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Jan. 24, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:49
BEAR ON THE PROWL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep255
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There's a bear on the prowl in the Ukraine, and it's the Russian bear.
How should we respond?
A new bipartisan bill to break up big tech is making its way forward.
I'll give you the scoop. What's the deal with Trump's Truth Social?
When is it coming out?
I'll give you the latest from Devin Nunes.
Activist mom Sharona Bishop joins me.
She's going to talk about the day the FBI came visiting.
And I'll explore the macabre comedy of Gogol's short story, The Inspector General.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
There's a bear on the prowl in the Ukraine, and it's the Russian bear.
I was curious about this notion of the bear symbolizing Russia and apparently that goes back to the 16th century.
It's something that predates communism, continued that symbol during communism and in fact it represents also the Russian Federation now.
Now, you know that things are heating up, not just because the Russians have sent close to 100,000 troops toward the Ukraine border.
I've actually seen some video of Russian military jets landing at airfields at the Ukraine border.
And perhaps the most troubling, here's the New York Post, U.S. embassy families to evacuate Ukraine as Russia tensions rise.
You know, they say that when there's a storm coming, like, the rats all go underground because they sort of know it's coming.
Well, you can tell when the embassy is being cleared out.
I mean, how familiar is this?
And to me, it raises larger problems here.
Yes, it's about the Ukraine, but it's also about China and Taiwan.
It's also about the fact that when Democrats come to power, the world always seems to become a more dangerous place.
I mean, think back. Jimmy Carter, the fall of Iran.
Think of Bill Clinton and the emboldening of Bin Laden and the plotting of 9-11, not to mention the Arab Spring, which of course came later, but was in a sense motivated by the lassitude of the Clinton years.
Then under Obama, all kinds of chaos in all kinds of places, and now of course Biden.
Now, there are two schools of thought in thinking about the Ukraine, And neither of them seems to me to be satisfactory.
The first one is, well, let's call it the warmongering approach.
Here's Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.
He says, in the global struggle between democracy and dictatorship and the fight for a peaceful Europe, Ukraine is on the front line, not unlike West Germany during the Cold War.
Well, Number one, this is a facile transplantation from one crisis to another.
Second, there's a huge difference between Ukraine and West Germany.
To take a single example, Ukraine used to be part of Russia.
In fact, in my series talking about Russian literature, A number of the Russian writers, and I'll talk later today about Gogol.
Gogol was born in the Ukraine, and the Ukraine was then part of the Tsarist Empire.
So part of what makes this a little tricky is that in the case of Ukraine, Russia is saying not that we are invading a bordering or neighboring country, but rather We are exercising influence and seeking to sort of absorb a country that was always, or at least that was historically part of Russia.
By the way, China makes exactly the same claim about Taiwan.
It's what China is saying is, we're not invading India, we're not invading...
We're essentially absorbing a country, Taiwan, that was part of China.
Look at the people over there.
They are Chinese. So we have to understand the point of view of the people that we're up against.
Now, on the other side, there's the warmongering side that I mentioned.
On the other side, you've got the, I would call it, quasi-isolationist side.
It's not our fight.
We have nothing to do with this.
Here's Matt Walsh, kind of a typical expression of this view.
Ukraine is not our country and not our problem.
Anyone who would risk a war with Russia for the sake of some random country 6,000 miles away is a fool or a psychopath.
Now, strictly speaking, this is true.
I don't see, it's difficult to think of the United States going to war over the Ukraine.
But it's also difficult to consider the United States going to war over Taiwan.
And then, would the United States go to war if China took over South Korea?
How about if China then took over Japan?
Would the United States go to war over that?
So, when you apply this kind of America First principle at an extreme, it would seem to suggest that the United States should basically mind its own business, let all the bullies of the world satisfy their appetite for aggression.
We are hands-off.
What's this got to do with us until you show up basically, you know, at New York City or in California?
This is not our problem.
I really cannot agree with this.
I think it actually reflects a naive and perhaps even foolish view of power politics.
Why? Because the simple truth is that there are innumerable options in between doing nothing and going to war.
But number two, the whole concept of deterrence is that you don't want to get to the bad place where you're forced to think about those options and exercise them.
I mean, here's China. This is Fox News.
China flying dozens of warplanes near Taiwan.
Now ask yourself, why is all this happening now?
Why is China suddenly sort of taunting Taiwan?
Why is Russia moving troops to the Ukraine?
Well, I think the answer is not merely Biden, but the humiliation of America and Afghanistan.
Essentially, the combination of the ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, a Saigon-style withdrawal, the leaving of Americans behind, and then perhaps all this kind of epicene and effeminate displays of the woke military.
