All Episodes
Previous Next
May 15, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:42
REMAKING AMERICA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep579
| 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, I'll reveal how the illegal swarm across the border represents perhaps the greatest threat to this country in the last two decades.
I'll come to the defense of Elon Musk and his appointment of Linda Yaccarino as the new Twitter CEO.
Entrepreneur Amy Sterner Nelson joins me.
We're going to talk about how online giant Amazon colluded with the FBI to frame her husband and destroy her family.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please hit the subscribe button.
and I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza show.
America needs this voice.
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.
I guess it was almost a decade ago when Barack Obama, upon his election, or whether it's his re-election, I don't remember, talked about the fact that we begin now the work, he said, of remaking America.
And there are many ways to remake America, and America has to some degree been remade, not in a good way, I would say, over the past decade.
In fact, there are all kinds of things that were unfamiliar in America.
The routine practices of censorship, the targeting of political opponents, all of this has become normalized.
Education has nothing more than an engine of propaganda.
There was always some of that, but the degree of that, the attempt to sexualize children and subject them to a kind of relentless propaganda of perversity, again, all of this is new.
But there's also another way to remake America, and that is to remake the population of America, to change the composition of America.
And that is going on in stark and almost eerie way now at the southern border.
Yes, it is an invasion, but it's not a Mexican invasion.
In fact, it's an invasion of people from all over the world.
The world is showing up at our southern border.
Afghans are showing up and Iranians are showing up and Chinese, people from all over Latin and South America, Venezuelans are coming in droves.
This is really unprecedented.
I've never seen in 35 years I've been in America the flagrant disregard of our immigration laws.
And what makes the whole thing even scarier is no one seems to be really doing anything about it.
I mean, yeah, I'll see John Cornyn on Fox News and Ted Cruz is down at the border.
But, you know, when Trump did things, Republicans would immediately, I mean, Democrats would immediately try to block him.
They'd go to some sympathetic judge who would issue an injunction.
You can't do this.
You can't build a border wall.
And Trump would then have to fight that case and get around that obstacle.
And in the meantime, the whole thing would be stopped.
For some reason, our side is not good at stopping them.
We complain about it, we deplore it, we make threats about it, but we aren't able to actually stop it.
And so, the Biden open border, the porous border continues.
Now, there was a case, it was taken before a judge, but all that the judge said is, hey, listen, you cannot let these people into the country without giving them a court date.
And so the Biden administration realized, well, listen, even though the system is jammed, it's clogged, it's overrun, let's just give them ridiculously distant court dates.
Court dates in 2025, 2026.
I saw one guy getting a court date in 2027.
So in the meantime...
It's one thing if you said, hey, go home.
Come back in 2027 for your court date.
That would at least be a sensible thing to do.
But to say that you can stay in the country, you not just hold this little sheet of paper which has your court date stamped on it.
And so what we're doing is we're creating a complete wreck of our sovereignty and a wreck of, really, of the country.
And this is done now...
This is being done at the same time that the people doing it are denying they're doing it.
And so I've seen Joe Biden say, I've seen Kamala Harris say, I've seen Mallorca say, oh no, the border's not open.
Oh no, no. The number of people is down.
Down? Really?
It's down? What they do...
And this is kind of a clever way, dishonest, but clever way of doing these things and pretending you're not doing them.
You set an expectation. We expect a surge at the border.
And then you go, well, the actual number of people is below what we expected.
And so it's down compared to our estimates.
It's kind of like saying, I expected to be raped, but I was merely assaulted.
I expected to be killed, but all they did was take all my money.
And so you act as if that is now some kind of a small victory.
Why? Because you're measuring yourself against your own expectations.
I've seen headlines that basically go, yeah, there is a surge at the border, but it's all under control.
There hasn't been chaos. And this is the media trying to reassure the American people that what is going on in front of their eyes, you have to look at social media.
You can see all the videos.
You can also look at the things that are being said by the Border Patrol Union.
They are aghast. I can't imagine how traumatic it must be to be a Border Patrol agent where your job is to secure the border and your own bosses are telling you, not only telling you not to do that, but they're measuring your effectiveness by how well you don't do that.
So it's almost like a cop who now gets promotions because he doesn't catch the criminals.
And that's what's going on at the border.
Debbie and I are a little... You know, we're moved by seeing some of the human tragedy.
You know, women struggling across water with kids.
I mean, your heart goes out to them.
And I don't blame the illegals.
Debbie's like, well, they do know they're breaking the law.
Well, what do you mean when you...
