was beating at 160 beats per minute.
It did not come natural to me.
And I think the characteristics of someone who does go record these things, most of the people that we work with, these whistleblowers, describe it as following their conscience.
So you have a choice to make.
You can survive at any price, maintain your mortgage, maintain your pension, and just let bygones be bygones.
Or you can Follow your conscience into the gates of hell.
And increasingly, I find that many of these people that do this are not extroverted, sociopathic.
You almost have to be a masochist to do this sort of work.
You almost have to like pain.
But they're so passionate.
And I, speaking for myself, found that I wanted to get the story so badly.
I wanted to expose them for precisely who they were.
Therefore, no explanation was required.
I just have to record it, and it's so evident.
My passion for doing that and my colleagues' passion for getting that overrides any concern we have, for example, sometimes our safety or our reputation or the discomfort of doing it.
Awesome. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to look at a couple of the bombshell stories that you've broken and how you went about doing it.
We'll be right back. Okay, it's time to talk to you about the fruits and the veggies.
Well, I mean, I like fruits probably better than veggies.
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Guys, I'm back with James O'Keefe, author of the new book, American Muckraker.
We're talking about muckraking journalism, 21st century style.
James, let's start with something very interesting you say in the book.
You say that... The conservative movement has failed the demoralized.
And by the demoralized here, you mean the people who believe in justice but don't believe that the world is just.
These are people who believe that institutions have let them down and that the truth is being squashed by lies.
And I think what you're saying is that the conservative movement of the 1970s and 80s has become, what, calcified, ossified, institutionalized?
Talk about that for a moment.
Well, I mean, I would say two things, Dinesh.
I quote Charles Murray in this book, that government is in an advanced state of sclerosis where solutions are outside the legislative and judicial processes, that the pendulum swings back and forth it goes.
And I reject the premise, and I think the conservative movement, first of all, they're very defensive.
They're very... If the lib media wasn't doing anything today, I don't know what they would talk about.
And you have to be willing to go on, for lack of a better word, offense.
You have to be proactive, not reactive.
You have to break news.
But I think, Dinesh, you said it best.
I actually quote you in this book.
I hope I attributed the quote to you, but I will do so now.
That the conservatives fear the terrifying and humiliating power of the press so much that even though they know it's false...
There's a sort of perverse incentive not to do the right thing and not tell the truth for fear of being given that scarlet letter.
I mean, CNN is a laughingstock, obviously.
The chyrons are absurd.
But we understand and revere their ability to shame us.
And because they control the levers of Google and Twitter and Facebook, it's a slippery slope, I've found, because people hesitate to speak the truth for fear of losing their Twitter account.
And they may not admit it, But deep down inside, of course they fear admitting that.
So the moment you stop, and there's a trap in this book called Power, where I confront the executive editor of the Dean Baquet.
I was actually speaking at a journalism conference alongside Marty Barron and Dean Baquet, and I go to shake Dean Baquet's hand, even though we're adversaries, even though he writes defamatory articles about me, I thought we'll have a moment of humanity.
And Dean Baquet, the head of the New York Times, cowered away from me in the corner of that room holding his glass of Chardonnay, And at that moment, it's an amazing story in this book.
I realized in that moment in space and time, this was October of 2018, the moment you stop caring about what they think of you is the moment you're actually free to be effective at what you're doing, whether it's muckraking journalism or if you're, for example, a Republican politician.
And I wonder, do these Republican politicians care too much about, and do people in the conservative movement We care too much about what CNN thinks about them, or the New York Times, and of course the premise is yes they do.
And we need to abandon that fear, we need to reject that fear entirely so that we're liberated to speak the truth unspoken.
I mean, James, part of what you're doing is you're doing to them what they normally do to us unmolested, right?
In other words, they run these humiliating attacks on Republicans and on conservatives, and what you're doing is you're saying, well, listen, you know, they love to bring surveillance, and they bring the full apparatus of the state behind them, but you're like, listen, I'll take my little camera and get into their life.
I'll take my little camera and get into their newsroom.
I'll get into Google and I'll expose them and let's see if they can endure the same kind of scrutiny that they put other people under.
Now, do you see this as a good formula in a broader sense?
Let me tell you what I mean.
I just put out a tweet today saying, listen, if Republicans take the House and the Senate in 2022, why don't we do exactly what Nancy Pelosi did in 2018?
She said, if we get the House, if we get the Senate, we will impeach Trump.
Why don't we say the same of Biden?
But see, interestingly for Republicans, it's like, well, Biden has to do something that's going to make us, you know, Biden's done plenty that makes it, we have plenty of cause to impeach him, but we have a different psychology in which we don't want to go tit for tat, don't want to do to them what they're doing to us.
I think part of your broader clarion call is, listen, we should not be afraid of them.
Why should we?
What can they really in the end do to us?
