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Jan. 31, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:37
THE LAST GOOD MEN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep260
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A couple of big announcements I want to make.
The first one is that I've released a trailer for my new film.
It's a teaser trailer, kind of an early trailer, if you will.
The film is going to be called 2,000 Mules.
And you can watch the trailer in one of two places.
The first one is the website, 2000mules.com.
And if you go to the website, make sure that you sign up on the email list because we'll keep you informed as we get closer to the movie.
The other place to watch the trailer is on my Rumble channel.
Now, I'm not putting the trailer up on YouTube or on Facebook for the obvious reasons of the censorship regimes in place there.
I almost feel like one of these guys in the Soviet Union where there was what was called a samizdat or an underground press.
There was a samizdat media, there was a samizdat literature, and there were also samizdat conversations, things that people could say, truths that they could utter in the private sphere, but only among themselves And out of earshot of the censorship regimes in place there, in those socialist countries.
So it's a disturbing sign of socialism that we're dealing with those things here.
In any event, this is going to be huge.
It's probably going to be my biggest movie.
I believe that President Trump, former President Trump, is going to issue a statement today about this trailer.
And this is nothing like you've heard before, so keep an eye out for it.
My other announcement is minor.
I'm not going to be doing my Locals Q&A tomorrow, Tuesday.
The reason is I'm actually on the road as part of the filming of the movie, so I'll pick it up next weekend.
But if you want to check out my Locals channel, it's dinesh.locals.com.
Now, I'm going to reveal today the frustration of the Border Patrol agents who are kind of the last good men with the callous and lawless Biden administration.
A case involving the DOJ trying to get a light sentence or a lighter sentence for a very vicious Antifa-slash-BLM murderer is very revealing about the double standard of justice in this country.
Dan Crenshaw, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, is going to join me.
He's going to clarify his positions on two controversial social media clips.
And finally, I'm going to look at what is it that motivates entrepreneurs to do what they do?
And the answer turns out to be not money.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy in 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 Biden administration has, for cynical political reasons, essentially left the border open, porous.
And people are pouring through, record numbers of people.
It seems like every month we exceed the record of the previous month.
The latest data from December shows another record.
180,000 people crossed the border in December, surpassing the previous month.
To give you an idea, only 75,000 crossed in December of 2020.
So, a big surge. And this is all being done not just with the complicity, but with the invitation of Mayorkas, Kamala Harris, and of course, President Biden himself.
You can imagine what it's like to be a Border Patrol agent, and if you want to just get a sense of the kind of frustration that Border Patrol agents feel in being asked to do a job in an impossible situation, take a peek at this.
Listen. I can't hear you.
For evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
That's exactly what's happening here. Good men are doing nothing.
You are doing something.
No sir, we're not. You are.
You're rescuing people every day.
You're taking fentanyl off the streets every day.
You're taking meth at fentanyl streets.
You're eliminating it off the streets every day.
We've got the highest fentanyl death in the history of our country.
In one year.
In this country.
Well, Alex Mayorkas, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, is in town.
And, of course, this is just bringing out the anger of the ordinary Border Patrol agents.
And here's Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz.
And he's in Laredo, Texas.
And he's sort of trying to calm the Border Patrol agents and sort of put on a brave face like they're doing the best job they can.
And they're not having it.
So, you know, Ortiz is basically saying, well, listen, you know, we're still doing a lot of good work, guys.
You know, we're still stopping the fentanyl as best we can.
And the Border Patrol agents are having none of it.
They're saying, listen, there's record numbers of fentanyl coming in.
They're coming in, apparently, with the kind of wink-wink of the Biden administration.
And so, what are we even doing here?
We can't even use the word illegal.
We can't call them illegal aliens.
And then, of course, Ortiz goes, well, you call them illegals right now.
I'm not firing you, am I? So you've got a guy who's a supervisor, and he's obviously an apparatchik.
In other words, he has to represent the Biden administration.
He has to pretend like their jobs are not being systematically abused.
But I love the line where one of the agents is, in effect, quoting Edmund Burke.
That's exactly what's happening here.
Good men are doing nothing.
And I guess the implication here is if the Border Patrol agents don't speak out, it's kind of like if cops don't speak out when you have a kind of system of organized lawlessness, the system is only going to continue to get worse.
And so I feel terrible for these guys.
They've put their lives on the line.
They take risks going out every day.
They're trying to serve their country.
They're trying to do good work.
And they're being spiked.
They're being torpedoed by a callous, cynical, and politically calculating Biden administration.