How can you say someone's breaking the law when the other side is, in a sense, letting you in, giving you a paper saying, show up in 2027?
In other words, the prime malefactor here, the evil, goes right to Biden.
This is a manufactured crisis, and it's a crisis with long-term implications.
We're going to see homeless encampments, not just in the border towns, which are already being ruined, but spreading out into other cities.
I mean, Republicans are fighting back by saying, okay, I'm going to send some buses to Kamala Harris's house.
I'm going to send some buses to New York and D.C. And those places are recoiling.
The mayor of New York is now asking a judge to remove New York as a sanctuary city because he doesn't want, because we are a sanctuary city, you've got to welcome all the illegals.
He goes, well, we never expected this.
We're not ready for this.
So Democrats, you know, they're all for it.
Until they have to deal with it, and then they don't want to deal with it.
But the impact on places like Texas is huge.
I'll talk in the next segment about Texas' own response.
But I fear that this is going to have a long-term impact on this country, not just in terms of homelessness, also in terms of crime.
Who knows how many terrorists we're letting into the border.
People are coming in from Iran, China.
Look at them. They're able-bodied males, generally in their 20s and 30s.
It's not unreasonable that at least some of them would be really bad guys.
Former President Trump recently issued a warning from Mar-a-Lago, quote, our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world standard, which will be our greatest defeat, frankly, in 200 years, end quote.
Now, some experts believe there are serious threats to the future value of the U.S. dollar because of inflation, deficit spending, and our increasing national debt.
One asset that has withstood famine, wars, and economic upheaval dating back to biblical times is gold.
And you can own it in a tax-sheltered retirement account with the help of Birch Gold.
Birch Gold will help you convert an existing IRA or 401k, maybe from a previous employer, into an IRA in gold.
And the best part, you don't pay a penny out of pocket.
So get started by texting Dinesh to 989898.
Think about this. In March of this year, when the banks faltered, the stock market faltered, gold surged.
Birch Gold can help you find out how to protect your savings with gold.
Birch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, thousands of happy customers.
So go ahead, text Dinesh to 989898.
You'll get a free information kit on gold to get you started.
Again, text Dinesh to 989898.
I'd like to focus on the border crisis by looking at its impact on the state of Texas, Texas which seems to be getting the worst brunt of it.
Now, a little part of me is...
It looks at what's happening down in the Rio Grande Valley.
It looks at what happens on the southern border of Texas.
And the people there are aghast.
They can't believe it. Even the Democrats down there are screaming that we can't handle this.
We don't know how to handle this.
This is unprecedented. This is going to be a big mess for us.
But then I say to myself, and actually Debbie and I were talking about this yesterday, that you know what?
It's the blue part of Texas.
The Rio Grande Valley voted.
Now, it is moving right.
And in fairness, this is why we strongly supported Mayra Flores.
There was a Republican who won down there.
But for the most part, the Rio Grande Valley still remains Democratic.
So they're the ones who helped to put Joe Biden in office.
And so, it's a little bit difficult for me to work up the emotion to go, oh, I'm really unhappy.
It's kind of like the same way I feel about democratic cities and crime.
If you vote for these kinds of leaders, leftists, Marxists, defund the police, BLM, then...
You're inviting the kind of surge of crime that matches the surge of illegals at the border.
Now, several Texas counties, especially in South Texas, have issued disaster declarations.
And this is as Venezuelans, 15,000 Venezuelans, 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the Rio Grande Valley, and another 23,000 apparently on their way to Del Rio.
So Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez has issued a disaster declaration, basically saying that all available resources are being stressed.
By the way, there was an all-state disaster declaration by Greg Abbott.
There are disaster declarations that have been filed by 30 different counties.
And apparently the Mexican government is saying that another 10,000 people are in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, waiting to cross.
Over in Cameron County, Judge Eddie Trevino, he goes, the surge of individuals unlawfully crossing the Texas-Mexico border poses an imminent threat of disaster for Texas counties.
Brownsville issued a disaster declaration.
And And Del Rio is also bracing for impact.
Now, I will say that Abbott, the governor of Texas, has been doing a lot more.
Now, there are conservatives who have faulted Abbott for not doing more up to this point.
But Abbott has mobilized the National Guard.
The National Guard is down at the border.
They are blocking a lot of people from coming through.
And so you seem to have a sort of a standoff between the Texas government We're good to go.
Here's Governor Abbott.
He says, Texas is, quote, being overrun by our own federal government.
Texas is being undermined by our federal government and our efforts to secure the border.
