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Feb. 7, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:34
TRUCKERS UNITE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep265
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The rebellion of the truckers, both in Canada and the United States, represents kind of what Marx envisioned, a true worker-led, working-class revolt.
And is it any surprise the left is vehemently opposed to it?
I want to talk about why the left hates Joe Rogan so much.
Author Peter Schweitzer will join me.
We're going to talk about China's deep ties to the Bidens and a whole bunch of other US elites.
Trump and Pence are kind of at it again, and I'll try to play umpire.
And finally, I'll consult theologian Yosef Pieper on the question of whether work is for its own sake or whether it's for the sake of something else.
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.
It was Karl Marx who coined the slogan, Workers of the World Unite.
And Marx's point is that workers everywhere have a kind of common interest, and they're being exploited by the elites, and they need to rise up.
Well... Look at this trucker revolt that we're seeing.
It started in Canada. It's now in the United States.
And who are the truckers?
Well, they're the working class.
These are the blue-collar guys who get it done and deliver merchandise and drive cross-country.
And they are up in arms about, well, what they see as elite tyranny, symbolized by vaccine mandates, shutdowns, and so on.
So, this is something that the left has waited for, for a long time.
Well, really, ever since Marx.
So, they've been waiting for this for 150 years.
And for a long time, there were socialists who said, well, the working class, they're not organized.
They don't know how to do this revolt.
The revolt has to be done for them.
This was kind of Lenin, who talked about a kind of proletarian vanguard, a leadership elite that would sort of spearhead the revolution.
Here with the truckers, you don't have that kind of elite.
This is not something that is being organized by a group of intellectuals or professors or lawyers.
It's the truckers themselves.
So this is a bottom-up, genuine working-class revolt.
And guess what? The left absolutely hates it.
And so here we get to an insight that Marx seems to have missed completely, which is that the values of the left, certainly the modern left, today's left, are thoroughly antagonistic to the values of the working class.
From the left's point of view, the working class is obsessed with religion, they're obsessed with guns, they're obsessed with patriotism, they want to be left alone, they want to be free, and of course the elites don't want them to be free because the elites want to be ruling over them.
And so the elites look at the working class guys as being these kind of misguided, racist, white supremacists.
You can just see all the slogans.
And sure enough, in Canada, Justin Trudeau has been excoriating the truckers.
They're a small fringe...
Now, let's leave aside the question of whether the truckers are a fringe or not.
I mean, I guess you can argue about this.
Canada is a more liberal country than the United States.
I've looked at some survey data that says that 65% of Canadians support these vaccine mandates.
About 50% of Canadians think that the government needs to crack down more on the unvaccinated.
And apparently a lot of truckers are vaccinated.
But here's the point.
You've got this trucker revolt that's being portrayed as a, quote, fringe minority.
Only 12,000 truckers are involved.
But presumably, if this was some kind of a fringe revolt, and the vast majority of the Canadians or Americans are against the truckers, my question is, where are the counter-protests?
Where are the...
Normally, if there's a fringe group, if the Ku Klux Klan, for example, organizes a rally in Virginia and they produce 100 people, there are usually 700 people protesting the KKK on the other side.
So where's the counter-protest to the truckers?
Turns out that there really isn't one.
And... The truckers, as I say, are a genuine grassroots movement.
Now, there are some...
Canada, although a liberal country, is liberal, this is kind of similar to America, in the cities.
And the cities in Canada, I'm thinking of places like Toronto and Quebec, Montreal, do dominate the politics of the country.
But nevertheless, there are large swaths of Canada, particularly Western Canada, going all the way out to Vancouver, that are more conservative.
And apparently the Trucker Revolt is being driven from British Columbia, from that part of the country.
And look, I think as the Canadians take a stock of the situation, the political elites are all against the truckers.
But really, who needs political elites?
We do need truckers. Without truckers, you're not going to get food, you're not going to get basic provisions, you're not going to get stuff in the stores.
The truckers are the people who keep the country, you may say, moving.
And the politicians do not.
In fact, when the politicians go on vacation, the country does just fine.
Thank you very much. So I'm on the side of the truckers.
I think solidarity with the truckers is an expression of sympathy with working class sentiment.
It is a statement of resistance to the elites that have taken COVID as an opportunity to establish ever greater control over our lives.
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And to get the discounts, you need to use promo code DINESHDINESH. What's the controversy over Joe Rogan's podcast really all about?
Now, Joe Rogan is, well he's not a conservative.
He is a fellow who doesn't go with the establishment.