Right. I think that's a very well astute point, particularly the last sentence you said.
They have tremendous power and we are nothing.
In this book I say...
We are nothing. This is true.
They have the FBI, they have the paper of record, and frankly, the New York Times has no power.
The only power they have is by virtue of Google and Facebook giving them the algorithmic preferences in their articles.
I don't want to call it journalism because they've defamed me and I've won in court in New York.
We'll talk about that some of the time.
But the only power they have is the power that we give to them.
And you think about it, and the first chapter of this book, Dinesh, is called Suffering.
You might say, why the hell are you writing a journalism book and the first chapter is called Suffering?
And here's why. Because in this life, we're going to suffer.
I mean, society is in a bad place right now.
I hope our society does not collapse.
And the Jeffersonian ideals of information and informed consent, I hope these things don't collapse.
But we're going to suffer either way.
My premise is, let's do the right thing.
Let's tell the truth.
We've got a lot of good people in government.
I mean, I think there are a lot of good people at the DOJ, for example, whether they're willing to Speak the truth is another thing.
But that's where meaning comes in.
And it's about the salvation of your own soul.
It's about doing the right thing.
And stop being afraid of these organs of propaganda.
It's not that bad.
I've lived through it, Dinesh.
I've been arrested in New Orleans.
I've been raided by the FBI in New York.
I've been sued more than a dozen times.
We've never lost a lawsuit.
We overturned the law in Massachusetts at the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
I've been deposed 15 times, and you know what?
They fear depositions.
They fear the discovery process of litigation.
The truth is there's only one reality out there.
There's not multiple realities unless you're Stephen Hawking.
There's only one truth, and you're not entitled to your own facts, so let's expose them because, as Whitaker Chambers writes in Witness, there's only one thing the communists fear, and that's being exposed.
They don't fear the government.
They certainly don't fear the Republicans.
What they fear is sunlight.
What they fear, as Justice Brandeis said, sunlight is the best disinfectant, whether it's through the discovery process of litigation or a hidden camera.
This book is a handbook on how to do it and how to survive the arrows that you get.
And by the way, all proceeds from this book goes to our nonprofit, Project Veritas, helps pay our journalists' salaries.
Learn their stories and the courage is contagious.
Dinesh, I can't philosophize courage.
I can't convince you people watching to go out and do this.
The only way you're going to do it is if you see someone else do it.
So I think there's going to be a mass movement of these truth tellers.
I hope, Dinesh, people in Congress grow a pair.
I don't have much faith there.
I believe the outsiders and the whistleblowers are going to have to do it.
I mean, absolutely. That's beautifully said.
And what I love about this book is I think it actually, I was expecting a compendium of the various kind of greatest hits of Project Veritas.
But what you get to here is the idea of what it takes to look at truth as something that you can cling to like a dog with a bone.
And no matter who comes at you, You're going to hang on to that bone no matter what because the truth itself matters more to you than anything that anybody can do to you.
Thanks, James O'Keefe, for coming on the podcast.
Great book and you're doing great work.
Keep it up. Thanks, Dinesh.
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Feel the difference. The large statue of Teddy Roosevelt that stood right in front of the Natural History Museum in New York City.
It was finally taken down.
The City Commission had voted for its takedown.
There were some reports about it.
I mentioned this at the time.
But it was still a little bit of an eerie feeling for me to actually watch the statue come down.
Here's a glimpse of this.
Take a look. So there it is.
This, by the way, the video is from ScooterCaster.
So it's at ScooterCasterNY.
I want to give credit for people.
So it's work to take these videos, and very often they get widely shared on social media without credit.
Now, what was really objectionable about the statue?
Well, apparently, for the left, for the leftists who caused this protest in the first place, and let's remember, all of this occurred in the wake of George Floyd.
This is the Kind of ugly aftermath of George Floyd.
Let's pull down all the statues.
Teddy Roosevelt, what does he have to do with George Floyd?
Nothing. But they look at the statue and they go, wait a minute, here's Teddy Roosevelt and he's sort of prominently with sort of head raised and you've got these two American Indians who seem to be kind of crouched in a, what seems to be a subordinate position.
So they take the statue as symbolizing racism.
Roosevelt is Calling the shots.
The two Indians are bowing to him.
But no. If you look at the statue more closely, you see what's going on.
The statue actually predates Teddy Roosevelt's days as president.
It's from his early days, and he's with two Indian trackers.
Now, since these Indians are trackers, what are they doing?
Looking down. At what?
Tracks! And Roosevelt, of course, is following their lead.
So far from this being a depiction of Indian subordination, it shows something really quite different.
By the way, if you want to read about Teddy Roosevelt, pick up Edmund Morris' book.
I think it's called The Rise of Teddy Roosevelt.