And then he goes on to say, Texas is doing more than any other state in the United States.
To deal with the border crisis.
So there's no question the border crisis is worse in Texas than it is in California or in Florida.
By the way, I saw that Ron DeSantis basically goes, listen, if this were up to me, I would seal the border.
I would just shut it down.
I'd close it down. And And this is DeSantis taking a tough line as he has in Florida.
But immigration remains a federal matter.
Federal immigration law overrides what states can do.
And so while perhaps there's more that Abbott can do, I'm glad to see Abbott doing more than he has.
But if you just look at these pictures in places like El Paso, it is just amazing.
I mean, it doesn't even look like you're in America.
In fact, it looks like you're in Mexico.
And so it's almost like what has happened now is that the border has broken down and Mexico has come to America.
And Mexico here I'm using loosely because it includes people from a whole bunch of different countries.
They're sleeping on the streets.
Homeless encampments are everywhere.
You kind of have to walk around and jump over people as you walk around.
The whole place has a kind of a walking dead feel.
Now, none of this is really being reported in mainstream media.
You can watch the news.
No coverage of it.
You have to go to videos online.
On TikTok, videos on Twitter, videos on Facebook where independent journalists are down there recording things that apparently the New York Times is not recording, CNBC is not recording, CBS is not recording.
And so we were in this strange time in our country when really bad things are happening and we find out almost nothing about them.
Most of the important things that are happening are not being reported.
The stuff that is being reported is typically unimportant stuff.
And so we have to be more vigilant than ever to seek out sources that can show us what's really happening.
And then, of course, the next question is once you know about them, you have to ask what can be done about them.
Summer's just around the corner.
I'm asking for your help to bless a child with a mom or dad in prison by joining my campaign to send prisoners' kids for a week of fun, fresh air, and Christ-centered activities that can literally transform their lives forever.
Angel Tree Camp, which is operated by the non-profit Prison Fellowship, gives kids enriching new experiences.
They interact with caring camp counselors, make new friends with other children who have a parent behind bars, and most important, hear the gospel.
Listen to how donations from people just like you help transform this child's life.
It is a great camp for kids to go to.
Everybody loves you, cares for you, and it's a great camp to learn about God.
The best part of Angel Tree was, for me, would have to be the activities.
I get to play. In the gym, you get to go tubing in the lake, weightboarding, water weenie.
What I learned the most about Jesus was that even though your father has been incarcerated or in jail, you still have a father up in heaven.
The cost to help reach one child like the girl you just heard with a week of Angel Tree camping is only $200.
So your donation in any amount will bless the child of a prisoner this summer.
Just go to my website, DineshD'Souza.com, click on the Angel Tree banner at the top of the page, or you can phone in your gift by calling my special number, 888-206-2801.
$400 helps send two children to camp.
$800 will help send four children to camp.
You do the math and see how many kids you can bless.
Once again, the Angel Tree banner is so easy to access.
Go to DineshD'Souza.com.
It's at the top of my homepage.
And thank you in advance for joining my campaign to help even more miracles of transformation take place this year.
By God's grace, it's going to be an amazing campaign.
Elon Musk has named a new CEO for Twitter, and he's taking some heat from it, especially from the right, from conservatives.
The CEO is Linda Yaccarino.
Now, Musk had tweeted out, I guess this was about a week ago, I've got a new CEO. She's going to start in six months.
And then some sleuths were able to find out, oh, it's this woman, Linda Yaccarino.
And then Musk publicly acknowledged that, welcomed her to Twitter.
I'm excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO. And then people began immediately to sort of dig into Linda Yaccarino.
In fact, I was at an event a couple of days ago and somebody goes, well, you know, she follows you on Twitter.
And I honestly didn't know who she was, but I'm like, oh yeah, that's right.
I look it up and I see that she does follow me.
I follow her. But people do this.
They kind of do this excavation into somebody's background.
Well, it turns out Linda Yaccarino went to Penn State.
She's... An advertising executive.
She in fact became the chair of advertising sales for NBC Universal.
Now as people began to look into her politics, I assume they checked out her Facebook or her LinkedIn or various social media, Sources they go, well, this is a woman who has some kind of advisory appointment at the World Economic Forum, you know, red flag.
She seems to be sort of a feminist, and that's because she is appearing in some feminist type of rallies.
She's presumably pro-choice.
And so immediately the word goes out, she's a leftist.
Horrible choice. Big mistake.
Yeah. There goes our free speech.
What a waste of $44 billion that Elon Musk paid to acquire Twitter.
