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Jan. 26, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:27
ABSOLUTE POWER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep257
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and for proof of this, we need to look no further than the Pelosi January 6th committee.
Biden's poll number is like his brain cells are dropping rapidly, and I want to explain why this is both scary but also exhilarating.
The Biden administration is denying Florida monoclonal antibody treatments, and I want to explain the motive behind this despicable behavior.
Activist and congressional candidate Robbie Starbuck will join me.
We're going to talk about his new contract with America.
And finally, the questionable enthusiasms of W.E.B. Du Bois.
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 Pelosi January 6th committee is a bogus operation from start to finish.
Uh...
It is not about revealing the truth about January 6th.
It's about confirming a narrative.
It's about suppressing, in some cases, the truth.
And it's also about going after and demonizing Trump supporters, including people who had little or nothing to do with January 6th.
But what I'm going to focus on today is the means that are used by the January 6th committee to carry out its nefarious operations.
Now, it was Lord Acton, I believe, who said that absolute power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And what Acton is getting at is that power, which is a reality in the world, does have to be checked.
It requires oversight.
It requires legal limitations.
John Adams, writing around the time of the founding, spoke about power.
He used the word dominion.
Dominion here meaning authority, exercising force over someone else.
And John Adams made the point that this idea of dominion is kind of a tyrannical impulse in human nature.
And again, Adams was talking about the need for power to be balanced, to be checked.
And that is what our complex constitutional machinery is supposed to do.
Now, I've talked on this podcast about the abuses of the FBI. The FBI, for example, trying to do surveillance on people, getting their bank records.
But here's the point. The FBI is under legal limitation.
The FBI can't just get your bank records because they feel like it.
They have to go to a judge.
They have to get a warrant. They have to get permission.
They need to have some defined authority that they can appeal to and say, look right here, this is what gives us the authorization to do this.
Interestingly, these limitations do not, or at least in the view of the January 6th Committee, do not apply to Congress.
Congress can do whatever it wants with no oversight whatsoever.
No oversight, certainly not from the executive branch, not even from the judicial branch.
Now, Let's look at how this plays out in practice.
Basically, the January 6th committee started out by getting cell phone records of people.
They go to the telecom companies and they say, listen, we're going to give you a list of people.
Give us their phone records, give us their email logs, give us their texts, give us their internet and browsing history.
And, again, this would be one thing, and questionable enough, if it was limited to the people, for example, who breached the Capitol, who are, in some senses, there was probable cause to believe that they had broken the law.
But what if you're demanding the phone records of people who didn't even go into the Capitol, who are merely in D.C., or who are merely associated with the Trump administration and have nothing directly to do with January 6th at all?
You're just trying to find out how they responded to January 6th, or what they said to the President, or what they said to somebody else in the White House.
And so the January 6th committee is on a kind of witch hunt to get these phone records.
And again, no warrant, no judicial oversight, just give them to us.
Now, the next move of the January 6th Committee, and this is an escalation beyond the phone records and the telecom data, is bank records.
So now the FBI, I'm sorry, the January 6th Committee makes a list of people and goes to their banks and says, give us their bank records.
And, not only do we want their bank records, but don't tell them that you're giving us their bank records, because if you do, they could then go to court and try to get a judge to block it.
So, in other words, give us the bank records in secrecy.
There's a very interesting case involving a guy named Taylor Budovich.
Now, this is a guy who's a former spokesman for the Trump campaign.
But he's a guy who never worked in the U.S. government.
He has nothing to do with January 6th.
He didn't go into the Capitol. But he got a request, and when I say he, it's not him.
The January 6th committee went to his bank, J.P. Morgan, and said, turn over this guy's bank records.
Now, interestingly, J.P. Morgan has as its legal advisor for this sort of thing, guess who?
Loretta Lynch. Yes, Loretta Lynch from the Obama administration.
So Loretta Lynch says, yeah, turn over the bank records, and second, don't tell Buttovich that you're doing that.
In other words, don't tell our clients that we are trespassing on their privacy and their secrecy, and we are forking over this information to the January 6th.
Now, all of this is highly despicable, particularly because these are people by which is not suspected of committing any crimes.
He has not, in fact, committed any crimes.
As I say, his relationship with January 6th is essentially...
It kind of reminds me a little bit of the abuses of the war on terror, because in the war on terror, essentially what happened, and a lot of conservatives were swept up in this.
The idea was, hey, listen, there's a war on terror.
