All Episodes
Previous Next
April 19, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:19
STATE OF THE UNION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep313
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Quick announcement, guys.
No locals Q&A tonight.
I normally do a Tuesday, but not this week.
Well, coming up, Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to talk about the state of Biden's union.
Not his domestic union, but his state of the country under Biden.
I'm also going to analyze Obama's strange notion that ideas he doesn't agree with pose a, quote, grave danger to democracy.
I'll explore the implications of the, well, very interesting revelation that the FBI had no less than 20 agents embedded in the January 6th protest.
And the Indian government, the government of India, says America has a human rights problem.
And I agree.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
Barack Obama is in the news again.
He attended a somewhat ironically titled conference on disinformation.
The conference was sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, which, by the way, has been one of the chief purveyors of disinformation.
They've been part of the Russia collusion hoax.
In fact, one of the Atlantic writers, Franklin Foer, was the source of putting out all the lies that were concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign, by this guy Sussman, by Christopher Steele.
So the Atlantic were not only the dupes, but I think the willing collaborators of these lies.
But this conference was in conjunction with the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, and of course they trot out good old Barack Obama, who can be always counted on as a...
I mean, this is America's leading con man.
I mean, there's competition.
Stacey Abrams is in that competition, Hillary Clinton, there are others.
But I think Obama owns the title in part because he's able to kind of put that pompous expression and look to the left and he looks to the right.
It's kind of his style.
It was... It was a little bit befuddling when it first came out in 2008, but of course by 2012 and later, 2016, everyone had sort of seen through it.
It's like the con man who's like fanning out the cards, take a look.
Well, you know, we kind of know the routine by now.
Well, let's look at Obama.
And he's talking about disinformation, and here he goes.
It's something I grappled with.
Imagine Obama grappling with disinformation during my presidency.
I saw it sort of unfold, and that's the degree to which information, disinformation, and misinformation was being weaponized.
Well, let's start with, let's look at that and analyze.
I mean, you have to realize how these people don't even think about words.
How can information be weaponized?
It can't be. Information is basically information.
It's like the information contained in DNA, or the information in an equation, or the information of factual stuff.
How do you weaponize information?
Then there's disinformation and misinformation.
And again, these are used as synonyms, but it would seem to me that there's a critical difference between these two.
Namely, misinformation is if someone is misinformed.
Someone says something like, oh, you know, I thought you were in your 40s, Dinesh.
I'm like, no, actually, I'm going to be turning 61.
You're misinformed.
That's misinformation. But that's not disinformation.
Now, of course, if the Indian government puts out some press release falsely stating that I'm in my 40s for some nefarious purpose, presumably that would be official government propaganda, and for that reason it could be counted as disinformation.
But, you know, you find that people like Obama have now incorporated these words and kind of melded them together, I think, ultimately to cause confusion.
Let's continue with Obama.
And he says, and we saw it, meaning Obama says, we saw this problem in his time, but I think I underestimated the degree to which democracies were as vulnerable to it as they were, including ours.
So, Obama underestimated how dangerous democracies This misinformation and disinformation.
Well, if disinformation can only come from the government, then the disinformation in the Obama administration must have been coming from him.
From the Obama administration itself.
Who else could it be coming from?
Is an ordinary citizen capable of producing disinformation?
How? Now, misinformation is a word that basically means error.
And how can error be by itself a threat to democracy?
Because think about it.
What you have in democratic politics, and democratic politics are by definition messier than aristocratic or monarchical or even authoritarian politics, because in authoritarian countries, no Argument is allowed.
The people aren't even consulted.
Who cares what they think?
But in a democracy, people are fighting over what is the truth, which policies work better.
And there are competing claims, factual claims, claims of interpretation.
Sometimes the facts are known, but many times they're not.
Particularly in situations where you have something like COVID, which kind of springs on the scene, a new virus of unknown origin, where exactly it came from.
So naturally, people are going to propound all kinds of theories.
Well, this would seem to be the normal give and take of democracy.
When the left says, as Obama does here, that there's misinformation and disinformation, what is an example of this misinformation that's being put out on the right that is supposedly a danger to democracy?
Even if the right says things that are wrong or turn out to be wrong, that doesn't inherently threaten democracy.
That's merely misinformation, which presumably can be corrected with accurate information.
I mean, the whole argument for free speech is that when you have a contest of truth and error, truth is going to win.
