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Feb. 14, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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LOVE ACTUALLY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep270
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Today is Valentine's Day and so Debbie and I are going to discuss the secrets of a happy marriage.
Now you guys are like, you guys have a happy marriage?
Well, you're going to find out. John Durham may have caught Hillary red-handed and the only question now is will the crooked one get away with it again?
We're getting the results, the practical, empirical results of the Texas law, and I think it's going to help convince the Supreme Court that Roe v.
Wade should go.
And entertainment writer Christian Toto will join me.
We're going to talk about how Hollywood became so deranged on identity politics and everything else.
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.
Today is, well, Valentine's Day, and so we thought we would do a little Valentine's Day special.
And we thought we would actually talk about relationships and about marriage and...
Kind of what makes marriages tick?
Now, obviously, I don't know if we have a representative marriage, but I think we do have a happy marriage.
Now, people say, listen, the man's opinion does not matter.
It all depends on the wife.
Really? Apparently, you're, like, sovereign on this question.
Interesting. As to whether we have a happy marriage.
What would you say? I would say we absolutely have a happy marriage.
Okay, now, I think there's the opening line in...
Is it War and Peace or is it Anna Karenina?
He says that happy marriages are all the same, but unhappy marriages are unhappy in different ways.
So do you think that there is a set of ingredients that makes a happy marriage?
You printed this thing out you were showing me where I guess they have couples who write in and offer comments about what they think makes a marriage successful.
Yeah, yeah. Well, you can refer to the comments, but let's just also talk about our own experience.
What do you think are the two or three key ingredients that make marriages work?
Well, I'm not going to go into one of them because it's rated R. But anyway, you can take whatever you like from that.
But also, though, I think that communication is super important.
And I think that both of us definitely communicate.
And, you know, a lot of times people ask if we talk about politics and, you know, all of those things.
What do we talk about? We do talk about politics, but of course that's not all we talk about.
We have a lot of other interests that we, you know, share.
And also I think we're both very, we're kind people and we're kind to each other.
And I think that goes a long way because...
And it's interesting. We have friends who are...
Well, we would call them sort of combative and yellers.
And so they will...
I mean, they've had long marriages.
And so they will excoriate each other.
They'll use insulting names.
And they let it bounce off each other.
So their marriages actually are fine.
But we don't do that.
We're actually quite gentle with each other.
And if you get flustered about something, it flusters me.
And vice versa.
So... I think you're right.
We don't use that word.
We don't use that motto. Now, interestingly, there's an article here.
This is from The Mirror.
This is actually British. The recipe for a perfect marriage includes two huge arguments a month.
Now, it doesn't say just argue.
It talks about six meaningful conversations, three long walks, and two barnstorming arguments.
Oh. Wow.
Well, we have more than six meaningful conversations.
We have six meaningful conversations per day.
And we do take walks, although perhaps not in the winter.
Not now. It's too cold. But we don't have the arguments.
I mean, we've had what I would say.
Well, I would say yesterday we came as close to a disagreement as like we've come in a while.
What was the nature of that disagreement?
So basically, you know, I have to tell everybody.
So Dinesh did an event in Idaho this past weekend.
And unfortunately, it was not one of those trips where you can just come and go, you know, direct flight or whatever.
It was one stop and all those things.
So he was gone all weekend.
He was gone from Friday noon until Friday.
Like 10 o'clock at night last night.
And he calls me when he gets to the airport or whatever.
He goes, honey, I have this radical idea.
And I said, what's your radical idea?
Well, you know, as you know, we are doing a movie right now.
And Dinesh always does an accompanying book with the movie.
So he's working on a book that goes with the movie.
It's 2,000 Mules. And the book will come out later than the movie and it will...
But the idea is you can put more comprehensive stuff in a book.
Yes, absolutely. So you have more detail in the book and everything.
Well, it turns out that my husband doesn't know how to say the word no.
So he gets all kinds of media requests.
Oh yeah, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it.
So there goes his whole day.
But because of that, he hasn't really had time to sit down and write the book.
So last night when he was at the airport, he says he had this radical idea.
He said he was going to, and I'm not kidding, get up at 2 in the morning, every morning, and work from 2 to 4 or 2 to 5, and then from 5 to 6 work on the podcast.
I thought I was going to lose it.
You thought this was nuts. Oh, yes.
I sent you your nuts emoji.
And then I had to go, I'm nuts about you, actually.
But no, seriously. So you work so hard.
You work nonstop. But there are some things that I think you do that I feel can actually not benefit you health-wise.
So here's a good point. And that is that, you know, so you're...
I think that the reason we don't have friction on all these points, even on, well, another big issue, of course, and this is a case of constant, is my diet.
Oh, yeah. And my working out habits.
Now, the point is...
Some might say you're a little bossy.
Yeah. Some might say you're on me.
But the reason I don't take it that way, or I don't take it the wrong way, I think, is because I know it's well-motivated.
So you're motivated by...
And you're motivated really not even by your convenience.
You're motivated by my welfare.
So your idea is, Dinesh, I want you to be healthy.
I want you to be around a long time.
So you need to eat properly.
And exercise is really good for you.
And you watch my sugar levels.
Yeah. Well, we're both pre-diabetic, so we both need to watch our sugar, right?
And so now we're eating, like, he's not supposed to eat chocolate.
But our interpretation of pre-diabetic differs dramatically.
To me, pre-diabetic is another way of saying you are not diabetic.
It's sort of like saying I am, you know, I am pre-being in the coffin.
Yeah, I'm pre-being in the coffin.
I'm not in the coffin.
I'm not dead yet. Yeah.
Exactly. Oh, no. But so we've found these chocolates that are really good.
They're chocolate with no sugar.
But I always tell you, but honey, you have to watch the chocolate because it has a lot of fat.
So even though it doesn't have sugar, it has fat.
And we have to be very careful because, again, we have...
May I just note that sugar-free chocolates are really expensive.
We've supposedly found the best sugar-free chocolates, but they were literally, I think they were $5 each, and once you order them and you factor in the tax, it was $7 per piece.
Oh, per piece. And the piece was like this little.
I mean, I couldn't even enjoy them.
It was tiny. No, and it was good, but it wasn't that good.
Let's talk about the importance of, do you think, some people say, and in fact, apparently when young people are asked, what are you looking for in a mate, they answer, the number one answer is a sense of humor.
Do you think a sense of humor is important in a marriage and also...
Well, I mean, it's a bonus.
Yeah. It's a bonus.
It's not important.
The person can be kind, compassionate, patient with you, all those things.
I mean, there are people who have no sense of humor, and they are nice people.
And they are nice people. But when you have all the other qualities that you have, plus you're really super funny and you make me laugh out loud pretty much every day and every night, I think that's a bonus.
I think that's like the icing on the cake.
Well, I think the reason I make her laugh is because I'm...
Because you're funny. Well, no, it's because I'm straight-laced on the surface.
Oh, very straight-laced.
But I do see the ridiculous aspect of human nature.
And I think, you know, one way humor works the best is if you're willing to turn that same lens on yourself.
Yeah, self-deprecating.
Yeah, because then people can see that the humor isn't really ridicule.
Like, I make jokes about you, but they're not mean.
They're never aimed at injuring you.
No, you make fun of my germophobia.
I make fun of your germophobia and other things.
Yeah, yeah. Thank you.
Thank you for pointing that out.
Happy Valentine's Day to you.
Happy Valentine's Day, honey.
I love you. Oh, I love you too.
One of the things Debbie and I know from personal experience, but you can also see it from his public actions, is what a nice guy Mike Lindell is.
There's a hurricane. He's there to help.
And the latest is he's helping the truckers.
The truckers. He's sending how many pillows?
Thousands of pillows. And, you know, this is a guy who just has a huge heart.
And for this reason, we think that we want to support him every which way.
It's our way of uncanceling Mike Lindell.
And he makes it easy because he has good products.
And he also offers good deals.
Well, here's a good deal. This is on the Geezer Dream Sheet.
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And plus, Mike is throwing in his book.
So if you make an order from MyPillow, Mike will send you a copy of his book.
Yeah, and it's a really good book.
It's a window into his life and the ordeal that he went through and his Christianity, how he found Christ.
I mean, it's amazing. It's a book about redemption.
Yeah. And it's a book about suffering, but it's also about transcending that suffering.
It's very moving. So here's how you do it.
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What actual impact has the Texas pro-life law had on the number of abortions in the state of Texas?
When the law passed, I mentioned that a number of the abortion clinics were closing down or were restricting their operations.
All very good news.
But it was not clear what the actual effect would be.
And now we have, well, just an early glimpse that the Texas law is working.
Now, according to the data, this is coming from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
The number of abortions in Texas fell 60% the very first month under this abortion law.
And the abortion law, by the way, does not allow abortions It's a heartbeat bill.
Once cardiac activity is detected, that's usually around six weeks.
So this is a law that essentially stops abortion in its tracks.
And it doesn't have any real exceptions.
No exceptions for rape, no exceptions for incest.
It's a law across the board.
And the law has the funny provision, or the interesting provision, that it allows private citizens to sue and actually get $10,000 from abortion providers and abortion sort of enablers.
And interestingly, there have been no such lawsuits yet.
No one has actually filed a case.
And so the law, however, has had a powerful deterrent effect.
Planned Parenthood, of course, was screaming about the law from the beginning.
And they're actually screaming even more now that the actual number of abortions has gone down.
So here are the numbers. In August, this is right before the law, there were 5,400 abortions in Texas statewide.
And in September, that number plummets to 2,200.
So it drops more than half, drops 60% to be precise.
Now, some of it, you could say, well, the abortions aren't being prevented because someone in Texas could cross over the border, say, into Louisiana.
Or go someplace else and get an abortion there.
That's possible. And of course, even if the Supreme Court overturns Roe vs.
Wade, returns abortion decisions to the states, probably about half the states would have some, if not many, restrictions on abortion.
But again, people could leave the state and go to a sort of, let's call it a state with liberal or permissive Roe vs.
Wade style laws on abortion and get their abortions there.
Planned Parenthood issues a statement saying that these numbers are, quote, devastating.
They show the devastating impact of the law.
So think about it. For them, fewer abortions is devastating.
I guess if abortions were up 60%, Planned Parenthood would be elated.
This is a pro-abortion organization.
Even the word pro-choice is really not all that appropriate here.
There's been no big ruckus in Texas, no social convulsion.
The state isn't turned upside down.
We haven't seen any, you know, coat hanger abortions, none of that.
So I think the Supreme Court looking at all this, and by the way, courts in Texas, but also the Supreme Court, there have been a number of efforts, emergency appeals to the court to To put a stay on this Texas abortion law pending the resolution of all the litigation that surrounds it.
But the courts have basically said, no, no, we're not going to put a stay.
The law remains in effect.
We can argue about the constitutionality.
The cases can make their way through the courts, but we're not putting the law on the shelf.
And I think that this has been a very interesting experiment because the Supreme Court can say, well, listen, clearly if abortion is returned to the states, there's not going to be a big national hullabaloo.
All the hysteria predicted by the left.
And perhaps this is something that some of us on the right might have worried about, that there's going to be all kinds of disruptions to society.
But no, the Texas law and the experience of the Texas law, and we're now, of course, you know, this law went into effect, what, last September?
So we're a good six months into the law, and it's turned out to be just fine.
So I think all of this will embolden the Supreme Court to do what it should do, legally, constitutionally, and morally.
But on top of all the legal and constitutional arguments, there's now a new one.
It's called the practical argument.
I guess if you talk to my grandparents, they would say aches and pains are part of the normal wear and tear of life.
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Feel the difference. John Durham is the, well, he may not be an inventor, but he's the practitioner of the tortoise school of investigation.
He is a plotter.
He moves very deliberately.
He only very slowly, like a tortoise, brings his neck out of his shell.
Sometimes he pulls it back in.
But I have to say that as someone who had worried that with Biden's election, Durham would essentially disappear, he has not disappeared.
This is a kind of sure-footed tortoise.
And from his filings, and this is a guy who doesn't have press conferences, not a lot of public brouhaha, he puts his findings in his legal briefs.
And the latest one has a very revealing tidbit.
It's only a tidbit, but it's a tidbit that makes you go, whoa.
What he shows in the latest filing is that This guy, Sussman.
And Sussman, let's remember, has been indicted for lying.
This is a top lawyer with the Hillary Clinton campaign.
But what Sussman was doing, Michael Sussman, is working with a technology executive.
Who's a technology executive?
Well, he's been sort of unmasked now.
He's a new star.
Senior Vice President Rodney Joffe.
And also with a healthcare company called Spectrum Health.
So here's the deal.
Sussman, working with the technology executive, Jaffe, and Spectrum Health, were spying on not just the Trump campaign.
That was actually known.
And we know that they were spying not to find collusion with Russia.
They did not have any reason to believe there was.
In fact, we now know there wasn't.
What they were doing is to try and spin a narrative, a false narrative of collusion, but they needed something to point to, like, look at this, look at this.
And so they were looking for that.
And it turns out, according to Durham, that these people were spying not just on the Trump campaign, they were spying on Trump Tower.
And they were spying on Donald Trump's Central Park West apartment building.
And then this is the crusher.
They were spying on the executive office of the President of the United States.
In other words, they were spying on Trump while he was in the White House.
So think about it. You've got these external groups.
And you might say, well, how can you spy on the White House?
How do you even have that kind of access?
Well, it turns out that the internet company, that's this new star, had a contract with the government in which they were providing resolution services for the White House's servers.
And this contract was obviously a contract to protect the security and the equipment at the White House.
But essentially what happened is this guy, Jaffe, decided to use the access granted by that contract To do this kind of spying, to look for derogatory information on Trump.
Now, I think we should let the significance of this sink in.
You've got a rival campaign and the leader of the rival campaign, which is a top lawyer.
Now, I don't think that Michael Sussman would do all of this on his own.
It's not like he decided, well, you know what?
I'm just going to go rogue.
I'm going to spy on the President of the United States.
No, this is coming from the highest ranks of the campaign, and I would not be a bit surprised if it's coming from Hillary herself.
At the very least, did she know about it?
I mean, these were the exact same questions asked about Watergate.
Not that Nixon ordered the burglary.
He actually didn't. But he knew about it, and he made all kinds of efforts to cover it up.
And it seems here that this is a plot hatched at the top levels of the Clinton campaign Now, Trump is out with a statement saying, quote, that in an earlier time, these are crimes.
I mean, there's an element of treason here because you're essentially violating the fundamental pact between the two parties that we are competitors in a fair fight.
And apparently what's going on here is they were looking for a smear on Trump.
That would hand the election to Hillary.
And Trump goes, this kind of treason would, quote, in an earlier generation, quote, would have been punishable by death.
And, you know, I think clinically that's probably true.
We only have to look back to Hillary Clinton's actions to see what an absolute snake this woman is.
I retweeted yesterday Hillary's statement from the campaign by her.
It says, computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump organization to a Russian-based bank.
This tweet, by the way, a few days before the election, October 31, 2016.
And she links to a statement from her then special policy advisor, Jake Sullivan.
Jake Sullivan, now high official in the Biden administration.
And she also links a little bit later in a second statement to an article in Slate magazine.
Now, let's remember that the Clinton campaign planted the article in Slate magazine.
Let's remember the Clinton campaign is the ones that set off, that tipped off the FBI to start this investigation, and the computer scientists were scientists working at Sussman's direction.
And under Joffe's direction, to find these connections that they could then use to smear Trump.
So the whole thing is rotten from start to finish.
And to me, the only real question is, I mean, I'm not all that surprised by the fact that the media is pretending a ho-hum attitude about this.
You can't look to the media.
You know, we've looked at the media in the past for cues about how we should feel about things.
Is this a big scandal? Well, what's the press saying about it?
Turns out that there are big scandals that the press says nothing about.
And there are scandals that are no big deal.
Or even bogus scandals.
Oh, Trump and Russia bounties.
And the press is all over it and screaming about it.
So we've got to train our instincts not to pay attention to the press.
And not to take our emotional cues from the press.
Because these people are completely fake.
They're propagandists for one side.
And they're hostile propagandists to our point of view.
And I sort of marvel here at Hillary's ability, her constant ability to stay one step ahead of the posse.
I hope that Durham, I really hope that Durham here, the tortoise, is willing to follow, perhaps methodically, but nevertheless unyieldingly, follow this path all the way to the top so that the phrase, lock her up, goes from being a rally slogan to being a well-deserved reality.
Fruits and veggies need to be an essential part of your diet.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. How did Roseanne Boylan die?
This is a question I've addressed previously on the podcast.
It seems very unlikely now that the medical examiner's decision that Roseanne Boylan died due to a drug overdose is correct.
It seems also suspicious that the police promptly immolated her body without even contacting the family.
They just went ahead and did it.
And so that by itself appears to suggest some kind of a cover-up.
And now we see that there's video, a very incriminating video, that shows a Capitol Police officer Named Morris, Lisa Morris, literally beating, I'm sorry, Lila Morris, literally beating Roseanne Boylan with a wooden stick and with a steel baton.
This is as she was in the tunnel.
And this footage has been very disturbing to anyone who sees it now.
But it disturbed people at the time.
There was a friend of Boylan named Justin Winchell.
He was right next to her. And if you look at the video, you can see the astonishment on his face when he sees Lila Morris hitting Boylan.
A woman who was defenseless and a woman who wasn't using any kind of force.
And you can hear Justin Winchell saying, she's going to die, she's going to die.
He knew that she was, in effect, being beaten as it looked to him to death.
Now, there's a, in Texas, a guy named Gary McBride of Decatur, Texas.
This is a kind of, he's an entrepreneur, but he's also kind of a self-starter video guy.
And this is a guy who has been studying the video, the available video on Roseanne Boylan, and he made a formal complaint with the Capitol Police to their Department of Investigations To look into this and he provided supporting video.
He also said that there must be body cam video that shows from the police's point of view what happened and he asked that that video be released.
Now again, very suspiciously, even though Freedom of Information Act petitions have been foiled, including, by the way, by Roseanne Boylan's family, The Shania Hughes, who's from the Metropolitan Police Department, says we're not releasing any body cam footage.
Quote, the release of this information could interfere with the enforcement proceedings by revealing the direction and pace of the investigation.
What? This is gobbledygook.
Basically, what they're saying is, we don't want to show you what we can see on the body cam footage.
But interestingly, they have apparently done some kind of an investigation, or at least they claim to have.
And we have this statement from David K. Augustine, Director of Risk Management at the MPD Internal Affairs Bureau.
Quote,"...the use of force within this investigation was determined to be objectively reasonable." And those are the two words that really struck me objectively.
So objectively is, not just from the police's point of view, but from a reasonable third party's point of view, this was a reasonable use of force.
Now again, this is not apparent on the video.
On the video, what you see appears to be just an appalling and unnecessary use of force against an unarmed woman that ends her life.
Why was it necessary to use that kind of a force?
Why beat a woman who's prostrate on the ground in such a way that actually ends her life?
And this, I think, seems to suggest that there were two...
Female Trumpsters who were apparently killed by the police.
Well, in one case, we know Ashley Babbitt.
In the case of Roseanne Boylan, we're trying to get to the truth of the matter.
But what we're getting is obfuscation, what we're getting is obstruction, and what we're getting are statements by the police, in this case, Captain David K. Augustine, that are manifestly preposterous.
Ronald Reagan saw it 40 years ago.
Massive inflation that we haven't seen since then.
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Right now your retirement accounts are under attack thanks to the inflationary policies of this administration.
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I'm very pleased, guys.
Welcome to the podcast a writer and a journalist, an award-winning journalist, film critic, founder of HollywoodIntoto.com.
His name is Christian Toto.
He's also the author of a new book.
It's called Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul.
Hey, Christian, thanks for coming on.
I appreciate it. You and I have talked, well, several times in the past because you've been covering the Hollywood beat.
And so you've covered some of the film projects I've done and also some of the controversies, some of my Razzies, including my cherished Worst Actor Award for playing myself.
Talk about a little bit how you got interested in Hollywood.
There are not a lot of guys like you on the conservative side who watch and study and analyze Hollywood.
How did you get into it?
Well, I'm a failed art major, and I segued from art to journalism, and I really just wanted to be a film critic.
It's what my passion was. And I eventually got there, and then I looked around the landscape and thought, well, No one is really reviewing films from a right-of-center perspective.
That's who I am.
That's what I believe. And there really should be someone doing that.
And there, you know, today there are a couple, John Nolte, Kyle Smith, but there's really not good representation, to use the left's language, in this arena.
So I decided to just be open and honest about who I am, what I do, and it's become more and more important in recent years.
Now, the subtitle of your book is about how Hollywood got woke, and we'll talk about that in a second.
And you say, and lost its soul.
And this would seem to imply to me that you are appealing to an older idea of Hollywood that...
I mean, Hollywood has always had all kinds of weirdos in it, it seems to me.
Even going back to the old days, I'm surprised when you zoom into the lives of Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, and so many others, you realize, wow, these people lived really messed up lives.
But even so, what is the soul that you're referring to that is now in danger or has already been lost?
It's the creative soul.
I agree. There's lots of tawdry business in Hollywood, for sure.
Any business, you can find some darkness there, but it certainly works in Hollywood.
I don't disagree with that at all.
But, you know, it was a time where you could tell a joke, you could tell a story, you could craft a novel.
Listen, if it would sell, then that'd be successful and you'd make more of it.
But what we're seeing now is something that's interrupting the creative flow.
You start to tell a story, well, I can't do it that way, or I can't tell that joke, or this is not diverse enough, or this is unpleasant, or this will rankle the wrong interest group.
And that's where the soul comes in, the creative soul.
I think that it's in harm's way.
And you described this process.
I mean, it's kind of fascinating to see how it has crept into, well, not just movies, but it's crept into music, and it's crept even into comedy.
Let's talk about comedy for a second, because comedy relies on being able to poke Fun and a taboo.
It relies on overturning, if you can say, the cultural apple cart.
But here we have this sort of woke culture that is exercising its big supervisory glance over comedy, and it seems to have largely killed comedy, hasn't it?
Yeah, okay. When was the last time you went to a movie and saw a really rip-roaring comedy?
You laughed, you laughed.
You had to tell all your friends, you've got to go see this.
You know, I'm thinking maybe The Hangover or Bridesmaids, Old School.
You know, they could be R-rated for sure, but they were just really funny and outrageous and bawdy.
And we don't see much of that these days.
You look at late night TV, which is technically the home of comedy, especially satirical comedy.
It's all one way of thinking, one group think.
You can't tell this joke, it's that joke.
And honestly, they're not even funny.
So they've lost the plot in that way.
How do you think that this woke culture made its way into Hollywood?
We had an interview with Isaiah Washington in my last film, Trump Card, and he made the point that he said he thinks it's more related to the gay issue than anything else.
He said, you have all these small town southern boys and midwestern guys and they come to Hollywood and they come from places where they felt constrained in their sexuality.
I guess it was their parents and their preacher.
Uh, And the small town mentality.
And so Hollywood to them represents the opposite.
They interpret freedom as freedom from these moral constraints.
Do you think that that's an important element here?
But obviously there's also the racial element.
There's also the Me Too element.
How did these elements kind of come together to, in a sense, completely overtake Hollywood?
It's funny. Hollywood often reflects the culture, but often it reflects a subset of the culture.
And I think what Hollywood is doing right now is looking at sort of the Twitter mob and saying, okay, this subset believes certain things and certain relationships and certain things.
And we're going to really kind of hammer, kind of zoom in on that.
But it doesn't really reflect the larger American population.
So I think it's sort of a twisted thing.
And, you know, it's all over the culture.
I mean, it's on universities, it's academia, it's Hollywood, it's sports, it's news.
So I don't think Hollywood can be immune to what's going on with this sort of woke mindset.
It couldn't help but embrace it and get subsumed by it, really.
What I find interesting, you have a chapter called How Taylor and Jimmy Got Woke, and I take that in a broader sense that you've got young actors and actresses, and some of them come from fairly conservative backgrounds.
Reese Witherspoon, for example, growing up in the South, Taylor Swift, and they start off kind of normal and clean-cut.
Jimmy, of course, refers to Jimmy Kimmel.
And I remember the old Jimmy Kimmel, and he was kind of a straightforward guy, had a good sense of humor.
I think he was, if I'm not mistaken, on The Man Show.
So there was a kind of almost exaggerated manliness being portrayed with a humorous aspect to it.
But suddenly this guy has gone like hard left.
And do you think this is just a career move on the part of Taylor Swift, Jimmy Kimmel?
They're like, look, I'm in a culture where I have to play this game.
Or do you think that they've undergone genuine ideological conversions and they now themselves have become not just followers, but leaders of the woke mob?
I mentioned earlier in the book that fear is such a powerful force in Hollywood.
It's always been that way, and it's now worse.
So for Jimmy Kimmel, I think he's afraid to be that bold, brash, man-show kind of guy.
He knows that he could get in real trouble, that he won't get invited to the right parties.
Maybe he won't get the right guests.
Taylor Swift is interesting because she was aggressively apolitical, and that's important to think about.
She wasn't left. She wasn't right.
She didn't kind of get involved with it at all.
And the press Just absolutely just savaged her and said, you can't stay out.
You've got to make a choice.
Of course, you know the choice they want you to make, you know, vote for Hillary in 2016, for example.
And so I think they were partially bullying her to be more progressive.
And then she did it.
And now they love her even more.
She gets accolades from the press.
Mr. Americana was a movie she made about sort of that transformation.
It's such an interesting ecosystem, and there's no accident why people become who they are.
And what you're saying is that, because see, normally if somebody intimidates you into doing something, you're going to harbor some resentment, and you're going to be very angry that they made you do this, and you're going to look for clever ways you can strike out at them.
What I find interesting is that with Jimmy Kimmel and with Taylor Swift, it's like they're beaten into submission, and then they sort of...
Become converts, and then you don't have to push them anymore.
It's almost like they now know how they should behave, and they're actually happy to behave that way.
Yeah, you know, I think that there's a reward system in place.
Look at Howard Stern. I listened to Howard Stern for years.
If any of his material really resurfaced today, he would be done.
But what Howard Stern cleverly did, perhaps for survival, is he basically went anti-Trump.
He went pro-vaccine mandates.
He basically embraced all the That's fascinating.
So it's absolution, but the price of it is that you have to go woke.
This is a very interesting book, and, you know, it has a level of concreteness and detail that I find really fascinating.
Christian Toto, you're doing great work.
Thank you for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks so much. I appreciate it.
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Comedian Dave Chappelle has become a controversial figure on the left, not because he is making conservative or right-wing jokes, but because he is not accepting the parameters of identity politics.
This is a guy who's a politically incorrect comedian for the obvious reason that that's where the humor is.
Those are the taboos of our society and it's natural that that's going to be the place where comedians are going to go.
But the left is sort of on a crusade to get Chappelle. And here's an article in the LA Times Dave Chappelle rebuffs affordable housing in Ohio hometown. So if you read the article it appears like Dave Chappelle is just a you know callous guy who He's a rich guy in a big town, and the town is considering some affordable housing, and Chappelle is not going to have any of it.
In fact, the article has the headline, I am not bluffing.
Apparently what happens is we're talking about the town of Yellow Springs, Ohio.
And they were going to build 140 new homes on 53 acres of land.
This is a developer in the area.
And the town council had said, listen, if you're going to do that, we want you to also build an affordable housing component with some townhomes and duplexes because home prices have just escalated in this town.
Now, Dave Chappelle shows up at the council meeting.
Dave Chappelle was apparently planning to make a pretty big investment in the town.
He's going to put up a new restaurant, a new comedy club.
And basically, Dave Chappelle said, quote, I am not bluffing.
I will take it all off the table.
That's all. Thank you. So in other words, if you go ahead with this whole project, I'm going to pull my business out of the town.
And apparently, that was enough leverage for the town To vote two to two with one guy abstaining, and so essentially it's going to be no affordable housing in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
At least no new affordable housing.
The LA Times article, and this is typical of the coverage of this, seems to suggest that Chappelle just doesn't want poor people or relatively poor people moving into the town.
But the moment you look a little more closely, you realize that's actually not what the fight is about at all.
So this is a smear on Chappelle.
Here's the truth of the matter.
You've got Yellow Springs. It's a really small town, 4,000 people.
It's got a kind of a college town vibe.
An outside developer comes in, and this guy bought a huge plot of land, 50 acres.
They want to build 140 very costly homes, costly by comparative standards.
So the typical Ohio home is about $200,000, and these homes are going to be $300,000 to $600,000.
And apparently a lot of residents of the town like the small town, college, even village field.
The local council, by the way, is called the village council.
They don't want outside developers changing the complexion of the town.
And so what the town council did in sort of its usual kind of muscling style is they basically said to the developer, listen, we'll let you make this development.
Of all these homes, the 140 homes, if you create some, if you essentially give us some of that land to build affordable housing.
And the developer goes, okay, well, I'll let you build an affordable housing.
I'm not gonna build it, but I'll let you build it on this land.
So it was kind of one of those, you could call it the price of doing business, a little bit of the town council shakedown.
And so the point is, That Dave Chappelle didn't oppose the affordable housing.
He opposed the development.
He didn't want all these new homes popping up in the area, changing the complexion of town.
He was hardly alone in this.
But what the developer did was focus on the affordable council and then go affordable housing and go running to the LA Times and go, listen, Dave Chappelle's against affordable housing.
No, Dave Chappelle wasn't against the affordable housing.
The affordable housing was merely the kind of add-on to the development itself.
So the The fight was over the development.
Should this town allow all these new homes to be built, yes or no?
Now, of course, the irony of all this is that the town council decided we'll shelve the affordable housing component, but they decided to go ahead with the development.
So, in some way, Chappelle didn't get everything he wanted.
In fact, he didn't get the thing he wanted most, which is to stop this accelerated pace of development in the first place.
The net effect is that the development continues apace, the affordable housing is put to the side, but the point I'm trying to make is that while they're making it look like Dave Chappelle is against affordable housing, what he was really against is, as he saw it, development in a town that he wanted to stay relatively the same. There's an interesting debate going on in conservative precincts over the idea of
the common good. And there are a group of writers and thinkers, the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, the writer Saurabh Amari of the New York Post, And the Notre Dame scholar Patrick Deneen and others have been arguing that we need a conservatism that is just not solely about liberty and the protection of individual liberties and rights.
It should include that.
But it should also focus on the idea of the common good of the community, of the whole society.
And these are writers who don't hesitate to see the state, the government as being an instrument of this common good.
That's the point. We're good to go.
A lot of libertarians think it is like downright communist because our goal should be freedom.
The government should basically leave you alone.
You should be free to make your own decisions, live your own life.
Why are they telling you what to do?
And what is this nonsense about the common good?
Well... Let's look at it this way.
The family, which is an institution within society, does protect individuality.
In a family, you want children, for example, to develop their own personality.
Obviously, the adults in the family are looking for their own success and fulfillment, a happy life within the family.
So there are individual goods involved, but the family also involves a common good.
In fact, someone has pointed out the family operates according to the principles of strict communism, from each according to his ability or her ability, to each according to their needs.
That's the principle of a successful family.
Now, the family is not the same thing, of course, as the state.
Because in a family, you have these mutual bonds of affection.
And let's remember also in a family, with regard to children, they get a lot from their parents.
They don't give a lot.
Well, they give affection, but they don't support their parents or give in the measure of what they're receiving.
But let's remember that the period of being a child is somewhat probationary.
You're going to go on to be an adult.
You're going to go on and live your own life.
So the family in that sense is transitional, enabling people to live successfully or set up successfully on their own.
Now, the question he raised in this debate that I find interesting is, was the American founding set up merely to protect individual rights?
And of course, when you go to the Bill of Rights, you see these individual rights specified, the right to free speech, the right to assemble, the right to own a gun, and so on.
But... The defenders of this notion of the common good say that the founding is about more than that.
The founding also enables and empowers the states to do all kinds of things that go way beyond that.
States, for example, are allowed to pass laws that promote the common good in all kinds of ways.
And in that sense, it is wrong to see the founding as a purely Lockean compact around individual rights.
Let's look at this. States, for example, have traditional common law police powers.
They can promote public health.
They can promote public safety.
They can promote public morality.
States have run schools and hospitals and homeless shelters.
States can restrict or limit prostitution, narcotics, obscenity.
States offer things like recycling, leaf removal.
They have building codes, zoning laws.
There are also things like national days of prayer, Thanksgiving.
Some states have Sunday blue laws in which liquor stores are closed.
Other types of stores are closed.
And the defenders of the common good also say that rights exist, but their key proviso is they exist up to a point.
And this up to a point is, by the way, a clause that comes out of George Will's book going back to the 1980s.
It's somewhat tellingly titled, Statecraft as Soulcraft.
And in some ways, I think Will goes a little too far with all that because it's a little difficult to see what the stopping point is in state power if the state is in charge not just of your pocketbook, but also of your soul.
But one of the points Will does make is he says that rights have a kind of...
They have to be reasonable.
So yeah, you have a right to free speech, and as long as free speech is promoting discussion, debate, perhaps even artistic self-expression, okay.
But what happens when speech is going into obscenity, defamation, intimidation, extortion, incitement of violence?
Well, the argument is at a certain point, and you may want to put that point pretty far out, because there's obviously going to be gray areas, but wills...
Argument is that there is a point at which we would say enough.
No, that's not what free speech is meant to do.
Similarly, there's freedom to marry.
Yeah, we have a freedom to marry.
But we do say, wait a minute, you can't exercise that freedom to marry at the age of 12.
You can't exercise the freedom to marry and marry seven people at the same time.
So there are restrictions on marriage.
It depends upon how you define marriage.
And so the people who say freedom to marry act as if all definitional restraints have got to be chucked out the window.
And it's up to the individual to decide when, who, where, when, and to whom they get married.
And so again, freedom to marry, yes, but to a point.
And I think the deeper point being made here is this.
That freedom, in general, is for something.
I'm abstracting from the specific cases of free speech and marriage, that freedom has a goal.
And the goal for the American founders wasn't just the free society, but the prosperous society, and the decent society, and the orderly society, and the society in pursuit of truth.
And so, the point is, this is the common good.
This is the goal. Freedom, you may say, is the means to pursue that goal.
And so you want a wide orbit for freedom, and you do want a limited national government, and the defenders of the common good jurisprudence or the common good philosophy don't deny that there should be a limited federal government,
but they also think that at the state level and at the local level, you should have communities that, not just individually, but also collectively, Through the democratic process, through the constitutional process of promoting not just individual rights, not just individual freedom,
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