There's a little bit of a downbeat sensibility on the right that tends to think that things have collapsed because of a single appointment.
Not to say it's not an important appointment.
She is the CEO of Twitter.
But when a couple of prominent people said that Twitter is now going to go back to censoring people and deplatforming them, Elon Musk immediately waited and goes, no, that is not happening.
And also, he said...
Even if I lose money, I am strongly committed to free speech.
And frankly, I believe Elon Musk for the simple reason that it makes...
Well, he's delivered. Twitter is largely a free speech platform.
The contrast between the kind of debate you see now on Twitter versus, say, YouTube or Meta Facebook is shocking.
I mean, it's stark. And so we have one of the sort of mainstream platforms.
We have one free speech platform, Twitter.
And then we have heavy censorship at Google and YouTube and heavy censorship at Meta.
So it makes no sense to me that Elon Musk would buy Twitter, buy it, in fact, at, well, maybe 60% or 50% above Twitter.
It's stated value.
Why would he do that if there wasn't a sort of a cause behind it?
I don't think that Elon Musk simply said I want to do this as an economic proposition.
Now that said... Elon Musk does want Twitter to be profitable.
He does want to turn it around economically.
All the waste at Twitter, the fact that people weren't even coming into work, they would cook all these meals, nobody would eat them, they would make all these stupid sculptures.
I mean, it looks like the two Indians, Parag Agarwal and Vijaya Ghadi, were just running the place as a socialist paradise and really doing it with other people's money.
But Elon Musk cares about advertising.
Now, he was apparently in a session at a marketing conference, and Linda Iaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter, kind of corralled Elon Musk and challenged him and basically said, listen, you're not paying enough attention to your advertisers.
Advertisers, obviously, are going to be a key source of revenue for Twitter.
And you need to listen to advertisers.
I don't think she was specifically talking about censorship, but she was talking about how to make the platform better, how to make it so that people who are using the platform are also able to buy the products, make it easier to connect basically to a point of sale.
And it looks like Elon Musk said, these are all really good ideas.
It's important to remember that Linda Yagarin is not being brought on Twitter to do content moderation or any of that.
In fact, Elon Musk says in his tweet, Linda Yagarin will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design and new technology.
So it doesn't look like Musk is backing off and saying, look, I'll go worry about SpaceX and Tesla and sending humanity to other planets and you run Twitter.
No, I think he likes Twitter.
He's very active on Twitter.
He's much more active on Twitter than she is.
She actually admits that she has been...
In fact, I looked at her Twitter and some of it's just about like the Kentucky Derby or some kind of advertising conference or even just the marketing of products.
She's very interested in pop culture and how products are marketed.
So I'm not really giving up on Twitter by any means.
In fact, I'm not even worried at this point about Twitter.
Yes, I don't deny that Linda Yaccarino may be a leftist of some sort, but it seems like she's a leftist that Elon Musk has impressed upon the importance of protecting free speech.
And I think if she doesn't do it, I suspect her tenure at Twitter will be short-lived.
You know, when it comes to towels, nothing compares to MyPillow towels.
Mike has really hit a home run with his towels.
Imagine having towels that actually work, that actually dry you.
Now, the MyPillow towels are soft to the touch without the lotion-y feel.
There's proprietary technology which makes them highly absorbent.
Other towels feel good but don't absorb.
MyPillow towels are available in multiple sizes and styles.
They're made with 100% USA cotton.
They're machine washable and durable, 10-year warranty, 60-day money-back guarantee.
And Mike is now running a MyTowel 6-Piece Set Special, $25 with promo code Dinesh.
These towels were regularly $99.98.
An amazing offer.
The MyPillow towels include two bath towels, two hand towels, and two washcloths.
So call 800-876-0227.
The number again, 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
Don't forget to use the promo code D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
Her name is Amy Sterner Nelson.
And she has a story to tell.
We've talked on the podcast a good deal about political targeting.
And what Amy's family has gone through is something that you need to hear about.
She's the CEO and founder of The Riveter.
She's co-host of What's Her Story with Sam and Amy podcast.
She's a contributor for Inc.
She's also an attorney, a mom of four kids.
Amy, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
You have had quite a remarkable experience, and I want to frame it by Saying something that I sometimes run into people who say this to me.
They go, Dinesh, you know, you talk a lot about political targeting and selective prosecution.
But they go, you know, I'm not Trump.
I didn't go in the Capitol on January 6th.
I'm a law-abiding guy.
I pay my taxes. So if somebody is doing surveillance on me, monitoring my habits, looking at my bank statements or my tax returns, I don't have anything to worry about.