Edmund Morris, by the way, is the guy who later wrote a biography, a terrible biography, of Reagan.
He misunderstood Reagan.
He never got Reagan.
I understand Reagan picked him to write the biography because Reagan liked Morris' book on Teddy Roosevelt.
And Reagan probably thought, well, listen, I'm like Teddy.
You know, I'm a Republican. He was a Republican.
He rode a horse. I ride a horse.
But... You know, Teddy Roosevelt was an aristocrat.
He was a very cultured man.
Reagan was a middle-class guy who became an actor.
So I think for some reason, Morris never got Reagan.
But he did get Teddy Roosevelt.
He captured Teddy Roosevelt.
And he makes the point in his...
The Teddy Roosevelt, although a progressive, in some ways like Woodrow Wilson, and although somebody who broke from the Republican Party and ran on a progressive, what was called a bull moose ticket, in 1912 the Republican vote was split between Taft.
And Teddy Roosevelt, this is what gave Woodrow Wilson the presidency.
Nevertheless, Teddy Roosevelt was a different kind of progressive.
And it seems funny here, because we're talking about racism.
Progressivism and racism were hand in hand.
This is the point. And the point I'm trying to make is that Teddy Roosevelt was much milder in his progressivism.
So, in other words... Woodrow Wilson was an open segregationist.
He restored segregation to the government.
He was an out-and-out racist.
Teddy Roosevelt succumbed to some ideas of social Darwinism.
He used sometimes the language of the superior races will prevail.
It was sort of Darwinist language adapted, if you will, to politics.
But Teddy Roosevelt was not, and even talk about survival of the fittest, but Teddy Roosevelt was not a eugenicist.
He was a family guy and a pro-family guy, and I think this really gets to the heart of what is objectionable about Teddy Roosevelt.
He was a patriot. He was pro-American.
He was pro-family. He was a Christian. He believed in the superiority of Western civilization.
And this was his real sin from the point of the left. This is why they hate him.
This is why they're really taking his statue down.
So I guess what I'm saying is at the end, they do understand.
It's not that they misunderstand what's going on in the statue itself, in the depiction itself.
The left does understand, but they don't care.
Because their bigger point is that Teddy Roosevelt represents the confidence, the exploring, the adventurous, and to them, the imperialistic thrust of Western civilization, a civilization that has remade the world, but that the left wants to unmake right here in America.
I'm going to continue my discussion of Russian literature by focusing on the important writer who came after Pushkin, and this is Nikolai Gogol.
Now Gogol, in a sense, stands in between Pushkin, early 19th century, and then Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who come in the later part of the 19th century.
Russian literature has this sort of deep texture of connections.
I mentioned when I was talking about Eugene Onegin how you have this very moving scene where Tatyana, toward the end of the story, the poem, is approached by Onegin.
He's like, I'm in love with you, even though you're married, and you've got to sort of give yourself to me.
You don't belong with this guy, this Russian general, and sort of succumb to the temptation of love.
And she doesn't do it. She goes, I'm not going for it.
But think of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
Anna Karenina, in a sense, is based on a plot that takes Tatyana's refusal and changes it.
So that her no becomes a yes.
Anna Karenina succumbs exactly to a similar proposition.
This is from a, again, very kind of romantic but disturbed individual, Count Vronsky.
She succumbs to the adultery and Tolstoy explores with...
A very Tolstoyan richness and depth, the full and tragic consequence of this, in which Anna, at the end, throws herself in front of a moving, fast-moving train, commits suicide in that sense.
But let's come back to Gogol.
And before I do Gogol, I want to say a word.
You know, a lot of people really love this series on Russian literature because it's exposing them to a world that's different than they normally know.
This is actually my fascination with it as well.
I'm obviously not Russian.
Well, I've been to Russia once, but only very briefly, St.
Petersburg. And so I'm learning about Russia.
Ancient Russia, modern Russia, through Russian literature.
A lot of people are like, wow, this is really amazing.
This is fascinating. But one or two guys are like, why Russia?
Why do you choose this topic?
I chose it because of its richness, its psychological depth.
But I also want to...
I think I'm also going to...
I could go on in the Russian series for like three months.
I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about Gogol and then I'm going to give it a pause.
I'm going to pivot and do other topics and so on.
And I'll pick up later, probably later in the year, I'll pick up Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and sort of do this more in...
It's almost like season two, you've got to wait for a while and I'll pick it up instead of just doing it continuously.
And in sequence.
But I am following a chronological sequence.
And so back to Gogol.
The thing about Gogol is, while Pushkin and Tolstoy are sort of encyclopedic in their range, they cover everything.
They want to give you the full society.
That's not Gogol.
He zooms in.
He picks a single episode, a single incident.
He's kind of a portrait painter.
And then he gets to what's behind it.
And what's behind it, it often turns out, is the grotesque.
It's the macabre.