There are all these bad guys. Who cares about their civil rights?
Let's just basically get their bank records.
Let's spy on them. Let's figure out what they're really up to, and let's get them.
So the idea here was that civil rights were kind of unnecessary obstacles to getting the bad guys.
And what's really chilling is that the left is using this exact model, except we're the bad guys now.
It's not some bunch of Syrians who are planning to do X or Y. It's you and me.
We're the bad guys. And the left's view is, listen, who cares about their civil rights?
Who Who cares about their privacy?
Who cares about the idea that their bank records belong to them?
It's something between them and the bank.
No! Let's run roughshod over these guys.
And Glenn Greenwald, who writes an interesting article about all this, says, This is pure McCarthyism.
And what he means by this, he's not just using a kind of catchphrase.
He says, in the McCarthy era, the House Un-American Affairs Committee went after people for communist associations.
They did exactly the same thing.
They went after people's bank records.
They went after their communications.
Obviously, they didn't have emails in those days.
And... They essentially said, we are accountable to no one.
We cannot be overseen by any court or the legislative branch.
We have, in a sense, absolute power.
And so, you see here a committee, the January 6th committee, of dubious constitutional authority.
And I say of dubious constitutional authority for the simple reason that it is the job of the executive branch to do these investigations.
Oh, it's the job of the DOJ. It's the job of the FBI. Congress can do investigations, of course, but congressional investigations are usually limited to two things.
The first thing is investigations related to lawmaking power.
You want to pass a law, let's say, about the environment.
You do some investigations into whether there have been environmental abuses that provide a basis of justification for passing this new law.
The other congressional investigations are based upon the Congress's oversight role.
And so if, for example, you suspect that people in the executive branch have abused their congressional authority, that they are doing things outside the limits of the law, yes, Congress can in fact do investigations to hold the executive branch accountable.
Let's remember that none of that is involved in this case.
We're not talking about Congress having oversight of people who are serving in the government We're talking in the case of Buttigieg, a guy who's a private citizen, and of course many of the people who went to D.C. on January 6th had nothing to do with the government, their nurses and their doctors and their cops and their ordinary businessmen,
and yet Congress is subjecting them to this kind of exacting scrutiny, meddling in their lives, creating a kind of chilling effect, and treating them as the domestic opponents, the domestic threats that they absolutely are not.
Even as the left tries to cancel Mike Lindell on all fronts, you and I have the power to uncancel him.
We have the power, yes, you and I do, to give a big up yours to this whole cancel culture movement.
And the way you do it is you get behind Lindell.
This is a positive way to show your appreciation for Mike and also your lack of appreciation for his political enemies.
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I've been reveling, I have to say, in these Biden poll numbers.
Poll numbers that aren't coming from a conservative source of any kind, not even Rasmussen, but rather coming from NBC, coming from Harvard and Harris, places that have been, well, you can just say have an ideological incentive to massage their polls to make Biden look as good as possible.
Now, I want to talk about the two recent polls, NBC News poll, As reported on NBCNews.com, Biden's overall job rating, 43%.
54% disapprove.
And NBC makes the observation that it's the numbers beneath the approval rating that show a really grim picture for the White House.
It's not just that people disapprove of Biden, like they don't disapprove of Biden the man, they do.
But they also disapprove of what Biden is doing on virtually every front.
NBC points out that, quote, Biden's standing among key parts of the Democratic base has eroded.
Look at this.
Number of people who strongly approve of Biden's job performance, 15%.
So right there, we know that there are 15% of Americans who absolutely need their heads examined.
But the 15% strongly approve is more than matched by 43% who strongly disapprove.
Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitz says a year into his presidency, Joe Biden's standing with the American people is diminished, and he's a smaller figure than he was when he entered the White House.
I was a day or so ago on Fox, and we were talking about the fact, in fact, you had this Democratic operative saying, you know, the problem with Biden is he's a little too cloistered.
He's a little too insulated.
He needs to get out.
He needs to show himself to the American people, interact with people, be a more engaged figure.
And I made the observation that I don't think that's going to help.
Why? Because the problem isn't that people don't see enough of Biden.
It's that what they see of Biden, they don't like.
So it's kind of like, you know, you thought you're getting this unifier you have in Biden, this mean-spirited divider.
You thought you're getting this kind of jovial, get-along guy who sort of can work with all kinds of people is...
A compromiser and someone who views his opponents not as enemies, but just as people he disagrees with.