It's never going to happen to me.
And I don't know if you were one of those people also before it did happen to you, but talk a little bit about yourself and a little bit about how this even got started.
Yes. So, you know, I was actually very involved in politics before this got started, but my husband completely stayed out of politics and thought, you know, I'm a businessman, I'll live my life, and this is what I'm concerned about.
But what we've lived through shows that government institutions can be weaponized not just by political parties, but by corporations.
My husband worked for Amazon Web Services for 8 years.
That is the division of Amazon that builds the internet.
Because the internet lives not in an actual cloud, but here on earth in big data centers, which are really big buildings.
And my husband worked in real estate.
After my husband left Amazon in 2019, Amazon broke a contract with one of their business partners.
And it was a very strange contract, and it was related to data centers.
And per the terms of the contract, the only way that Amazon could break the contract.
And not be liable for 100M dollars in damages.
Is if they could prove that the real estate developer.
And that would be convicted of a felony or pled guilty to a felony crime.
So, the day after Amazon broke that contract, they had their very 1st meeting with the Department of justice.
Amazon hired a former federal prosecutor from the Eastern district of Virginia to lobby his former colleagues.
To secure felony charges against a real estate developer and they allege that the real estate developer.
Paid kickbacks to my husband in order for my husband to steer deals to the real estate developer.
This didn't happen. A succinct way of putting it is that.
A man who made money from the real estate developer who was not and it was not Amazon's money.
In a perfectly legal way, lawyer, lawyered by lots of lawyers.
Later invested in my husband's new real estate development business that he operated after he left Amazon.
Setting aside that my husband could not even steer a deal at Amazon because he had no authority to approve any contract.
You know, for us, the Department of Justice knocked on our, well, not the Department of Justice, FBI agents knocked on our door early one morning at the beginning of the pandemic and told my husband that they believed he had committed a crime.
He was told he was under investigation.
And six weeks later, the government used civil forfeiture to seize all of our bank accounts.
My husband was not then, nor has he ever been charged with a crime.
But the government engaged in this campaign really at Amazon's urging to seize our assets.
They raided our home with a search warrant, and for many years my husband was under investigation.
The government held our bank accounts for 21 months.
And they didn't just freeze our assets.
They literally took them. And we had four little girls and they took every dollar we had.
And for 21 months, we could do nothing.
During that period of time, when Amazon knew the DOJ had seized our money, Amazon then sued my husband in civil court, trying to prove a crime in civil court.
We got our money back in February of 2022, but not before we had to sell our home, liquidate our retirement, move in with family.
I suffered repercussions career-wise from it, as did my husband.
My husband lost all of his real estate development work.
And last month, fortunately, the judge in the civil case threw out most of Amazon's claims saying that my husband did not even breach his employment contract.
And Dinesh, the thing is, Amazon had hid my husband's employment contract in post-employment non-compete from the government.
They misrepresented their code of conduct.
They literally created this criminal theory just by saying something happened without explaining anything to the government.
And the government acted on it.
And if we hadn't had the wherewithal to fight, if we hadn't been able to make more money because we're both professionals, if we didn't have family that would help us, What would have happened to my husband?
Would he have been charged with a crime?
Would he have had to give up and plead guilty to something that didn't happen because he had no other choice?
I wonder how many people Amazon has done this to.
Amy, let's take a pause.
When we come back, I'm going to put your story into a little bit of slow motion because there are interesting concepts here.
You mentioned civil forfeiture, for example.
Let's come back and revisit these and what gives the government the power to do these kinds of things.
We'll be right back. Aches and pains have finally met their match.
Debbie and I started taking Relief Factor a couple of years ago.
The difference we've seen in our joints, nothing short of amazing.
Aches and pains are gone thanks to this 100% drug-free solution called Relief Factor.
Now 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 is a true believer. She can now do the exercises that for a long time she wasn't able to do.
So Relief Factor has been a big 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 800-4-RELIEF to find out more about the offer.
Once again, the number 800-4-RELIEF or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference.
I'm back with Amy Sterner Nelson, CEO and founder of The Riveter, co-host of What's Her Story with Sam and Amy podcast, contributor for Inc.
Magazine. She's also an attorney.
Her website, amysternernelson.com.
Amy, I mean, what a preposterous and incredible set of events.
You've got... Amazon, this sort of online retail giant, and I think we can fairly assume, and you probably know very well, these kinds of corporations are, they're like small nations, aren't they?