It's kind of the rich Russian world of demons and devils.
And some of them are benign.
And some of them are just ridiculous and grotesque.
But some of them are macabre and fiendish and just downright evil in ways that it takes a Gogolian imagination to fully comprehend.
Now Gogol grew up not in Russia, oddly enough, but in what was the Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian Empire.
And so he was, in a sense, a foreigner.
He was an outsider. In fact, when he first came to Petersburg to kind of, very ambitious, make his way as a writer, he recognized that he was seen as kind of an exotic.
He was sort of seen as an outsider.
And he realized that his world, the world of the Ukraine, the world of these Cossacks, These independent farmers was very unfamiliar to the people of Petersburg, the cosmopolitans of Petersburg, who were very European in their style.
They spoke French. And so Gogol realized that he could take this world that he knew very well from the Ukraine, and it would be seen as strange and exotic.
So his early stories...
His first work was called Evenings on a Farm Near Dekanka.
And Dekanka is a place that he made up.
It was kind of an imaginary village in the Ukraine.
But all these strange characters and the Russians in Petersburg were like, wow, this is fascinating stuff.
And it's almost like if someone in America were to write about a regional culture in Appalachia or some part of America that people don't really know very well.
and it opens the eyes of Americans.
Gogol had a fantastic imagination.
Early in the 19th century, he raises a question in one of his stories.
He says, you know, if you're at town square, you see things kind of from the individual point of view.
Your point of view, my point of view.
But what if you could circle above the town like a bird?
What would the town square look to you then?
So think of it. Here's Gogol in an age before, you know, air travel, an age before drones.
In imagination, looking at it, looking at society from the point of view, from the up looking down.
One of Gogol's stories is called The Nose.
It's a perfect example of his kind of grotesquery of Gogol.
A man wakes up in the morning and he's missing his nose.
Where's my nose? And then he begins to get really angry.
He's like, I love my nose.
I've got a really prominent nose.
My nose kind of is, it advertises me.
It comes out right in front of me.
It says who I am. It's a big part of who I am.
I cannot afford to be without a nose.
Then he decides, well, listen, I can't go out and, you know, I can't go look for my nose because people will laugh at me.
They'll say, where's this guy's nose?
So the guy basically says, listen, I'll take my scarf, my overcoat, I'll drape my overcoat over my head, I'll wrap my scarf around me, and this way people will not see that I'm missing my nose.
And so he goes looking for his nose.
Finally, he finds his nose.
His nose is right there walking on the street.
And so he goes up to his nose and he goes, what?
What the? And the nose is like, what?
What? And he's like, you're my nose.
You belong attached to my face.
And the nose is like, I don't belong to you.
What makes you think that I got to reattach myself to you?
I might have once been attached to you, but now I'm my own person.
Goodbye! So the nose takes off.
He chases after his nose.
I mean, you can see how crazy this all is.
Well, eventually he convinces his nose.
Okay, he makes a deal with the nose.
The nose agrees to be reattached to the face.
They go see a doctor, but the doctor takes elaborate measurements, you know, and the doctor says, you know, it's really very odd, but it's not going to work.
I can't do it. And the man's like, what do you mean you can't do it?
It's my nose. It fits on my face.
It was there before. The doctor's like, no, somehow the measurements don't work.
I don't think I can actually make this happen.
And so, the man, in utter despair, realizing he's lost, and see, again, you see here a metaphor, because while Pushkin covered the whole person, think of Gogol.
Gogol is focused on the nose.
Gogol is focused not on the whole, but on the part.
And one of the underlying sort of philosophical questions is, what is the relationship of the part to the whole?
That's the question Gogol is sort of raising in our mind.
Well, as the story ends, the man is utterly disconsolate.
He's in despair. He goes to sleep.
He wakes up in the morning. And there's his nose, right back attached to his face, just as if it had never left.
Now, you can think back and think, was this all a dream?
Gogol doesn't say.
Or did he really lose his nose?
Is such a thing even possible?
So Gogol is raising the question of whether the world that we experience is the world, or could it be that there is a world, even our world, our normal world, that's being manipulated by some fiendish devils that create in us these experiences, which we think are ours, And then we're asleep, and then we're awake.
But is it possible that when we're awake, we're really asleep?
All these are the kind of crazy types of questions that Gogol forces us to consider.
So what I'm going to do on Monday, probably on Tuesday, talk a little bit more about Gogol and his themes and his ideas, and then focus on one of his, I think, unforgettable stories, It was sometimes called The Government Inspector, but in my translation it's called The Inspector General.
It is grotesque in the classic Gogolian mode, but it's also hilarious, and in some ways it's also profound.
I'll take it to be a sort of representative of the best work of Nikolai Gogol, and then we will take a pause in Russian literature, give it a break, and pick it up later on in the weeks and months ahead.
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