We have cadets walking around in high heels, people essentially doing all kinds of trans dances and salutes and this sort of worship of identity politics.
Any other country looking at this would say, this is not a serious power.
This is basically a joke.
And we don't have anything to fear from these guys.
And this is the point. It was Teddy Roosevelt who said, you know, speak softly but carry a big stick.
And if you think what Teddy was saying, it's not intervene everywhere.
Neither was Reagan.
With Reagan, it was peace through strength.
Be judicious in the use of force, but be willing to use force when necessary.
Use it in a proportional way to achieve your objectives.
Think of how successfully the United States, for example, deployed force to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan without getting into a U.S.-Soviet war.
So... The Ukraine, I think, is becoming a problem, and it's symbolic of the larger problem.
And the larger problem is that the United States seems to be voluntarily ceding or relinquishing its position as the world's superpower.
And for this, I blame largely Biden and the Democrats.
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There's a very interesting new report that has come out of the house Antitrust Committee.
This is the committee that oversees cartels and monopolies and is in charge of oversight of the antitrust laws.
And the report is a bipartisan report.
You've got Democrats and Republicans signing on.
So here's an interesting case where the Democrats' traditional kind of hatred of large, giant corporations combines with the right's newfound and, I think, legitimate suspicion of corporate power.
And this report focuses on Amazon, on Apple, Facebook, and Google.
And the question it raises, and it really answers the question, are these virtual monopolies?
And the answer is yes.
Now, what that means, and I think it's very significant, by the way, these very corporations which have built up a lot of influence in Washington lobbied aggressively to block this report, to water it down, to defeat it.
But it nevertheless has made its way out and it's going to be the foundation now for antitrust laws that could conceivably break up We're good to go.
Markets depend upon enforcing contracts, and you need courts to do that.
Markets depend upon legitimate accounting practices, and you need to have those in place so that, for example, someone thinking of investing or buying into a corporation can find out what the books of that corporation look like.
Obviously, there are other laws affecting pollution and so on, but one of the key principles of free markets is competition.
And competition does not exist when you have corporations that are so big that they can provide what are called barriers to entry.
Barriers to entry are essentially roadblocks.
That means that new people who want to do this...
Let's say somebody wants to start a search engine.
What happens now?
Google blocks you. They'll try to buy you out.
They try to cajole you.
They try to shut you down.
They try to intimidate you.
They try to tell your potential customers not to do business with you or Google won't do business with them.
And it's like this with all these other players, too.
The report goes into a lot of really fascinating detail.
To show, for example, how Amazon allows competitors, people selling, for example, if you want to sell books, you can go sell books on Amazon, even though Amazon is a bookstore.
But if you go try to sell books on Amazon, they will essentially steal all your data so that they now know who your customers are.
They can then sell their products to your customers, but do it by undercutting your prices And not only can they do it, but they do do it.
They are doing it even now.
So they're leveraging their monopoly power essentially to wreck the competition.
Now, just being a big corporation doesn't by itself make you a monopoly.
Let's say you're a big corporation because...
You have better products that you sell at better prices and you have really better marketing and so you're beating the competition.
Anybody else is welcome to come in and compete with you and you just happen to do the job best.
That is not a monopoly.
What a monopoly is, is an agglomeration of power in a particular field where you're shutting down the competition or where you're combining...
Think, for example, here of...
Of Apple and its apps.
Where Apple is basically able to shut down competitive apps by saying in effect that if you want to deal with Apple and do business with Apple, you have to use the Apple app.
And if you use the Apple app, you have to pay with Apple's independently acquired payment system.
And if you want to use other types of payment system, Apple will try to thwart you or try to block you.
Similarly, think of the combination of say, Google and YouTube.
Google owns YouTube. And so, for example, if you have videos on Rumble, Google can suppress them in Google searches.
Why? Because Rumble is competing with something that Google owns, which is YouTube.
Now this is the classic definition of using monopoly power to try to shut down competition.
And I think that there is an interesting...
By the way, we've talked about censorship and free speech.
What I'm talking about now has nothing directly to do with that.
But it would benefit free speech because if you break up these corporations, then you begin to have competition.
You begin to have a more varied marketplace.
And with a more varied marketplace, you get a greater variety and a greater diversity of ideas.
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A lot of us are waiting with great interest for Trump's new platform, Truth Social.
And this could be a real game-changer.
Right now we have Rumble, and we have Getter, we have Parler, we have Telegram, Gab.
So we have these alternative platforms, but they are quite honestly small, relatively small.
Rumble is probably the largest, I believe 40 or so million companies.
But Getter's 4 million.