Because truth ultimately is nothing more than a verbal expression of reality.
And so reality in the end asserts itself, right?
So if I say...
That if you stick your hand in the fire, it's going to burn you.
That can't be misinformation because at some point someone's going to stick their hand in the fire and they're going to go, ouch!
And reality, it turns out, is accurately described by what I'm saying.
On the other hand, if someone denies it, they're providing misinformation.
But if they stick their hand in the fire, they're going to have the same result.
So this is the basis of the assertion that truth wins in the end.
Obama doesn't seem to believe it.
These are people who want to shut down their opponents.
If my opponents can't talk...
I win. If my opponents don't get to organize, I win.
If I can censor my opponents, I win.
And that's the psychology that Barack Obama not only articulates, but has now brought ultimately to the Democratic Party as a whole.
Mike Lindell, the inventor and CEO of MyPillow, wants to make it easy for you to be a super shopper like Debbie and me.
How? Well, by giving you great deals.
For example, his Giza Dream bed sheets are now 60% off.
Wow. As low as $39.99 plus.
With any purchase using promo code Dinesh, You'll get a free copy of Mike's inspirational book.
Mike is also offering up to 66% off on his other products, and he's got a whole bunch of them, more than 150 products.
All the MyPillow products come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 10-year warranty.
Call 800-876-0227, that number, 800-876-0227, or go to MyPillow.com.
To get the discounts, you've got to use promo code D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
There's a new revelation that the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had at least 20 undercover agents embedded in January 6th in the crowd or in the groups involved in January 6th.
And here we're talking particularly about a single group, namely the so-called Oath Keepers.
Now, how do we know this?
Well, it comes out of a filing by a defense attorney in the Oath Keeper's case.
And so interestingly here, the government does not put out information.
It doesn't tell you what they did, but the defense gets this information from Discovery.
And they look through the Discovery and the government admits, yeah, we had More than 20 agents.
And so the defense puts that into their motion.
That's how we know about it, because the motions are official documents.
At least 20 could mean more than 20.
We don't know how many more.
And the case that's going to trial, Judge Amit Mehta, and this is a Democratic appointee, a guy who's been very hostile to the January 6th defendants.
So you're dealing here with the D.C. establishment, D.C. judges, D.C. juries.
This is part of what I think is giving The January 6th defendants are raw deal, not really a jury of their peers, certainly not a jury in any way sympathetic to their ideas or even their motivation for why they might have gone to D.C. in the first place.
Now, when the government admits that it's got all these agents, they also admit, according at least to these documents, that these agents were embedded prior to January 6th.
So that means that the government had infiltrated organizations like the Oath Keepers, and they were essentially spying on them and monitoring them before January 6th.
And on what basis?
I mean, were these people guilty of breaking any laws if they weren't?
What possible justification can the government have for doing this?
Well, the government's justification is we're monitoring hate groups, we're monitoring this kind of troubling activity, and it's given the government a kind of open license to Sort of penetrate these groups with true informants and monitor them.
Now, as we know, all of this is coming in the wake of an exoneration of two defendants in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case, where the FBI seems to have had a large role in orchestrating the so-called conspiracy, in helping to plan it, in helping to organize it, and in helping to carry it out, upon which they turn around and bust these guys.
So that's the background against which you have to look at what's happening in January 6th.
And in fact, the chief FBI agent in Michigan and Detroit, who was overseeing this operation, this frame-up operation, this entrapment operation, is a guy who was subsequently transferred to D.C. and given a high position in the January 6th manner.
And that's where he is now.
Now... The defense, the Oath Keeper's defense in this seditious conspiracy case and the whole idea that they were planning sedition is just inherently absurd.
But again, when you have a D.C. jury of D.C. judges, things that are absurd on the face of it, absurd to the normal outsider, suddenly become very plausible.
Yeah, D.C. was under the greatest attack since 1812.
This is the kind of stuff that these...
Jurors and judges have been reading about in The Hill and in The Washington Post and hearing it on NPR. So in their cubicle of knowledge, this is actually what happened.
That's the interpretive framework that they're bringing to these events.
Now, very interestingly, as you read the documents produced by the Oath Keepers in their defense, they offer a sort of an ingenious argument.
I have difficulty believing that this is going to work, but it is kind of clever and I want to share it with you.
Their argument is that the definition under the Title 18 of the U.S. Code, seditious conspiracy, is this.