In fact, you get this cranky, nasty old man who seems to take a certain relish in his meanness and shows a kind of casual indifference to suffering to pain.
Oh, all those people fell out of planes.
Well, that was five days ago. Why are you bringing it up now?
Remember that from the pullout in Afghanistan.
So I don't think greater exposure is going to help Biden whatsoever.
Here's a second poll. Harvard-Harris poll has reported in The Hill.
Its numbers for Biden are even worse.
Biden's approval rating is now 39% in this poll.
So it's now in the high 30s.
And it has about half of those 39% saying that they approve of Biden and the other half saying that they somewhat approve.
This approval number, 39%, is down from November of last year when it was 45%.
It was six points higher.
And, of course, all of this is way down from when Biden was first elected.
I think the remarkable thing about all this is that one would expect in seeing this kind of, it's almost like the elevator with the cord cut and it's falling down, down, down.
Usually what people do is they start thinking about, what do we do, you know?
How do we avoid the elevator from crashing into the floor?
Do we, like, jump into the air and hope that the elevator will hit, but we won't hit?
In other words, you take measures, however desperate, to try to avoid the catastrophe that seems right before you.
Striking thing about Biden is he isn't.
You get no sense that Biden is pivoting No sense that Biden is modifying course.
No sense that Biden is listening and saying, okay, listen, how can I do better?
I mean, contrast, Biden would say the behavior of Clinton in the 90s, when Clinton's approval rating, by the way, wasn't free fall, but Clinton very slyly and very subtly Sort of accommodated to that.
He's like, listen, I'm not going to come across as too leftist.
I'm not going to let my crazy wife sort of take over.
I'm going to strike a centrist course.
I'm going to bring in some people who are sort of from the other side.
I'm going to sign welfare reform.
And all of this will show the American people that, you know, even though I might be, you know, depraved in my private life.
Nevertheless, I am doing my best to run the country and move it in a sort of centrist direction.
Well, none of this from Biden.
I guess politically this is all good for us because it means that Biden's poll numbers are disintegrating as fast as his brain cells.
And that's a little dangerous for the country, right?
Because who knows what kind of decisions this kind of adult character makes.
On the other hand, it also means that people are beginning to see that you've got not just an incompetent but a mean-spirited fool in the White House and sweeping him out, getting rid of him and getting rid of all his minions and getting rid of the party that's enabling him.
This is the urgent task for the country ahead.
The Biden administration continues to put a sort of wrecking ball to the economy.
And of course, the glaring evidence of this is inflation.
Inflation at 40-year highs.
And I think secretly the government is okay with this inflation.
You know why? They want it.
Inflation rates are higher than the interest on Treasury bonds.
And so what that means is with every day that passes, the government owes less and less on its mountain of debt.
Imagine if your mortgage had a negative interest rate.
Would you be in a hurry to pay it off?
Exactly. So your pain is their gain.
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Sarah Palin, yes, that's Sarah Palin, is suing the New York Times and the case is going to trial.
Now, this alone is significant because, by and large, when you have these kinds of lawsuits against a media outlet, particularly a large, powerful media outlet like the New York Times, they normally don't go anywhere.
The case of New York Times versus Sullivan, a case that is now, what, 40 years old?
It's essentially been almost impossible to prove libel.
Why? Because to prove libel, you have to prove what's called actual malice.
And actual malice is defined as, I knew it was false, and I still said it.
And second, if I didn't know it was false, I acted with, quote, reckless disregard of the truth.
I didn't care if it was true or false.
I still published it. And C, on top of that, you have to show actual damages.
You have to show that there was harm to your reputation and that this cost you.
So this standard has been almost impossible to meet because even if a media outlet says something that's flatly untrue, they could say, well, listen, we didn't know it was untrue.
Or even though we suspected it might be untrue, we didn't act with reckless disregard.
We did try to find out the truth, even though, in fact, we were unsuccessful in doing so.
So this provides a kind of almost libel-free environment for the press.
But the atmosphere is clearly changing, and this notion that you can libel people with impunity looks like it's going to be a thing of the past.
Now, let's talk about the Sarah Palin case.
The New York Times basically publishes something that is downright scarless.
A 2017 editorial took a political map that the Sarah Palin PAC had put out and said, look at this political map, and they superimposed it on a shooting in which six people were killed, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords was badly wounded.
So basically what the New York Times was, I wouldn't say implying, was...
What she was flatly saying is that somehow Sarah Palin was providing the road map to get these people killed.
Now in reality Sarah Palin's kind of political map had nothing to do with the shooting and the New York Times eventually admitted this and they We're good to go.
And I want to make the point that with the press, these accidents are not accidents.
They're not accidents because the ball always falls on the same side of the net.
If they were truly accidents, you're in relentless pursuit of the truth, all the news that fit to print, that's the New York Times' motto, then you'd get things wrong.
You'd frequently be accidentally saying bad things about Democrats.
You'd accidentally be saying nice things about Republicans.
But you notice that's never the case.
They do their best.
They were trying very clearly here to pin the tail, to pin the mass shooting tail on Sarah Palin.
Blame her for it.
And they failed to do it.
And they were caught. And so their apology, if you will, was not an apology of we're sorry we did it.
It was really an apology, we're sorry you busted us.
And we're kind of, we now regret being sued.
So, look, it's going to be difficult, I think.
This is a case that's being heard in New York, and it's being heard before a liberal judge, and I would be shocked, I mean shocked, if Sarah Palin would win the case.
But I don't think actually that's what this case is about.
I think part of the, well, the cleverness of Sarah Palin here is she's using the case to ferret out all kinds of information about the New York Times.
Now, the scoundrel who published this 2017 article is James Bennett, the former editorial editor of the New York Times.
James Bennett was caught in a kind of scandal at the Times.
He had published an op-ed, this is much later, by Senator Tom Cotton.
And literally, publishing that op-ed caused a kind of woke uprising at the time.
How dare you publish an op-ed by a Republican?
And in effect, Bennett was pushed out of the Times because of that.
So I think what Sarah Palin realizes is that there's a lot of discontent.
There's a lot of internal bickering.
There's a lot of knives being drawn within the times.
And it would be kind of good to bring all of this out into the public to show what?
To show that these are not real journalists.
These aren't people who are after the truth.
These are ideological saboteurs.
And basically, Bennett was trying to sabotage Palin.
And then ultimately he got sabotaged himself.
Other people crazier than him working at the Times decided to use the same long knives that he was using on Palin on him.
So it would actually be very entertaining, to be honest, to have all of this come into the public square.
I personally would love to see it.
And I hope that the trial, through its discovery process, furnishes an opportunity, if not to provide full justice to Sarah Palin, nevertheless to show us this sausage-making machine, these hatchet men at the New York Times, and hatchet women, if you will, or hatchet trans, the whole menagerie.
We have the circus operating behind closed doors.
Let's see the circus play out in the public arena.
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Feel the difference. In a move that seems motivated more by malice than by health concerns, the FDA is blocking Florida from using monoclonal antibody treatments for COVID. So the FDA put out a statement saying that we should no longer use these monoclonal treatments.
They're not effective against the Omicron variant.
So that is the justification.
That is the stated reason.
For why these treatments are now prohibited.
And the net effect is that Florida has been forced to close its monoclonal treatment centers.
They can't provide these treatments anymore.
Governor Ron DeSantis is apoplectic.
He goes, without a shred of clinical data to support its decision, the Biden administration has failed.
Done this, preventing, quote, life-saving monoclonal treatments from being administered.
And of course, if you look at the comments below the governor's statement, you see all kinds of people weighing in.
I'm just going to read a little remark or two.
The monoclonal antibody treatment saves lives.
It saved my grandpa and myself when we had COVID. Somebody else goes, this treatment prevented my friend from being hospitalized.
His 105...
Fever drastically stopped after visiting a monoclonal site.
And so, you have to ask, why would the Biden administration do something so spiteful?
Now, they claim it's not spiteful.
They claim that the FDA says that their reason for doing this is because there are other therapies.
And they name some of them.
Paxlovid, Sotrovinab, Molnupiravir.
These are treatments that are expected to work.
But the key word here is expected to work.
Because the question you have to ask is this.
Aren't those experimental treatments like the monoclonal treatments?
Are those actually proven?
Do those have full FDA approval?
Or is it the case that the FDA, despite Florida, because Florida has been actually quite successfully using these monoclonal treatments.
Now, here's Jen Psaki.
She goes, let's just take a step back here to realize how crazy this is.
We know what works.
Vaccines and boosters.
Well... First of all, the vast majority of people who go in for monoclonal treatments are vaccinated.
Some of them are boosted.
So the majority of Floridians have been vaccinated, and we know that being vaccinated doesn't prevent you from getting COVID, Omicron.
And so what you have here is vaccination, which is supposed to reduce your risk of getting it and reduce the lethality of it.
And then you have the, what happens if you do get it?
So the treatment issue is a little separate, I think, from the vaccination and booster issue.
And the question that, well, Debbie and I talk about this is sort of like, why would you try to choose between one or the other?
Why is this an either-or situation?
Why can't you have vaccinations that are available for those who choose them?
Boosters that are available for those who choose them?
And monoclonal antibody treatments are available for those who want them.
This, I think, is the politics of COVID. This, I think, is a reason, not the only reason, but one reason, why people have so much distrust surrounding this issue.
They don't trust the health authorities because they think that the health authorities aren't just playing health, but in many cases are playing pure politics.
You know, ever since I was a kid, my mom would round up me and my brother and sister, Shashi and Nani, and she's like, guys, you gotta eat your fruits, you gotta eat your veggies, and the answers that came back to her were like, no, no, and no.
Not that we minded the And of course, these were tropical fruits in India, but the veggies, I think none of us were fans of the veggies.
And I think this is the norm.
Most people don't eat enough fruits and veggies, and they kind of know it, but they're not really sure how to go about fixing the problem.
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To get a discount, you've got to use discount code AMERICA. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast my friend Ravi Starbuck.
Ravi is a, well, he's a former Hollywood guy.
He's a filmmaker. He's directed all kinds of music stuff.
His family is originally from Cuba.
In fact, fled communism.
And now he is running for Congress in District 5 of Tennessee.
And Robbie, delighted to have you on the podcast.
Thanks for joining me. First of all, I've got to say, you're running for Congress, and Robbie Starbuck is really a cool name.
Is that your real name, or is this a stage name?
It is actually a real name, yeah.
No, my family gave some very strange names to us.
It's a really long story, but yes, it is a real name.
Yeah, because I mean, if I went around calling myself Dinesh Starbuck, people would give me a little bit of a suspicious look, I think, right?
Yes, especially because my family is from Cuba.
You know, there's people that are like, is that a Cuban last name?
No, me and my sisters all got very strange names, and it is a really long, weird story, but it all involves stars and suns and stuff like that.
So it's like sunshine, starshine.
It's strange. It's a weird one, but it's fun.
Hey, listen, you have had a career in Hollywood, in films, as well as in music.
Talk about how that world and maybe what was happening in that world pointed you or pushed you in the direction of politics.
You know, it was really a combination of seeing the way the left had taken over culture in every segment, where you could just tell that there was this environment where You couldn't have any view opposing this one that they had approved.
You know, seeing that in the United States of America, that you couldn't just be free to disagree.
And seeing just some of the markers throughout the Obama administration is really what provoked me to come out and, you know, endorse President Trump, but then also, you know, be very vocal on politics.
Because, you know, I said I'd rather be a poor man with integrity and stand up for what I believe in the way that, you know, so many Cubans wish they would have, than be a rich man who is silent and is essentially a puppet of somebody else because they control what I say and don't say.
And is it the case that your political convictions were, I'm sure, in part formed by just the knowledge of your family's experience, what your family was freeing, fleeing, the way in which tyranny in Cuba, as in other socialist societies, is not just the tyranny of the government or inside the government, but spreads through every nook and cranny of the society?
Yeah, definitely heavily informed by it.
You know, the family experience is obviously what runs through my DNA. But beyond that, I mean, you really don't even need a family experience to see what's going on in our country right now.
I said it right before the 2020 election.
What we were facing was if we had a Democrat in office, we had somebody like Joe Biden in the current modern Democratic Party, which is not a liberal group.
They're not in any way what they claim to be.
They are a Marxist party now.
That we were going to be headed towards runaway inflation.
We were going to have an economic crisis the likes of which we haven't seen in our modern lifetime.
And I think that's exactly where we're heading now.
And I think that I was absolutely right.
And I think, you know, anybody who has a wallet that is living in America right now can tell we're veering off a cliff.
Robby, you have issued something that you're calling the New Contract with America, a reference, I'm sure, to the 1994 Contract with America that Newt Gingrich and his team put out.
Let's talk. I want to talk about some of the provisions in the New Contract with America, but before we do...
Talk about why the Republican Party needs to take this kind of a step in your view.
Is it because Republicans can't merely run against Biden?
They need to spell out a kind of this is our path and we're going to specify it and specify it with some clarity so the American people know exactly what they're getting if they decide to toss the Biden team out and bring in the other team.