He's a fellow who asks questions.
He's a fellow who likes to learn.
He puts guys on his podcast.
He doesn't mind putting guys from widely across the political spectrum.
It's not clear what Joe Rogan's own politics are.
At one point, I think he said he wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders.
I know that he wasn't an enthusiast of Biden.
In fact, he memorably described going with Biden as kind of going on a hike with a guy with a very dim light bulb that was about to go out.
Flashlight. And this is the intolerableness, if I can coin a word, of Joe Rogan, is that he doesn't play from the official, well, sheet music.
And this is why the left is determined to get him.
He also has a wide reach, a big influence, the number one podcast really in the country.
And so they want to bring Joe Rogan to heel.
And this all started with a couple of hundred medical Professionals.
Now, some of them were just med students.
This wasn't really the best and the brightest of the medical community.
But nevertheless, they dash off this letter to Spotify.
Joe Rogan is putting out misinformation.
I guess this has to do with Rogan's interview with Malone, the virologist and the epidemiologist who was a partial inventor of the mRNA technology.
And this is a guy, Malone, who's not, again, on board with the CDC on COVID.
And so they want to get Joe Rogan's podcast pulled off of Spotify.
And then Neil Young, the musician, jumped on board and goes, I'm going to pull my music from Spotify.
And Spotify is like, okay.
And now others have piled in Joni Mitchell, apparently Bruce Springsteen, Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
Now, if you notice, most of these guys are like 75-year-old rockers.
We're not talking here about the biggest stars of music today.
They've been a little bit silent about all this.
But there's pressure from the left...
For these people to join in.
At one point I saw something to the effect that the Obamas are now using their leverage with Spotify to pull Rogan.
Now, Spotify is proving to be a little bit weak-kneed on this.
They've so far not given in to the idea of pulling Rogan, but they've agreed to, well, we're going to set aside a special fund for marginalized groups.
They've taken down apparently more than 100 episodes of Joe Rogan's podcast.
Now, some of this has to do with the old days.
Apparently, Joe Rogan at some time used the N-word, not as if he was using it himself, but quoting people and so on.
He's interviewed Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys.
He's interviewed Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos.
So Rogan is not allergic to having people with bold and even outlandish views on because he wants to hear them out.
He's got this kind of inexhaustible curiosity.
And I think that's a good thing.
That's a good thing in our debate.
We should have that sort of thing in America.
And obviously it appeals to people because Rogan has a kind of young demographic, an ideologically quite diverse audience.
By the way, this is why Spotify paid Joe Rogan a whole bunch of money to bring his podcast over to Spotify.
So... This is really not about misinformation.
It's not about the N-word.
Let's remember that the Antifa dude, Joseph Rosenbaum, used the N-word in his confrontation with Kyle Rittenhouse.
The left didn't seem to mind that at all.
Howard Stern, the shock jock, who's now a major leftist, but Stern in his old days used the N-word all the time, used vulgarity, used all kinds of derogatory racial epithets.
Nobody's making claims against Howard Stern or demanding that he be taken down.
So all of this is nothing more than a selective and staged indignation of a kind we're very familiar with.
And I'm worried that Spotify will collapse in the face of this pressure.
Here's the text of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, his note to his own staff.
And I'm just going to read a line or two because you get the tone.
There are no words.
First of all, whenever someone goes, there are no words, you know the guy's lying.
Because he's acting like he's so deeply troubled, he's unable to find the correct answer.
There are no words I can say to adequately convey how deeply sorry I am for the way that Joe Rogan experienced controversy continues to impact each one of you.
Not only are some of Joe Rogan's comments incredibly hurtful, I want to make clear they do not represent the values of this company.
I know the situation leaves many of you feeling drained, frustrated, and unheard.
So what this is is a weak-kneed CEO responding not to the genuine outrage, but the pretend outrage.
This is a performance, and the left realizes you put on the performance, you get the CEO to jump, and then you use that weakness.
You prey on it. You recognize that that weakness shows that the CEO is an invertebrate.
He doesn't have a backbone.
What's required is more pressure to get him to yield.
And given all this, and this is in a way a sorry testament to the state of our culture these days, I fear for the future of Joe Rogan.
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In what I admit is a move that surprised me, the Republican National Committee voted to censure both Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
These are the two Republicans, or nominal Republicans, who are on the Pelosi January 6 Committee.
And interestingly, Rona McDaniel, who's normally very cautious, this is the RNC chairwoman, was behind this.
And they said, hey, look, these are people who have become party to a political persecution.
Notice how these ideas of political persecution that were once, you know, it was one time it seemed like Julie Kelly and I and three other people were talking about this, but now this has now become the mainstream of the Republican Party.
And it's recognized the horrific role that Kinzinger and Cheney are playing as stooges of Pelosi.
Now, Cheney of course fires back, I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump.
Well, this isn't really about Donald Trump.
In fact, Donald Trump hasn't said a whole lot about January 6th.
This is about fellow Republicans Who are being put in solitary confinement, in a sense tortured.
And some of them are non-violent and some of them have not even had a trial.
They haven't been found guilty of anything.
And even so, Cheney and Kinzinger have been the cover artists for this political hit.
And hit by the Democrats.
Now... Kinzinger is an opportunist, and he's basically making his way out of politics.
But Liz Cheney is running again.
And in fact, she's raised a bunch of money.
Why? Because people like the Bushes and people like Romney have been doing fundraisers for her.
She's been able to sort of tap the old neoconservative establishment to generate money.
I don't think there's any real prospect that she's going to win re-election.
But nevertheless, she's got a war chest, and she seems to think that this kind of independence, if you will, is going to enable her to survive politically.
But I want to think a little bit about Liz Cheney, because even though Trump issued a statement and said, in effect...
Congratulations to the RNC and its chairwoman, Rona McDaniel, on their great ruling in censuring Liz Cheney and crying Adam Kinzinger, two horrible rhinos.
And that's the word I want to zoom in on, because Liz Cheney and her voting record has not been a rhino.
It's not right to say that Liz Cheney is some kind of a leftist in disguise.
No, you have someone with a pretty conservative voting record.
And so what's up with Liz Cheney?
Well, I think that there are really three things that are up with Liz Cheney.
Number one, family loyalty.
Liz Cheney sees this, her animus against Trump, is because of Trump's not just personal attack, We're good to go.
Liz Cheney is, and she's not alone in this, of course, in the Republican Party, very straight-laced.
And so her straight-lacedness, I think, turns against Trump.
She doesn't understand how other people who are also straight-laced manage to vote for Trump and go, listen, you know, Trump is the right man for the right time.
Trump is the guy who knows how to fight.
Trump is providing a kind of leadership the Republican Party does not typically provide.
And so personal foibles and peccadilloes aside, we're going to support the best general in this sort of current domestic Cold War.
But Liz Cheney doesn't get that.
She's like, why would anybody want to support that guy?
So, here you have a person who has this family loyalty, who is straight-laced, and then, this is the third element that I think is needed to complete the picture, has a certain kind of obstinacy and self-righteousness.
I say that because she's the kind of person where if you question her...
I mean, look, you have the vast majority of the Republican Party that's gone the other way.
And you think a normal person would go, well, you know what?
Yeah, I have these views, but when all my fellow Republicans think differently, maybe there's something wrong with the way I'm seeing it, but that's not Liz Cheney.
Her view is, I'm right.
Well, if the majority of Republicans don't see it my way, that's because they are craven sycophants who have decided to worship at the altar of Donald Trump, whereas I alone, Liz Cheney, are going to stand against the tide.
So this is the self-righteousness I'm talking about.
It's actually a character defect.
Why? It's a character defect because it doesn't recognize that there is a range of ways that one can look at a situation in the world.
And by the way, we have to extend that same sort of sympathy of understanding, which I've tried to do in this very segment, toward Liz Cheney, but it's a sympathy that I don't detect that Liz Cheney has for the rest of us.
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Guys, I'm just delighted to welcome to the podcast Peter Schweitzer, my friend, investigator extraordinaire, president of the Government Accountability Institute, and author of this remarkable bestseller, Red-Handed, How American Elites Get Rich, Helping China Win.
Peter, thanks for joining me.
There's just so much in this book.
It's so thoroughly researched.
I want people to get the book, read the chapter and verse for themselves, but let's just touch on some of the high points, starting with the big man, Joe Biden.
How has Joe Biden and the Biden family enriched themselves at the hands of the Chinese?
Well, Hunter Biden did a series of business deals in China.
I first reported on that back in 2018.
But we have new information.
We have the Hunter Biden laptop.
We have an email collection from one of his business partners.
And what we've done, Dinesh, is try to figure out exactly how much money did they get and who made those deals happen.
Or as our kids would say, who made it rain now?
For the Bidens in China.
And what we found is that the deals that we know of, they received some 31 million dollars in these deals.
And these deals were arranged by Chinese businessmen, and every single one of them has links to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence.
So what was initially a story about corruption, self-dealing, and cronyism is, in my mind, a story now of intelligence, possibly of espionage.
And we need to entertain the idea and investigate the fact that the Biden family may actually be compromised by Chinese intelligence.
One thing I found striking is that we know, and I think you talked in one of my movies about Rosemont Seneca as being one of the pass-through companies that was set up by Hunter Biden along with a business partner named Archer.
But here in the book, you divulge that it isn't one company.
Rather, there's a kind of a myriad, a network of companies.
And I wonder if the motive of doing it this way is to camouflage the degree of involvement between the Bidens and China.
I think absolutely that's part of the motivation.
I mean, there are dozens of LLCs, limited liability companies, that Hunter Biden set up.
Some of them are simply pass-throughs.
Some of them serve very specific purposes.
But yes, it's kind of this plate of spaghetti of entangled LLCs that work together.
And I think obscuring the trail is part of it.
It's also clear that Hunter Biden was trying to obscure the trail in One of the things I point out is that once he starts securing these deals in China that, as I said, are linked to Chinese intelligence in some way, you have Hunter Biden make a very bizarre request.
He goes to the U.S. Secret Service, and they've confirmed this, and says, I don't want protection when I travel overseas, including to China.
This is remarkable because anybody who does business in China knows that you can be vulnerable to compromise to all kinds of intelligence operations, and that would include the vice president as well.
So yes, there's a lot of efforts here to conceal who he was doing the deals with and how that money was channeled back to the family.
Also, Peter, once you trace the money flowing into the Biden family, you make it really clear that this isn't just for funding Hunter Biden's drug habit or it isn't money just for Hunter Biden to pocket for himself.
There's a very interesting way in which it flows back to other members of the Biden family, including the man sitting in the Oval Office.
Describe how that happens.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
Joe Biden says, I've never taken a dime of foreign money.
Well, that's because it's, in effect, laundered through Hunter.
Because what we found out is that Hunter Biden was subsidizing his father's lifestyle.
He was paying some of his monthly bills, but he was also paying for other expenses, like renovations on his home in Delaware, while Joe Biden was vice president of the United States.
So Hunter Biden, in a sense, is kind of the entity that serves as the pass-through.
Between these Chinese companies or businessmen and Joe Biden himself, to be clear, this is not legal.
You're not allowed to do this as a politician, to have your lifestyle subsidized by a family member.
And it also raises troubling questions about the issue of compromise, because I'm sure that Beijing has some awareness of where this money is going.
And I think that Joe Biden had to have an inkling that this money was coming from hundreds overseas deals.
One thing, Peter, is that you could have written a whole book just on the Bidens, but you expand the circumference of this inquiry.
You talk about members of Congress.
I want to focus briefly on two, Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein.
I mentioned Dianne Feinstein because she's not only an influential senator, but she's been in there for a long time.
And so, has cultivated, as you demonstrate, long-term dealings with the Chinese.
Talk about how the Pelosi and Feinstein families have struck it rich, in part, through the Chinese.
Well, Dianne Feinstein, as you point out, it's unfolded over the course of decades.
And what's important to point out is that Dianne Feinstein was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of only a handful of people that get access to the top intelligence in the country.
And during her tenure in that position, her husband was securing Hundreds of millions of dollars of deals in China, deals with Chinese state-owned companies.
A lot of them were regarded as groundbreaking because her husband Richard Blum was the first one to get those kinds of deals in China, which speaks to the fact that these were special deals.
But to show how this penetration worked in sort of a bizarre way, While she is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, her husband Richard Blum is a large shareholder in a Chinese computer company called Legend, which sells computers to the United States military.
You gotta wonder how that happens.
But the US Marine Corps discovers that these laptop computers have bugs in them, and they're sending all the information back to China.
That's part of the record in several court cases.
So the bottom line is the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee's husband is partners with a company that is trying to bug the laptops of the United States Marine Corps at the same time.
You can't make it up. We're good to go.
China's very happy with that.
It's important to keep in mind, their approach on these matters is they don't expect robotic response from American politicians.
Their strategy, loosely translated, is they want big help with a little bad mouth.
So if you talk about the Uyghurs, if you talk about human rights, they don't really care.
As long as you help them with the really big and important stuff, they are very happy with what American politicians are doing for them.
Let's take a pause, Peter.
When we come back, I want to delve into this some more by talking about some private sector actors, people like Jack Dorsey at Twitter, people like Joe Sy, LeBron James.
We'll be right back.
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I'm back with author Peter Schweitzer, the new bestseller, Red-Handed, How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.
Peter, one thing that struck me about the book is, you know, you have people who might habitually say, well, listen, you know, China has moved from a socialist to a capitalist economy.
True, it's a state-directed capitalism, but it's capitalism all the same.
What's the big deal of doing commerce with China?
But you're not talking about mere trade back and forth in which the normal rules of comparative advantage apply.
It seems to me you're talking about the Chinese government having a long-standing policy of corrupting politicians by sweetening their pockets in the hope and expectation that That these politicians will then do the bidding of China.
Isn't that the core argument you're making here?
Yeah, no, I think this is a vitally important point for people to understand.
China's not a Marxist-Leninist system.
It's a Leninist system.
So, yeah, you have capitalism, but it's state-directed capitalism.
And what we're talking about here is not, you know, wanting to import potato chips or export potato chips to China.
What we're talking about here is getting access to critical Chinese industries, being able to invest in certain companies and certain industries that are restricted, And sweetheart deals, where it's really not at all merit-based.
It's not based on some competition.
It's based on the Chinese government deciding to enrich a politician and their family.
And they have a term for this, by the way.
They call it elite capture.
That's the term that Chinese intelligence uses.
And it's kind of genius if you think about it, Dinesh, because they know if they go head to head to the United States, they're going to run into trouble.
We've got a dynamic economy.
We've got cultural influences around the world.
So their strategy is we're not going to go head to head.
We're going to effectively lobotomize Our chief rival, the United States, by buying off key elements of the leadership.
If we can get the leadership to ignore Chinese threats, to ignore our expansionist policies, to make excuse, we will win this race.
And they are very confident.
And I think if you look at the evidence right now, they're doing a pretty damn good job of doing it.
Peter, let's move beyond the immediate precincts of government to now move into the American private sector.
You point out that in 2010, Jack Dorsey was a little shocked to hear that Twitter had been banned in China.
Now, all these high-tech guys want to make money in China.
They see it as a giant market and a bigger market even in the future.
So talk about Twitter's strategy.
Once they realize, we have no business in China right now— They needed to take down this sort of great wall of China, so to speak, in terms of Twitter.
How did they do it? Yeah, their strategy to do it was to basically get co-opted by Beijing.
And they did it by bringing in a senior leadership team of people focused on China that had links to the Chinese government, that had links to the Chinese military.
The problem is, as you can imagine, when these executives came and took positions at Twitter, they started making excuses for Beijing's conduct.
They certainly didn't do anything to limit the censorship of Twitter in China, but what they did do was get Twitter to start doing the bidding of Beijing.
And there are numerous examples in the book where opponents of the Beijing regime who wanted to recount the anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square found themselves blocked on Twitter.
And it was done by Twitter itself, not by the Chinese government.
And Jack Dorsey's strategy at Twitter is very reminiscent of what you see with all the big players, Google, Microsoft and Bill Gates, LinkedIn.
They all have this strategy of doing Beijing's bidding because they believe that that's what's going to be the secret to untapping the market.
The problem is that gives Beijing leverage over them.
And Beijing never lets go of that leverage and these big tech firms end up essentially doing what Beijing wants them to do.
Let's move from high tech to the world of sports.
And let's talk about Joe Tsai and LeBron James.
I mean, here's the case where you have a guy who helped make a lot of money in China right through the company called Alibaba with a partner named Jack Ma.
These guys make a ton of money.
Joe Tsai subsequently buys a sports team.
And then you begin to see the NBA as a franchise starting to bow, if you will, before the Chinese communists.
Talk a little bit about how that process came to be.
You'd think that the NBA would be fiercely independent, but it looks like they're perfectly willing to do the bidding of the Chinese, aren't they?
Yeah, I mean, the NBA has made the calculation that there are far more consumers in China for the sport than there are in the United States.
And one of the reasons that Joe Tsai was welcomed as an owner of the Brooklyn Nets is precisely because he's supposed to be a bridge to China.
Here's the problem. I mean, Joe Tsai is the co-founder of Alibaba.
This is a company that was protected by the Chinese state, does a lot of work with the Chinese military and the Chinese intelligence services.
Joe Mai is estimated to be worth 15 to $20 billion.
And he's very supportive of the regime.
He says that there really aren't human rights problems in China, they're exaggerated.
At the same time, he's put some $100 million into Black Lives Matter causes in the United States.