I mean, when you look at the resources at their command, you look at the amount of money that's involved.
I mean, Amazon's not the only one.
Google has huge resources.
So you're dealing with companies that operate on a national and sometimes transnational basis.
They give a lot of money, I take it, into the political system.
So they are very well connected.
Of course, we know that Jeff Bezos, the guy who started Amazon, is also the owner of the Washington Post.
So they've got tentacles in the media.
So you must have felt like you're up against a real kind of behemoth here.
And however much your family, you know, pitches in, just the feeling of not only dealing, first of all, with this giant corporation, but now this giant corporation allied with the U.S. government.
Talk a little, just a bit about that, the emotion of that.
It feels like it's so big that there's nothing you can do.
I mean, at the beginning of it, I thought, we have no chance no matter what the truth is, and we know what the truth is.
But I will say that we've been fortunate that the system has worked for us the way it should.
We had an incredible judge who had been a state court judge in Virginia.
Interestingly, Dinesh, the first judge that Amazon secured when it sued my husband, it turned out that he owned Amazon stock, tens of thousands of dollars, and didn't disclose it.
And it was actually through a report in the Wall Street Journal that I learned that he owned Amazon stock.
And he fought recusal from the case, but eventually recused.
But you just see Amazon's tentacles are everywhere in the world.
Not only does Bezos own the Washington Post, Amazon is the largest buyer of advertising space in all media across the globe.
And so it's very frightening for anybody to hold Amazon to account because they don't know what repercussions there will be.
You mentioned a concept that I think some people are familiar with, but not others.
Civil forfeiture.
Here you're being investigated supposedly by the FBI, but where do they get the right to come and take your stuff?
And by stuff here, I don't just mean your furniture, but in a sense, freeze your bank accounts, claim what you own.
Where does the legal authority come to do that?
So I wasn't aware of civil forfeiture at all before it happened to us.
But in America, the government at the federal, state, and local level can seize your assets on the suspicion that they are related to criminal activity.
They do not have to charge you with a crime or prove a crime, and they can just take it.
In our case, the government went so far as to go into my husband's attorney's law firm's client trust account and seize all of the money my husband had paid to his attorney's.
Yeah. So here you are, and not only are you facing this criminal investigation, but you say Amazon turned around and sues you on a civil basis.
And presumably, you need resources to defend yourself against that kind of a suit, and yet your money and your assets have been confiscated, or at least are being held.
Yeah. Yeah, they have.
And it's interesting with Amazon.
You know, Amazon, and the judge confirmed this in Virginia recently, has shown evidence of no damages to Amazon.
They are doing this because they need to get out of the liability to the real estate developer for a decision they made.
But Amazon has spent tens of millions of dollars on this legal crusade against my family, against the real estate developer.
And for us, when they seized all of our assets, in order to fight, we had to sell everything we had and work really hard to make money.
Eventually, there was a point where I had to move away from my four little girls who were under the age of six To take a job, to pay lawyers and support my family.
I had to go live in another state.
It's been devastating.
You were vindicated.
And in that, as you say, the charges were eventually thrown out.
I assume you're, or at least, I don't know if the civil case is still proceeding.
Where does it stand now? Well, he was actually never charged with anything, which is the craziest part of all of this.
Despite everything, my husband was never charged with a crime.
So this all happened just on the suspicion of a crime.
And in the civil case, the judge threw out Amazon's racketeering claims.
They said no fraud occurred.
And they said my husband did not even violate his employment contract.
There's one claim remaining in the civil case, and that will go to trial in October, called tortious interference with business expectancy.
But, I mean, setting aside, like, the federal judge said there was no breach of employment contract.
And for Amazon to be able to do what it did, and for us to spend three years fighting that, you know, it could really happen to anyone, and it's terrifying.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, let's talk about the wider implications of what happened to Amy Stern and Nelson and her family.
Debbie and I started eating better this year.
We've lost weight, but foods we can't seem to eat enough of, and it's a requirement, are veggies and fiber.
Now, what better way to get all your fruits and veggies plus fiber than with Balance of Nature?
Balance of Nature fiber and spice right here.
It's a proprietary blend of 12 spices for digestive health, the intense flavors and deep colors of spices.
Are the most condensed whole food source of phytonutrition available.
It's recommended to be paired with this star product, fruits and veggies in a capsule.
So easy. Select the whole health system for the best price.
Start your journey to better health right now.
Take advantage of Balance of Nature's Great Offer.
$25 off plus free fiber and spice with your first preferred order of fruits and veggies when you use discount code AMERICA. The offer can end at any time.