You have to somehow conspire or plan to forcibly obstruct the We're good to go.
They have to be executing a law, they have to be in the process of doing it, and you have to act forcibly to stop them.
The question is, did the Oath Keepers do that?
Now, the Oath Keepers' argument is that there is a difference between the legislative branch and the executive branch, and the legislative branch, including members of Congress, their job is not to execute any laws.
In fact, they are By definition, part of the legislative branch that makes laws, but so says the Oath Keepers lawyers, certifying an election is not an executive function.
It's a legislative function.
The Constitution says that members of Congress will, in fact, certify the election.
And so what they're basically saying is, listen, we're by definition not guilty of this because sedition involves the executive act, the executive branch, the execution of the laws, and not the legislative function that Congress is having.
Empowered by the Constitution to carry out.
As I say, this is a clever distinction, but it looks to me one that the judge is going to probably give short shrift to.
But the broader issue here is that...
And I think this is really, if I were a defense lawyer, I would be pushing this idea.
To what degree did the FBI actually push this case, push January 6th forward, in the exact same way that they did with the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping?
I'm not sure if it's going to be possible to bring the facts of that situation in here.
It could be challenged on the ground of relevance, but...
If you could show that the FBI, having infiltrated groups like the Oath Keepers, was egging them on.
Hey, guys, you thought of going to the Capitol.
Hey, guys, you don't have any money?
Well, listen, how about if we advance you some dollars?
How about if we make your hotel reservations?
Hey, listen, we're all going to go down to the rally, but what are we going to do after the rally?
How about if we mosey over to the Capitol?
Listen, I know a door that might be open.
How about if we go through that door?
So this is...
This would be a clear-cut case of the FBI informants not acting as mere informants, but as participants and in fact as drivers of the plot.
I think that's what made the Michigan case so interesting.
The FBI was driving forward a plot.
That probably would have not gone forward if the FBI had not been involved.
And so the jury saw that and they were like, no, we're not going to convict.
The FBI couldn't get a single conviction in that case.
And it seems to me that provides an illuminating model for the defense to pursue in the events of January 6th.
Have you noticed lately that criminals, illegal migrants, corrupt politicians, even tyrants are getting all the protection?
Well, I say it's time we protect what is right and good, and my friends, that AMAC can help you to do just that.
AMAC is the Association of Mature American Citizens, and AMAC is standing up for your conservative values and for the future of America.
AMAC is the conservative voice for mature Americans and they stand up for causes that all freedom-loving Americans share.
By joining AMAC, you'll combine your efforts with over 2.3 million members who share your values and you'll receive exclusive benefits, discounts on travel, cell phone plans, and so much more.
Go to amac.us slash Dinesh and join or renew today.
Debbie and I are proud members and for just $16 a year, you can be one too.
It's time to protect faith, family and freedom.
Join AMAC today by going to amac.us slash Dinesh and take a stand for America.
Joe Biden is proving to be a disaster on all fronts, the foreign policy front, the domestic front.
And it's really because of him that the state of the union is such a mess.
Biden himself tries to blame all this on external factors, but he did it.
And the State of the Union prior to Biden was actually pretty good, despite all the pressures imposed by COVID. So this is a change that's produced by policy.
And Debbie and I thought we would do, well, kind of a survey, honey, right?
Looking at a couple of the key issues where this guy has changed the policy and gotten a terrible result.
And I think there's no single issue.
If one had to come to mind, it would be the border.
Well, you know, it's really interesting you mention that because I feel like the border, our Mexican border and Mexico poses the largest threat that we face, even more so than the Middle East.
Or China.
Or China.
Because they are at war in Mexico.
And people don't talk about that.
And people don't, you know, we have all these illegals coming through and, oh, we have so many illegals, what are we going to do with them?
Let's send them to D.C.
Let's do this, let's do that.
But nobody is addressing the root cause of why these people are coming over in the first place.
And so I feel like we're just not putting enough resources.
You know, we're sending all this money.
Obviously, the Ukraine right now is needing it and all of that.
But Mexico is in a very, very, very severe crisis.
They have all these cartels, and I just have to say something really quickly here, but the cartels get emboldened with the president of the, whoever the president of the United States is, makes them emboldened.
During Barack Obama, these cartels went haywire.
During Trump, not as much, although they were doing their damage, but not as much.