That was exactly what I was feeling.
But beyond that, you know, just the overall environment that I'm seeing on the campaign trail of people saying, like, what do we get in these places?
How do we tell who's a real person that's really going to fight for us?
And I think that that's a barometer we don't really have.
And especially when you look at how quickly, you know, you've seen some people cave in the past to the establishment.
People want to know, are you going to stick to these things or not?
And so I felt like it was important to have something like this, you know.
Especially when you look around and you see the environment we're in where we've had so many people content to just not lose every election.
That doesn't mean they actually want to win every election.
They're content with just not losing all of them.
And if we want to be a dominant party, we want to truly be a party that can make these things in the contract become a reality.
We have to have a cohesive group that is sticking to an actual plan to go on offense instead of just constantly being on defense.
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of being on defense.
I'm tired of seeing people defend, oh, we're not racist, we're not this, we're not that.
We need to be on offense.
We need to be selling the vision for America that is aspirational, that people can latch onto and say, I want that.
Let's take a pause, Robbie.
When we come back, I want to look at some of the ingredients of your new contract with America and have you make the case that this can be a sort of platform not just for you, but that the Republican Party in general can get behind.
Happy New Year, guys. 2022 is going to be a critical year for America and also for AMAC. This is the Association of Mature American Citizens, along with their nearly two million members like me and Debbie.
Now, the fight to stop out-of-control spending and the President's Build Back Better scheme is far from over.
Congress is plotting more legislation that could hurt our seniors.
And the midterm elections are going to be a titanic battle between freedom and socialism.
Now, unlike liberal groups, and I think you know the one I'm thinking of, AMAC is America's conservative, action-oriented organization for people 50-plus, fighting hard every day in Washington and across the nation for our seniors.
Now, I'm urging you to join and choose AMAC now.
You'll get all the great membership benefits, AMAC discounts on hotels, And your membership will support your values.
That's critical. Go to amac.us slash Dinesh.
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I'm back with Robbie Starbuck.
He's running for Congress in District 5 of Tennessee.
Robbie, I'm sure this is good news for you.
Jim Cooper, the incumbent congressman, has decided to not run again, but run for the exit.
He's not running again, thus creating an open seat in a heavily Republican-leaning district.
I think this means that if you can make it through the primary, you'll be a good shot to win the election.
Talk a little bit about your...
Contract with America that you just released.
Newt Gingrich, I believe, has just endorsed it.
We talked about why we need a contract with America.
What's in your contract with America?
Well, step one, I think, is one that's going to excite a lot of people because without step one, you really don't have a chance to get everything else done.
And it's that we need to recommit ourselves to clean bills.
I think one of the things that we've seen the most In terms of negative outcome in America has been these omnibus bills that are 2,000, 4,000 pages long.
No rep actually reads them.
We're depending on aides and lobbyists to write our bills that are then dictating policy in our country.
We have got to stop doing this.
We've got to go back and revert to The basics.
We've got to have bills that the reps actually write, they read, and they know what they're voting on.
So that's step one.
But as you go further down the line, I think simplicity is sort of a surprising factor in it, where it says, you know, something like, let's say, an issue like CRT. I think CRT is actually very simple to solve.
And I think it's that we, number one, have to recognize it already violates anti-discrimination law.
But number two, we need to pass through that makes it very clear that anybody who takes federal funds cannot teach, train, or deploy CRT in any way.
That by itself covers everything.
It covers all the public schools.
It covers Lockheed Martin.
It covers even Amazon, Coca-Cola.
All these places, they take federal dollars.
So if you take them, you are not going to be able to use this stuff.
You won't have trainings like Coca-Cola's Training recently this year where they said, can you be less white, please?
You know, this stuff won't happen anymore.
And so I think as you run the game and you go through it, immigration is another one where we have a very simple proposal to immigration.
It's that we need to flip the incentives.
We need to go and say, hey, we have this Citizenship Protection Act.
And what it does is it says, if you're caught here illegally, you will never be allowed to become a citizen and you will never receive benefits in the United States of America.
It changes the incentives entirely from an era right now where people in Central America, South America, Mexico, they believe they can come here and get anything.
We need to change that incentive and that messaging, and that's part of it.
Bye.
I like the Internet Bill of Rights that is part of your contract with America, where you make the point that social media is the public square.
I guess what you're doing is you're going against what has been a little bit of a libertarian nostrum, this notion that, well, these are private companies, and as long as they are not officially part of the U.S. government, they have every right to kick whoever they want, for whatever reason or no reason at all, off their platforms, and you're saying, no, why not?
Absolutely not. And there's a number of reasons.
Number one, on that sort of more libertarian bent argument, the truth is that these companies are working in concert with the government.
We saw it in California where they worked with the governor's office and multiple people within the state party for the Democratic Party to censor people online.
They've done that across the U.S. When they're meddling in elections and they're doing all this and they're shutting down voices and prominent parties and essentially what I would argue is Making contributions beyond the legal limits, okay?
These are things that we should be able to look at and say very clearly there's a problem here.
But beyond that, when you just look at normal people having conversations and being banned off these websites, I relate it to cell phones because if you and I are having a conversation on our cell phones right now and we're talking about politics and Verizon doesn't like what I say, they're not allowed to hop on the line and say, hey, Robbie, you're not allowed to say that.
You're going to be banned for seven days.
And if you do it again, you're going to be banned forever.
And by the way, we're going to call AT&T and T-Mobile and we're going to tell them they have to ban you too.
Everybody would understand that's crazy.
But what's kind of crazy is that they don't see that with social media, some of these people, and they should because these social media sites are actually used more for communication and conversation and sharing information than our cell phones are in terms of calling people.
So we've got to protect people's right to engage in the public square.
It's really a hallmark of American tradition and of who we are as a country.
And so that's why we've got to do it.
One of your provisions in the contract is make America safe again, which I guess is part of the way you make America great again.
We've seen these massive crime waves in, well, I would have to say largely democratic cities, and although one of your provisions is about rebuilding rural America, I think it seems to me your contract covers not just the rural areas but also the cities, and it seems like what you're saying is one of the best things you can do for cities.
is to sort of clean out the criminal element, right?
100%. And I wrote a large op-ed in the New York Post about Soros prosecutors, and I had actually done it years ago in the Federalist and warned people about what was coming and that Soros understood all politics was local and that we didn't have anybody fighting this.
And if you don't get in the fight now and realize what Soros realizes and is investing money in, we are going to end up in big trouble with crime.
And that's exactly what happened, is we didn't fight it.
Soros poured in millions into DA races that typically used to have tens of thousands of dollars put into them.
And now we have these DAs who refuse to prosecute violent crime.
I mean, they refuse to prosecute things that you would never dream of.
They're releasing people from prison who are child predators.
This is just, it should never happen in America.
And the only way it's going to stop is if we get really smart about this and we have a cohesive plan that everybody gets behind to stop it.
What do you think, Ravi, as we close out here, what do you think the motivation here is on the part of Soros and the left?
Is it that they genuinely believe the criminals are a misunderstood group of people who are a product of a racist America?
Or do you think that this is something a little darker and more insidious?
They actually want to create chaos in the cities.
Maybe this is a prelude to some sort of revolution.
Maybe, as in Venezuela, they want to deploy the criminal class as colectivos.
What do you think they're trying to do in dismantling the law and order structure of America?
It's much darker and much more insidious.
It's twofold for somebody like Soros.
Number one, he makes his money manipulating currency.
So he wants to be able to manipulate currency while he's doing this.
It's where he's made his money his whole career.
It's not a secret. But most people, I think, are not aware of that.
When you go into the real why, though, when you get into sort of the philosophical goals here, the truth is Marxism has never come to fruition in a happy country.
It comes through chaos.
And so they know they have to build up chaos, they have to build unrest, and they have to divide us as much as they possibly can if they want Marxism to have a way to rise to the top here in America.
And, you know, I think that this is a very clear strategy from them to make that happen and make that chaos reality.
And it's obviously working at this point.
Ravi, you're a great guy.
You're doing great work. All the best with your race, and thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you so much, Dinesh.
Love you guys. I'd like to talk about one of the heroes of the 1619 Project, W.E.B. Du Bois.
Now, the 1619 Project is a kind of debunking project.
It tries to debunk the American founders.
It tries to make it seem they were all white men who were in some ways trying to protect slavery.
And there are figures from black history who appear little or nowhere in the 1619 Project.
Frederick Douglass is virtually unmentioned.
They hate Frederick Douglass.
He was too pro-American.
He was a Republican.
He believed in the colorblind idea.
And even Martin Luther King.
Who championed the colorblind ideal, even though King moved left in the latter part of his life, became a virtual socialist.
Nevertheless, Martin Luther King is a bad guy as far as the 1690s.
They don't like the I have a dream speech at all.
But they do like Du Bois, and it's worth looking at what it is about Du Bois that they like the best.
Interestingly, I think what it is that they like best about Du Bois is not mentioned in the 1619 project, but we'll get to that.
So Du Bois was a sociologist, the first actually black sociologist to get a PhD from Harvard.
He was a northerner.
He was an educated man.
And he did some important work.
He did a study of the so-called Negro family around 1905.
He pointed out very importantly that the Negro family, the black family, had restored itself in the aftermath of slavery.
There are many people today who trace the breakdown of the black family.
Oh, it's due to slavery. Under slavery, people could sell off your kids and so on.
Well, all that was true, but the simple fact is that many blacks, at great pains, reunited with their families, Created a fairly stable family structure in the early part of the century, and Du Bois points this out in his important study, which was focused on Philadelphia.
Du Bois is probably best known for his book, The Souls of Black Folk, where he makes a point that I think was true in his time, but is really not true today.
And that is that blacks are caught in this kind of double identity, a dual pull, a dual tug.
On the one hand, they are Americans.
On the other hand, they are blacks.
And these identities, according to Du Bois, are sort of in conflict.
And I think this was a reasonable thing to say when you had a predominant white culture in which black culture, in a sense, was subordinated, was seen as defective, as inferior.
And so someone who was in black culture and actually appreciated black culture felt that they were being ultimately rejected in mainstream society.
And so hence this kind of feeling Of two forces pulling you in opposite directions.
But think about today and how different it is because black culture dominates American culture.
It, in fact, has shaped American culture in such a way that you have white guys who try to walk in the kind of black style or talk in the black style.
And so you have whites imitating blacks far more than you have blacks imitating whites.
And so this notion of a dual identity, which, again, I think was a legitimate issue to talk about a century ago, I think has largely become antiquated now.
But the point about Du Bois was that he was a radical, a socialist, someone who became very anti-American.
This is, I think, the real reason that the 1619 people adore him.
He was the founder of the NAACP, but the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, at that time was largely made up of whites.
But over time, Du Bois became alienated from the NAACP. Even though he edited the magazine called The Crisis, they eventually grew tired of him.
They pushed him out. He rejected them.
And in fact, he gave up his U.S. citizenship toward the end of his life.
He moved to, I believe, Ghana.
And he died there at a very advanced age, I believe his early 1990s.
Du Bois in 1937 visited Nazi Germany and came back full of praise for the Nazis.
Now, the praise was qualified.
I don't want to imply that Du Bois somehow became a Nazi, but he said nice things about Hitler.
Think about that. He admired the efficiency of the Nazis.
He even said that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis was in some way understandable under the circumstances.
And what we see here from Du Bois is an affection that he had for socialist dictatorships.
A kind of, I'm going to coin a word here, tyrannophilia that we see in Dubois.
Not just in the case with Hitler, but listen to some things that Dubois said about Stalin.
I'm just going to read a few lines.
This is from March 16, 1953, an article in The National Guardian.
I'm only going to read a few lines, but it's full of this kind of stuff.
It's absolutely disgusting.
And it's the anti-Americanism of Dubois and his praise for tyranny that I think is...
The Secret of His Appeal by the 1619 Project.
Quote, Joseph Stalin was a great man.
That's the first line.
Joseph Stalin was a great man.
Goes on to say, This was the highest proof of his greatness.
He knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his faith.
This is the Stalin who killed probably three to four times the number of Jews that Hitler killed in the Holocaust.
He goes on, Stalin was a man who thought deeply, read understandingly, listened to wisdom.
And then, to me, the worst line in the article, because it's an apology for mass murder, he says, quote, his kulaks, the kulaks are the farmers, the independent farmers, his kulaks clung tenaciously to capitalism, so says Du Bois, and were near wrecking the revolution when Stalin risked a second revolution and drove out the rural bloodsuckers.
So basically what Du Bois is doing here, he's approving...
Well, there was a mass relocation.
There was massive famine that followed that.
Stalin destroyed the kulaks as a class of people.
He didn't want these independent farmers.
He wanted the farmers to be servants of the state.
And so did Du Bois.
Du Bois approved of the tyrannical system in which you don't have independent farmers, you don't have independent businessmen, you break their necks, you break their backs, you break their spirit, and you make them into supine subordinates of an all-powerful state.
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