You know, the left might have the power, at least to a point, to cancel Mike Lindell, but you and I have the power to uncancel him.
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Make sure to use promo code DINESHDINESH. If you don't really believe that there is a now deeply rooted double standard of justice in this country, let me give you a couple of cases to compare one against the other.
You remember Jacob Chansley, the guy with the big feathers and the guy with the ridiculous outfit on January 6th.
Now, this is a guy who went into the Capitol And basically paraded around.
No weapons, no assault, no even implication of violence.
He spent 317 days in solitary confinement.
And he got 41 months in prison.
The DOJ actually wanted more, but that's what the judge gave him.
Now, let's compare his case with the case of another guy.
This guy's name is Montez Teriel Lee.
And this is a guy during a George Floyd riot, an Antifa BLM riot.
What did he do?
He set fire to a pawn shop, deliberately.
He was an arsonist.
And there was a man inside the pawn shop named Oscar Lee Stewart, 30 years old, who was torched to death.
This guy was burned.
And his body was found afterward.
He obviously inhaled fumes and he suffocated to death as a result of the actions of this guy, Montez Terrielle Lee.
I'm looking at a picture of him.
He's kind of holding his hand up in a kind of black power salute outside the pawn shop.
He was obviously very proud of himself and what he did, and he was making a defiant gesture outside the pawn shop, like, look, I'm the guy who did this.
And now I want to read from the Biden DOJ's statement to the judge asking for this guy not to get a typical murder sentence, not to get a life sentence, not to get a capital murder sentence, because the truth of it is if you commit an intentional felony, and in the course of that felony, even though you didn't intend to kill that guy— In the commission of the intentional felony, you did kill that guy.
It becomes a capital offense normally.
Normally. But for the Biden DOJ, these are, let's just say, understandable circumstances.
And so the Biden DOJ wants 12 years for this guy, for this crime, a crime that normally carries life.
I want to read from the Biden DOJ's document...
They say, Mr.
Lee's motive for setting the fire is a foremost issue.
Mr. Lee credibly states that he was in the streets to protest unlawful police violence and was, quote, caught up in the fury.
Now, they say, the DOJ, as anyone watching the news worldwide knows many other people in Minnesota were similarly caught up.
There appear also to have been many people who felt angry, frustrated, and disenfranchised, and who were attempting, in many cases, in an unacceptably reckless and dangerous manner, to give voice to those feelings.
Mr. Lee appears to be in that category.
And then they go on to say...
He appears to have believed that he was, quote, in Dr.
King's eloquent words, engaging in, quote, the language of the unheard.
Now, Martin Luther King at one point said a riot is the language of the unheard.
And here you have the Biden DOJ invoking Martin Luther King to make this guy seem like not a nice guy, but someone who sort of got whipped up into a frenzy.
And we can kind of understand the cause because, after all, he was fighting for social justice.
And then the judge goes along with this.
The guy gets 10 years, which when you consider what he did, is an absurdly light sentence.
Here's the judge. The judge says, to Mr.
Lee. And contrast this again with the judges who have been excoriating the January 6th protesters.
Non-violent protesters.
Oh, you're overturning.
You're trying to overturn election.
You're trying to mount a coup.
You're endangering our system of government.
Here's the judge. Her name is Wilhelmina Wright.
She says to Lee that you are, quote, more than the person who celebrated your actions on social media.
You are more than the person who destroyed that business by fire.
You are more than the person who set that fire that killed a man.
In other words, the real Mr.
Lee is not the guy who did those things.
And then the basic idea is, this is how she concludes, so while there were no excuses for your actions on May 28, 2020, you have a chance to move forward and live a productive life.
The judge is actually, even though the victim is dead, saying to the perpetrator, You know, I'd like to see you go on.
I'd like to see you become a better person.
We don't have to judge you entirely by what you did on that day.
You were sort of carried away.
You were articulating, quote, the language of the unheard.
So, look at the kind of gentle, understanding, empathetic way in which the DOJ treats this particular case and then contrast it with the tight-lipped, glint-in-your-eye anger that That judges,
including in one or two cases Trump judges, have unleashed on protesters who showed up in Washington, D.C. on January 6th to simply express their frustration at what they believed was a completely stolen election.
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And there would be an investigation of what made them do that.
Actually, such an investigation of conducted impartially and fairly would reveal that these are not insurrectionists, that these are people, certainly for the most part, maybe there are one or two exceptions, who thought, oh, I'm going to take over the US government.
You'd have to be a little mentally deranged to even think that.
But nevertheless, the vast majority of people were not there for that purpose.
