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March 1, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:08
QUESTION DINESH (AND DEBBIE) Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep280
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This is a special episode of the podcast devoted to answering your questions.
We sometimes get questions that are really interesting and they need a little bit of space.
And so in this one, I'm going to be taking some, but I'm also going to be joined by Debbie to take some of the questions as well.
And here are a few that we are going to talk about today.
Is America a democracy or a republic?
The media often dismisses conservative ideas as conspiracy theories, but are conspiracy theories always false?
Who, Dinesh, is your favorite Democratic president?
How close is America going to going the way of Venezuela?
What do you think of the concept of the hyphenated American?
And if you could live at any time in history, what era would you choose?
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.
Is America a democracy or a republic?
We have a very good question about this.
Listen. Hi Dinesh.
Some conservatives say that we are not a democracy, but a republic.
How would you characterize America?
Let's think about these terms, democracy and republic, and start by asking what they mean.
Now, a democracy, strictly speaking, is ruled by the demos, which is the people, ruled by the people.
And ideally, the people would rule by consensus.
This is how, in ancient tribes, You sort of tried to get everybody together, make a decision that everyone agreed with.
But in reality, when you have conflicting desires and interests and so on, it's hard to get unanimity, as we all know.
So therefore, we get the idea of majority rule.
And the majority is a surrogate for the whole people.
So the majority is not the whole people.
In fact, It's 51 or more, so it can be a narrow majority.
But nevertheless, the majority is, in a sense, making a decision in the stead of the whole people.
Why? Because you can't get unanimity, and obviously the whole people can't be said to be represented by a small minority.
So the majority is the closest thing we can get to consensus.
That's the logic of a democracy.
Now, ancient democracies were direct democracies, and so in ancient Athens, for example, if you wanted to make an important decision, should we go to war with Sparta?
Should we raise taxes? You essentially invited all the eligible adult males in that era to show up and decide.
You have a debate in the agora, the open space, and you choose.
You make your decisions.
The people rule themselves.
Now, the American founders looked at this kind of democracy, and they didn't like it.
In fact, Madison rails against it.
In fact, he describes ancient Greek democracy as, quote, he goes, popular liberty.
In those days, he goes, build statues the one day and gives the same guy the hemlock the next day.
He's thinking here, actually, of Athenian democracy, which put Socrates, its greatest philosopher, to death.
This is also from the Federalist Papers.
Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
What's Madison saying here?
Well, what he's saying is that democracies operate by popular will, but what if the popular will decides, let's ostracize that guy.
Let's take that guy's house.
Let's put that guy to death.
So there's no compatibility between majority will, which often tramples on the rights of individuals, and the idea of personal liberty.
So this is why the American founders were unsatisfied.
with ancient democracy and found, in a sense, a replacement for it on two counts, two important counts.
The first is they moved from direct democracy to representative democracy.
And the idea of representative democracy is that we elect other people, representatives, congressmen, senators, the president, and they rule in our stead.
And the idea here is that representative democracy can be a little bit more deliberative We're good to go.
However, Madison's big concern and the concern of all the founders was, what about minority rights?
Why should the majority be able to run roughshod over the minority?
And so, majority rights have got to be qualified by, number one, limiting the scope of government.
That's called limited government.
Number two, insisting that individuals have rights.
That's the Bill of Rights. Insisting that the minority has rights.
That later came to be expressed in things like the filibuster and the Senate.
The minority, too, has rights.
The majority doesn't get to have all the say.
And then moreover, all kinds of other mechanisms like separation of powers, checks and balances, by the way, all intended to be limitations and curbs on what the founders believed to be and called the tyranny of the majority.
So the reason I think America is more accurately called a republic.
But, you know, I don't reject the term democracy because we are a certain type of democracy.
We are, I would say, a constitutional democracy.
And as long as democracy is qualified in that sense, that we are a constitutional democracy, Now remember that there are even representative democracies around the world, and this is to some degree true in Britain, it's true in Canada and Australia, where once you have representative democracy, the majority can make decisions on pretty much everything.
You don't have the same architecture of checks and balances.
You don't have the same protections for individual rights.
That's why, for example, you've got some of these extremely severe COVID limitations in places like Australia and Canada.
They don't really care about individual rights.
Individual rights are not a big deal.
Individual rights are subordinated to the will of the majority, but not here in America.
And I think the American system is better.
And therefore, we have a Republican form of government.
And if we're a democracy at all, we're a constitutional democracy in this specified sense.
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You need to use promo code DINESHDINESH. Here's a question about a phrase we hear a lot these days, particularly applied to conservatives.
Conspiracy theories.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
My name is Ileana. Whenever conservatives advance an idea, the left routinely dismisses them as conspiracy theories.
Can you address the issue of conspiracy theories and if they're always invalid?
Well, this question is very well framed because when we hear from the left and from the media, this is a conspiracy theory.
The automatic assumption is it's got to be false.
In other words, the idea here is that any insinuation that there might be a conspiracy afoot is on the face of it preposterous.
I would concede that conspiracies are difficult to organize.
In general, conspiracies fail because human nature is too fallible.
When you have particularly elaborate conspiracies, someone is going to go tell, someone's going to rat it out, or someone's not going to do what they were told.
Think of, by the way, the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln.
That was a conspiracy. So right there, you know, conspiracies do exist.
But the conspiracy was kind of blown because one guy was supposed to go after the vice president and he didn't really do it.
Another guy was supposed to kill the Secretary of State, so Booth, Wilts Booth, went into the theater and shot Lincoln, and even his plan didn't exactly go as planned.
And eventually, of course, the conspirators were caught and they were hanged.
But the point is, the conspiracy was a botched conspiracy, although it was partially successful in that it did succeed in ending Lincoln's life.
When we look through history, history is rife with conspiracies.
Conspiracies all over the place.
Think, for example, of the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar.
Think of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar.
Brutus and Cassius conspire together, and then they bring in a whole bunch of other conspirators, Casca and so on, and together they go, let's go get Caesar.
That's not a conspiracy theory, that's a conspiracy theory.
The Mafia. The Mafia is a conspiracy.
The Mafia operates by a kind of structure, a conspiratorial secretive structure governed, by the way, by all the rules of conspiracy.
Things like the rule of silence or murder.
You can't say what you've been told.
Why? Because you're part of this secret circle of crime and your only communication is with your fellow criminals.
There are some conspiracies, of course, that are, well, it's not clear that they were conspiracies.
Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. Now, was he part of a conspiracy?
Was the mafia involved?
I don't think so, but there have been credible arguments that it was.
Were the Russians involved?
Lee Harvey Oswald at one point, I believe, went to Russia.
Was this part of a Cold War conspiracy?
And Oswald was simply the...
Maybe he wasn't even the shooter at all.
So there have been all these wild-flying theories, and I guess at the end of it, my view of this is that probably it was just Lee Harvey Oswald.
So, yes, you do have an assassin, but you don't have a more elaborate conspiracy of the kind that has been alleged over the past 50 years.
Here's a conspiracy that is true.
Russia collusion.
Not a conspiracy of Trump and Russia.
That's the conspiracy that was alleged by the left.
The real conspiracy is the conspiracy between the Clinton campaign and its representatives like Michael Sussman and tech executives and other researchers all working together to frame Trump.
And they were knowingly looking for dirt on Trump.
Let's try to find the kind of stuff that will make it look Like Trump is colluding with Russia.
Now, the media was in on that conspiracy, but the media were not directly part of the conspiracy.
So, here we distinguish between a conspiracy theory and a coordination theory.
And what I mean by that is that the media wants to attack Trump.
And so what they do is they become fall guys for the conspiracy.
They are coordinating with the Democrats.
The Democrats feed them information.
And so, for example, very specifically, Franklin Foer, writer at Slate Magazine, is fed information.
And he's only too willing to write it up.
Why? Not because he's part of a conspiracy.
He didn't know that the Democrats cooked it up.
But he was coordinating with them to get Trump.
Here's another example of a coordination theory.
Think of the relationship between the Biden administration and the cartels on illegal immigration.
I don't believe that they're conspiring.
Biden doesn't have phone calls with the heads of the cartels saying, listen, you bring all the illegals over to the border, we'll take it from there.
No, but Biden knows that if you want to get illegals into this country for political reasons to Long-term benefit the Democratic Party.
Who's going to get them there? Who's going to bring people all the way from El Salvador and Nicaragua?
How are they going to get across hundreds of miles?
Well, the cartels already have a system for doing that.
So there's a kind of knowing wink wink collusion between the Biden administration and the cartels.
It's not an overt conspiracy, but it is a coordination. The Biden people fully understand what the cartels are doing and allow them and let them do it. Why? Because it's to their political benefit. So by and large, you notice that these conservative conspiracy theories, one by one, are all proving to be true. But in some cases, they're actual conspiracies.
In some cases, we're dealing with left-wing coordination.
You'll see in my movie, upcoming 2000 Mules, I get into all this because when we're dealing with these issues covered by the movie, we have to ask, how is all this being organized and who's doing it?
Is this a conspiracy theory or is it a coordination theory?
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Here's a question I don't think about all that often.
Who are the good Democrats?
Listen. Hey, Dinesh.
I know that good Democrats today are in short supply, but who is your favorite Democratic president?
Wow. Well, I think I was asked a version of this question once before, but I'm going to answer it a different way.
It's certainly true that Democrats, by and large, are a gang of scoundrels.
I made this point in Hillary's America, The History of the Party.
is one of deep corruption and bigotry and, in some cases, just criminal syndicates.
And it goes all the way back to the beginning of the Democratic Party.
Andrew Jackson was a patriot, but he was also a scoundrel.
Now, if I were to make a list of the great presidents, you don't find too many Democrats.
I would put Lincoln as number one.
Washington, who was not Republican or Democrat.
He was a member of the Federalist Party.
Number two, Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt.
Now Trump is a little hard to evaluate because I'm not sure Trump is even finished.
But Trump had a successful first term, although unbelievably turbulent because of the vehemence of the attacks on him.
But where are the Democrats on this list?
They're kind of hard to find.
With Democrats you need a lower standard because by and large you only have three or four who even were halfway decent.
And I certainly would not not include in that list people like FDR and Woodrow Wilson or LBJ. So these are standard Democrats that probably a lot of liberals would go, I revere FDR. FDR was a thug.
And a scoundrel. LBJ was, if anything, worse.
So the half-decent Democrats, to me, are the following.
There's Truman. There's JFK, who was obviously a flawed individual, but nevertheless, and very hardly held office for, what, a year and a half, two years, 1960 to 1962.
The Democrat I'm going to go with here is James Polk.
Now, Polk himself was hardly...
Admirable on every front.
He was a slaveholder.
And he was a protege of Andrew Jackson.
However, his achievement really is what he did with the country in general.
Now, you have to remember that the United States was kind of a small country when Polk became the president.
And Polk spearheaded the Mexican War.
And this was a controversial war.
Abraham Lincoln, by the way, was on the other side of that war.
Abraham Lincoln gave a series of speeches called the speeches on the spot resolutions where Abraham Lincoln accused Polk of unnecessarily starting this war with Mexico.
Supposedly because American soldiers had been attacked and Lincoln's point was, show me the spot where they were attacked.
His point was that Polk was kind of exaggerating or making it all up.
But nevertheless, Polk, and this is a very rare case where Abraham Lincoln was sort of politically defeated here, Polk went ahead and fought a popular war against Mexico and won it.
And as a result, a large chunk of Mexican, previously Mexican territory, all the way to the Rio Grande, now became part of the United States.
But Polk didn't even stop there.
Polk also spearheaded the acquisitions of large territories of California, also a large part of the Oregon Territory, and And he did all this through a combination, not just of force, but also of negotiation.
So the Mexican War, obviously, was a triumph of force, although it was subsequently ratified by a treaty, Guadalupe Hidalgo.
And then there was the Gadsden Purchase.
So Polk, essentially, in one term.
I mean, here's a guy who served a single term.
Died in June of 1849.
But within that space, he virtually doubled the size of the United States.
And it was his... I don't know if this would have happened without Polk.
And so here you've got a guy, kind of a mild-mannered character, who was somewhat seen as a political novice.
And yet, I'm judging him solely by the result.
The United States currently is a country that stretches, you know, from sea to smiling sea.
In other words, going all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
And the power and strength of the United States, the economic power, the military power, its influence in the world, all driven by the fact that the United States became a large geographical landmass and one that was able to develop its economic strength as well as its political and ultimately military strength.
James Polk is the guy who played a critical role in making that happen.
So if I had to pick Sort of reluctant to pick, but if I had to pick the best Democratic president, I would answer James Polk.
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You'll feel the difference. We're going to do some questions together, but before we get into it, honey, I'm kind of chuckling because look at our t-shirt.
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Oh yeah. You're welcome.
It's got, I mean, we've got mugs and we have hats.
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This is a sweatshirt, but there's also hoodies, which I love.
Oh my gosh, I love hoodies.
Absolutely. And one of the instigators of all this, my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, she goes, Dad, we need to sort of...
We need to make our own stuff.
Don't rely on doing it with the left.
So this is part of all that.
Anyway, let's turn to our questions.
We got a really good one about Venezuela.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
We always hear that we're headed towards Venezuela.
What do you think?
And what does Debbie think?
I think we got to take this, turn this over to the Venezuelan.
Yeah. Well, I know I've heard you talk about, are we headed to Venezuela?
I believe we are headed to Venezuela.
And let me tell you why.
There are three reasons why I think we are.
Number one, the polarization between the left and the right...
is exactly like it was in Venezuela when Hugo Chavez came in and basically took over the country.
There was a lot of animosity even between the political parties.
So, for example, the center-right party, Kobe, was self-destructing.
They were, you know, fighting amongst each other.
And so that was the discourse between them really couldn't keep their own side together.
And then they just became very polarized left and right.
So that's one.
The second one is, of course, the age old, you know, Marxist rich against the poor, the socio-economic fight, right?
Demonizing the rich, promising the poor.
If you vote for me, I'm going to give you this, this, this and this and still keep you poor.
But that's, you know, you think you're getting something right.
So that's number two.
Number three is the fight and the animosity between races and ethnicities.
And the left always drives it.
So Hugo Chavez drove that.
He drove that sentiment.
So people... In Venezuela, it was a very, you know, just great multicultural society when I was growing up.
We never really saw each other as far as like, you're black, I'm white, you're this, you're that.
We never did that. Until Hugo Chavez came along and decided that white people were evil.
And I see this happening now within America.
So just those three reasons, there are many others.
Let me tell you, there are a lot of parallels.
But those three reasons that basically started the decline of Venezuela are here today in America.
I mean in some ways I think if you're thinking about the racial divide, the American situation is in a way even more problematic I think than Venezuela because most of the Latin American countries and South American countries don't have a sharp distinction of just having whites and blacks, right? They have the whole spectrum in between. So when you have the whole spectrum in between, you've got white, you've got sort of dark coffee, you've got light coffee. Don't we have that here too? Well, we do now.
But what I'm saying is if you just look at the stark contour of American history, it was a more dramatic white versus black.
So for example, the blacks were enslaved.
And so the black-white distinction, now it's more fluid, but for a long time was pretty stark.
And so I think that the Marxists and the socialists in this country have realized that that is a very fertile Well, that's why Hugo Chavez did it, because in Venezuela, they had black slaves as well, as you know.
Right. Simón Bolívar was the emancipator of slavery.
So, no, they had that there too.
It's very similar in many, many ways, because Venezuela not only has the white, the black, the indigenous, but they also have the European and the Asian.
So they have, it's almost like a little version of America.
I think with the critical difference that while America might be in a position, at least under the right leadership, to save Venezuela, who's in a position to save America?
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Our next question moves from Venezuela to America and it deals with American identity.
Listen. Hi Dinesh and Debbie.
In this age of identity politics, what do you and Debbie think of the concept of the hyphenated American?
Well honey, why don't you go first on this one?
Speaking from a hyphenated American.
Yeah. So I, you know, the interesting thing about that is when I was in college, I was not, I never hyphenated my ethnicity ever.
I was an American and only an American.
But I did notice, though, that the left, even then, always wanted to make it an issue.
And so I fought against that.
For example, somebody from LULAC came up to me.
LULAC, the League of Latin American Citizens, something like that.
Something like that. But it's actually for Mexican Americans born in America.
I think that was the thing.
And so I said...
Listen, I have too many things in me.
I'm not Mexican because I wasn't born in Mexico.
My mother is Mexican-American.
She was born in Texas.
But I was born in Venezuela.
So I have a lot of...
My cultural Hispanic, so to speak, spans, you know, through two continents, right?
What I think is funny is that they were treating your reluctance as if I was ashamed of my heritage, yes.
And the really funny thing is, At the time, now, my Spanish is horrible now.
I'm very guilty of that.
Well, it's not great, and it's because I don't practice it.
But when I was in college, I did speak it very fluently.
So when this person was talking to me, I decided just to be, you know, funny and speak in Spanish to him and tell him, you know, I was not ashamed of my heritage.
And the funny thing is that this person did not know Spanish.
So, you know, so then I think he began to realize, oh, wait a minute, you're more Latina than I am.
Oh, my goodness. You even have the language.
So anyway, just ridiculous, really.
I mean, I think we're similar in this respect, that we both cherish our American identity values.
Primarily. And we see ourselves as 100% American, even though neither of us was born here.
But at the same time, we're not like there were some immigrant generations in the past where the parents would come from Italy and they would tell the children, forget everything about Italy.
No eating Italian food.
So the idea was that you've got to sort of completely relinquish and give up the world you came from.
We don't take that view.
In other words, we both are proud of where we were born and we cherished our childhood and we have a lot of affection for the places we were born.
At least for me, I'm not completely opposed to the idea of the hyphenated American understood in the correct way.
Now, to me, the meaning of a hyphenated American is that Indian is the adjective and America is the noun.
So, in other words, America is the anchor.
It's the primary one. But Indian kind of qualifies what type of American.
You know, so there are Native Americans and there are Italian Americans and there are Indian Americans.
And as long as the emphasis is on the American, it is no diminution of America.
In fact, it's an enrichment of America.
Think of the concept of the melting pot.
It brings many elements coming from all over the world and all coming together, if you will, to create something greater.
No, and I also use Hispanic and Venezuelan a lot now, primarily because I like to poke fun at the left.
And so I, in 2009, I started a page called Conservative Latina to mess with them because...
Conservatives aren't supposed to be Latinas and Latinas aren't supposed to be conservatives.
So I thought it was funny.
But in reality, there's no incompatibility at all.
In fact, the opposite. Not at all.
Not at all. It's the opposite, really.
And I also like to use the Venezuelan as a word of authority when I'm speaking about Venezuela and Venezuelan things so that people know, oh, she knows what she's talking about.
She was born in Venezuela. She still has family there.
They are suffering through socialism.
So, the word of authority, basically, is why I use Venezuelan.
Well, I think the other thing is, and this is true, not specifically of India, Venezuela, but anybody who's born outside the United States and has lived elsewhere for a significant part of their life...
To them, America can be seen in a comparative framework, right?
So we're always able to say, America compared to this.
And even when people say things like, well, these people, Americans are so prejudiced.
Well, compared to who? Are you saying that Saudis are less prejudiced and people in India are less prejudiced?
They don't pay attention to people's background or color or family?
Ridiculous. So what happens is that the immigrant is always in a position to put what's happening in America in a larger context.
Whereas people want in America, it's kind of like this is the only thing you know.
And so you can only judge America by its own ideals.
You can't judge America compared to what's happening elsewhere in the world.
Right. And I always feel like, you know, this is our adopted country.
And we are...
Essentially successful because of America.
And so I never forget that.
While I never forget my roots and where I came from, such, you know, and you too, I'm very grateful to the country that has given us so much.
And we know, too, that the kind of life that we have in America is not a life that I could have had, in my case, if I had stayed back in India, and I argue even elsewhere in the world.
The chance to be able to shape your own destiny in the way that we have, that is something that is, even now, uniquely American.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Our next question concerns the future of the state of Texas.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
I was listening to your segment on AOC when she was saying that Texas will be turning blue.
Your reaction worries me very much.
We have underestimated the left for far too long.
We let them take over what we watch on CV, what is taught to our children in schools, and so much more just because we keep dismissing their ideas as loony and ridiculous.
May I remind you that Donald Trump won Texas by less than 6% in 2020, compared to 9% in 2016.
Ted Cruz won his 2018 re-election by less than 3%, compared to 16% in 2012.
The numbers don't lie, so my recommendations to conservatives like you and libertarians like myself is to take the left seriously, as crazy as some of them may sound.
Thanks, Dinesh. Great question.
Good question. Let me start by saying, first of all, I think that...
I think that you are into something important, and that is that even figures like AOC, Ilhan Omar, we've got to be a little careful in flatly dismissing them because they have strong constituencies.
They mobilize and motivate a lot of people.
In fact, my daughter Danielle was saying that she kind of studies AOC because she believes that AOC is playing a very kind of cunning game and that AOC... Whether she's bright or not is kind of beside the point because what she is is a, she's an actress. She's someone who's able to, she has a innate sense of theater and drama.
She knows how to draw the camera and she knows how to make something appear cool.
And very often for young people, it's more important to conform with the cool than it is to be convinced by an argument.
So let me say right up front that I think that you are on the money on that aspect.
What do you think about the broader point about the fragility of Texas?
Oh, well, I think he's right on point.
And I've never agreed with you on that one.
And he basically said, don't dismiss these people.
Don't dismiss Beto.
And when I heard that Beto was running for governor, not that I think he'll win, but I do think that he fools a lot of people.
And I think that... Especially the people that are not that involved in politics, they just kind of hear things like, you know, in the news, and typically they hear the mainstream media.
They might think Beto is like AOC, kind of like cool, and he would be such a cool governor, you know, not really understanding what he encompasses.
Yeah, I mean, I take Take the question really to be highlighting not so much the talents of AOC or Beto, but rather the power of the coordinated media and digital media.
Because let's look at Beto in the first race against Ted Cruz, right?
So Beto was portrayed as the new JFK. There was almost no reporting about Beto.
He was merely glamorized.
And of course, he went on this kind of fundraising trip.
He collected all this money from out of state.
Now, it has to be said that in that race, Ted Cruz was hurt by the fact that there was a schism on the right between the Ted Cruz faction and the Trump faction.
Those two had been at loggerheads.
Again, that goes to my point.
We are The right cannot self-destruct.
No, no, absolutely. I'm saying it's not that we undermest him.
It wasn't that Beto had this unbelievable political gift.
It was that he was inflated by the media and it was the case that there was a damaging break on the right.
So a lot of the Trumpsters were like, we're never voting for Ted Cruz.
It's similar to what happened in Georgia in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
There were conservative Georgians who stayed home We're like, we're going to teach the GOP a lesson and so on.
So you've got to realize that was an anomalous situation.
Now Beto is not the same man as he was when he ran first against Cruz.
So Robert, I want to call him Robert, Beto, because I call him the fake Mexican because he's not Mexican and he tries to pretend like he is.
In fact, my mom says he goes down to the valley and he tries to like really, you know, like...
Pander to Hispanics down there.
And so, you know, he sometimes even tries to have the accent like he's Hispanic, but he is not.
And then yesterday, when you played the clip, the AOC clip, and she goes, San Antonio!
These people are like, just like...
Well, but this is the point we were making about the fact that goofball, though she might be, these are people who are able to convey a cool vibe.
I mean, think about it. Ted Cruz has been trying to convey a cool vibe.
Every now and then you'll see him on social media dunking a basketball.
But he's much more refined than that.
And people on our side don't do that.
They don't pander. They're not like...
These people on the left, they are the king of pandering.
They know how to do it so well.
I mean, the main thrust of my point about Texas is just this.
If the Hispanics as a group, and Hispanics are, I don't think they're quite the majority yet, but they will be.
And so the future of Texas does depend on the Hispanics.
And if the Hispanics go the way of the blacks, then Texas is totally lost.
And the Democrats have a strategy to make that happen, and it's basically dependency.
San Antonio and Beto.
That and also just the sheer...
I mean, this is when you were growing up.
Think about it. You were basically saying how the government would offer your family cheese and say, oh, yes.
So that's a symbol to me for the kind of dependency the Democrats are trying to cultivate.
No, I mean, it is.
And they promise these people in the valley...
Welfare and all those things that they think they're getting something out of it.
And so they think their government is great.
But I think we need to teach people that the government is not the answer.
That the government gets in the way of prosperity.
The government is not prosperity.
And I think once Hispanics and Blacks learn that...
We won't have any of this.
Well, it's happening already. I mean, as Hispanics, we know a whole bunch of people who as they become, as they start running a store or they become entrepreneurs of one sort or the other.
Debbie actually has a friend who somewhat amusingly is a Viagra salesman, but a very successful one.
And he's a very humorous guy.
And he's obviously, he goes into these hospitals and he basically cracks jokes.
Oh, yeah. And he's, as a result, he's doing extremely well.
And so the point is, as people realize, listen.
And they are Trumpsters, let me tell you.
I'm not going to mention their name because I want to.
Well, but I mean, they love Trump.
Yeah, they love Trump. Why?
Because they see that what Republicans are offering them are the prospects of having a better life that you can build for yourself.
Well, you know what? And this caller, what this caller maybe doesn't know is that in the Valley, before the election, you know, I told you that I'd gone and I had seen these parades and I had never seen so much support for a candidate ever.
Not Democrat, not Republican.
I was just amazed and And these rallies and these, like, parades would go on for miles and miles and miles, and they had all these Trump flags.
And I would look and hear, sure enough, there are my Latino, you know, friends.
They love Trump.
And I think that maybe the caller doesn't understand that aspect.
And so when we make fun of AOC and Beto, they don't really understand that in the Valley...
There are working class Hispanics and working class people, I think, across the board ethnically can sort of see through an AOC type.
They know that she's a fake.
Yes. Absolutely. You know, they know that she's kind of like, you know, a margarita Hispanic.
What? Well, I mean, what I'm saying is, I'm actually referring to the fact that she once made, I think, a video where she was making margaritas like she used to do in her bartending days.
But this was all part of her strategic cool.
I'm cool. I'm making a margarita and I'm talking about, you know, child support or some, you know, some democratic policy.
Mm-hmm. So, look, I think that we're seeing good things happening with the Hispanics, and for this reason, I think Texas is going to be okay.
Not to say that we should be complacent, none of that, but if we continue to articulate and campaign effectively in Hispanic neighborhoods, and now we have all these, I told you today, Trump endorsed...
Candidates in the valley.
Oh, that is just, that makes my heart happy.
Yeah. And women. These are female Hispanics who are coming out front and taking the lead.
And, I mean, those are some pretty tough characters in taking on the left.
Love it. I'd like to have at least one question that is sort of completely off the beaten track, and that's this one.
Hi, Dinesh.
If you could live in any era of time in the past, what era would you choose to live in?
Hmm, wow. Now, to me, the idea of living at times in the past has to be qualified by the simple fact that we live in a time when we have unbelievable medical advances.
And if we go to earlier eras, we find that simple things like You know, losing a tooth or just getting sick and not being able to do anything about it.
Or, perhaps even worse, the medical treatments in earlier times made the problem worse.
Doctors would start bleeding you even as late as the 19th century.
Think about the horrors of the Civil War, a very interesting time in many ways.
But man, if you got injured on the battlefield, they would saw your arm off or saw your leg off while putting a thick piece of cloth in your mouth and giving you like a swig of whiskey before it happened.
So none of this I find all that appealing.
And if this is what's going on in the 19th century, just think about how much worse it was in earlier centuries.
The 19th century was advanced.
Compared, let's say, to the Middle Ages, let alone compared to say the period of the Roman Empire or even earlier.
Now, the Let me highlight what I think are some really interesting times to have lived ignoring this issue of medical advances and focusing just solely on the intellectual and cultural life and the sort of unbounded curiosity of particular times in history.
There's of course the 5th century BC and I think if I had to choose, if I was forced to choose, I would go there.
Because this is just a civilization that sprung out of nowhere.
It was almost like, you know, the airplane is like bouncing on the tarmac and suddenly it takes off.
And the human civilization got a lift with the ancient Greeks.
It was the era of Plato and Socrates.
It was the era of the great Greek tragedians.
It was the era of democracy with Pericles.
And it was the era of Thucydides and history.
So all of this happening in one place at one time, really unbelievable.
And I think it was Plato who said somewhere something to the effect of, you know, I thank God that I was made Greek instead of barbarian, man instead of woman.
But most of all, I thank God that I was born in the age of Socrates.
So it was in Plato's case, his teacher that made all the difference.
Fast forward to the Middle Ages.
I'm fascinated by what happened in the University of Paris with Thomas Aquinas, or even a little bit later with Dante.
Of course, I've been doing a Dante series on the Divine Comedy.
So Dante's Florence, a fascinating place in the 13th and 14th centuries.
I would have liked to have been there and seen it.
Elizabethan England. Wow!
This is the era of Shakespeare.
And Shakespeare, you have to think about, Shakespeare didn't just sort of...
Shakespeare was a genius. And it is theoretically possible that that kind of a genius can be born any place, any time.
But it's not clear that their genius would be fulfilled.
Shakespeare required the Elizabethan stage.
He required the works that came before him and around him.
He required the intellectual environment of people like Ben Johnson.
And it also required sponsorship.
Shakespeare was a member of a theater company, I think called All the King's Men.
So without patronage, without sponsorship, without theaters, without a theater-going audience, without all that...
So the cultural ambiance is important in producing Shakespeare, and that ambiance, that Elizabethan England, that kind of Renaissance, I think is a wonderful time to have been alive.
The United States at the time of the American founding, obviously we weren't the United States, but the intellectual ferment, think about the possibility of being present or fly on the wall in Philadelphia.
When the founders were debating the Constitution, what must that have been like?
Well, it was evidently very hot and apparently tempers flared, but nevertheless, I think what was remarkable is the people in that room knew the significance of what was going on, that they were creating something truly new for all time.
And then, of course, Germany in the 19th century.
This is something we don't often think about, but Germany had somewhere between the 1830s and the 1880s an unbelievable explosion, not just a philosophical talent.
Think of all the major modern philosophers that we think of, people starting with Schopenhauer, but Hegel.
We go on through Nietzsche.
And so many others.
And then we pivot to musical talent and think of all the major musical figures that came out of Germany in the 19th century.
So Germany had its own renaissance about 130 years ago.
And I'm not...
Particularly enthusiastic about the German language or perhaps even German food, so I don't really want to be eating bratwurst while I'm there.
But nevertheless, I can't deny the cultural flowering of Germany in the 19th century.
I think when I first came to America, if you asked me this question, I would probably have said I would have loved to live in America in the late 40s and 50s because that seems to have been almost a more innocent time in America, a time that is very attractive to people around the world.
When most people think of the American dream, they think sort of Loosely of America in the 1950s.
Now, as I study America more closely, I'm a little bit less enthusiastic about the 1950s because I think that many of the problems of the 1960s came out of the soil of the 1950s.
There was, for example, a spiritual deadness of vacuum in the 50s, and it took...
Bizarre and exotic and corrupt shapes in the 1960s, but the spirituality of the 1960s arose out of the deformed environment of the 1950s.
And so the 1950s was a prosperous time.
It was a peaceful time.
There were a lot of nice things about it.
But on the other hand, I think that there also was a A kind of hollowness to the 1950s.
The 60s didn't come out of nowhere.
They came out of the 1950s and for a reason.
So this is my very brief survey of some of what I would call the bright spots of Western civilization, but if forced to choose myself, I think I would choose to be one of those young men on the streets of Athens listening to and participating in the debates between Socrates and the Sophists.
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