Parler at one point had gone up to 15 million, but I think its number of active users is considerably less.
Trump, his platform, I think, has the potential to get 40, 50, 60 million, maybe more.
I remember when we met with Trump, my family, Debbie, and I, Trump was talking about his social media, and if you just add it up, His Twitter, his Facebook, his Instagram, he had something like 120 million.
There might be some overlap on that, but nevertheless, huge numbers.
So this could be transformative for conservative voices.
We just become less dependent on other platforms.
Well, when is Truth Social going to make its debut?
It was supposed to be the early part of this year.
I see now from an interview with Devin Nunes, who is now the CEO of Truth Social, he He resigned from Congress to take up this job that they're looking to launch it by the end of March, so the end of the first quarter of this year.
He says the reason it's taken a little longer is because they're building infrastructure.
And this actually is a good thing.
He says we're building the infrastructure from scratch so that essentially Truth Social can't be shut down, can't be shut down by Amazon or can't be shut down by Apple.
And he says the great thing is they've got people from all over the world working to build this technology and to make it invincible.
He also says Devin Nunes does, quote, there's plenty of room out there for multiple platforms, but then he goes on to rail against the mainstream platforms, basically saying that they're using algorithms, they're using censorship, they steal your data.
And he says, you know, we're not going to do those things.
And we're going to start with a social media platform.
And then I get the impression, this is actually not fully fleshed out in this article, That the social media platform is going to be allied to some kind of a streaming news service, which may be the next phase of its development.
But ultimately, we seem to be seeing here a hybrid of social media and some sort of a digital network, a network on the web, but providing news.
Now, some people are like, well, isn't it odd that you have this guy Devin Nunes running this operation?
I don't think so. Actually, Devin Nunes was the guy who busted the Russia collusion hoax.
He has good investigative skills. He also, by the way, is an entrepreneur himself, and so he has good entrepreneurial skills, and he understands the stakes.
I think this is really important. You need somebody who's going to recognize that they're in a big battle, and Devin Nunes certainly does.
In fact, he says something like, this is the, well, quote, so I see this as the battle of all battles.
And he means the battle against these big tech giants that he says have accumulated so much power that they've become like traditional empires, although in some ways even more intolerant, even more oppressive.
This will be a very important development, not just for the midterm elections, the launching of Truth Social, but I think with a potential long-term impact in the transformation of American politics and American culture.
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I think the dirty secret is the government kind of wants it because inflation rates are higher than the interest on treasury bonds.
So with every day that passes, the government owes less on its mountain of debt.
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You'll get a free information kit on holding gold in a tax sheltered account and you can call Birch Gold Figure out how they can help you protect your hard-earned savings text Dinesh to 98 98 98 and get your free information kit now Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Sharona Bishop Sharona is a mom.
She's the founder, in fact, of a group called America's Mom.
Which is a conservative platform to support and encourage and involve parents.
She's also a wife and mom herself of four children.
I saw a very disturbing account of the FBI visiting Sharona Bishop at her home, and I was like, wow, I need to get the full story.
Sharona, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I've been reading a little bit about your case, but of course, I'm a little distrustful of the sources I'm reading, such as PolitiFact, And I'll get to that, but let me start by asking, just describe the experience, because it's got to be a completely unnerving one of the FBI showing up at your door.
When was that and what happened?
Thank you, Dinesh, for having me on to share this story.
I think it's very important because I'm a regular, everyday citizen.
I have no criminal history, no violent history.
And the FBI is usually reserved for those who are participating in extreme criminal behavior.
On November 16th, I was homeschooling my kids and cooking for the week.
You know, we're still in our pajamas and just living our life.
And at 930 in the morning, there was banging on our front door and followed by yelling.
I didn't have any reason to believe the FBI would ever be at my door.
So it took me just a minute to kind of figure out what was going on.
I ushered my boys into their bedroom and just said, wait here, they're eight and ten.
And my husband came up from his office downstairs.
He could hear banging on the door and didn't know what was going on.
And probably in less, definitely under a minute, maybe 45 seconds, we were at the door about to open it.
They were yelling, this is the FBI, we have a warrant.
And before we could open the door, we were literally right there.
They took a battering ram to my door and busted it open.
The irony is the door wasn't even locked.
And again, I mean, no time for us to get to the door and contemplate and comprehend what is going on.
After they busted my door open, they proceeded to pull my husband out the front door and pulled me out the front door.
I had my phone in my hands trying to call our attorney because I didn't know what to do.
I don't know what Are they allowed to do this?
And what am I supposed to be doing when they come to my home like this?
They grabbed my phone from my hand.
I asked for it back. They said, absolutely not.
It's part of the warrant and they can take it.
And they proceeded to pull my arm back behind me and handcuff me.
They handcuffed myself and attempted to handcuff my husband as well.
Um, I was in handcuffs for about 30 minutes.
My boys finally came to the front door to see what was going on.
And, you know, you're standing out there in your pajamas.
It's, it's cold.
It's November in the mountains here where I live and they are, um, going through my home.
They didn't, uh, gosh, you know, it's still kind of a, um, a shocking situation.
Um, But there was more that went on that day as well with my oldest daughter who was present.
One of the agents who was 6'5", 6'7", proceeded to manhandle her by her hoodie, pulling her up the stairs and back down the stairs after we'd asked that she get her phone so she could call our attorney and we could figure out what to do.
You know, I'm a regular person.
And I'm well aware of the October 4th mandate that was put out by the DOJ to go after parents who are being vocal against this regime right now, both in the school board and nationally.
So that's really where we're at right now.
Now, let's turn to that.
Let's describe what is the type of activism that you're involved in that you think made you a target?
And then second, what was their stated reason for being at your door?
They're like, we've got to search your house.
Search your house for what?
Right. So it took them, they needed about a half an hour to clear my house, quote unquote.
And the warrant stated that it was conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
I don't know what that means, but I've spoken to many retired agents since who have told me that's just a categorical, you know, cover to be able to get your contact information.
One thing I want you to know is that one of the investigators that was present that morning I asked him, what do you think I've done that warrants this behavior on my family?
And he said, you connect people.
So the activism that I do is I hold school boards accountable.
I realized in 2019 that elections have consequences.
Bad policy is destroying my state, destroying my local county.
And I wanted the people, regular people, to get involved and stop letting the political elite determine our lives.
Their policies are destroying us.
And in a very quick, hasty way, we're seeing it right now under the Biden regime.
But that's what I do.
I educate parents. I bring them together with elected officials so they can hear firsthand and get involved in the conversation.
In Colorado, we flipped 10 school boards on November 3rd, 2021.
It was an unprecedented action.
And it was because parents got involved.
And that's what we do.
We encourage regular people, get involved.
This is your country. It's your state.
It's your town. And you've got to hold these people accountable.
So that's really the work I do.
I've also been aware of election irregularities in Colorado, as well as the rest of the country.
I think those two things in tandem are dangerous right now.
They do not want regular people being a part of this process.
They don't want us asking questions and they definitely don't want us using social media to educate other people.
I mean, you know how that goes.
The censorship has been unbelievable.
Our phones are tapped.
You know, it's unbelievable.
It's alarming what is happening in America where we're supposed to be able to express our grievances.
We're supposed to be able to hold our government accountable and these actions definitely persuade some to be silent.
No, Sharona, there's a so-called fact check in PolitiFact, and I'm sort of chuckling because I know that these fact checks are largely fraudulent.
But in this fact check, it says that the FBI was really trying to search a woman named Tina Peters, who was a Mesa County clerk, on some apparent election violation.
And that they searched your home because you were an ally of Tina Peters.
And I'm thinking to myself, how stupid is that?
Whatever they're searching her house for, whether legitimate or not, what possibly could you have to do with that just by being, quote, associated with her?
So the article was deeply unsatisfactory on its own merits.
But would you address this issue that they weren't going after you, says PolitiFacte, Because you're a parent or you're an activist.
It had nothing to do with school boards.
But there was evidently some alleged corruption against this other woman, Tina Peters.
You're associated with her.
That's why they came to search your house.
Address that directly, if you will.
Absolutely. Well, there's two things you're not allowed to talk about.
You're not allowed to talk about election irregularities, and you're not allowed to talk about your grievances with school boards.
We know for a fact that our superintendent of our school district here reported parents to the FBI. They took advantage of that offer.
And they made a list and sent it to them.
Interestingly enough, I don't work for Clerk Peters.
I'm an independent citizen.
I've simply used my voice to say there are some things going on that don't look right.
I've been a very vocal supporter of people who are investigating election irregularities And a very vocal supporter of grassroots people who are running for school boards.
PolitiFact has never called me.
They've never interviewed me.
They have no idea what they're talking about.
They've certainly never seen the warrant that was served to me.
And as far as I know, they haven't spoken with the FBI. We also have never seen the affidavit that led to these warrants.
So they have no idea.
And quite frankly, at the end of the day, I still don't fully understand why they came to my home.
I really don't. But I speculate that those are the two things we're just not allowed to be a part of in America anymore.
I think what's disturbing, Sharona, and maybe I'll close on this, is the fact that we heard about Merrick Garland and his task force against terrorism.