But what the January 6th committee is doing is hounding all kinds of people who had nothing to do with January 6th.
A case in point is a black guy named Jeff Clark, who wrote a very interesting article in the American Spectator that I'm going to summarize.
This is a guy who's kind of an American success story.
He grew up in a middle-class family.
His dad was a truck driver, a Democrat.
He became the youngest in his family to graduate from Harvard.
And I'm sorry, he was one of the youngest graduates from Harvard.
He got a degree in economics.
He went on to practice law at the law firm of Kirkland and Ellis.
And then he served a distinguished career in the Justice Department, advising in a whole bunch of different capacities.
He goes through some of his cases.
They're very different cases.
But under Trump, he becomes the head of the DOJ's civil division.
And now, when you're an attorney in the Justice Department, your job is to provide advice, your best opinion, to the president.
And that's what this guy did.
The January 6th Committee now wants him to come before the January 6th Committee and reveal what did he tell President Trump, what did he advise President Trump to do in the period leading up to and in the aftermath of what happened on January 6th.
Now, let's notice that in this country we have not only a long tradition of attorney-client privilege, but also executive privilege.
Executive privilege means that the president has a staff and he has lawyers, and in order to let those lawyers do their job, which is to say to advise him freely, what the lawyers tell him is protected and is not something that can just be blared in public or something that can be extracted even in a congressional investigation.
And so, Mr.
Clark appeals to Trump and says, in effect, are you asserting executive privilege?
Do you want me, in a sense, to divulge what I told you?
And Trump goes, yeah, I'm asserting executive privilege.
I was the chief executive.
You were my lawyer inside of the government, and so our communications are privileged.
And so Clark tells the January 6th committee, sorry, but given executive privilege and given the long tradition, by the way, the first guy to assert executive privilege in this country was none other than one George Washington.
So this is a tradition of executive privilege for the reasons I've just outlined that goes back to the beginning of the country.
So this guy, Clark, is like, I'm not showing up.
And then they're saying, well, what if we force you to show up?
What if we make you show up?
And he goes, well, if you make me show up, I'm going to have to plead the fifth.
Now, what's remarkable is that when he said that, The head of the January 6th committee, this is committee chair Bernie Thompson, I'm sorry, Benny Thompson, basically goes on Rachel Maddow and says, if this guy pleads the fifth, that means he's guilty.
I'm going to read the quote. If Clark is saying, I'll come, but I'll plead the fifth, he says, then, quote, you're part and parcel guilty of what occurred.
Really? Once again, what you're seeing here from the Democrats is flagrant violations, not just of process, but of the basic idea that you're innocent until proven guilty, that if someone wants to claim that you did a crime, you have every right to say prove it.
I don't have to collaborate with you in proving it.
You prove it, and I will plead the fifth.
Now, once again, I want to emphasize that this is not a guy who breached the Capitol.
This is not a guy who did anything on January 6th.
He's not charged in any way in that connection.
They're simply trying to bludgeon him into setting aside both executive privilege and his Fifth Amendment rights to make him testify.
And absent that, they're implying that he must be a bad guy.
This is such a basic violation of Judicial fairness that I think we can fairly conclude that the January 6th committee is legally, as well as morally, completely out of control.
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Hey guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast fellow Texan Dan Crenshaw.
Dan was a military veteran and a military hero, 10 years in the SEAL teams, two bronze stars, one with Valor, the Purple Heart, the Navy Commendation Medal with Valor, the Kennedy School of Government, And since November of 2018, he has been representing Texas's second congressional district.
Hey, Dan, thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Really appreciate it.
I remember you had me on your podcast about a year ago, I guess, and we were talking about my book on socialism and the prospect of America moving in the direction of socialism.
What's your assessment of how far we are down that road, basically one year into the Biden administration?
Yeah, it's long overdue to have you on again, Dinesh, and thanks for having me on yours.
It's a good question.
I think the question of socialism in America is fundamentally a cultural one, wherein my greatest fear is that people have become so accustomed to being paid off by the government, to being bribed by the government for their vote, That you continue to give up freedoms for the sake of whatever it is, maybe safety, maybe comfort, maybe free money.
That's the true path to socialism.
And if we don't talk more about the adventure of freedom, right?
Because freedom is hard. Freedom is risky.
Freedom means you can fail, but it also means you can succeed greatly.
And if we don't talk more about that at a cultural level, I do worry that we're on the path to socialism.
Legislatively, we've been pretty successful in stopping the Biden agenda.
Build Back Better plan is all but dead.