Things really came to a head when the general manager of the Houston Rockets sent out a tweet in support of protesters in Hong Kong.
Tsai really led the charge in condemning that move that eventually got the general manager of the Houston Rockets fired.
LeBron James came in a ringing defense of China saying that the Houston Rockets general manager didn't know what he was talking about.
He was speaking out of ignorance.
And the problem is that LeBron James has been doing this for a while, because not only does he have the big Nike deal, and of course Nike sells a lot of products in China, he also has a media deal with Chinese state-owned media.
He has a separate shoe line that is released only in China.
So he's been doing this for a while.
Going back to 2007-2008, Dinesh, you probably remember the crisis in Darfur.
That's South Sudan.
Where the Sudanese government, the Arabic government, was slaughtering black Christians in the South.
By some estimates, 200,000 people were killed.
That regime was doing it with the full support of the Chinese government.
There was actually a petition drive in the NBA to condemn the Chinese government for these mass killings.
LeBron James refused to sign that petition.
He was one of only two players on the Cleveland Cavaliers who wouldn't sign it.
The other one had a shoe contract with a Chinese company.
So this is a long and deep problem and I think really shows the rank hypocrisy and inconsistency of people like LeBron James because obviously those 200,000 Christians slaughtered in South Sudan, those black lives did not matter to LeBron James.
Do you think, Peter, that part of the racial and political posturing of a lot of these individuals is aimed at camouflaging the fact that when it comes to China, their commercial interests are front and center, so that it's almost like they're preening and putting themselves forward as if these are people who don't care about money, They care about virtue kind of the Colin Kaepernick sort of business model But but it when you look at the bottom line you see that
these people care about money a great deal Yeah, there's a lot of camouflage going on here Dinesh. I mean Thank you.
Absolutely do not say that about China.
And they actually praise the regime in China.
It's really quite stunning when you see the contrast between the two.
So you have to ask yourself, how really committed are they to these social justice causes?
Or is this a way of them kind of, you know, Peter, this is a remarkable book, folks. You've got to check it out.
It's called Red Handed by Peter Schweitzer.
Peter, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Always a pleasure, Dinesh. Thanks for having me.
We all know we need to eat a certain amount of fruits and veggies for our diet just to keep us healthy, just to keep ourselves going, just to preserve our vitality.
But most of us, and I'm included in this, we don't do it.
Partly we don't know how, partly we don't like certain vegetables or certain fruits.
Well, here's a great remedy for this problem.
It's called balance of nature.
Debbie and I are sold on balance of nature.
Every day we take three of these.
This is the fruits. Three of this.
These are the veggies. And it's easy to do.
It goes down very easily.
No problem. And Debbie also swears by this.
This is the fiber and spice.
She says it keeps her more regular.
She says it also helps with her acid reflux.
So try Relief Factor.
It works. Invest in your health.
Invest in your life. Experience the balance of nature difference for yourself.
And for a limited time, all new preferred customers will get an additional 35% discount and free shipping on your first balance of nature or There's a skirmish that's developed, a public skirmish between Trump and Mike Pence.
And I want to kind of adjudicate it a little bit.
It's not the kind of vicious back and forth that we have seen with other people.
Trump, for example, has been pretty severe in attacking Mitch McConnell.
He calls him, I mean, wow, a broken old crow.
And so you've got some...
Harshness that Trump has habitually exercised against other Republicans.
Now, I don't in general approve of this.
I don't think it's the right way to go.
And in fact, I think Trump himself has paid dearly for it.
I say this because there are Republicans, Marco Rubio being a notable example of someone that Trump sort of humiliated, and Rubio has sort of never been quite the same.
Never been quite the same in general and never been quite the same Now, Trump is not making that mistake with Mike Pence.
At the Federalist Society in Florida.
And he said this, quote, President Trump is wrong.
I had no right to overturn the election.
And then he gives this reasoning.
The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.
Frankly, there's almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.
Now, you could analyze almost every line in that statement because it's a very odd statement.
Yes, the presidency belongs to the American people, but of course the issue here was, was this election properly conducted?
That was the issue. Did the states that submitted these results follow their own rules?
Trump, of course, was not asking Pence to, quote, choose the American president.
Trump was asking Pence to return the matter to the states for reconsideration in conjunction with their own laws.
So, in a sense, Trump was saying to Pence, hit the pause button.
You have the power to do this.
Now, whether or not Pence has the power to do this is a little bit, is debatable.
There is an Electoral Count Act.
And by the way, the Democrats now, with some Republican support, are talking about modifying the Electoral Count Act.
They're talking about modifying it so that there needs to be a larger number of lawmakers who object before a state's electoral vote count can be challenged.
They're also trying to, quote, clarify the role of the vice president in the certification process.
He plays a formal role, but he doesn't have the right unilaterally to say, hey, listen, I adjudicate this process to be insufficient.
Back it goes to the states.
And Trump is making a subtle point in his reply to Pence.
He's going, wait a minute. If they're trying to amend the Electoral Count Act to sort of say that the vice president doesn't have this kind of power, well, doesn't that imply that as of now, the vice president does have the power?
So, in other words, Trump is saying, isn't the very need, the so-called need to modify the rules, show that the rules as they are currently, Would have given Pence this exact power.
Here's Trump. Just saw Mike Pence's statement, and he goes on the fact that he had no right to do anything with respect to the electoral vote count other than being an automatic conveyor belt for the old crow Mitch McConnell to get Biden elected president as quickly as possible.
So here's Trump lashing out, not so much at Pence, but really more at McConnell.
And then Trump makes the point that if there is fraud, if there's irregularities, then Pence, he says, does in fact have that kind of a right.
Now, on the merits of this, I'm actually on Pence's side.
I think that Pence, it would have been too much for Pence unilaterally.
And remember, the thing about Pence is not merely that Pence is the one who would be deciding to send it back to the States.
Pence is himself on the ticket.
I mean, Pence is one of the participants in the election.
Now, by the way, if this was a Democrat, they would do it.
You know, the Democrats are not known to be held back by scruples or moral qualms.
Wait a minute, I'm on the ticket. I can't possibly do this.
But I have to say that on the merits, looked at them strictly speaking, I think that Pence did make the right decision.
I do think that the challenges to the election should have come earlier.
The Republican Party in general should have been better prepared.
All of this is stuff I'm looking into now, and I think you know I'm making a movie on this subject.
Look, I hope that Trump and Pence can mend their fences.
Obviously, if Trump runs again, Pence is not going to be on his ticket.
Apparently, Pence himself is considering running for the presidency.
Personally, I consider that to be a bit of a joke.
I'm, in fact, amazed at the psychology of people like Pence who think that they would be a serious candidate.
I mean, just because you are a vice president, you're, what, the automatic frontrunner?
No. I think what happens is that people like Pence, and this is true of others, they surround themselves by flatterers, they surround themselves by toadies, and these toadies are like, oh yes, you would undoubtedly be the frontrunner.
And then Pence goes, oh boy, yeah, I better run, I better run, I'm going to make it.
So there's this kind of ridiculous psychology that gets these people already predisposed to megalomania, to have their megalomania go through the roof.
And then they wonder where when they speak, you know, people stare stone-faced like, what did I just hear?
And they're like, what's wrong with the audience?
I'm amazing.
The audience must be very unamazing.
It's kind of a pity that I have to lead such yahoos.
So this is how that elite mentality develops itself.
And instead of having a little introspection, I'm going, you know what?
I shouldn't be a candidate.
Looked in the mirror. I've got to recognize I suck.
I should go do something else.
But instead, it's like, no, I shouldn't do something else.
You know, all my aides think I'm amazing.
True, they're on my payroll.
But nevertheless, they see me up close.
They recognize how great I am.
And therefore, they're only greater things for me to come in the future.
There is an amusing anecdote, I find it amusing, about a millionaire who comes across on the street a, well, a bum, a guy who's doing nothing with his life.
And the millionaire says, why are you a bum?
And the guy goes, well, what do you want me to be?
And the millionaire goes, well, listen, you need to get a job.
And the guy goes, why?
And the millionaire goes, well, if you get a job, you can then, um...
Earn some money. And if you earn some money, you can put aside some savings.
And over time, your job may lead to a better job.
And that means more money.
And that means more savings.
And you can build up a retirement plan so eventually you won't have to work anymore.
And the bum goes, why do all that?
I'm not working now. And although this is, you know, kind of a wry anecdote, I think it encapsulates something rather profound, which is the question of what it is that work is for.
Now, Debbie says, honey, I think you would you classify me as a workaholic?
I think the verdict here is yes.
And Debbie's point is that I sort of never turn it off totally.
Her point is, you don't seem to respect weekends, Dinesh.
In fact, sometimes I'll try to call someone on a Saturday and she's like, Dinesh, some people do not work on the weekend.
They may not live at this house, but nevertheless, you should respect the fact that people don't work on weekends.
And I think it is maybe part of the architecture of our modern society that the weekend has to some degree been maybe not abolished, but eroded.
These days, if somebody sends you a text, they get really annoyed if you don't respond in like 30 minutes or even sooner because it's like, wait a minute, I texted you.
Obviously, you got it.
Why haven't you replied?
And by the way, Debbie is an incredibly prompt replier to text.
I mean, she's watching a movie.
She's like, oh, I better reply.
So here's a line from the theologian Joseph Pieper.
The world of work is becoming our entire world.
Now, interestingly, Pieper wrote that in 1947.
And think how much more true it is today.
Now, true, we have people in our society who don't work, and some who don't want to work, and some who would rather take their government checks instead of working.
So you do have that. But on the other hand, Americans have long been known to be really hard workers.
I remember there was a survey some years ago in which they asked people from different countries, if you were paid double and you were working the normal eight hours a day, how much overtime would you want to put in per day?
And I think the British came in as absolutely the laziest.
They were like, none. They were like, listen, I've got to go to the pub, you know, hang out with my friends, you know, have a little tip.
And then they're also like, I've got to go home.
I've got some vegetables in my outer garden, and I have to water them.
Or I've got to go watch a bird.
Okay. This is the British.
And by the way, the French come in close after that.
They're like, I have to eat my croissant.
Now, the hardworking people are the Germans and the Americans.
They're like, we'll put in a lot of hours.
You pay us double? Really? Okay, sign me up.
And so this is the hardworkingness of the American psyche.
And Pieper's point is, at a point, after a point, it's not good.
Pieper's reason is kind of subtle.
He says, look, work is utilitarian.
Work is, you may say, for the sake of something else.
And what is that something else?
Well, Pieper says that something else is what he calls leisure.
And Pieper's book is called Leisure, the Basis of Culture.
And now, by leisure, Pieper does not mean doing nothing, although doing nothing is part of leisure.
Pieper means that, as opposed to the utilitarian philosophy, which is work, work, work, Pieper says that leisure is for its own sake.
And he has very poignant and interesting things to say about leisure.
He says that leisure is what you would do and that you don't have to be paid to do.
What it is that you truly want to do.
Moreover, he says leisure is a kind of gift.
Because in leisure, you accept life as something that is given to you.
You didn't do anything to, quote, earn it.
It's received by you.
And in leisure, you, in a sense, absorb and contemplate and take in the beauty of life, again, for its own sake.
It's not for something else.
It's for its own sake. And so leisure, says Pieper, quote,"...allows us to grasp the world as a whole." And to see our place in it.
Now contrast this with work.
In work, if you're, think of it, you're in an assembly line.
You know, you're trying to get a part.
You're trying to move something down the conveyor belt.
You're trying to get a car made.
That's a very specific thing.
But, says Pieper, in leisure, we take in the entire cosmos, so to speak.
And leisure for Pieper, and he's a theologian, is a form of worship.
And by worship, he means this isn't you just getting something for yourself.
This is you submitting, if you will, to the grandeur of creation, putting yourself under the sovereignty of God.
Leisure is something that you kind of, it's a voluntary sort of submission.
And in the end, says Pieper, a guy can be materially poor.
But rich in terms of the psychological and spiritual good that he calls leisure.
And says Pieper, the world is fighting between the world of work and the world of leisure.
And it's almost like each side wants to overtake the other.
And it may appear that in our world, work has won.
Work has essentially overrun leisure.
Now, the one thing that I think that Pieper does not focus on sufficiently, and this is particularly true not of all work, but it is true of my kind of work, and I would describe it as work as a form of leisure.
And what I mean by that is, obviously, someone like me works hard.
And why do I work hard?
Well, it's because I enjoy it.
It's because for me, well, I mean, I enjoy things other than work.
I enjoy hanging out with Debbie.
I enjoy traveling. I enjoy spending time together.
I enjoy chess. Maybe a bit too much, Debbie goes, yes.
But the point is, I also enjoy work.
And, you know, someone once said, if you find a job that you love...
You'll never work a day in your life.
It was also true of the medieval craftsman.
Think of somebody who made a table, but made a table with such kind of care and creativity and love and perfection that he could step back and look at that table and go, wow, what a table.
This is a kind of act of creation that I, the craftsman, have done that brings, if you will, a certain pleasure.
And it goes far beyond what I can sell the table for or what I can barter the table for.
So I think Pieper is right about the importance of leisure.
What he overlooks is that work at times can include or be a form of leisure itself.
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