We heard about the prospect of parents being targeted, but you are a real-life parent who was, in fact, whose privacy and whose life was invaded in this way.
I think it's a very disturbing indication.
And thank you very much for coming on the podcast and sharing your story.
I appreciate you having me on.
Thank you so much, Dinesh. Keep up the good fight.
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I was having a very interesting conversation last night.
Danielle, my daughter, and my son-in-law, Brandon, are visiting.
And so, Debbie, the four of us, we're sitting around, we're just talking about, they're kind of in the social media business.
And we were talking about social media and how it is that even though the left has huge advantages in social media, Even though our side is under scrutiny, under deplatforming, under bans, under censorship. I mean, as we speak, I'm currently demonetized on Facebook.
I'm restricted in my Facebook description.
Several months ago, I kind of narrowly evaded the scythe, the hatchet at YouTube.
So this is the world we live in.
We live precariously, at least on mainstream social media.
The left doesn't. They can promulgate the most brazen lies.
NPR puts out lies about the court.
They put out lies about COVID. They put out lies about all...
Russia collusion was an ongoing lie, which lasted really four years.
And who got censored over it, by the way?
No one. As far as I know.
We were talking about how they have it so easy and we have it so hard, and yet we dominate, at least in a number of areas of social media.
So Facebook, for example, if you just look at the accounts of Shapiro and Candace Owens and me, we're just bigger than a lot of left-wing accounts, even though the left-wing accounts are constantly boosted and massaged and Facebook is promoting them, and the same is true with some of the other platforms.
I think if you turn to cable news, you can see kind of the same thing.
The left has multiple outlets, multiple channels, but their spokesmen and their pundits and their hosts are just unimpressive, downright incompetent.
I mean, think of such losers as Joy Reid and Jake Tapper, David Frum writing at The Atlantic, Jim Acosta, Rachel Maddow, Nina Totenberg at NPR, Maggie Haberman at The New York Times.
I mean, this is a It's a singularly unimpressive crew of individuals.
Their arguments, if you even can call them that, are risible.
Their tactics are crude.
They always seek to threaten and bludgeon instead of to persuade.
They try to censor you instead of refuting you.
It kind of all brings to mind Milton's line that who conquers by force The point being here that they never seem to convince us, and they probably never will, because their method is the method of trying to put a rope around us or bring us to heel rather than to make a plausible or persuasive case.
If you compare our guys to their guys, there's almost no comparison.
Compare, say, Bongino on the one hand with Cenk Uygur of Young Turks.
Wow, no comparison.
Compare the investigative work of Julie Kelly at American Greatness.
A small sight, but nevertheless, compare the quality of her work with, say, Maggie Haberman at the New York Times.
This is like, Julie Kelly is like a giant compared to Maggie Haberman.
Compare Jack Posobiec, his influence on social media, to any writer for the New York Times.
And we're trying to talk about, we got into sort of, why is this?
Why is it the case that our side, even though subdued, even though pressured, is so much better at what we do?
And it came to me that, in a sense, one way to understand this is through a famous parable that the philosopher Hegel wrote.
It was Hegel's famous parable of the master and the slave.
And in Hegel's parable, the master dominates the slave.
The master can bend the slave to his will.
The master can make the slave do what the master wants.
And to this degree, the master is obviously superior.
And so far, Hegel's parable is kind of conventional, but where the parable really kind of takes off is Hegel says, well, what happens next?
Well, he says, what happens next is that the master makes the slave do the work.
And over time, the slave and the slaves do all the work.
And what does the master do?
Nothing. The master sits around and twiddles his thumbs, and over time the master and the master class becomes inert, becomes stupid, becomes lazy.
And who are the people who become inventive and innovative and industrious and cunning?
The slaves. The slaves are the ones who figure everything out.
The slaves are the ones who make the plantation run.
The master becomes dependent on the slave, not so much the other way around.
And if the slave were ever to be free, the slave would know how to get by.
The slave is a mason. The slave knows how to plant crops.
The slave knows how to do this and do that.
The master, on the other hand, cannot survive.
Without the slave, the master has become, in a sense, a slug.
This, I think, helps to explain what's going on in American culture now.
We are, in effect, we occupy the place in the Hegelian narrative of the slaves.
We're being shut down.
We're being subdued.
But on the other hand, it forces us to become more creative, to become more inventive, to figure out ways around the obstacles.
Whereas the left has it easy.
They don't really have to fight with us.
They can shut us down.
They just do these bogus fact checks to try to get us thrown off.