So call now. Call 800-246-8751.
That's 800-246-8751.
Or go to balanceofnature.com.
Use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Amy Sterner Nelson.
Her website, amysternernelson.com.
We're talking about Amazon.
We're talking about the FBI. Amy, do you think that you have gotten your life back?
Or, you know, sometimes people who go through this go, hey, listen, once they make all these charges against you, whether or not they file them, you know, it's very difficult to be a normal person again.
Are you living a normal life now?
And also, is there some way that you can turn around and hold Amazon to account or hold the government to account?
So we actually had to agree not to sue the government in order to get our money back from the civil forfeiture.
But our life will never look the same.
And I don't think I'll ever feel the same about America, about the country I live in.
We lived in Seattle, Washington, when this happened, where I built a company that generated millions in revenue, where we had our four little girls who were part of the community.
We can't live there anymore because we had to sell our house to pay lawyers.
We now live in Ohio, where I grew up.
And, you know, my husband's career has been devastatingly impacted by this, even though he is one of the foremost experts in real estate development for data centers in the world.
He's built almost more than anyone in the world.
But, you know, we are people who believe, you know, the only thing that you can control is how you react to something and that we owed it to our daughters to show them, you know, how we believed you should handle this.
And we actually started speaking publicly about this many years ago.
I have a TikTok that has 115,000 people watching every day to hear our story.
I think it's really important to tell our story because if we don't, Amazon will do this to other people.
You know, and we have our faith and we still have a future.
You made the comment just a moment ago about your view of America.
And, you know, I'm an immigrant to the country.
I came at the age of 17.
A lot of people say we're not living now quite in the same America that you grew up in or that I came to in the late 1970s.
Do you think that that's true?
And why is that?
Is it simply because... Government has been given too much power?
Is it simply because, to a new degree, you have a kind of...
You know, Eisenhower spoke about the military-industrial complex.
Is there a kind of...
I've seen on Twitter a discussion about a censorship-industrial complex.
Could it be that there's a corporate government complex?
Has the country changed in some way that you can put your finger on?
I think it's changed really in two different ways.
I think, you know, I grew up in Ohio in the 1980s, and I grew up in a world where you spoke to people who supported the other party.
Where you spoke, you tried to reach compromise, you didn't immediately say the other side was bad.
I went on to live in And I think second to that, as far as corporations, I think that corporate power in America is absolutely stunning because of Citizens United.
I mean, if you look at the fact that almost every member of the House of Representatives, and this to me is an indictment of both parties, almost all of them are millionaires.
And I don't remember in America where public service went into public service expecting to make millions, but now they do.
And with Citizens United, corporations have such absolute power.
And I think that's really devastating.
And I think that, you know, we live in a world now where we don't look at the Constitution or the Bill of Rights as these documents that should stand alone from partisan politics.
We look at things that we weaponize the Bill of Rights and the Constitution to say what we want and do what we want.
It used to be the Democrats very much were against the surveillance state.
And after 9-11, they rose up against Homeland Security and everything that happened after 9-11.
And now the Democratic Party is very pro-FBI because they see being pro-FBI as being anti-Trump.
And it shouldn't be partisan.
It should be about what's best for America.
I also remember thinking back to the 60s and 70s, the idea that, I mean, you'd have people on the left advocating for stronger government, but their rationale was that we need stronger government to keep a check on these giant corporations that are going to do things mainly based upon their selfish interests.
So I find it really odd that what you now seem to have is this corporate governmental alliance, whether it comes to sort of, you know, woke sensibilities, whether it comes to censorship, the kind of hand in hand in which digital platforms will work, for example, with government agencies.
So it's almost like the government and the corporate sector, at least the big corporate sector, have teamed up against the ordinary guy.
Well, and Amazon is its own animal and should frighten us in many different ways.
But, you know, Amazon, their data centers store the secrets of the CIA, of the NSA, of the Department of Defense.
We, the taxpayers, pay Amazon billions of dollars to store our national secrets.
There isn't a world anymore where Amazon doesn't exist for the U.S. government.
And that seems wrong to me, particularly when Amazon is hiring hundreds of former federal prosecutors and FBI agents for reasons I don't quite understand.
I mean, that alone could make a separate investigation as to why they would want to do that.
So, Amy Stern and Nelson, thank you very much for joining me.
What an eye-opening account, and I appreciate it.
Thank you for having me The reason we're kind to people, the reason we're generous, the reason we even make sacrifices is that these people are genetically close to us.
They share our genes.
