All Episodes
Previous Next
April 12, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:52
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALIST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep556
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, a conversation with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to discuss his 2024 presidential campaign focused on American exceptionalism.
I'll show why the left's attack on Clarence Thomas is both absurd and hypocritical, and I'll consider the consequences of the corrupt and unlawful shenanigans of the Democrat activist group called ActBlue.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, make sure to hit the subscribe button.
Also, please share the podcast.
If you're listening on Rumble, please do the same.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The left simply hates...
Clarence Thomas. Think about the left.
The party of the plantations, the Democratic Party maintained the actual plantations.
But even after slavery, they loved to keep blacks in political subjugation, and even now.
But here's Clarence Thomas, and he's sort of like...
No, I'm going to think for myself.
I'm going to speak my mind.
I'm not going to be reined in by you people.
And so they despise him.
They hate him. They tried what Thomas himself called the high-tech lynching when he was first nominated to the Supreme Court.
They tried to topple his nomination.
They couldn't do it on substance, and so they wheeled out Anita Hill.
With absurd allegations about Clarence Thomas, you know, made inappropriate remarks toward me.
All, of course, again, unsubstantiated.
By the way, we saw a replay of all that later with Kavanaugh.
Essentially the same playbook and happily it didn't work the second time either.
But now they're trying to go after Thomas again, and this time on a completely different pretext.
There's a non-profit sort of research group called ProPublica, and they did a big expose.
And what does the expose show?
Clarence Thomas, for the last 15 years, has been going on extremely luxurious vacations.
With a big Republican donor.
In fact, it's a Republican guy that I happen to know, in fact, pretty well.
His name is Harlan Crow.
His father, Trammell Crow, built much of the Dallas skyline.
Harlan Crow is a kind of institution in Dallas.
He was on the board of the American Enterprise Institute when I was a scholar there.
So I got to know Harlan pretty well and have stayed in touch over the years.
In any event, Clarence Thomas' friend was this guy.
And apparently they do stuff together and this guy, Harlan Crowe, buys Clarence Thomas dinners and takes him on vacation, probably flies him on a private jet.
He stays in nice facilities.
So what?
What is all this really about?
So, well, it's all about ethics.
Clarence Thomas has a duty to disclose.
Well, what does the duty to disclose actually say?
The duty to disclose is pretty clear, and that is that if you're getting benefits from somebody who has a case before the court, from somebody that would create an appearance, not just a conflict of interest, but even an appearance of a conflict of interest.
So, for example, if there were pro-life groups that were sponsoring events and paying Clarence Thomas large fees or We're good to go.
Moreover, the disclosure requirements specifically say if you've got somebody who is either a family member or a relative or even a close friend, then you don't have to disclose, oh, you know what, he gave me a fountain pen for Christmas.
Oh, he gave me this or he gave me that.
That is not included.
Clarence Thomas was not obligated to disclose this, quote, friend benefit, if you will.
And so he didn't.
And in any event, this big expose, of course, is amplified in lots of media.
AOC, I saw raving and ranting, claiming he deserves to be impeached.
The whole thing is just downright laughable.
And as the story began to lose steam, the left realized, well, this is kind of how they work, by the way.
We need some further investigations.
We need to sort of try to up the ante.
And so they've upped the ante with an article in The Washingtonian, which I have in front of me, Clarence Thomas' billionaire friend collects Hitler artifacts.
What? So I first saw this.
And by the way, I happen to have a little bit of inside knowledge about all this.
So I was like, wait a minute.
I smell a rat.
And as I began to read the article, I totally got the picture.
So here is the actual picture.
And And it's completely misrepresented in this article to make it sound like Harlan Crow is some sort of a Hitler sympathizer.
Now, Harlan Crow is actually a student of history.
And when the Cold War was nearing its end, the Berlin Wall was coming down.
Basically, there were freedom movements in places like Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
Ceaușescu was toppled.
So Harlan Crow did something very interesting.
He sent his emissaries, or he sent some of his representatives, into Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union to buy up, you could call it, tyrant artifacts.
He bought huge statues of Ceausescu, of Mao, of Lenin, of Stalin.
Now, the idea here is not...
That Harlan Crow admires Lenin or Stalin or Mao.
In fact, the opposite is the truth.
He hates them. But he thinks that that is an important part of history and the defeat of these regimes needs to be memorialized.
So Harlan Crow, and I think a brilliant touch, We're good to go.
So what is Harlan Crowe doing?
He's memorializing these were the bad villains of history.
And look, here is a sketch that Hitler painted.
And look, here is a letter that one of the Eastern European dictators wrote.
And here is a statue that this thing stood in one of the prime squares in Prague.
So all of this is not an indictment of Harlan Crow.
It's being twisted by the leftist media, in this case by Sylvie McNamara of the Washingtonian, to try to keep going a vendetta, not primarily against Harlan Crow, but against Clarence Thomas.
It's not going to work.
Americans have really had it.
We're done supporting companies that rake in hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars, while trashing the country that made their success possible.
Until recently, we had to take it, but companies like Patriot Mobile are building a whole new economy, one which embraces the values that have made America the greatest country on Earth.
Patriot Mobile is America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.
It offers dependable nationwide coverage on all three major networks, So you get the best possible service.
Plus, they offer a coverage guarantee.
If you're not happy with your coverage, you can switch to a different network for free.
All this plus the knowledge that you're supporting free speech, the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, and our military and first responder heroes.
Patriot Mobile's 100% US-based customer service makes switching easy.
Just go to Patriot Mobile, Patriot M-O-B-I-L-E dot com slash Dinesh or call them right now at 878-PATRIOT. Get free activation today with the offer code Dinesh.
We need to stand together and support companies that share our values.
Again, go to Patriot Mobile, M-O-B-I-L-E dot com slash Dinesh or call 878-PATRIOT. A real scandal is emerging involving the Democrat activist group that is called ActBlue.
Now, the scandal was initially kicked off by James O'Keefe and his new group.
They stumbled upon a very interesting fact in these campaign filings.
And the campaign filings by ActBlue showed that there were ActBlue donors who appeared to be regular guys and, in fact, are in all cases elderly people.
But these elderly people were shown as making...
Thousands of contributions each to Act Blue, sometimes multiple contributions on the same day.
Now, this is, on the face of it, fishy, suspicious.
And so James O'Keefe decided to do what conservatives often don't do.
They'll say, oh, well, notice these anomalies in the filings.
No, James O'Keefe goes, let me go drop in on some of these people and talk to them.
And it turns out That these people, by their own admission, did not make these contributions.
Certainly did not make this many.
So it appears like ActBlue is cooking the books.
It appears that there is all kinds of shenanigans going on.
And as we'll see at multiple levels, campaign finance violations, violations of exploiting the elderly, violations on multiple counts.
The identity theft because they're pretending that this guy made the contribution, whereas in fact the contribution obviously came from somewhere else.
Money laundering.
So this is something that reveals the indications of rampant illegality.
And you know something else that's interesting?
Normally with election fraud, the left always scurries.
There's no there, there.
Oh, there's nothing. Oh, there's...
They love to say that.
But interestingly, with this controversy, I've been scouring social media.
The left is very silent.
And they're very silent because they can see on video the interviews with the very people who are supposedly making these contributions and they go, Contributions? Well, I give once a month or I give now and then, but no multiple contributions a day? $18,000? No, I don't have $18,000 to give.
So this is the kind of thing that you're hearing from the horse's mouth, from the horses themselves who supposedly gave this money.
Let's look at some examples.
O'Keefe went to the home of Michael Jameson in Maryland, who supposedly contributed 3,000 times, totaling $32,000.
When the guy is asked, did you do this?
He gets super mad.
He starts screaming at James O'Keefe and screaming about Trump and basically says, stop effing with me.
Now, that's an odd response.
If someone gave the money, they're like, well, of course I did.
That's not illegal. What's the big deal?
O'Keefe goes to the home of Cindy Ngo, who apparently contributed 1,000 times to Act Blue.
And she goes that she gave money once in a while.
She says she's given to various charities.
But when she was asked, did you give $18,000?
She goes, no, I did not.
O'Keefe goes to see Carolyn Lenz in Tucson.
She supposedly gave 18,000 separate contributions in the past seven years.
Here's your reaction when she's asked.
She goes, no, no, no, no, no.
So she didn't do it. Garland Riggs, who's 80 years old, supposedly made 31,000 contributions totaling $230,000.
Again, on the face of it, preposterous.
And when he was asked, he goes, absolutely not.
There's no way that he could have given that amount.
His wife even says, we don't even give $1,000 a year.
And it goes on like this.
Now, the cool thing is that other people picking up from James O'Keefe have started doing the same thing.
Why? Because it's perfectly permitted to stop in on people and say, hey, did you give the money that this federal report claims that you actually gave?
Here's Wisconsin resident Dale Wing, supposedly made 11,000 donations over seven years.
He goes, nah.
Cindy Grossberg in Wisconsin says it doesn't sound accurate that she made 4,000 donations.
These are people on the left.
So they probably made some contributions.
They don't want to incriminate Act Blue.
They don't want Act Blue to get into trouble.
So they don't, well, it doesn't sound right.
But the truth of it is, I bet if you looked at their bank accounts, you would see they did not make these contributions.
And so the next step is just screaming for investigation, screaming for the House or the authorities to start looking into this.
Penelope Harris of Southern California, some citizen journalists track her down.
Asked for about 1,800 donations totaling $13,000.
She says, quote, this is Penelope Harms.
That's her name. She goes, that doesn't sound right.
Lori Bale, who supposedly made 500 contributions, she goes, I have never donated seven times in one day, as the records seem to show.
She goes, I donate $5 a month.
So it's very obvious here that there is a huge racket going on.
And when we think of campaign finance fraud, there are an election fraud.
This is one piece of the picture that needs to be looked at.
So ActBlue is dead silent about it.
The left is dead silent about it.
and that should tell us, our side, not just the investigative journalists on our side who are doing a really good job, but people who have real investigative authority on our side that they need to get moving.
Look, inflation has consequences as the Fed raises interest rates to combat out-of-control government spending.
Long-term bonds have declined in value, crippling banks.
Depositors are holding their breath.
Investors are bailing on bank stocks, so diversification has never been more important.
The recent surge in gold prices shows why gold has historically been a great hedge against the stock market and against inflation.
The only company I trust to help you diversify into gold is Birch Gold Group.
I buy my gold from them because I want a safety net for my family. You can do the same. Text Inesh to 989898 to get a free information kit on gold. Birch Gold can help you convert an existing IRA or 401k that's tied to a volatile market into an IRA in physical precious metals, gold and silver and the best part it's tax shelter. Text Inesh to 989898 to claim your free information kit on gold today with an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau. Thousands of happy customers.
I buy my gold from them because I want a safety net for my family.
You can do the same.
Text Dinesh to 989898 to get a free information kit on gold.
Birchgold can help you convert an existing IRA or 401k that's I trust to help you diversify into gold is Birch Gold Group.
Birch Gold is who Debbie and I trust to protect our future and yours.
Text Dinesh to 989898 today.
There are two new developments in Cary Lake's continuing campaign to get justice and be vindicated in the 2022 gubernatorial election in Arizona.
Maricopa County commissioned a review of what went wrong on Election Day.
And the review has come out now.
It vindicates Maricopa County.
But you only have to read the conclusion to see how dubious and problematic and borderline absurd this review is.
So I'm going to read a few sentences and comment on them.
We were asked to determine whether the problems occurring on Election Day were the result of human error, procedural shortcomings or equipment failure.
Now, right away, this sort of distinction between these three things is a little problematic because, of course, if there's equipment failure, the question is, was the equipment failure due to human error?
It can be negligence.
It can be people fiddling and fooling with the equipment.
So, right away, you see, it's not one or the other.
It could be any combination of these factors.
Anyway... Although separating related causes is always difficult, the primary cause of the Election Day failures was equipment failure.
Okay, it's the tabulators.
And despite the assurances of the manufacturer, many of the printers were not capable of reliably printing 20-inch ballots on 100-pound paper under Election Day conditions.
Now, the obvious screaming question is, why?
If the printers were working before, is it really that hard to cut the paper to the right size?
Why is it that under election day conditions, this somehow becomes impossible?
You'd think that this question would be resolved.
But no. In fact, the review goes on to conclude, any failure in process or human error relates to a failure to anticipate and prepare for printer failures.
But nothing we learned in our interviews or documents gave any clear indication the problem should have been anticipated.
The leadership and staff were uniformly confident that the election would run smoothly, and there was reason for their confidence the printers had performed reliably in the past, both in Maricopa and elsewhere.
The county's experience with 100-pound paper had been positive, and the printer's stress test with 20-inch ballots revealed no problems.
Now, you would think that anyone who with a straight face says this realizes that the mystery is only deepened.
This is kind of like saying, it's a real mystery about why the gun didn't fire because the gun was tested, it was firing perfectly well before, there was no reason to anticipate that anything would go wrong, and yet, and yet, at the crucial moment when the firing squad guy was getting ready, the gun did not go off.
And right away, this raises the question, why didn't it go off?
Why is it the case that suddenly my printer, which I filled with toner right before doing this print job, just as I had done before, and suddenly it fails to print?
Something... This is suggestive of a deeper problem that requires examination.
Merely to point out the toner didn't work, the gun didn't fire, in no way resolves the matter.
But that is exactly what they do.
They kick the can down the road by almost mechanically pointing out, this is what went wrong, the equipment didn't work.
Not asking, how improbable is it?
I mean, let's just say you have an office printer that works 99% of the time, unless you need new ink or you need new paper.
The settings don't change automatically on their own.
But suddenly, not one printer, but many printers all across Maricopa County simultaneously break down on a single day, which happens to be Election Day, the day in which Republicans are turning out in large numbers to vote.
This makes no sense.
And this review looks more like a cover-up than a review.
Now, a second point I want to stress is that Cary Lake has now challenged the chain of custody leading to the emergence of 35,000 ballots at this group called Runbeck.
Runbeck was charged with doing the matching signatures on these ballots, and evidently 35,000 ballots show up at Runbeck.
Now, an appellate court that looked at this basically said, and this is the sort of standard phrase, there is no evidence or there's no clear proof that these ballots were, quote, added or inserted.
Well, Carrie Lake isn't definitively saying that they were added or inserted.
She's just saying the ballots turned up and there's no chain of custody which is required by law, which tracks those ballots to show where they came from.
So it's almost like...
The ballots mysteriously appear.
There's no chain of custody, which, by the way, makes all those ballots problematic.
It is a Class 2 misdemeanor not to have a proper chain of custody.
And Maricopa County, by its own admission, says that they have no record of these ballots.
They admit, we did not count these ballots before we turned them over to Runbeck.
So, what you have is a broken chain of custody.
And a broken chain of custody does what?
It casts doubt on the outcome.
And let's remember that election law does not require Carrie Lake to prove, I won the election.
She simply has to prove that there are enough dubious and questionable ballots that cast the outcome into doubt.
That has been sufficient basis for overturning elections in North Carolina and elsewhere and in the past.
And that's basically what Carrie Lake seems to deserve in this case.
Debbie and I gained weight, not saying how much, but too much, during COVID. We decided it's time to drop some pounds.
We started the PhD weight loss and nutrition program 10 weeks ago.
Debbie has already lost 14 pounds and I'm down 21 pounds.
Wow! The program is based on science and nutrition.
No injections, no pills, no hours in the gym, no severe calorie restriction, just good, sound, scientifically proven nutrition.
It's so simple. We're good to go.
If you're ready to lose that excess weight for the last time, call PhD Weight Loss and Nutrition.
Here's the number, 864-644-1900.
Or find them online at myphdweightloss.com.
The number again to call, 864-644-1900.
I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast a great guy, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
The difference from when he came on last time, he is now running for President of the United States.
He's a best-selling author.
He's host of the Vivek Show podcast and his website, vivek2024.com.
Vivek, you have jumped into this presidential fray.
I gotta say, it was perhaps unexpected, certainly an audacious move, and it seems like you're building a theme or an argument around American exceptionalism.
Am I right about that?
Do you think that American exceptionalism has been eroding or declining, and what are the causes of that?
Yeah, I think American exceptionalism has become a four-letter word in our culture.
And I think, Dinesh, it's because we're in the middle of this national identity crisis where faith, patriotism, hard work, family, these things have disappeared.
And I can tell you my generation, I'm a millennial, I'm the first millennial candidate to ever run as a Republican for president.
Really, my generation, but every generation in this country is so hungry for purpose and meaning And when the things that used to satisfy our purpose are gone from faith to belief in country, we then allow wokeism and victimhood and climatism and COVIDism to fill the void, now transgenderism.
It's not an accident.
It's not a coincidence that we see the rise of these secular religions, these cults in America at the same time.
It's because we're starved for purpose and meaning.
And I think that what the next U.S. president can do, what the conservative movement can do, Is to fill that vacuum of purpose with a vision of what it means to be American.
And I'm all in for the America First agenda.
But to put America first, we need to rediscover what America is.
And that's the movement that I'm leading, hopefully all the way through leading in the White House and doing to this country what Reagan did in the 1980s, leading our country out of the last national identity crisis.
That's what I want to do to lead our country out of this one.
Vivek, if I flashback a generation to when I was coming of age in American politics, it appeared like the left's critique of American exceptionalism was that American exceptionalism did not apply to everybody.
So that there was a ladder of opportunity, but blacks in the South particularly were excluded.
And so the original project appeared to be, let's make sure that these principles are aligned.
Applied more ecumenically, more universally.
Everybody has a chance.
But now it seems like there is an attack on the principles themselves.
And wokeism, as you just suggested a moment ago, is almost a rival and alternative ideology unto itself.
What do you think that those people want?
And why is it bad?
Yes, so it's really interesting you point that out, Dinesh.
Back then it was a debate about do we have equality of opportunity?
And I think that's a fair debate to have.
America has never been perfect.
Perfection doesn't exist on God's green earth, but it is about the pursuit of perfection.
But that's a reasonable debate to have.
What's happening today is something different altogether.
It's that when the civil rights movements actually achieved their own promised land, today there is equality before the law based on race or gender.
And say what you will, people are free to marry who they want, if they want, when they want.
It's precisely when that movement reached the promised land, its own promised land, that it then went berserk, that it actually then became most vehement about systemic racism or transgender ideology right when its own goals were achieved.
So that reveals what's going on.
What's going on is actually that when faith, patriotism and hard work disappeared, people then latched on to civil rights But when that struggle, that so-called struggle, was itself achieved in its own goals in delivering itself from that struggle, then you have a group of people who are just lost.
It's like the Israelites.
When the Israelites are lost in the desert, what do they do?
They said they want to go bend the knee to Pharaoh.
Well, you know what? We're lost in the desert now.
And you ask why it is.
We do have an authoritarian sort of regime growing in this country, a merger of state power and corporate power, the woke industrial complex, as I called it in my first book, that's far more powerful than either one alone.
But as much as even people like me have been complaining about the top-down problem… It's equally a bottom-up cultural problem, too, where that trick only works if we have a culture, a people, a generation that wants to bend the knee to that authority.
And so what I'm working on now through this presidential campaign, which is really more of a cultural campaign than a political campaign, to be honest, what I'm working on is...
Let's fill that void of purpose so that people don't feel compelled to bend the knee to the church of climate or the church of gender ideology as they're doing today, and that's what I think makes this far more dangerous and far more concerning than the I think more rational discussions about whether or not we have equality of opportunity with the political debates used to look like in the 1990s.
I just shared a video a couple of days ago with Debbie on social media.
It was picked off of TikTok.
But you have a young woman and she's extremely enraged.
And she's basically saying, you know, I like to have nice things.
But now I'm learning that I really have to go and like work eight hours a day to get them.
And she goes, why?
Why? Why? Now, you know, when I think about that, I think to myself, I don't know what to say to this person because all my life I've taken certain things as a given.
It's a given that I'm a male and not a female.
It's a given that life will end at some point and doesn't go on forever.
It's a given that we have to work in order to have a livelihood.
And yet it seems that there are people, particularly younger people these days, for whom these things are not given or they're outraged at the givenness of nature.
What would you say to someone like that who seems to feel that life should simply rain like manna from heaven and, you know, shouldn't have to work and you shouldn't have to be what nature made you to be.
You can pretty much, you need to have choices in these matters.
Look, my message to young people, actually, you're reminding me of a commencement speech that I gave to actually my own high school about a year ago, you know, last cycle before last.
It was the first time I looked into everyone in that audience where not a single one of those high school students was even born when those two planes hit the Twin Towers on 9-11.
And I picked that because I actually gave my high school commencement address when I was a high school senior, and it was about my experience of going through 9-11.
And because that happened when I was in high school.
And why do I bring that up?
I think that part of what we have today is a culture where it's not that people are encountering too much hardship.
It's that we haven't encountered enough of it, actually, in the last decade of our cultural life as Americans.
There hasn't been that 9-11 moment.
And I'm not saying that we need a tragedy like that, but we've had – talk about raining from on high like mana from heaven.
The Federal Reserve has been printing money from on high like mana from heaven.
Artificially juicing an economy that actually was far behind in its own ability to produce.
And so we haven't encountered or had to face that real hardship.
Hardship is not the same thing as victimhood.
That is my message to the young generation.
Hardship can be what teaches you who you really are.
That's what we need to rediscover and re-embrace.
And the irony is that policies now given to us by the Biden administration or otherwise ensures that hardship indeed we will have.
But I'm an optimist, Dinesh.
I think that that can be tough in the short run, economically and otherwise, but it could be what our culture needs in the long run to actually rediscover our fortitude because that's a big part of- Let's take a pause when we come back more with Vivek Ramaswamy.
Hey, have you heard? Mike Lindell and MyPillow have launched My Mattress Stopper 2.0.
This is just going to change the way that you sleep.
The new 3-inch MyPillow Mattress Stopper is made up of three unique layers.
Layer 1, MyPillow patented foam, which provides superior support and durability.
Layer 2, transitional foam, which provides optimal comfort, evenly distributes body weight, and helps relieve pressure points.
And Layer 3, the cover, made from a special material to keep your body temperature regulated through the night.
This MyPillow mattress topper is washable and dryable.
It's made in the USA. It comes with a 10-year warranty and a 60-day money-back guarantee.
This incredible 3-inch mattress topper is as low as $219.59 with promo code Dinesh.
So go ahead, call 800-876-0227.
The number again, 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use the promo code D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
I'm back with entrepreneur, now presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, best-selling author, host of the Vivek Show podcast.
His website, vivek2024.com.
Vivek, let's pivot to the issue of affirmative action and merit.
Coming back to what we were talking about in the last segment, it seemed like there was, again, a couple of decades ago, a debate about what merit means.
And so, for example, if you apply to college, clearly academic skills are important, but college is also about being well-rounded, about having extracurricular skills, about maybe playing a sport.
But now it seems that there has been a shift to an attack on the meritocratic ideal itself.
And so you have colleges brazenly using race and gender and other sort of identity characteristics to offer benefits and privileges What does this mean for the future of our society?
It seems that Republicans have been a little wary about frontally addressing this issue.
I mean, it's addressed in conservative commentary, but not at the political level, and certainly no one seems to have done anything about it.
What would you do about it?
I think the thing a US president can do is end affirmative action in America.
Not a lot of people know this, Dinesh.
It was created We're good to go.
What that executive order required is 20 percent of the U.S. workforce now works for companies that do business with the federal government that have to adopt race-based quotas in order to be eligible to do business with the federal government.
So we can end that. But I think affirmative action is a symptom of this deeper anti-meritocratic culture that now says you get ahead in America not on the – Content of your character, but on the color of your skin, on the genetically inherited attributes that you inherited on the day you were born, that is not American. We need to put merit back into America.
First of all, it makes us less competitive.
You want to talk about a GDP growth problem or competition versus China, we won't get there by using racial quotas.
But it's also divisive.
I can think of no greater way to foster anti-black racism in America than to take something else from I actually went to a majority black or close to majority black public school first through eighth grade.
I'll tell you this, Dinesh. There's not a single one of those kids who couldn't accomplish everything that I have in my life, finding multibillion-dollar companies and everything else, if they had also been given the same two-parent education.
Stable household upbringing with a focus on education that I had.
And I think we should focus on the root cause rather than these Band-Aid solutions of race-based quotas.
And unlike even anybody else in this Republican field, I have pledged unapologetically, regardless of political consequence, I will get that done.
And I think we need that kind of courage in the White House.
You're making, I think, a very important and in a way, a profound point here, which is that the reason that you have these group differences in academic achievement and economic performance, see, these differences have been very persistent over 30 years.
And many people thought that they would diminish or they would go away, but they are still there.
Asian Americans tend to come out on the top.
Whites tend to come out in the middle.
Hispanics, African Americans, then more toward the bottom.
And there's been a big debate about why these differences persist.
It's been very tempting for the left to say, and they have said, it's the test.
But you could argue with this test or that test, but when every test is showing the same result...
And what you're saying is this all traces back to deep-rooted behavioral and cultural differences anchored in differences of family structure, differences of savings rates, differences of amount of time invested in homework.
This is, by the way, something I've been preaching for a long time.
But what I like is the fact that you're boldly willing to say it and to say, look, we need to focus on the problem right there and not a bogus solution.
Exactly. These are hard truths.
I mean, we live in a time, Dinesh, where those are not easy things to say out loud.
I get called, you know, ironically, the brown face of white supremacy sometimes or whatever by random actors on Twitter when, in fact, I'm speaking about even discrimination, first of all, against my own race, Indian Americans in America.
But that's not even what motivates me.
It's actually empowering black Americans to make sure that every black American and every Hispanic American has an opportunity to perform every bit as well in college admissions testing or in the workforce.
As Asian Americans and Indian Americans, or white Americans for that matter.
And I think we can do it, but you have to have the courage to tackle the erosion of family structure in Black America.
And here's a dirty little secret.
Back in the 1960s, many Black families were better off economically than they even are today.
70% of Black kids in the 1960s were born into two-parent households.
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was anything but that.
It created an awful society.
Affirmative action was part of that by creating incentives for eroding the nuclear family structure, including in Black America.
That's been bad for Americans of every race, including Black Americans.
So I'm doing this not because, as I'm accused to sometimes by the left, because you don't have empathy for Black Americans, but precisely because I do, because I have empathy for every American who deserves that equal opportunity.
And we're not going to create a Band-Aid solution by saying that we're going to put an unqualified person...
In a boardroom or in a university or in an astronaut space suit or in a lab to do a job that they're not qualified to do, or an airplane pilot for that matter, that's wrong.
It's anti-meritocratic. But if you want to fix the problem, it starts 18, 20 years earlier when those kids are young.
Tough truths to speak, but it takes somebody to actually speak those hard truths before we get to solutions.
Let's take a pause when we come back.
More with Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Who likes aches and pains? Nobody really.
Debbie and I started taking ReliefFactor a couple of years ago.
The difference we've seen in our joints, nothing short of amazing.
Aches and pains are totally gone thanks to this 100% drug-free solution called ReliefFactor.
Now how does it work?
ReliefFactor supports your body's fight against inflammation.
That's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try Relief Factor love it.
They order more because it works for them.
Debbie's a true believer. She can now do the exercises that for a long time she wasn't able to do.
Relief Factor's been a game changer for her, her aunt, other members of our family, Mike, here in the studio, and for many other people.
You too can 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 the new number, 800-RELIEFFACTOR. 800-4-RELIEF to find out more about this offer.
The number again, 800-4-RELIEF or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. I'm back with presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, successful entrepreneur, best-selling author, host of the Vivek Show podcast.
His website, vivekvivek2024.com.
Vivek, another issue that you have been hammering on, and very frontally so, is the issue of climate change.
It seems like a lot of these corporations are now into this kind of climate stuff.
There's been a lot of talk about large agglomerations of capital being directed only toward companies that make climate pledges.
What is your view of this matter?
I mean, the left keeps telling us there's a scientific consensus about climate change.
How do you tackle this issue looking at it from the corporate side?
Well, first of all, on the substance, this climate religion is a cult, okay?
I think that the idea that we're going to suffer from existential climate change is I think that people fail to recognize that climate disaster-related deaths are down by 98% over the last century.
And you want to know why? Because of advances powered by, you guessed it, fossil fuels.
And this agenda is also weirdly hostile to nuclear energy, which is the best-known form of carbon-free energy production known to mankind.
That reveals what's going on.
The climate cult has nothing to do with the climate.
It has to do with punishing the West and America in particular for its economic advances.
Nuclear energy might be too good at driving more of those economic advances.
That's why they're against nuclear as well.
Now what they're doing is they're using the bank accounts of everyday Americans to actually vote their shares in corporate America to advance these climate agendas without most retirees knowing that their money is being abused to foist that agenda back onto them.
Because most Americans in their heart of hearts agree with me on this, Dinesh.
They would never stand by a policy agenda that did it through the front door.
So now they're abusing your investment accounts to be able to do it through the back door by telling corporate America to do it as a shareholder speaking on your behalf as an investor in the economy.
I've revealed that game through the books I've written, through the companies I've started.
I started Strive to compete with BlackRock fighting against this ESG agenda.
But now I'm doing it as a presidential candidate taking this to the next level.
We will overcome this climate cult and unlock the American economy.
I think it's actually possible. What you're saying generates a little bit of a puzzle.
If I was someone from China, let's say, I might say, hey, you Americans, it's great for you to get into this climate business because it's going to slow you down.
But of course, the chief apostles of climate change are people like Al Gore and John Kerry.
In other words, you have the left in America who Pursuing a strategy that you say will diminish American competitiveness, make us worse off relative to these other countries.
Why are they doing it?
Is it that they're just anti-American in the traditional sense?
Or is it that there's big profits to be made by being money?
Money. So talk about that.
Money is the answer. I'll give you a really clear example.
Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, one of the big apostles of this new cult, as you mentioned.
He will, on behalf of BlackRock's clients, which probably include many listeners of this program, though they don't know it, tell American companies like Exxon and Chevron that they need to net zero a line by 2050 to drop oil production projects.
Yet the people on the other side of the world literally buying up those projects from companies like Chevron are none other than PetroChina.
Then you look at who's one of the top shareholders of PetroChina, none other than BlackRock on behalf of Chinese clients over there, except they don't apply those ESG constraints to PetroChina.
You wanna know why?
Because if you apply those ESG constraints to a Chinese company, the CCP will say, you can leave and close the door on your way out, and you missed the Chinese opportunity.
That is what's going on, is that these people are, from Al Gore to Larry Fink, they make money either way, but it's the American people who are left holding the bag as they shackle the US while leaving China untouched.
And the CCP is actually that's the three letter acronym that matters most.
It's not ESG or DEI or CSR. It's CCP laughing at every step, closing that gap versus the US. And I'm sorry to say it's working perfectly according to their master plan.
I will, as the next U.S. president, change this, but it's going to take somebody who understands that problem deeply to actually have the courage to assess it.
Eye-opening stuff. Vivek Ramaswamy, thank you very much for joining me.
Guys, I want to tell you about a new film, Nefarious, hitting theaters this week on April 14th, and you simply gotta see it.
Debbie and I had the privilege of watching it.
It's captivating, suspenseful, beautiful in a haunting way, and also profound.
I suppose I'd call it a supernatural thriller.
You know, yesterday I had Sean Patrick Flannery as a guest on the podcast.
The film stars Sean Patrick Flannery and Jordan Belfi.
It's beautifully acted, keeps you on the edge of your seat.
It was written and directed by Carrie Solomon and Chuck Conzelman, who also did God's Not Dead and Unplanned.
I'm sure many of you saw those movies.
The plot involves a psychiatrist who must pronounce a murderous saying before he can be executed.
The problem? The murderer insists he's innocent.
He says he was possessed by a demon.
In effect, the demon did it, not me.
The movie takes off from there and it never lets up until its shattering climax.
This is a film unlike any you've seen before.
It will leave you moved and speechless.
Go ahead, buy tickets today at nefariousstickets.com.
Nefarious, N-E-F-A-R-I-O-U-S, tickets.com.
The movie is in theaters this Friday, April 14th.
We're now on to a new chapter of my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
It's chapter 17.
It's called A Skeptic's Wager, Pascal and the Reasonableness of Faith.
And I begin with a kind of an intriguing quotation from Pascal from his great work that is sometimes called the Pensee, P-E-N-S-E-E-S. And that simply means meditations or reflections.
Pascal, by the way, a great mathematician, a scientist, but also, as it turns out, a marvelous Christian apologist, one of the greatest and not often recognized to be so.
So that's a book you might want to consider looking at, Pascal's Pansé.
In it, Pascal writes, God is or is not.
There we go. Two possibilities.
There is an infinite chaos separating us.
At the far end of this infinite distance, a game is being played, and the coin will come down heads or tails.
How will you wager?
So this is Pascal's so-called wager.
And here's what he's saying. He's saying that we live in a world in which We're good to go.
We have to sort of take sides in this.
We have to figure out, are we going to come down on this side or that side, which Pascal calls calling heads or calling tails.
And then he asks, how will you wager?
Pascal is really asking, what is it reasonable to wager?
What is it reasonable to bet?
Is it reasonable to bet on the afterlife and God?
Or is it reasonable to bet that there is no such thing, there will be no afterlife, there is no God, and so let's cast our lot, if you will, that way.
In a sense, Pascal is asking the question, this is really what interests me in this chapter, is faith reasonable?
So we've considered now in the last several days the issue of miracles and the outer limits of science and what scientific laws do and don't show.
And now we're considering the stuff, the events, if you will, that go beyond reason, that it's not possible to know.
There's no laboratory tests, there's no experiential or empirical tests that can give you the answer.
And yet, as Pascal says, you kind of have to make a decision because it's going to come out one way or the other whether you go this way or that way.
To try to justify faith, to give reasons for the reasonableness of faith, seems a little paradoxical, right?
Faith itself doesn't seem to be...
Faith seems to be distinct from, if not the opposite of reason, and yet we're using reason, aren't we?
Or trying to use reason to make the case for faith.
But I intend to show you that faith is in no way, in no way, opposed to reason.
Rather, Faith is the only way to try to discover truths that are beyond the domain of reason and experience.
I'm going to draw on the philosopher and mathematician Pascal and argue that the atheist wager against God's existence is manifestly unreasonable.
In fact, I'll go further.
The agnostic position that I don't know is also manifestly unreasonable.
And the reason for that, by the way, is that the agnostic position, if it is not resolved in your lifetime, turns into a no vote.
It's a de facto no vote on God.
So, in that sense, agnosticism at the end of the road joins forces with atheism.
Now, we have to start by thinking about what we know and what we don't know about what comes after death.
And since no certainty is possible, we're going to have to weigh the odds.
And this is where Pascal is going.
He's arguing that when we weigh the odds, we discover that from the perspective of reason itself, and even from the Faith is the smart bet.
It makes sense to have faith.
It is reasonable to believe.
Now, to many skeptics and atheists, this conclusion will seem not only shocking, but perhaps even a little offensive.
Why? Because they think that faith is essentially a bad word.
Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard biologist, He looks at the famous scene in the Bible, in the Gospel of John, in which the Apostle Thomas refuses to believe that Christ has risen from the dead.
Basically, Thomas says, until I see for myself, I'm not going to believe.
It doesn't matter what you tell me.
I need to see it for myself.
And so Jesus appears to Thomas and shows him and says, basically, look, see, touch.
And Thomas does, and he goes, my Lord and my God.
But then Jesus says this.
He says, Thomas, because you have seen, you have believed, blessed are they that have not seen and yet believed.
So here is Jesus recommending, if you will, emphasizing the virtue of faith.
But Stephen Jay Gould comments on this passage, I cannot think of a statement more foreign to the norms of science than Jesus' celebrated chastisement of Thomas.
A skeptical attitude toward appeals based only on authority, combined with a demand for direct evidence, especially to support unusual claims, represents the first commandment of proper scientific procedure.
So basically, Stephen Jay Gould is saying there is faith on the one side and there is science or reason on the other and never the two shall meet.
▲
Export Selection