They say, well, listen, you might have Fox News, but we have, you know, and it's not just that we have CNN and MSNBC. We also have NPR and we have PBS and we have the History Channel and we have Disney and we have virtually all the newspapers and we've got ABC and CBS. So, in other words, they've got such a huge megaphone that they don't have to listen to our softer voice.
They can try to ignore it.
People are always writing to me and saying, oh, Dinesh, if you're so critical of Twitter, why don't you just get off Twitter?
So their idea is to avoid debate by kind of pushing us off and making us go elsewhere.
But I think that we are leaner and stronger and better than they are, in part because we have been forced to become that way.
What if there was someone out there who kept a log of every single thing you did every minute of the day?
Well, that would be pretty creepy, right?
What if I told you that's exactly what happens every time you go online?
Your internet provider is allowed to store logs of every website you've ever visited and can legally sell this data to anyone.
That's why I always use ExpressVPN.
ExpressVPN reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers so your internet provider can't see or log what you do online.
Many of you may be thinking, well, if I'm routing all my data through a VPN, doesn't that just mean the VPN can see what I'm doing and log my data instead?
Well, for some other VPNs, that's been a problem.
Some VPNs have a no-logs policy, but they've been caught logging customer activity.
ExpressVPN is the only VPN I trust.
Because they use trusted server technology, this makes it impossible for their VPN servers to store any data, including logs of any ExpressVPN customer.
And you don't have to take my word or ExpressVPN's word for it.
ExpressVPN is so confident in their no-log claim.
They've even had one of the biggest assurance firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Once again, go to expressvpn.com slash Dinesh.
I talked a few days ago about how China is not, repeat not, evolving in the direction of liberal democracy, contrary to what a lot of sort of neoliberal pundits had predicted, predicted going all the way back to the 1970s.
So for almost 40 years, oh yeah, as China becomes more prosperous, it's going to become more democratic, it's going to give people more say in the government.
It's also going to become more liberal.
People will want the right to assemble, to speak freely, to express their conscience.
And instead, what we've seen with China is a very strange pattern of rapidly increasing prosperity on the one hand and rapidly tightening state control on the other.
And not only does this demonstrate that those two things, authoritarianism and prosperity, can go together, but it appears, referring here to a July 2020 poll done by the Ash Center at Harvard's Kennedy School.
I suppose one can distrust these polls.
Particulate polls are not to be trusted even in the United States.
This is the poll of China.
But it does show a high degree of Chinese satisfaction.
Not just with China in general, but with the Chinese Communist Party.
In other words, evidently, a substantial number of Chinese, and again, the numbers might be exaggerated, but even if you discount them, you still find a remarkable phenomenon, which is that people, apparently, in China, are okay with living under a severely authoritarian regime.
In fact, a regime that is becoming more authoritarian.
The Chinese are always talking about reform, but their ideas of reform involve giving the Communist Party more power.
Here, for example, is a reform that the Chinese introduced in the last decade to make their economy work better.
The reform is to set up a commission that has given autonomous power so that if they find instances of corruption in business practices, they can arrest and hold suspects for months.
Their decisions cannot be overturned by any other entity in China, not even the Supreme Court.
You essentially have a commission that's above the law.
And from the Chinese point of view, this is a reform.
This is making their system work better.
China has always been, since 1949, not only Marxist, Marxist in the sense of Following a kind of Marxist model of economics, but Leninist.
And Leninism here has to do with the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat of having a kind of ruling elite that controls tightly the whole society.
And I think what's happening in China is that because the Chinese have no experience of freedom, before the Communists, the Chinese weren't free then either.
Before that, they had these long-standing dynasties, the Ming Dynasty, the Manchu Dynasty, and so on.
And so for the Chinese, it ultimately comes down not to being free or not free, because they've never really tasted that fruit, but rather to be less or more prosperous.
And this is sort of the way that traditionally people would evaluate kings.
Under monarchies of old, people wouldn't ask, well, is there an alternative to kingship?
Can we have some other different type of government?
Go back and read something like the Iliad.
You have good kings and you have bad kings.
The Peloponnesian War, the same thing.
But nobody thinks of asking the question, what alternative is there to kingship at all?
So, if your country is prosperous, if it's not at war, if you can go about your ordinary life, if you can look after your family, well, that must be a good king because we're doing pretty well.
On the other hand, if you're in misery, you can't buy potatoes, your family is starving, you're being conscripted to go fight someplace else, well, that must be a bad king.
He's doing a terrible job.
And I think this is kind of the way that people seem to be evaluating the Chinese government.
Is it or is it not a fact that we are living, we in China, are living better than our parents did and better than our grandparents did and seeing a level of prosperity and our country is now becoming stronger in the world.