Now with Biden, they're emboldened even more because they know that, you know, sleeping Biden is not going to do anything about it.
So there was this news article that really captivated my attention, and it was a CBS one where five men and a woman were found dead on the side of the road.
You know, you might think, well, so what?
But this is just a daily occurrence in Mexico.
Not even to mention the fact that some family members receive severed heads of their family members in suitcases, and this too is a daily occurrence.
Or displaying them, you know, at a...
I mean, it's horrific.
And the DOJ says that the Jalisco and Sinaloa drug cartels are two of the most dangerous transnational drug cartels in the entire world.
And you know how we have a fentanyl problem in America?
Guess who is responsible for that fentanyl problem?
They are. So I'm sorry, but we need to have some kind of legislation to address this because this is only going to get worse, that we're only going to get more people flooded into America because of this.
Who wants to live in a place where They don't know if they're next.
They train children to fight because their parents die.
So who's going to defend them?
I mean, it's just, it's really bad.
Now, you mentioned a moment ago that Biden was kind of lethargic or asleep.
But shouldn't we go a little further and say that what Biden has been doing is Is working hand in hand with the cartels.
I don't mean that he's conspiring with them.
They don't communicate directly with each other.
But Biden knows that you're not going to get this traffic of people coming across the border without the cartels facilitating it.
And how does somebody move a couple of thousand miles from Costa Rica or Nicaragua and show up on the Tijuana border?
That's another issue that the cartels are doing, is that they're causing all this havoc, but they're also making money on the side with doing this.
They make money on every person that they traffic across America.
And, you know, hey, when you have a political party that benefits from people needing help like this...
And cartels that are more than willing to do it, you know, you have a disaster in your hands.
I mean, there's an interesting connection here I should mention.
When we think about trafficking, there's drug trafficking.
Cartels are into that.
There's human trafficking.
Cartels are now into that.
And here I just simply mean by trafficking the carrying of people across the border, right?
And who does that?
Well, the people who do that are often called mules.
And it relates to our movie because we're talking about something entirely different, trafficking in the ballots area, a whole different matter.
But the point being here that the cartels give rise to the idea of the mule.
The cartels are the ones who have perfected, it seems, the art of both drug trafficking and to a degree human trafficking.
Yeah, they have definitely perfected that, as have the Democrats.
Yeah. The global upheaval caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the crippling sanctions on Russian trade are showing to have massive ripple effects around the world, including right here in the US. And it's not just at the gas pump.
Food prices are soaring right now, to quote President Biden.
With regard to food shortages, it's gonna be real.
Well, friends, inflation continues to skyrocket.
And as the dollar becomes worth less every day, We're good to go.
Information Kit on Gold.
There's no obligation.
Text Dinesh to 989898 and protect your savings with gold.
Debbie and I are talking about the border crisis.
And it seems like Governor Abbott had sort of a, well, I don't know if you'd call it a naughty idea or a little bit of an in-your-face idea.
But his idea was, listen, you know, if the Biden administration is importing all these people because they want them in this country, well...
Maybe they should have to deal with them directly.
And so Abbott's idea, and apparently the first Texas bus put the migrants in the bus.
Now, you can't force them.
So it's the migrants who agree to go voluntarily.
And the first bus drops them off blocks from the U.S. Capitol building.
Apparently, Fox News found out that this particular bus of migrants came from the Del Rio sector.
But there were people in there from Colombia, from Cuba, from Nicaragua, from Venezuela.
They apparently had all these wristbands.
And so when they got there, the bus driver was like, let's cut off your wristband.
You're free to roam the streets of D.C. So, I mean, this is kind of a nightmare.
And I think Abbott is only doing what he can do within his limited jurisdiction to say, listen, you want him, you got him.
Right. Well, did you hear Jen Psaki talking about it?
She acted like, oh, yes, it's great.
It's a great idea.
You know, so I think that they're trying to play a little game here because they're wanting to pretend like it's a good thing, even though they know it's bad for them.
It looks really horrible.
The optics are just awful.
And the really funny thing is that this bus...
You know, Abbott made sure that this bus dropped them off near the media stations, like near Fox Studios.
Here's Abbott. If they're not going to come to the border...
I'm going to take the border to them.
He's referring here to the D.C. politicians.
Washington is going to have to respond and deal with the same challenges that we're dealing with.
So have a taste of your own medicine.