I'm not sure how they're going to resurrect that.
But, you know, so far, we've done pretty well.
I think the Biden administration's biggest failure is one of leadership across a wide variety of subjects that I think your listeners and you already know about.
We don't have to get into it. But the socialism problem is a cultural one.
What do you think about the fact that socialism in America has also taken on a cast that you don't find in original socialism, namely, it comes with a sort of twist of race and gender and sexual orientation.
I mean, for Marx, it was all about class, but it would seem that as conservatives and as Republicans, we have to fight socialism in this new guise.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
I think you coined a term for this, didn't you?
Identity socialism or something along those lines.
And you're absolutely right.
And, you know, the history goes back to the 60s, where they wanted to reform Marxism, I think, to be more applicable to America, because Marxism fundamentally is about pitting different groups against one another.
So Marx believed that that was the labor class versus the capital holding class.
And American leftists have transformed that into, yes, it's still rich versus poor, but they realized that wasn't sufficient, especially in a country where everybody keeps getting wealthier.
And despite all of our troubles as a country, that remains true.
It is more likely that you will rise up to the next quintile of income in America.
And so how do they then foster that resentment if people are generally kind of happy?
Well, they have to do it through race.
They have to do it through gender. They have to divide people up into these different groups.
I think that's the fundamental strategy.
Whether they're conscious of that strategy or not, I think some of the founders of the postmodernism certainly were.
I think now they just sort of follow it as if it's second nature.
Dan, I want to turn to and have you explain and clarify a couple of issues that have popped up on social media.
At least that's where I saw them.
I think they come out of the town meeting that you had in which a young girl sort of accused you of not believing that Jesus Christ was a real person.
And of course you said, hey, Jesus Christ is a real person.
But you got a little annoyed at her and you implied that she was questioning your fate.
Talk a little bit about how that came about.
I wasn't there. I'd like to sort of just get your take on what happened there.
And I want to ask you just straight out, would you think you were a little hard on her in the sense of did you become a little too defensive?
I would say simply, no, I wasn't.
She's not a little girl. She's an 18-year-old volunteer for my opponent.
So people who were there understood that I had just addressed that question because this silly rumor has been going on recently.
There's a paid smear campaign against me.
It is primary season.
And so I had addressed the rumor.
I said, look, of course, I believe Jesus is real.
You could smear me in a variety of ways.
I get smeared and lied about every single day.
But there are certain lines that I think I'm going to push back on, that I'm going to feel like you can't cross.
And questioning my faith or attacking my family, those are going to be lines that I don't want crossed.
And this stems from a very disingenuous attack on me written by some no-name writer here in the Houston area that claims that...
That my words on a previous podcast imply that I didn't believe in Jesus, which is just absolutely false.
I was talking about my book in that podcast.
And in my book, you can very clearly understand what I'm saying about heroic archetypes.
And by the way, heroic archetypes doesn't mean somebody's not real.
It just means it's the prime example of something for someone, which Jesus is the prime example of the perfect human, the perfect man for which we are to follow, to try and be more like him.
It's a very simple point that Christians understand very well.
And to try and twist my words into saying I don't believe in Jesus, that, yeah, I will get defensive.
I will get defensive at those kind of things.
I mean, the interesting thing is when I saw it, I immediately disbelieved the substance of it.
But the question I was kind of looking at was, you know, does...
Did you seem a little bit kind of discombobulated by this?
But what you're saying is that this was sort of a planted question that was designed to kind of put you up against the wall, and it was in fact motivated by somebody who was supporting one of your opponents?
Exactly. The internet believes she was a 10-year-old girl.
She's not. She's an adult who works for my opponent.
I just addressed the question, and I don't think I acted in any discombobulated way.
I simply said, look, let me help you understand because you're claiming that you don't.
These are two separate thoughts talking about Jesus.
And don't question my faith.
That's all I said. So, you know, I think there was a bit of manufactured controversy over this one.
Gotcha. Let's take a short break.
When we come back, I want to talk further to Dan Crenshaw, this time about a question involving January 6th, and also the broader question of how the GOP, the Republican Party, can come together to have a unified front going into the midterms.
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I'm back talking to Dan Crenshaw, congressman representing Texas' second congressional district.
Dan, in a second episode that was kind of bandied about social media, a guy stands up in your town hall and basically says, what can you do to help the January 6th protesters?
And you made two points.
You said, one, we're in the minority, so there are limits to what we can do.
But I think the second point is what I want to ask you about.