It's able to throw its weight around, which becomes a source of national pride.
In other words, the Chinese, at least some of them, appear to view China's success as As not occurring despite or notwithstanding the CCP, but rather because of the CCP. Some Chinese at least seem to believe that China is prospering not because it has too much state control, but because state control has been tightened, has been made in a sense more regimented, but also in a way more effective.
I'm going to talk in this segment about a short story by Nikolai Gogol, the Russian writer.
And this story is called, in some places it's called The Government Inspector, but in my translation, The Inspector General.
And with this, I'm going to temporarily close out or at least hit the pause button on my series on Russian literature.
There's some other things I want to start pulling into the podcast.
I don't want to make this sort of a, you know, a 10-week course.
But later, I will pick this theme up and deal.
This is a nice kind of place to pause because having covered the introduction, you To Russian literature, having covered some of Pushkin and now Gogol, it's good to take a break, I think, and then pick up with figures like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy a little bit later.
Now Gogol is a writer of the macabre, but he's also, he has a kind of ghoulish sense of humor.
And he has his own distinctive style.
It's said by someone, it is impossible to confuse a story of Gogol With the story of anyone else.
And Gogol has written such works as, well, I referred to his short story called The Nose.
He's written a longer work, a novel called Dead Souls, and a very famous story, which I urge you to read, called The Overcoat.
But what's cool about this story called The Inspector General is it's actually not one of Gogol's crazier stories.
It's set sort of in a town in Russia.
And the town is full of, well, incompetence and greed and corruption.
And people are on the take.
And the mayor is running a kind of a racket.
In fact, the mayor admits everybody's doing some sort of indiscretion.
And the schoolteachers are not really teaching, and Gogol populates this town with all kinds of characters.
I mean, there's a schoolteacher who's out of control.
In fact, his sole passion is Alexander the Great.
And whenever the topic of Alexander the Great comes up, he gets so excited that he begins to grab chairs in the classroom and smash them and break them into pieces.
And finally, one of the other teachers says to him something like, well, Alexander the Great was a truly great man, but why break chairs?
He says, this is government property.
So this is Gogol combining his character sketching with a kind of almost wicked sense of humor.
And this pervades the whole story.
In fact, the little epitaph of the story is, and you'll see why it's relevant, it's, This is Gogol's sort of little motto for this story.
Now, As the story goes, there is an inspector general who's due to come from Petersburg to this Russian town to sort of whip everybody into shape and hold all these malefactors accountable.
And the reason that the town knows about it is because the postmaster of the town is a guy who always opens letters and reads them and then reseals the envelope, and so he got a letter That someone was sent to someone in the town saying, hey, the postmaster general is coming, and so you better be careful.
Make sure that you haven't got anything that they can get you for.
And so the postmaster now knows, oh, the inspector general is coming.
So he rushes to the mayor, and he gives him the news.
He says, listen, this inspector general is going to be in disguise.
He's going to be in plain clothes.
We're not going to know who he is.
And so the mayor is immediately extremely worried.
The mayor tells all the town councilmen they're worried.
Everybody knows they're running a racket.
And so they're trying to figure out, when is this Inspector General going to show up?
Well, as it turns out, two of the guys in the town go to a bar, and they see a man that they don't recognize.
And this man appears to be from St.
Petersburg, and he's in an argument with the bartender, who's like, you haven't paid your bill.
This guy's like, I'm from Petersburg, you can't talk to me like that, and so on.
And so the two guys who are watching this go, man, That's the inspector general.
That's the guy from Petersburg.
That's the guy we have to watch out for.
So they rushed to the town council and the mayor and they say, listen, we figured it out.
Now, of course, they're completely wrong.
This guy is kind of a bum from Petersburg.
In fact, he's a little bit of a scoundrel himself.
He doesn't have any money.
He's trying to bum off some free drinks.
And so he's not the inspector general, but they think he is.
And this is where Gogol's kind of story takes off because what happens is the mayor and the town council, they show up at the bar.
In fact, the two guys say, listen, you better rush over to the bar because we don't want to make him any angrier than he is already.
And right now, the bartender is kind of infuriating him.
So we've got to go deal with the situation.
So essentially, the big men, the big guys of the town go over to the bar.
They mollify the, quote, inspector general.
And they tell the guy, listen, don't be upset.
Don't worry about this issue of your bar bill.
We'll take care of it.
And besides, you know, you look like a guy who's a little out of sorts.
Perhaps you need a little bit of money.
And the guy's like, well, yeah, I could use a little bit of money.
So they start plying him with rubles, you know, 50 rubles, 100 rubles.
And, you know, what are they doing?
They're using the time-tested Russian scheme of bribery to try to get the inspector general off their back.
This is Russia. And in Russia, as in so many places, bribery always works.
The mayor invites this so-called inspector general to his own house, and then Gogol sort of carries things too far, where basically the mayor's wife comes out, the mayor's daughter comes out.
This guy's like, wow, they both look pretty good.
So he starts making the moves in a kind of ridiculous way with both the mayor's wife and his daughter at the same time.
And they're like, who are you?
And like, who do you know in Petersburg?
And so on. And he's like, well, you know, he knows Pushkin's a really good friend of mine.
So this guy is basically making stuff up, pretending to be this really important guy.
And then the business people of the town show up.
And the business people of the town are like, man, we've got a lot of complaints.
Our life is so hard.
They tell the so-called inspector general.
And then they start plying him with gifts.
They're like, here are some samples from my store.
Here are some things that surely you're going to want to take home with you.
And so... And so this guy is like laden with not only bribes, but gifts.
And then he decides, listen, things are going so well for me.
I better get the heck out of here before these guys wisen up.
And so he gets in a troika, basically a carriage drawn by three horses, and he takes off.
He leaves the town.
And when he leaves the town, the mayor is very excited because the mayor thinks he now has this important new contact, this important ally in St.
Petersburg. And the mayor basically tells everyone, listen, from now on, all of you are going to really have to listen to me because I've got really important friends.
And if you cross me the wrong way, you know, you might be sent to Siberia because I'm able to use my leverage, my influence with my new friend, the Inspector General.
But just when the mayor is doing this, the postmaster kind of taps him on the shoulder and says, well, sir, there's a little bit of a problem.
And the mayor's like, don't bother me now.
I'm really busy. But the postmaster general is like, listen, you need to know this.
It turns out I found a letter.
And it turns out, of course, the postmaster has opened a letter.
A letter from who? A letter from this guy, the guy who just took off, the guy who just left town.
And the mayor's like, you opened a letter from the inspector general?
The postmaster's like, he's not the inspector general.
In fact, read this letter that he's writing to his friends back in Petersburg where he's making fun of all of us.
He's ridiculing our entire town.
He says we're a bunch of idiots.
He says that you're a moron.
He says that the schoolteacher's a fool.
The whole place is being run by losers.
So his letter is essentially a kind of devastating expose of all the greed and sloth and ineptitude of the town.
And everybody is absolutely horrified.
In fact, the letter begins to go one by one into each major character.
And every time a character's name comes up, they're so embarrassed.
They're like, please stop reading. You don't have to read that aloud.
But, of course, the postmaster is like, listen, no, no, no, no.
I've got to keep going.
I've got to finish. And then as his reading of the letter draws to a close, and this is, of course, Gogol's perfect climax to the story, there's a loud announcement and someone says, Everyone to attention!
The inspector general has arrived from Petersburg.
Everyone has to report to him at once.
And then, in Gogol's, this was written as a play.
In this story, the play, the play version of it, the drama, the way Gogol has it, everyone freezes.
People freeze in the astonished expressions that they have when they discover that the real inspector general is here, they can't speak, and the curtain comes down.
Now, Interestingly, when this story was published in Russia, it generated a kind of remarkable controversy.
The Tsar, first of all, who was not a really very tolerant man, Nicholas I, recognized that the target of the story was really Russia.
And he goes, everyone got what was coming and I, worst of all.
So he sort of took it that this was an expose not just of one town, but really of all of Russia.
Now, in Russia, there were sort of two groups of critics.
There were the traditionalists who liked the old Russia, and then there were the innovators.
And the traditionalists said, Gogol has slandered Russia.
Gogol is demeaning the Russian people.
Gogol is basically, in a sense, proving to be disloyal to his own country.
The innovators or the people who wanted Russia to change said, Gogol is showing how backward we are.
Gogol is exposing the fact that Russia needs to change.
Russia needs to come into the modern era.
Russian government needs to be more accountable.
And while all of this was going on, someone approached Gogol and said, What do you think?
Which side do you take between the traditionalists and the innovators?
Are you an innovator calling for a new Russia?
And Gogol in typical Gogolian style said, no, my story has nothing to do with any of that.
My story is actually about the last judgment.
In other words, for Gogol, at least the way he explained it, and maybe he was being somewhat wry or sarcastic, he basically said, listen, think about the line in the Bible, Watch ye therefore, for ye know not when the Master cometh.
This is the line, by the way, that was quoted in the Shawshank Redemption, but the idea here is that the Inspector General is divine accountability to which, for all our sloth and all our greed and all our ineptitude, we are all, in the end, inevitably. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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