This is the effect of your policies.
Now, this is probably going to be, I'm expecting, challenged in court because the federal government has always said, well, you know, it's the federal government that makes immigration policy, not the states themselves.
But here's the problem with that.
They're not doing anything about it.
And the states are the ones that are taking in the brunt of it.
So we have to, as a Texan, as Texans, we have to pay for this.
The federal government is not paying for it.
Texas is...
In a sense, importing these people into our own government.
I mean, not our government.
Our communities. Into our own communities.
And so we have to pay for it ourselves.
Texas doesn't have the money to pay for all of these illegals.
I think the other thing is that if the federal government was following the immigration laws, it would be one thing.
Yeah. But they're flouting the laws.
They don't have the power to change the laws.
So the laws exist, but they're not being followed.
And so if the government goes to the court and says, you know, we, the federal government, are in charge of carrying out the law, the court could say, well, you're not doing that.
So states like Texas...
Why haven't they? I think it's because there have been some cases, and in fact, judges have ordered the restoration of Trump's Remain in Mexico policy.
Yeah, and what happened to that? Yeah, so the problem here is that, you know, you have a judge who issues a ruling, and the guy is sitting in a courtroom somewhere, and the Biden administration says, oh yeah, you know, we'll do that, but then they take weeks to carry it out, and they carry it out half-heartedly.
So they're using the power of enforcement And the supposed discretion that goes with that to flout the law.
It's very, very bad.
And folks, when you vote, you should know that this is the way that this administration and any Democrat administration is going to behave.
They want these people.
They want illegal immigration.
We have the power to stop them by pulling the lever for the other party.
Well, the Hispanics themselves are in revolt.
I mean, here's the latest. Look, this is a Quinnipiac poll just out.
Biden's approval rating, 33%.
But look at his rating with Hispanics, 26%.
He's actually lower with Hispanics than he is in the country as a whole.
He's polling badly with every group.
In fact, his approval rating with 18 to 34-year-olds is 21%, lowest of any age group.
Yeah. Wow. So I think young people are on to him and Hispanics are on to him.
So all of this is, it's almost like you're sort of heating water to a boiling point.
And I think the boiling point is going to be the November election.
I hope so. We certainly hope so because...
I hope so. I hope people understand what they are voting for and why they vote this way is, I have no idea why.
I mean, we have a media that covers up for Biden.
There's hardly any reporting about all these things in the media.
And so the news that you're getting day to day is not a reflection of what's going on.
It's almost like you have to decode the news and you have to look for alternative sources of information.
get a sense of what's really going on, but it looks like the American people are getting the picture.
And in a democracy, you know, ultimately it's up to the people to make their voices heard loud and clear. We certainly hope that that will occur this November.
Who actually eats six servings of fruits and vegetables every single day?
Well, who can realistically do that?
Balance of Nature provides that, and their products are 100% natural, vine-ripened, whole food, and third-party tested.
Real science, real food, real nutrition.
Debbie and I take 10 daily servings of fruits and veggies, and we do it just in six small capsules.
Take a look. They're no trouble swallowing, always fresh, nothing artificial, they smell great.
Balance of Nature keeps all the natural chemistry, the seeds, the skin, the core, the color, in their produce.
They only remove the water and the air.
And Debbie also swears by this, the fiber and spice.
Invest in your health, invest in your life.
Join me and experience the Balance of Nature difference for yourself for years to come.
For a limited time, All new preferred customers get an additional 35% discount and free shipping on your first balance of nature order.
Use discount code balance.
Call 800-246-8751.
That's 800-246-8751.
Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code balance.
When we contemplate Biden's State of the Union...
And Debbie and I have been talking in the last couple of segments about the border.
And the border is an issue that people can see.
You know, you see it on social media.
You see what's going on sometimes in the news.
But it doesn't affect everybody directly because most of the country is not on the border.
So unless you live in a border town in the Rio Grande Valley or in the south of Florida or in California, sometimes that issue is less visible to you.
But one issue that is very visible or at least is experienced directly is shortages and inflation.
And wow, honey, look at this.
This is the latest. Inflation, which, by the way, was 1.6% when Trump left office, is now at 8.5% 14 months later.
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's the result of giving money away to people.
Printing money. Exactly.
Printing money that we don't have.
So anyway, I kind of dread doing something right after the podcast, and that is filling up Because it's on empty.
I'm now letting it run all the way down.
And it's like, ah, because what used to cost $40 is now $90 to $100.
And it's really, you know, and we're blessed and we can afford it.
But I cannot imagine what it's like for somebody that makes $100 a day.
To have to fill up their car for that amount.
Yeah, if you make $15 an hour, you're basically making, well, about $105 a day.
But that's gross. That's not even your net income.
That's right. So a whole tank of gas is your whole day's work.
Just incredible.
Yeah, yeah. And the high prices aren't in one sector.
Now, the gas prices affect so many other things, right?
Because food has to be transported and merchandise is transported.
So... When you have high energy prices, they tend to spread out into higher costs.
But we're seeing dramatic increases in car prices and rental price.
Groceries are extremely expensive.
Milk, bread, all of the basics are just really, really expensive.
And people that are on a very limited budget...
It's heartbreaking, really.
I mean, the other thing is, even if you're willing to pay, there's a bunch of stuff you can't buy.
So, not only are prices going up, but things are unavailable.
I've ordered all kinds of gadgets.
You know me and gadgets. I love gadgets.
Well, what's that thing you ordered? No, I can't.
Well, not what is it, but you ordered it like eight months ago.
I ordered something six months ago, and they don't have the parts for it.
And so... And then remember, we had our media room redone because, you know, we do screenings in our media room, so it needs to look nice.
People don't need to get stuck in the chair, you know, in a down position.
A regrettable episode that happened with one of our friends and investors.
He leans his chair back and he can't bring it forward.
So we're like, okay, that's it.
We have to redo this media room.
Anyway, all that to say that it took a whole year To get the parts, the mechanical parts for the chair so that you could, you know, do the up-down motion or whatever, the mechanics of that chair.
They could not get for a whole year.
Another, I mean, this is also, by the way, a self-inflicted wound by the Biden administration because while they, you know, for them, everything is the result of Ukraine, although many of these problems, inflation was soaring before Ukraine.
It's gotten worse since then.
Gas prices were going up before Ukraine.
Right. Or they seem to imply that...
But isn't it nice, though, how they always find an excuse for everything?
They either blame Trump for it or Ukraine or some other thing.
Reminds me of my Dante series with everybody in the inferno.
None of them ever did it. Right.
The envious didn't do it.
Someone made them do it.
The lustful didn't do it.
You know, love made them do it.
So this very human tendency to avoid responsibility.
But, I mean, it's a little bit...
It's so creepy when you have people who have this level of responsibility, not just for society, but to some degree for the world, who appear to be so reckless with their use of power and so indifferent.
I mean, we talked in the last segment about Biden's poll ratings going down.
I don't get any sense that he's even aware of it or cares.
Yeah, I'm aware maybe.
Maybe not aware of it.
Is he aware of anything? I don't know.
I don't know. The people around him are.
The people around him are.
But you know what? Sometimes I do think that they do this on purpose.
It's just, you know, I can't imagine...
That anybody would do something like this and think that it's okay or they're not worried about the next election or whatever because it just seems like they're not.
I mean, in that way, Jen Psaki is kind of the perfect robotic representative of the administration because her blithe indifference or sort of shrugging of her shoulders...
It's almost like she can't comprehend.
You know what it reminds me of?
It reminds me of the posts by your childhood friend in Venezuela where people are eating out of trash cans and you've got people starving and people desperate.
And if you watch the Facebook postings of Debbie's former friend, you get the sense, what's everybody getting upset about?
I have a night. I've got a beautiful car.
My kids have just been traveling in Milan.
They just got back. It's a great day.
It's a let-them-eat-cake attitude.
It's a let-them-eat-cake attitude.
And look, the people who aren't eating cake are the ones who are going to have their say and are going to have a chance to push back.
The Democrats do a lot to bamboozle them come election time, but this time it may not work.
Some of us wish we could rewind the clock when it comes to our health.
Exercising, climbing stairs, all the things young people take for granted, well, those aren't things that have to stop just because you age.
Well, neither do you have to just endure the suffering from the normal aging aches and pains.
Now there's a 100% drug-free solution.
It's called Relief Factor.
Relief Factor supports your body's fight against inflammation.
That's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try Relief Factor order more.
Because it works for them.
Debbie loves using Relief Factor.
When her shoulders started acting up about a year or so ago, this was the only thing that worked for her.
And she knows if she quits taking it, well, the pain's going to come right back.
So Debbie's like, I'm not going to be without this again.
You can also benefit. Try it for yourself.
Order the three-week quick start for the discounted price of just $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com or call 833-690-7246 to find out more about this offer.
That number again, 833-690-7246 or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. Egged on by the media, the Biden administration is unnecessarily antagonizing the government of India, which has been a close ally of the United States.
And the reason for this...
This new campaign of denouncing India is basically because India is not going along with the Biden administration in its position on Ukraine.
So Biden has arm twisted a bunch of countries, mostly European countries, but some others also.
To approve all these sanctions and the sanctions also involve not buying oil from Russia, not doing trade deals with Russia and certainly not buying weapons from Russia.
But India has an ongoing weapons deal with Russia.
The Indians have agreed to purchase S-400 missile defense systems from Russia.
And India has been continuing with that transaction, which actually dates back for a couple of years.
So it's not something India newly agreed to do, but the Indians aren't willing to stop doing it.
The other thing that the Indians aren't willing to stop doing is follow America's lead and stop buying oil from Russia.
Now, let's remember that India and China are perhaps the two, well, the two largest countries in the world, but they're also two of the fastest-growing countries in the world, and they're coming up from the bottom.
They're coming up from positions, in India's case, of really almost scandalous worldwide, by worldwide standards, poverty.
So the Indians are like, we need the oil.
And since the Russians are one of the biggest oil producers in the world and India does not have a whole lot of oil, we're going to continue buying it from Russia.
So India's motives here are driven by self-interest.
India isn't even buying weapons from Russia in order to sort of threaten the United States.
India's worries have to do with Pakistan and have to do with radical Islam.
And so India is trying to fortify its defense in those areas.
But because India is not getting on the bandwagon, it's not saluting, it's not playing the game, you've got this sudden turn on India and criticism of India.
And what I find interesting is that the Indians, instead of just taking it, are actually pushing Here's the Indian External Affairs Minister.
His name is S. Jai Shankar.
And he was at the fourth U.S.-India ministerial dialogue at the State Department.
And instead of just being humble and saying, you know, yeah, you know, we're the guilty party.
And of course, you know, now these media reports suddenly popping all the human rights violations in India and so on.
So India is being sort of castigated across the board.
And this guy basically goes, well, if Americans are concerned about the human rights situation in India, he goes, we Indians are concerned about the human rights situation in America.
Take that. So, having said that, the Indian minister kind of backed off a little bit and said, look, you know, the areas we can cooperate with the Americans and the areas we might disagree, but it's all within a framework of that this is a normal way that countries deal with each other.
But I thought it'd be interesting to look at what this man is saying because I think part of what he's saying is that at one time, America could easily say things like, we have free speech in America, whereas in India, if you criticize the government, the goons will show up to beat you up.
But now America can't say that because we don't have free speech in America.
And in many respects, it's far worse than in India.
In India, you may not be able to just explicitly criticize the administration.
But in a whole bunch of other areas, you can discuss topics like climate change.
You can discuss all kinds of topics without getting banned.
Whereas in America, you're banned.
There are whole subjects that are put out of bounds, including, by the way, the open discussion of the Ukraine war.
Religious freedom. At one point, Americans could say, well, you know what?
There are all these kind of religious nationalist movements in India.
There's a new kind of affirmation of Hindus' movement called Hindutva, and that is making it more difficult to be a Christian or to be a Muslim in India, and there is a lot of truth to that, but...
The truth is also that in America now, religious freedom is imperiled in all kinds of ways, not imperiled by one religion being preferred over another, but imperiled by a radical secularism that tries to shut down religious expression, certainly excluded from the public square, and in some cases impose discriminatory shutdowns that apply to churches, but don't apply to other.
Bars can stay open, nail salons can stay open, clubs can stay open, but churches have to remain closed.
So religious freedom has now become an ambiguous issue in America.
Voter integrity. Yeah, there's been voter integrity problems in India for a long time.
Now there are voter integrity problems in America.
Going after political opponents.
That's true in India to some degree.
It's now true in America to a large degree.
So I think the point here is that America needs to get off its high horse in these times.
Because we're no longer the champions of the free world.
We're no longer the champions of human rights.
There's just as much, if not more, violations of human rights going on right now in this country other in many other places in the world, including India.
I want to talk about an illuminating double standard that is going on with Disney that demands a little bit of closer scrutiny.
Now, Disney sprang into political activism recently in opposing Florida's bill.
This is a law in Florida signed by Governor DeSantis that basically says you can't have sexually explicit instruction in schools for very young children.
Yeah, you can have sex education in later grades, but not at this very young age.
And the underlying assumption behind the law is that the responsibility for any sexual instruction at all that occurs at that age is with the parents and not with the school.
Now, Disney, somewhat oddly, moved into the full oppositional mode against this Florida bill.
It's outrageous, and children are being censored from discussing these issues.
Now, in reality, they're not.
Children can discuss anything that they want among themselves.
We're talking about a prohibition on the administration and the teachers, not a prohibition on the children.
But nevertheless, Nevertheless, this parents' rights bill in Florida is wrongly depicted as a kind of anti-gay bill.
Don't say gay is the big slogan that's being bandied about on the left.
But an interesting article has come out that says that Disney was perfectly willing to comply when China demanded that all mention of a gay character be removed from a Harry Potter movie.
Hollywood said, okay, no problem.
We'll do it. No objection, whatever.
No big outcry.
No Disney using its power to fight back against China.
Disney kind of humbly goes along with it.
So let's hear the details.
and I'm picking this up right from one of the Hollywood magazines, it's called Variety, references to a gay relationship in Fantastic Beasts, The Secrets of Dumbledore were edited out of the movie by Warner Brothers for the film's release in China. So apparently, what happens here is the author J.K. Rowling has revealed that Dumbledore, one of the kind of beloved characters, was gay.
She reveals this in 2009, but previous, earlier Harry Potter movies have made no reference to this at all.
Until this Fantastic Beasts movie came along.
And in that, there's apparently some dialogue about a romantic past that is alluded to between Dumbledore, a male character played by Jude Law, and Grindelwald, which is played by this guy named Mads Mikkelsen.
And China was like, we're not having it.
We don't really want any gay stuff going on here.
Take it out. And so these lines about these two being in love and they fell in love the previous summer, gone.
Gone from the film. And all that's now implied is that Dumbledore and Grindelwald are like good friends.
They've just had a really close bond for a long time.
Now, And when asked about this, the Warner Brothers people basically made a statement to Variety, and they said that, you know, yeah, we made the cuts, yeah, we kind of did a little bit of self-censorship, but, quote, the spirit of the film remains intact.
So our main story is okay, so we didn't mind making this kind of an accommodation for the Chinese.
And that's what I want to ask about, which is this.
You know, most cultures in the world are traditional.
I'm not entirely surprised that the Chinese have these reservations about these kids' movies that have all these themes.
I think that if you went to traditional people anywhere in the world, they would have the same concerns.
What these cultures are trying to do is keep a certain moral and social degeneracy from penetrating their cultures and seeing their cultures go into the kind of free fall that we've seen in the West and in the United States.
But what Disney appears to be doing is saying, in effect, listen, we don't mind these effects occurring in our culture here.
In fact, we're going to actively promote them.
But we're going to go along with the attempts of other cultures, particularly China.
And notice that China has a giant potential film market.
So Disney's motives here are partly commercial.
It's like, wow, we stand to make a lot of money in China.
So as a result, yeah, we can fight this, but the Chinese may then just get angry and say, listen, no Hollywood movies in China.
We're just going to have Chinese-made movies, and we'll contact independent film producers in other countries who are happy to conform to our requirements.
So Hollywood is behaving itself when it comes to China.
And by the way, this isn't just Disney.
We see this with the NBA. So we see this with sports franchises, entertainment franchises.
All of them are longingly and greedily looking to make money in China.
And so the Chinese comfortably dictate the terms.
The Chinese are in the driver's seat.
But here in America, these companies are woke.
And they push their woke politics in a manner that, as I say, they aren't trying to do in other parts of the world, at least parts of the world that are pushing back.
And so that must mean two things.
One, it means that Disney is really not afraid that conservative parents are going to stop going to Disney.
Because if Disney thought that half the country is going to not patronize Disney, stop going to Disneyland, not watch Disney movies, then they would think twice about doing this because that is a big part of their market.
So they must not fear the activism of the right.
And the second reason is that Disney must think that their economic future has less to do with commanding the lion's share, which they have had, of the American market and more to do with commanding a lion's share of the market.
▲
Export Selection