Or, explanation number two, it's what is sometimes called reciprocal altruism.
We do a favor to someone, but we expect them to do a favor for us.
So, ultimately, our motive is self-interested and not truly altruistic.
Let's take these explanations and match them up against an example.
I'm going to tell you the story of a Catholic priest.
His name is Maximilian Kolbe, K-O-L-B-E. He was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for his anti-Nazi activities.
Now, one day, the Nazis came around and said, listen, we're going to execute one prisoner every day.
And they would choose one person from the group and they would be let off to be executed.
Now, one of the first persons they selected was a man who pleaded for his life, and he said, hey, please don't take me.
Please don't kill me. I have a wife.
I have children. They're dependent on me.
I need to live in order to take care of them.
So just as the Nazis were about to drag him from the room, the priest, Maximilian Kolba, stood up and said, I don't have a family.
Take me in his place.
And the Nazis were a little confused and a little flustered.
But the priest was very insistent.
He's like, no, no, no, take me.
And the man was also uncomprehending.
He just couldn't understand how someone would do this.
And the priest said, hey, listen, I don't have a family.
I'm old. I won't be missed.
And so the Nazis agreed.
And the priest was sent to his death.
The man whose place he took survived the war and returned to his family.
Now... Where is the Darwinian explanation for Maximilian Kolbe's sacrifice?
It does not exist.
Here's Ernst Mayer, a leading evolutionary biologist.
He admits, quote, altruism towards strangers is a behavior not supported by natural selection.
So in other words, let's think about it.
The priest Maximilian Kolbe is in no way related to this man.
The man is a total stranger.
So you can't say, oh, they have the same genes.
They don't have the same genes.
So, the point here is that the Darwinian project...
Is a good explanation for the guiding motor of self-interest.
But it is the essence of morality to operate against self-interest.
If morality is nothing more than self-interest, you don't even need the term morality.
In fact, you don't need to instruct people to do anything.
Now, you ought to do this, you ought to do that.
No, because people will act in their self-interest immediately.
Anyway, the whole point of morality is that you are doing what you ought to do, not what you are inclined to do or disposed to do or what is in your interest to do.
Morality is described in the language of duty, and duty is something that we're obliged or obligated to do, whether we want to or not, whether it benefits us or not.
C.S. Lewis has a very good example that helps to reinforce this point.
He goes, hey, you're walking on the riverbank.
You hear the screams of someone who's drowning.
Now, you're not a good swimmer, and the fellow is not your relative.
He's actually nothing to you.
Now, you know, the evolutionary biologists might go, well, you know, if you have a bunch of your brothers and they're drowning, well, you might jump in because each of them has half your gene.
Or if a bunch of relatives are on a boat and the boat is sinking, you might jump in because, hey, listen, you're still trying to get your genes as present in your relatives to go on to the next generation.
But in this case, the drowning man is not related to you.
Kin selection is not involved.
And by the way, neither is reciprocal altruism because there's no reason to think if I risk my life for him, he's going to somehow risk his life for me.
That makes absolutely no sense.
And yet, says C.S. Lewis, there's a little voice inside your head that says you should jump into the water and you should try to save that man's life.
Now, some Darwinian thinkers have to, you know, they've got to figure this out.
They've got to explain this. And they can't say, well, you're acting for the good of society, because frankly, only an altruistic person cares about the good of society.
If you're truly self-interested, if you only want to get your genes into the next generation, or if you only want to do favors for people who can do favors for you, why should the good of society matter?
Now, you could say that human beings have a herd instinct, a kind of natural inclination that is just almost a fellow feeling.
Some people would say that's going to make you disposed to help.
There's a certain kindness that is present in human nature.
And Lewis even admits this.
I don't really know why he does, but let's say that he gives in to this.
C.S. Lewis says, okay, so let's say we have this instinct to help people, that's fellow feeling, but we also have an instinct of self-preservation.
So you've got two instincts that are pushing against each other.
And then, says Lewis, and this is his key point, a third voice distinct from both, distinct from the first and from the second, enters the picture.
And this is the voice that says, you ought to help.
It speaks gently, but with a kind of unmistakable firmness.
It says, you should listen to the good inclination that says help and ignore the selfish inclination that says don't help.
And then, says Lewis, this is the hidden call of conscience.
I'll pick up this topic later.
Tomorrow. But what I'm getting at here is that morality is this sort of independent sound that is within ourselves that cannot be reduced to instinct.
In fact, militates very often against instinct or, to put it somewhat differently, chooses the instinct that says, do the right thing.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection