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Feb. 15, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:21
NIGHTMARE IN SAN FRANCISCO Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep271
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Guys, a quick announcement.
Tonight, 7.30 p.m.
Eastern, I'll be doing my live Q&A at Locals.
No topic is off-limits.
Go to dinesh.locals.com and check it out.
Now, the American Dream is not dead, but it's dying in Democratic-run cities like San Francisco, and I'll talk about the experience of a fellow Indian in that city.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez AOC says it's inevitable Texas will go blue.
I'm going to show that her prophecy rests on an assumption that is false.
Representative Louie Gohmert is going to join me.
We're going to talk about why the Biden team is pressing on with its madness, even though the public opinion polls are plummeting.
And I'm going to reflect on the enduring lesson of O'Henry's delightful short story called The Gift of the Magi.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The philosopher Edmund Burke once said, to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
And I think what he meant by that is that we do love our country in part because it's ours.
But we should also love our country because it makes possible for us the good life.
It offers us opportunity.
It offers us a chance to make a better life for ourselves and for our children.
Now, I have a cousin in India.
Well, he's no longer in India, but he grew up in India along with me, my first cousin.
His name is Rahul. And one of his phrases was, I hate India.
And the rest of us would look at him like, what are you talking about?
Well, of course, India is all we knew.
But his point is it's exhausting to live in India.
He goes, everything is difficult.
You're always having to pay money under the table.
Just getting through the day is like tiring.
And I do think a lot of us in that generation of the 1960s, 70s, you know, we would identify with that sentiment.
Well, America has, for me and for so many other immigrants, been the opposite.
It's not exhausting to live in America.
In fact, it's kind of exhilarating.
Why? Because there are chances all the time to better yourself, to better your life, to learn, to explore new things.
And even if you fall down, even if you fail, even if you go bankrupt, you can pick up and start again, which is not easy to do in other places.
So, the American dream, and again, despite Biden, in many respects, it's still alive.
But it is getting choked off.
It is getting stunted in places like New York and San Francisco, basically in Democratic-run cities.
And I want to turn to the experience of kind of a fellow Indian who came to America, as I did, and came to California, as I once did, looking for opportunity.
This is a high-tech guy, and I'm I'm going to refer to him because it's interesting sometimes to go from data to lived experience.
What is it actually like for someone to come to California?
And this guy, his name is Hari Raghavan.
He's kind of a software guy.
And he comes to California, he says, because of the following things, quote, Fantastic universities, incredible natural beauty, plenty of agricultural land nearby, wonderful weather, renewable energy sources, and a critical mass of people who are both rule breakers and opportunity seekers.
So these are sort of, he calls it sort of the modern gold rush.
This is why people came to California.
But he's been there and he's been successful there to a point, but he is now exhausted and he's getting out of there.
And he doesn't say where he's going, but he does say why he's leaving.
He makes this striking statement.
He says, San Francisco today is a symbol of decline.
He says, quote, I think it's more inconvenient to live in San Francisco or Oakland than when I lived in Chennai or Bombay growing up.
That's quite a, for someone like me, a kind of a startling statement because what he's really saying is that places like California are becoming third world eyes, third world eyes in the sort of worst sense of that term.
Now, he says, a year ago, I was smirking at the people moving out of the Bay Area.
He goes, I thought, where are they going?
What's better than here?
But he goes, he's come to see that the American dream is no longer thriving in the Bay Area.
And he goes on to say exactly why.
Number one. He goes, it's hard to feel safe.
He goes, in the last seven years, my wife and I have experienced four home break-ins, one car break-in, multiple other thefts.
And he goes on to say that every one of his female friends in San Francisco has either been accosted or assaulted, typically by a homeless guy, but in some respect or the other.
And he goes, of all these break-ins, he goes, I only reported one.
Why? Because, quote, what's the point?
They don't do anything about it.
Number two, he goes, there is a systematic animus against business, particularly small business in California.
And so you're trying to do something, you're trying to get it done, and they make you into the bad guy.
They block you in all kinds of ways, and then they're hostile, they're actively hostile to entrepreneurship.
He says, they gifted programs and fields like math and science are being eliminated in schools.
Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are literally being chased out of California.
He goes, quote, privilege and success, instead of something to be mindful of and thoughtful about, has become something to be ashamed of.
In fact, he says, if you build a successful company, the attitude of the California democratic bureaucracy is this.
They say, A, you're exploiting the region, exploiting the region.
And B, you're not paying enough taxes, even though the entrepreneurs in San Francisco are paying the highest tax rates in the whole country.
He then goes on to say that the bureaucracy and animus toward the citizens on the part of the people who run the city—and remember, San Francisco, as California, is kind of a one-party state.
So they don't have to—there's no real competition, so they don't really care.
There's no profit motive, so they don't really care on that score either— And he goes, over time, they weigh you down.
He goes, you fight them.
You think I'll get around them.
But over time, you become enervated.
You become tired. And you then say, listen, this is toxic.
Why do I need more toxicity in my life?
It's time for me just to get the heck out of there.
Then he goes on to talk about merit, achievement, and success are becoming a lost cause.
Wow. In California, suddenly merit is now seen as a bad thing.
Merit is racist. And so success is diminished.
He's talking about the social contract, and he says, quote, There's a social contract between government and citizens.
We pay taxes and abide by the law, and the government provides social services and governs by the will of the people.
So, this is a very moderate guy.
He's not even all that political.
He's basically saying, I'm keeping my end of the deal, and you're not.
And so, at some point, he's saying, look...
I can stay, and I can stay, and I can hang in there, hoping that things will get better, but at some time, hope itself becomes a casualty, and then there's no alternative but to say, I came for the dream.
There are no more dreams here to be found.
I need to go elsewhere to search for greener pastures.
Mike Lindell's latest cause, the truckers.
He's helping the truckers and sending them a whole bunch of pillows.
I mean, think of it. This is a guy under the gun.
He's been canceled left and right, but it doesn't seem to put a block on his generosity.
And I think we should support Mike Lindell, Debbie and I do.
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I'd like to talk about the ideologizing of COVID and specifically of the Omicron variant.
Now, the Omicron variant was discovered in South Africa in November.
It spread since then to 57 countries.
It was discovered by a South African doctor, in fact, the head of the South African Medical Services, a woman named Dr.
Coetzee, C-O-E-T-Z-E-E, Angelique Coetzee.
And she described the virus and the symptoms in South Africa, and she said, look, this is a contagious disease.
More contagious than Delta or the earlier variants, but she says its symptoms are also, from her experience, mild.
And she described the South African patients who had this variant, and she basically said, look, these are people who have coughs, they have exhaustion, they have sore throat, but not a whole bunch of them are even ending up in the hospital.
Now, interestingly, Dr.
Coetzee has a recent interview in the London papers, I think it was in the London Telegraph originally, but it's now reported elsewhere, where she says the moment she said that, she started getting pressure from other medical authorities, not in South Africa, but elsewhere in the world, notably from Europe, saying, don't say that, don't say it's mild, don't say it's mild.
And she goes, well, but it is mild.
And she says, quote, she goes, they kept attacking me.
They kept telling me I had no idea what I was talking about.
Now, the truth of it is, she does have an idea what she's talking about.
There have actually now been several studies of the Omicron variant, and the studies show that the Omicron variant is notably milder than the Delta variant.
This is not to say that people don't die of Omicron.
It's not to say that some people don't end up in the hospital.
But basically what she's saying is that even though the good news and the bad news, and the bad news is that Omicron is more contagious, the good news is that it's not as severe on average.
So she's actually telling the truth about it, but what I think is striking is the way in which she was subjected to this kind of medical and ideological bullying.
She goes, they are accusing me of lying, of downplaying Omicron.
Quote, in their minds it's impossible for a disease with more than 38 mutations to be mild.
Now just think of the unscientific nature of that statement.
It is impossible. Just because there are multiple variants, it's impossible for one of those variants to be mild.
Why is it impossible? What does the science say about that?
Well, she actually knows the science, but what she's commenting on is the fact that this is an epidemic in which people are trying to make it more severe than it is.
And she's not unreasonable about it at all.
She says, in fact, that, look, if you are vaccinated, if you are boosted, that is going to diminish your chances of ending up in the hospital or dying from COVID. So she's actually an advocate.
of both vaccination and boosting.
But what she's merely reporting is that we're dealing with a less severe variant.
And I think on that, her statement is indisputable.
I think one of the reasons that so many people have distrust of what comes out of some of these health authorities is precisely for this reason, that the health authorities seem to believe That they have to increase the fear.
They have to sort of turn up the volume of public anxiety.
Otherwise, perhaps they may believe people won't wear a mask.
People won't bother to go get vaccinated.
So, in other words, it's kind of lies at the service of getting you to do something that they want.
And of course, this also feeds the broader narrative, the broader suspicion that it's all about control.
They ultimately want to exercise a kind of domination over your ordinary life, a domination that they're going to be reluctant to let go, even when there are milder variants, even when the actual severity of the epidemic subsides.
For these reasons, I think we have missed, sorely missed, the kind of honest presentation of objective scientific data that would have made this epidemic, well, it's a bad one.
There's no other way to look at it.
But it's not as bad.
It didn't have to be as bad as it's become.
And I think in part we have to say that some of the politicization of the virus and some of the politicization by the health authorities themselves has been to blame.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, is in Texas, and she's making some very AOC-type remarks.
Here's the latest one.
Listen. One day sooner, one day faster, this state will turn blue.
It's going to happen with the seat of San Antonio in Austin.
It's going to spring down to Laredo.
It's going to go up to Houston and to Dallas and to all across the state.
Well, it's the, you know, there's a manic tone to all this that, I mean, the first thing I read from AOC, and this is more of a general comment, is the kind of, you have here a kind of grown-up mental infant.
Because you notice how infants are, or even kids, when they want something, or they want something to happen, and there's no reason it's going to happen, but they insist, you know, it will, it will, it has to, you know, and...
And you watch them with a certain kind of detached disdain.
And when you see an adult behaving this way, it's particularly revolting.
There's a giddy immaturity to this woman.
And the sad thing is that may actually be part of her appeal.
It may be that the fact that she's emotionally stunted is what leads a lot of equally stunted people to identify with her.
She reflects the same kind of manic irrationality that they feel.
Now, I want to focus on AOC's comment that it is somehow inevitable, inevitable that Texas will become blue.
Seems to me that this is confusing desire with fulfillment, intention with execution, illusion with reality.
Why is it inevitable that anything will happen?
Well, she thinks it's inevitable for a simple reason, and that is that Hispanics in Texas is becoming more Hispanic.
It's becoming more Hispanic, by the way, not primarily due to immigration, not primarily due to illegals, but primarily due to the fact that Hispanics in the state have higher birth rates than non-Hispanic whites.
And so this is what is tilting Texas in the Hispanic direction.
But it is no foregone conclusion at all that these Hispanics are going to be blue.
This is the basis of AOC's fallacy.
She's assuming that the Democrats will continue to get the high proportion of Hispanic votes that they have counted on in the past.
She's counting on the fact that the Hispanics are going to go the way of the blacks.
And she's hoping that they go the way of the blacks.
But I think a lot of Hispanics say, wait a minute, if we go the way of the blacks, we're going to end up where the blacks are today as a group.
We're going to have a deep underclass.
We're going to have serious crime problems.
We're going to have Hispanic on Hispanic shootings.
We're going to have Hispanics, by and large, young people devolving into gangs.
And Hispanics are like, no, thank you.
We would rather be like other groups that are far more successful, that have claimed their share of the American dream.
So, AOC here is doing an old Marxist type of thing, and Marx did this too.
He would prophesy things that were in no way guaranteed to happen, but Marx would declare, it's a scientific law!
It's going to happen! The proletariat is going to rise up!
Even Lenin realized that this is stupid.
The proletariat is not going to rise up.
They're showing no signs of rising up, not just in Germany, but in any other country anywhere in the world.
And so Lenin basically came to the view that, listen, if there's going to be any kind of uprising, it's going to have to be done for them, not by them.
And it's going to have to be done by other types of people, maybe by lawyers, by soldiers, by students, by professional revolutionaries.
And so that ultimately is what pulled off the Russian Revolution.
Nothing was inevitable. History in general is not in a series of inevitabilities, but a series of contingencies brought about by concerted human action.
Now, at some kind of primal level, AOC knows this because after declaring that it was inevitable that Texas will become blue, she goes, you've got to get out there.
You've got to do this. And you're thinking, wait a minute.
What kind of nonsense is this? If it's inevitable, you don't have to do anything.
It's inevitable! But no, she's like, get out there!
Go door to door! Without even being aware that she's contradicting what she said exactly about 30 seconds prior.
So this is the scrambled egg that we can otherwise call AOC's brain.
It's a bit of a mess, but it's finding inevitabilities in things that I think are in no way inevitable at all.
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Feel the difference. Hey guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast my friend Louie Gohmert.
He's in his ninth term in the House of Representatives.
In fact, he was first sworn in in 2005.
He represents the first district of Texas, which includes Tyler, but a whole bunch of counties on the state's eastern border.
And he's running for Attorney General of Texas.
Louis, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
In fact, I'm thinking back right now to the time we spent together at T. Boone Pickens' Ranch, where if I remember, I was kind of going through my travails with the Obama administration.
And, you know, you were kind of advising me for how to approach all that psychologically.
Yeah. Well, you are and are an amazing person.
And you went through that harassment, a very unfair Department of Justice.
And prosecution.
But you had so much class.
You still got it.
And, you know, it just caused me to thank all the more of you.
And I appreciate your continuing to stand up for America.
You haven't been intimidated.
You're still out there exposing the lies and bringing out truth.
And I love that about you, Dinesh.
But that was also a time of a lot of prayer for you, too.
God's been good. Absolutely.
And those prayers certainly came to fruition.
I've gotten my pardon.
I've gotten all my rights back.
It's really awesome. So thank you for that very much.
Let's turn to the Biden administration, because there's so many disasters on so many different fronts, Louis.
But if you had to say, what is the single biggest crisis we face today?
With these Biden guys?
Is it China? Is it the border?
Is it inflation? When you look across the landscape, what worries you the most and why?
Well, he is taking us into an area of totalitarian Orwellian-type leadership, and that is just top-down, taking away our rights, That concerns me more than anything.
We've made mistakes in foreign policy.
Of course, it's hard to find one that's worse than how he ended Afghanistan.
We needed to be out, but not like that.
And not to empower the people that took down our towers and want to hit us again.
Not to empower Russia the way he has.
I mean, all of this was so predictable with the problems with Russia and China when he empowered them so much and then of course the southern border you cannot keep a republic as you know Dinesh when you've got two million people plus pouring in every year and they don't know what it takes to keep a republic so it's the overall of this administration but especially when you're taking away Americans rights And that just makes it nearly impossible to come back from what he is doing to us.
That's also concerning.
I mean, Louis, I think you're making an important distinction here, and that is that if I think back when I first came to America, it was the Carter administration.
one disastrous decision after another.
Remember there was the hostage crisis, there was the foreign policy disaster, there was runaway inflation.
So some of the same signatures we're seeing today.
But I think what you're saying is that an important difference is that Carter wouldn't dream of militarizing the FBI against his opponents.
He wouldn't dream of classifying his domestic critics as somehow domestic terrorists or enemies of the state.
We've seen an escalation of that type of rhetoric.
Why do you think the Democrats have made this fateful turn in which they have now, in a sense, are trying to establish, it seems, a one-party state and portray their political opponents as somehow enemies of democracy?
Well, I've been quoted accurately, which is very rare, when I said that the only thing Orwell got wrong was the year.
It wasn't 1984.
And here it's all happening.
But I think I have to point out as a Christian, you know, we were a Christian nation and that doesn't mean that everybody was a Christian.
It means that most all of the country believed in the morals of the Bible.
And that has been under attack.
Jimmy Carter would never, ever have thought it might be okay to shut churches down, leave marijuana and liquor stores open, but shut down the churches.
Throughout our history, when we had problems, we counted on the churches, people to pour in and pray and ask for God's blessing and help in the time of crisis.
This is the first one where we've ever said, let's shut down the churches and not let anybody in.
And in fact, some places arrest people for trying to go to church, even just sitting in their cars listening.
So that's a huge, huge change.
And I think it doesn't bode well.
I really believe that this republic will not last much longer with this type of mentality.
And when I've been saying that, I did not even know the full extent to which the DOJ and the FBI were weaponized, as you said, Dinesh.
They've been weaponized in ways that make it—it's going to be very, very difficult— To ever get back to a responsible DOJ They just infused so many people that would use it as a weapon Just such a dangerous time You have been one of the few,
very few, Republicans who have openly advocated for some of these nonviolent defendants on January 6th.
What explains the odd reluctance of the party more generally?
And I'm talking about the mainstream of the leadership.
To recognize that while there were bad guys in that pile, and some of them have to be held accountable, there were also a lot of good guys.
So even if they were wrong, came to D.C. to say, wait a minute, we don't believe that these election concerns we have are being adjudicated anywhere.
So this was kind of a primal scream at their own representatives.
Hey, pay attention.
And for them to be in solitary confinement for months, their trials delayed in some cases more than a year.
I mean, this is such atrocious behavior.
Why would the GOP leave so many of its own troops on the field, which obviously is going to send a demoralizing message throughout the rank and file?
Well, some of the Republicans have said, oh, they're horrible.
They deserve what they got.
And that plays really well with the lamestream media.
So perhaps that's what they're looking for.
Some pats on the back from people that hate people like us.
I think also intimidation is part of it.
This DOJ has intentionally...
Gone out of its way to be fascists in the way it's arrested people, the way they have prosecuted people, and gotten the media to demonize people.
Some who did wrong intentionally and deserve to be punished, but some who, when they saw Capitol Police step out of the way and people waving them in, oh well, I guess we could go in.
There's so much dishonesty, though, Dinesh, in our top FBI, including, I believe, the director, I believe Merrick Garland.
You know, I believe he was lying when I said, basically, was there a gun found on anybody that illegally entered the Capitol?
Now, I know he knows good and well.
That's one of the first things people investigating want to know.
And he knows there was no gun in the Capitol, that the only gun they found was in a car a long way away from the Capitol.
He has to know that.
And yet what he said was deceptive, dishonest, demeaning.
When he said, well, you know...
I remember they found a gun, but I'm not really sure where.
Dinesh, we cannot have justice in America when the head of the DOJ and the head of the FBI think it's okay to lie a little bit to achieve their purposes.
They have got to be straight arrows or we will not survive this kind of weaponization.
And not only DOJ and FBI, but also our intel community.
You know, Clapper, Brennan, they lied.
They should have been prosecuted for their lives like Republicans would be if they had lied like they did.
But nothing. Just silence.
And I think that's one of the things that scares me for our future.
When people that are dishonest are in charge, that many people in those powerful positions, that's really different to have that many And now the latest revelations from Durham.
I'm still upset with Durham that he hadn't brought these out more quickly.
His failure to bring them out more quickly has affected an election.
It did. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, I'm going to pursue these exact issues with Louie Gohmert and see what Republicans can do to straighten things out.
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I'm back with Congressman Louis Gohmert, the 1st District of Texas.
He's also running for Attorney General.
Louis, if you think about what you're saying, which is the fact that the Democrats have systematically weaponized these agencies and sort of corrupted them at the top and perhaps even at the middle.
And you were saying, I don't know how we're going to get out of this.
Well, Let me ask you this.
Let's say that the Republicans take the House and the Senate, and maybe even the presidency in 2024.
Do we merely go about trying to kind of clean up and fumigate these agencies?
Or do you think we should take the additional step Of giving the Democrats a taste of their own medicine.
And I say that because think about how you would deal with a classroom bully.
I mean, you wouldn't say, okay, listen, I'm going to try to make sure that he stops the bullying.
You have to make sure that he gets a lesson that he's not going to forget, and then he's going to go, bullying isn't working for me anymore, because these guys are actually stronger than me, and they can bully me if they get the power.
So isn't it a fact that that's the only way that we can get through these guys, that they've got to stop this kind of nonsense?
Well, you are right.
And it's not a matter of payback.
It's a matter of enforcing the law.
And you're talking to a guy, you know, the rules of the House got changed under Pelosi.
The Chief of Capital Police said no member, there's no evidence from any source that any member of Congress is a threat to another member.
And yet she put up Metal detectors exclusively for the members of Congress, just to jerk us around and to make it look like, oh, this is such a terrorist situation, these Republicans are terrorists, and then making us wear masks that have been very ineffective,
and now the science is starting to come out, and possibly Fauci was right in one of the flip-flops he's done along the way But one of the rules I wanted to see was instead of us just going along as we've done so many times, okay, we're going to change the rules back and be reasonable.
I wanted to have a rule that said anybody that voted for these Democratic rules that included metal detectors and masks, you have to continue to follow those rules you voted for and everybody else gets to follow the new rules where we get rid of this stuff.
And it's along the lines you're talking about.
People need to know that there is going to be a price.
And when it comes to justice, these people that have weaponized and abused our system, our justice system, they've got to be held accountable.
And you know, I'm sure you're so well plugged in.
I mean, a guy that absolutely intentionally lied, defrauded the FISA court.
He was allowed to leave and get a better-paying job, and so there were no real consequences.
And yes, he had charges, but, you know, wrist slap type stuff.
There's no message to the rest of the people in the DOJ. You're looking at time in real prison for people For violating the criminal law and violating the trust in you.
People have got to go to jail for what they've done.
And going back to the party, Dinesh, there are people that are afraid that if they say too much, the DOJ will come after them.
And that's exactly the way a weaponized federal government ends up getting total control.
It's when they have made the people subservient, made them fear.
But, you know, the old slogan when in New Hampshire, live free or die, people are, oh my gosh, I would rather give up my freedom than be afraid of my government.
I'm just going to...
And then they feed that fear by saying, look, if you haven't done anything wrong, Then you have nothing to worry about us going through all your emails and listening to your phone calls.
You got nothing to worry about.
You're innocent. That's exactly how you lose your freedom.
And so many people are buying into that and they've got to stand up.
And that's exactly why they're going after the January 6th to send the message, if you stand up, you can go to jail.
Now, I was happy to see on a small note that Kevin McCarthy did say that, look, if the Democrats are going to throw Republicans off committees and exercise that kind of jurisdiction on the opposition party, then if we get in, we're going to do the same thing to you.
We're going to throw Ilhan Omar off her committees and maybe AOC. And that's kind of what I'm talking about, is exercising a kind of deterrence.
Exactly. Let's turn to the Supreme Court because, as you know, the Trump nominees, I'm thinking here specifically of Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were subjected to the Democratic kind of ringer, right?
I mean, accusations, attacks.
And now I see Maisie Hirono and others saying, oh, let's just take a deep breath and...
And have a very civil, reasonable Senate confirmation process.
And once again, I come back to the same point.
Isn't it true that the way to rehabilitate and domesticate the process is to give them a taste of their own medicine?
I couldn't agree more.
Except we won't lie like they will.
We won't create false narratives the way they do.
Totally fictional narratives that they...
They have no problem making allegations and assassinating people's characters.
So we just need to use the truth to go after these people.
But so many Republican senators will not even use things that they have said and done that are so offensive to our way of life and to keeping a republic.
They need to brutalize them over the things they've actually said and done.
But too many Republicans say, well, they got a pass from the Bar Association, so we're going to go ahead and let them go.
No, some of them have such destructive beliefs to a republic, they need to be exposed for who they are.
Kevin is making clear Things are going to be different.
We have got to give them a taste of the brutality they did on us, and just in fairness.
But the Senate continues to think they can play nice and it'll get better.
And one other thing on the Supreme Court, and you mentioned Kavanaugh, one of the things, one of the reasons they go after people like that, accused Kavanaugh being a rapist and all this kind of thing, Is to try to turn people against them so that Republicans will get scared and not vote them onto the court.
That's obvious. But another reason is, I believe, intimidation.
And they are bound to have gone through some post-traumatic stress.
I mean, you don't get nominated for the Supreme Court unless you have lived a pretty clean life.
So you have people like Amy Coney Barrett, Kavanaugh, they've lived their lives being ethical and moral.
Every turn as a judge, people have respect.
And all of a sudden, you know, Kavanaugh is called a rapist and all this kind of stuff.
Their families were traumatized.
And I believe that, and one of my concerns was that the Democrats may have traumatized them to the point That they're reluctant to step out and take a bold stand for America because of what their families will go through again if they do.
Intimidation often works and I'm hoping they're going to overcome their fear of another post-traumatic stress episode.
But you can't live in fear and let the bad guys intimidate you.
You know who proves that Louis is Clarence Thomas because he got the same treatment but I think he realized, listen, I'm not going to forget what you guys did to me and I don't think he ever has.
Louis Gohmert, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.
Great to be with you. Thanks so much for all you keep doing.
Looking forward to the new film.
Thanks so much. Have you been following this stuff with Justin Trudeau and the truckers in Canada?
He's invoked for the first time in Canadian history the so-called Emergencies Act.
Now, this Emergencies Act is supposed to be for national emergencies.
This is the Act passed in 1988, and here's what it says.
It says that it's only supposed to be enacted during, quote, urgent and critical public emergencies, which, quote, seriously endanger the lives, health, or safety of Canadians or threatens the security of Canada.
Now, how are the truckers doing that?
The truckers are exercising a certain kind of annoyance, a certain kind of civil disobedience, a certain kind of public protest.
So they're expressing their views.
They just want to get back to normal life.
And their argument is that Canada has prevented them from doing that.
So here's Trudeau. And what is he doing?
He's locking them up.
He's blocking their bank accounts.
He's even trying to close the GoFundMe campaigns that are for the truckers.
And so all of this, a severe attack, I think, on just the idea of basic freedom.
Ironically, these slogans of the Trudeau government or regime, maybe a better word, are being echoed in America.
Here's Biden. He goes, I love how people talk about personal freedom.
If you're exercising personal freedom, put someone else in jeopardy, their health in jeopardy.
I don't consider that freedom.
Wow. And then, of course, sure enough, you know, almost mechanically, in a Pavlovian way, you see CNN and other media outlets echo this.
Here's CNN's Miguel Marquez.
He's talking about the trucker's convoy.
He goes, quote, It's wrapped up in this sort of notion of the guise of freedom, you know, whatever that means.
So evidently, he doesn't know what it means.
He's not really sure what sort of freedom are these truckers trying to push for.
Well... I think that, you know, and I'm a little surprised to see, coming from the highest ranks of the Democratic Party, an attack on freedom itself.
In fact, an attempt to portray freedom as some kind of a right-wing idea.
Now, Biden's premise appears to be, and I was talking last night about this on Fox, that freedom isn't really freedom.
It's not true freedom if it affects other people, particularly in a negative way.
And I want to point out what kind of nonsense this is.
All freedom has consequences, not just consequences for you, the person exercising it, but for lots of other people, both positive and negative.
Just take a simple example.
A wife and mom who has been at home decides to go to work, take up a job, take up a career.
Now, that's freedom. That's a choice.
It has consequences.
It has consequences for the company that she goes to work for.
It has consequences for her husband and her marriage.
It has consequences for her children.
Some of these may be positive.
Some of these may be negative.
But no one can say that it can't be freedom because, hey, look, it's affecting other people.
No. All our choices in pretty much every domain, unless you're sitting on a sacred pillar, your choices are going to affect other people.
Now, obviously, it is not a legitimate exercise of freedom if I am to swing my arm in a manner that makes a contact with somebody else's jaw.
Then my freedom is infringing on your rights.
But here's the point. When Biden is thinking about COVID, how am I actually doing that?
Let's say, for example, I go to a store or to a mall or to a restaurant or to a theater and I'm unmasked and I'm unvaccinated.
I'm exercising my freedom.
I agree. It affects other people.
But I'm saying I'm not swinging my arm in a manner that hits their jaw.
I'm simply saying they have freedom too.
If somebody says, well, Dinesh, I don't want to be exposed through you to COVID, I could say, well, I don't want to be exposed to COVID through you.
You're obviously vaccinated, so you're less vulnerable than someone who's unvaccinated.
Someone who's unvaccinated actually faces a greater danger from getting COVID from a vaccinated person than a vaccinated person faces from getting COVID from an unvaccinated person.
You're saying, don't come to the mall, Dinesh, because you're not wearing a mask.
You're not vaccinated. And I say, if you want to place a high premium on your own security and make sure you don't get COVID, why don't you stay home?
Why are you at the mall? Because whether vaccinated or not, you're not invulnerable to getting COVID. So the point I'm getting here is that you don't own the common air between us.
For me to breathe in and breathe out is not to violate your rights any more than for you to breathe in and breathe out is to violate my rights.
So the point here is that there's a deep misunderstanding of freedom going on that somehow implies that if somebody takes actions that put someone else at greater risk, for example, from contracting COVID because they're breathing the same air, and that therefore I'm somehow culpable for what you get as a result of that.
No, I'm not culpable.
You're culpable. If you don't want to get it, stay home.
Yesterday was Valentine's Day, and I'm still in the sort of Valentine's Day spirit.
And in that spirit, I want to talk today about a beautiful story that is, well, it was written as a Christmas story.
It's by the American short story writer O. Henry.
And it's called The Gift of the Magi.
So the Magi, of course, are the three wise men who came to see Jesus and brought gifts.
And as you can see from the title, it's a story that was published in 1905 as a Christmas story.
But I think you'll see in a moment why it's more fittingly a Valentine's Day story.
And it reflects the true genius of O. Henry, who was just a masterful short story writer.
The short story is itself a kind of art.
It's the novel in miniature.
And O. Henry had a kind of, well, some people called it a formula, but it was an idea of developing a simple plot revolving typically around a single idea...
With a twist at the end.
And the beauty of the twist is that the twist was always present in the plot itself.
It was present earlier on, but you didn't see it.
And so O. Henry, in a way, had thought more deeply about his own story than the reader.
And so when the reader sees the twist, it's a surprise, even though the ingredients of the surprise were there if you were attentive enough to spot them.
Now, in this story, we have...
It's not about the New Testament directly.
It's really about a couple of young...
It's a young couple that is in love and married in New York, and they have no money.
They have absolutely no money.
And with Christmas coming, they both feel they want to get a gift for each other.
But they have no money for the gift.
And so the young woman, whose name is Della, gets a kind of extreme idea.
She has this beautiful hair.
Here's O'Henry. He describes it as, quote, shining like a cascade of brown water.
And she's very, she loves her hair.
It's kind of her signature.
But she decides, look, you know, my husband, Jim...
He has a watch. And in those days, of course, the watch wasn't bound to your wrist.
It's kind of a loose watch. And the watch needs a chain.
And she decides, I want to buy this guy a platinum chain because the watch is his prized possession.
He loves his watch.
And this will kind of complete the watch.
But she goes, since I have no money, the only thing I can do is go get my hair chopped off and sold.
Sold for someone else to turn into a wig.
And so she decides to do it.
And she gets $20 for selling her hair, and she buys this chain.
And then, says O. Henry, the husband, Jim, is thinking exactly the same thing.
He goes, wow, I'd like to get something for my wife, but I don't have any money.
All I have is this watch.
And I know how she loves her hair.
She's so proud of her hair.
So I'm gonna sell my watch.
And I'm gonna get some money and I'm gonna buy some beautiful combs for her hair.
And sure enough, you can kind of see where this story is going.
It's all beautifully set up.
So the exchange of gifts arises.
They both whip out their presents.
And of course, you can see it's kind of a disaster, right?
Because she produces the change for the watch, but the watch has been sold.
He produces the combs for the hair, but the hair has been cut.
And so their gifts are, in a sense, there's a sadness to the story.
You have this couple that wants so much to do something for the other, and it's not going to happen.
The gifts are literally kind of useless.
But here we have the great closing of this story by O. Henry, where suddenly out of nowhere he gives us this.
The Magi, as you know, were wise men, wonderfully wise men, who brought gifts to the newborn Christ child.
Being wise, their gifts were doubtless wise ones.
And then a few sentences later, he goes, And here I've told you the story of two children, he calls them children, who were not wise.
Each sold the most valuable thing he owned in order to buy a gift for the other.
But then he goes, But let me speak a last word to the wise of these days.
Of all those who give gifts, these two were the most wise.
Of all who give and receive gifts such as they are the most wise, he repeats, Everywhere they are the most wise, they are the magi.
So the beauty of this story is it's a celebration of mutual love and sacrifice.
It's pointing out that the meaning of love is actually not even in the result, because the result in this case was botched.
But rather in the intention and in willing the good of the other person.
That love, which sometimes begins in selfishness, needs to move toward this kind of mutual giving to be truly love.
And that, I think, is a very poignant and true and enduring.
This is one reason this story has endured more than a century later.
And I think it is a very apt message in the aftermath of Valentine's Day, but applicable, of course, to every day.
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