You said that taking symbolic action, kind of like showing up in solidarity with those guys, you said doesn't really help them.
It's maybe a photo op for me, but what does it do for those guys?
In fact, there may even be retaliation, and arguably those guys could be put into lockdown because of the public visibility and so on.
The question I kind of wanted to ask you is, A, do you sort of stand by those remarks?
And B, what if the guys who are on the inside said, you know what, we'll take the heat.
We want Dan Crenshaw to come down here and at least make a presence on our behalf.
At least assert publicly the idea that there is mistreatment going on.
There are people who are being held.
Their trials are being put off for long periods of time.
Address the January 6th issue the way you feel about it now in the context of what Of what you were asked about in the town meeting?
Yes, there's a couple of things.
Based on the allegations and the evidence we've seen or heard about, there's no question there's some mistreatment going on.
And it appears to be a very broad problem throughout our jailing system, our prison system.
So that seems to be a fact.
But I do stand by those answers.
You know, in a recent Judiciary Committee hearing, the witnesses testify that after those congressional visits, things got worse.
So it does appear to be the case that things will get worse when the wrong kind of attention is drawn to this.
Now, I've been through this before, right, with this question of what Congress should do, what kind of influence we should exert to get the outcome we wanted.
If you remember the Navy SEAL, Eddie Gallagher, he was in squalid conditions as well.
He was being treated unfairly, treated as if he was guilty and so proven innocent.
And there was a discussion in Congress about what kind of letter to write to the DOD to get this on the president's radar.
Because at the time, the president was Trump.
So we had an ally in the administration.
That's another thing that's different now.
And there was my side of it, which said, look, we've talked to legal counsel.
We believe that this approach is the right one because it might actually have an outcome.
It might actually have some kind of benefit.
And then there's this other letter that the Gallagher family wanted and that some members of Congress wanted, which was really just performative.
It was really just a shot in the dark that had no real legal teeth to it, that had no real arguments to it, and would have been ignored.
But it sounded better.
And so the question is, do we want to sound good or do good?
That's the question. And of course, some people would prefer to sound good.
I mean, Eddie Gallagher is one of my biggest trolls online right now, perhaps for that reason.
But he should know that what we were trying to do was more thoughtful, an approach that actually would have helped him.
Now, in the end, President Trump finally did Get on his radar and he took action accordingly.
So it didn't really matter what was going on in the Congress.
So that's my only point here is we have to be realistic about what we can accomplish and then how our strategy should be to get the outcome that we want.
Because I do think that there's some wrongdoing right here with these prisoners and how long they've been held without trial, without...
Without formal charges, without access to legal counsel.
Those are things that absolutely need to be investigated.
We need to win elections so that we can control those committees and investigate them accordingly.
So, I take two things from what you said, which I actually find very encouraging.
One, you're actually saying publicly now that there is a lot of mistreatment, and particularly when you're dealing with the non-violent protesters.
A lot of these guys are being, first of all, their motives are being wrongly described.
These are not young Robert E. Lees who came to overthrow the government.
These are guys who believe that hey, the Supreme Court wouldn't even hear our case.
They wouldn't even adjudicate an issue.
Let's go down there and see if we can bring it to the attention of Congress.
What about the idea of, A, just issuing a public statement that basically says, hey, listen, from what I can see, there's a lot of mistreatment because there's so much, I would say, frustration on the part of Republicans that the Democrats take their issue to the mat.
They go as far as they can go.
And for your constituents who say, well, maybe it's not tactically wise for Dan to go down there— But why hasn't he been a little more outspoken on things that he clearly believes because you're saying them to me now?
Well, every time I'm asked about this, I say it.
I said it at the event that you're referencing, too.
But that event was designed just to clip certain things and take things out of context.
But I have said it publicly, actually, many times, even before last week.
It is something, it's a fact that we're not even arguing about.
I don't even think the Democrats are arguing about it.
You know, the question is, how do we conduct that oversight that it doesn't seem like Democrats really, really want to.
It was somewhat encouraging in that in the recent hearing, the Democrats tried to argue with Jim Jordan and say, well, why do you only care now?
You know, this has been a problem that's been ongoing for years across the prisons.
And Jim Jordan actually said, yes, exactly.
Let's address all that, too.
And I thought that was a really great response.
Dan, let me ask you about a broader question, which is that here we are with an unpopular administration, an administration that has been pushing an extreme agenda and appears to be almost impervious to public opinion, thus creating a great Republican opportunity for the midterms.
But it does appear, and part of what we've been talking about shows, that there's a certain factionalism in the GOP. Can you identify, from your point of view, what is the dividing line in the GOP? Is it between an establishment and a kind of populist wing?
Is it between sort of hardcore people and so-called rhinos or moderates?
How would you draw the dividing line?
And then more importantly, how do you think that Republicans can sort of heal that divide and come together So we can march to victory in November.
I tend to think that the divisions on the right, and this is different from the left, the divisions on the right are manufactured for the most part.
There aren't wide ideological differences between a so-called moderate established Republican and a, you know, shoot first, ask questions later kind of populist fire thrower.
I'm not sure what the difference is as far as policy goes.
There's certainly a difference in tactics and in tone and in strategy.
Look, and I tend to kind of fall somewhere in between those two things, because I understand that if we really want to win, or if we really want to show people that we're fighting, then we have to have winning as the ultimate outcome.
You don't win without persuading people who disagree with you.
There's some real fighters out there, but what have they ever won for you?
They've never persuaded anybody to be part of our side.
And that's one thing I like about your career.
You go into college campuses, you bring facts, you bring reason, you bring history, and you probably persuaded a lot of people And so I suppose that puts you in this category of, you know, what people would call you establishment, you know, because you're thoughtful and you do these things.
I don't think you would call yourself that.
But I think the point is, these are often manufactured labels that are really just meant to tear somebody down so you can rise up above them.
And that's a real toxic trend that we have on the right.
This idea that you can only rise on the right if you're tearing other people down around you, calling them neocons and establishments and rhinos and all that.
But what do you even disagree on?
Really, what? I mean, if you look at the Democrats, they seriously disagree on some things.
There's a wide, wide difference between Joe Manchin philosophy and AOC philosophy.
They're in a much worse position.
They actually do have to fight that out.
And yet, they don't.
They actually don't.
Not to the extent that we do.
It's almost like we're looking for enemies everywhere.
And it should probably stop.
So you're saying we should recognize that even if there are temperamental and strategic differences on our side, we should recognize that we are on the same side and that the adversary, if you will, is on the other side of the aisle.
That's who we're up against in the election, right?
Exactly. Stop the circular firing squads and spending millions trying to invest in these primaries where It's really just about one side wants their guy and the other side wants their guy.
And what's the difference between the guys?
That's not important, right?
It's just they just want their guy.
And you see that play out instead of spending those resources on the left.
Dan Crenshaw, thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Sidesh, always great to be with you. Going online without ExpressVPN, well, that's like leaving your kids with a nearest stranger while using the restroom.
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I noticed that Washington State School Board has decided to remove from its curriculum a classic novel that I read for the first time in 12th grade in high school in this country.
I was in public school in Arizona.
This is Patagonia Union High School, circa 1978.
And I wasn't familiar with Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
A beautifully evocative novel that is set in Alabama in the 1920s, early 30s, that period.
And it's about a black guy who is unjustly accused of raping a white girl.
Gregory Peck, who plays the role in the movie, is a very good movie to Kill a Mockingbird, quite closely based on the book, and defends this black guy and is unsuccessful in defense, although he makes a completely persuasive case.
Everybody knows what happened.
Everybody knows the guy didn't do it, and yet a kind of Bigoted jury finds him guilty.
It appeals to your sense of justice.
It makes you angry at the injustice.
It is a deeply anti-racist book, as well as movie.
And yet, you might have to ask, why would the Washington State School Board, which is into anti-racism, want to get rid of it?
And now I can think of some reasons why one might want to change out a book like this.
You might say, well, wait a minute, Dinesh.
This is giving a picture of the United States that is a time capsule.
Maybe the United States was like that in the 1920s and 30s, but here we are a century later, and it's in no way like that now.
In fact, if anything, it's leaning the opposite way.
So the story, powerful though it is, has an historic significance, but it's out of date.
It's like you and me reading about the French Revolution.
We're a little far removed from that.
So young people today may not identify with the story.
In fact, it may be hard for them to make sense of it.
It becomes a measure of how much America has changed.
So maybe we should have a book that will more directly touch them.
But see, none of this has anything to do with why they pulled the story.
They pulled the story because, and this is the key point, today's anti-racism, so-called, is actually a new form of race consciousness.
It's a new form of collectivism.
It is a new form of racial dehumanization.
Now the target of the racial dehumanization today is whites.
Whites are the evil people who cannot even repent of their evil because they're congenitally evil.
So the very things that that racist jury believed of blacks in the 1920s, the left today believes of whites.
It's the same vein of bigotry now steered in a somewhat different direction.
But the moral principle being defended by Harper Lee and that is evoked by To Kill a Mockingbird is the moral principle that we should not use people's race against them.
We should not play the race card.
It's the idea that we are all individuals.
We are all in the country a minority of one.
That our rights accrue to us by virtue of being human.
These are human rights.
And so what you see is that the same anti-human hatred that is attacked in To Kill a Mockingbird is alive and well today, except now it marches not under the banner of a certain kind of brazen racism, but now under the banner of an equally brazen anti-racism.
The economist Joseph Schumpeter is one of the few economists who truly understands and in some ways celebrates the entrepreneur.
Now, if this seems odd, there's certainly been a lot of free market economists going all the way back to Adam Smith.
We can continue with people like Ricardo on through Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, there are many others.
But very few economists look at what it is that entrepreneurs do.
What kind of people become entrepreneurs?
What motivates them to do what they do?
And is it the traditional motivation that motivates most people?
A guy who goes to work is motivated, I think, by and large, by, listen, I work in order to live.
I work in order to support my family.
I work in order to have some money.
And the more money I have, I'm going to trade that money for leisure.
I'll try to go on vacation.
Obviously, ultimately, I'd like not to have to work at all.
I'd like to be able to retire, so I'm not working into my feeble years.
And this is the traditional motivation of most people.
But, says Schumpeter, this is not the motivation of the entrepreneur.
In fact, Schumpeter points out that for many, many centuries, not just in the West, but also around the world, there were really no entrepreneurs.
And he says that societies for most of history have been largely static.
If this seems like a little bit astounding, because of course history does move on, things are different, let's say, in 800 A.D. than they were in 400 A.D., and the Roman Empire comes and goes.
But no, Schumpeter's point is if you look at the standard of living, let's say of Europe, in the year 1300, and compare it to the standard of living in Europe in, say, 900.
Think of it, 400-year difference, it's about the same.
You have pheasant societies, agricultural societies, people are eking a living out of the ground.
And if all of that seems in the remote past, Schumpeter points out, and you could just as validly point out now, look around the world today.
You have today a number of societies that could accurately be described as static.
And by static, you mean that the lifestyle of the children is not much different from the parents, and their lifestyle not much different from their parents before them.
The society moves at a kind of glacial pace.
Now today, because of technology and global communications, you'd have to find rather remote societies that are static in this full sense.
But they do exist. And Schumpeter's point is what made societies different?
What put the world into the kind of forward motion in which we can almost expect that life expectancy will continue to go up and our children will have more opportunities than we did.
And that things are going to get better.
And in 1969, we got to the moon.
America did. Mankind did.
But next week, we're going to be able to put people on Mars.
And who knows what the future will bring?
Well, this notion of innovation and improvement, this is the entrepreneurial society.
And Sir Schumpeter, the guy responsible for doing it, is none other than the strange creature we sometimes call the entrepreneur.
Now, anyone who is an entrepreneur, says Schumpeter, is not an inventor, but an innovator.
And this is a kind of critical difference.
An inventor is someone who comes up with something new, but doesn't necessarily do anything with it.
Historically, for example, the Chinese had huge inventions.
They invented gunpowder, they invented printing, they invented the compass.
But because printing was kind of the prerogative of the Chinese court, the royal court, We're good to go.
Is that an invention by itself is not entrepreneurship.
What the entrepreneur is looking for is a way to bring the invention into play.
And in some cases, no inventions are involved.
The entrepreneur simply figures out a new combination, a new arrangement, a new alignment of forces that puts something new into the world.
So the novelty is the distinguishing feature of the entrepreneur.
And the entrepreneur, says Schumpeter, is a kind of a gambler.
And he makes the point here, not that the entrepreneur is taking sort of wild risks or anything like that, but the gambler is in it because he believes in the game.
The gambler is in it to gamble.
You might wonder where a guy who makes a big hit on a gambling table doesn't typically go, you know what, I made $1,000, I'm out of here.
But most gamblers aren't like that.
I mean, some of us are like that because we're like, okay, I'll try it once.
If I win, I'll go take the money and go to dinner or watch a show.
But Schumpeter's point is the real gambler, qua gambler, is going to want to keep gambling.
Win or lose, he's going to try to stay in the game.
As long as he's got coins, as long as he's got tokens, he's going to keep playing.
Because for him, it's all about the gambling.
and says, Schumpeter, for the entrepreneur, it's about the entrepreneurship.
He says the typical entrepreneur doesn't want to get out of the game.
He wants to stay in it.
As long as he's still an entrepreneur, he wants to keep going.
And this means that his motivation cannot be, let's call it hedonistic.
In other words, it is not I'm working in order to buy something else, which is to say the privilege of doing nothing, or I'm working in order to buy pleasure.
For the entrepreneur, the pleasure is the working.
The pleasure comes out of the task itself.
Now, if the entrepreneur is not motivated by hedonism, which is not motivated, let's just say, by money, what, in fact, is the entrepreneur motivated by?
And here Schumpeter gives three answers.
He says, number one, quote,"...there is the dream and the will to found a private kingdom." Wow, what an interesting way of putting it.
Essentially, Shampater Singh, and he recognizes this, that entrepreneurship today is, quote, the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man.
So the entrepreneur is not necessarily trying to be a medieval lord in the sense of having an old castle and a bunch of serfs to move around.
On the contrary, what the entrepreneur wants to do is be Sort of the monarch of his own domain.
So if I'm starting a new business, let's call it Business X, I want Business X to be it.
I want Business X to dominate the market.
I want Business X to be the standard that everybody looks to to say, if you want to get this particular product, this is the guy who knows how to do it.
And the it can be something big.
Starting, let's say, a revolution in e-commerce, or it could be something small, making the softest, sort of most enjoyable toilet paper that there is on the market.
Whatever the entrepreneur sets himself or herself out to do, they want to become the monarch of that domain.
Number two, there's the will to conquer.
And he calls it the will to succeed for the sake not of the fruits of success, but But of success itself.
So the entrepreneur wants to be a winner.
Not a winner in the sense of, I've got the most coins.
And I've actually heard entrepreneurs talk about the fact that, yeah, they like to have the most coins, but really more as a kind of measure of their success.
In a market where money becomes a determinant of whether or not people like your product, having more money becomes a symbol, almost like a badge.
Hey, people must love my product because, look, they're willingly exchanging a lot of coins for what I have to offer them.
And so it's not the money that is the goal.
The money is the sign of the success.
But the goal itself is to succeed.
It's like I had an idea, I executed the idea, and I carried the idea to the finish line.
And he says, quote, this is number three, finally there's the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply exercising one's energy and ingenuity.
And here, I think, is where what Schumpeter is saying, he doesn't say this explicitly, but I'm saying it, he compares the entrepreneur to an artist.
What do artists do?
They express themselves.
And it's the joy of creation, of self-expression.
This is the artist at his or her best.
This is the artist qua artist.
Again, the artist might say, I'd love to sell my painting like Picasso for $27 million, but that's not why I painted it.
I painted it because I had a vision.
I had an idea.
I don't feel anyone has done it this way.
I want to sort of...
Have a new approach to art.
So the entrepreneur is like that.
There's an element of artistry, there's an element of science, there's an element of art, and obviously there's also an element of mathematics.
And then, says Schumpeter, I think very interestingly, that the entrepreneur, although he doesn't want to quit, at some point he has to quit.
And why does he quit?
He says, quote, our man of action never retires while he has all his forces.
And if he does quit, quote, it is because they can see their day drawing to an end and no longer feel up to younger adversaries.
At some point the entrepreneur goes...
You know, I've been in front, I've done it, but now I'm sort of like the old bull that is being pushed by the younger bulls, and I'm no longer kind of up to the challenge.
I can no longer get in the ring with these guys.
And so he says, at this point, the entrepreneur may start behaving a little bit more like a hedonist.
And he says that even though the entrepreneur now is, you know, gets a big yacht and spends most of his time sailing the sea and essentially wants to be seen at Hollywood parties, he goes, listen.
He goes, that entrepreneur is on the downward slope.
That entrepreneur is really not even an entrepreneur.
And Sean Peter puts it beautifully.
He goes... What he's saying is that the warrior who finally picks up his weapons and goes, you know, I can't fight anymore.
There are younger guys who are bigger, they're stronger, they're just better than me.
He goes, well, you're not a warrior anymore.
Your warrior days are over.
So yeah, you've got the same man, and he looks the same, but he's a shell of his entrepreneurial self.
And I conclude this way here, Schumpeter.
You only live during a fraction of your physical life.
He says, the artist, the scholar, the politician, and also our captain of industry, they all have a relatively short time span of really creative activity.
Then a peculiar exhaustion kicks in.
The man is not himself anymore.
He doesn't come up with anything new anymore.
So at this point, you have entrepreneurs whose greatness, as you may say, in the past had They recognize it and they leave the field.
But when they leave the field, they are entrepreneurs who once were, but no longer entrepreneurs per se.
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