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May 31, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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DUMB AND DUMBER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep590
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
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Coming up, I'll talk about social media skirmishes by challenging a prominent Never Trumper who says Trump supporters are the dumbest group in the country. Wow.
Stuart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, calls in from jail to talk to me about his sedition trial and sentence.
I'll explain how high school debate is becoming a thing of the past, that judges now take sides on a partisan basis.
Michael Reagan, son of the former president, joins me.
We're going to talk about his dad and some of his current pursuits.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to the podcast.
I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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I came of age politically in an era of written debate and also oral debate.
Written debate in the sense of point, counterpoint.
I write an article, somebody else writes a reflective rebuttal.
And then I respond to that.
Or oral debate in which you go toe-to-toe with somebody, and I've done dozens of these over the years, some of them in Christian apologetics, some of them in politics, debating people like Walter Mondale, Christopher Hitchens, and so many others.
We're now in an era of social media debate, and I'm going to talk about a recent skirmish I had with a Never Trumper Over the issue of whether Trump's supporters are the dumbest people in the country.
This is his contention, and I think I found a way to completely undercut, embarrass, and destroy his argument.
But I'll get to that in a moment because I want to just briefly comment first on this latest business with AOC. She's really worried because there is a new account claiming to be AOC. In fact, it Designates itself as an AOC parody account.
But AOC is apparently worried that her opinions and the opinions of the parody account might be confused.
Now, this in itself is really interesting.
And what's even more interesting is that Politico recently had an article The headline is, no, that isn't the real AOC you may have seen on Twitter.
So even political thinks that you might look at the tweets of this parody account and think it is AOC. Now, let's turn to the parody account, which has, of course, a meme, a picture of AOC. But I want to read some of the tweets from that account.
Imagine believing you know more about science than Greta Thunberg.
So this is obviously sarcastic.
Here's another one.
If you could milk a cow and get fat-free organic almond milk...
I wouldn't complain about their farts so much.
So this is obviously parody, obviously ridiculous, obviously over the top.
I can keep going. It's time we stop spending taxpayer money and start spending the government's money in it.
Think of how unbelievably stupid you would have to be to actually think these things.
And yet, I think what makes the whole thing so amusing is that not only is AOC stupid enough to say things that sound like this, but AOC herself looks at these parody tweets and goes, well, that actually sounds a lot like me.
There are people who might think it is me.
And so she's like, I'm talking to my staff about what we can do about this.
I really don't know what she can do about this because the simple truth of it is that the account clearly labels itself as parody.
I think what this shows is that the line between AOC parody and AOC parody is actually a verified lie.
There's not a big difference there.
And so the AOC account is really, the parody account is really valuable to have, not only because it annoys AOC, that's good enough, but also because it highlights that this kind of leftism that AOC represents is unbelievably stupid and only one step, and a very small step, away from satire.
Now let me turn to the never-Trumper.
This is Bruce Bartlett.
And by way of background, Bruce Bartlett and I used to work together at the White House.
This guy was at one time a Reaganite.
He was a fairly respected economist and wrote a decent book about supply-side economics in the, I think, in the early 1980s.
In any event, we got along just fine.
But over the years, he has migrated to becoming not just a vociferous never-Trumper, but also somebody who's sort of carrying water now for the Democrats.
And Bruce Bartlett puts out a quote basically saying that the Trump supporters are the dumbest people in the country.
And I don't want to read the whole quote.
I'll just read the first part of it and then pick it up in the next segment.
He says, the most important truth in American politics, the most important truth that no one ever talks about is that half the population has an IQ below the median and the GOP represents them.
And he goes on to say, over the past generation, the parties have sorted themselves according to intelligence.
And so basically what he's saying is that the smart people in the country are all Democrats or virtually all Democrats.
And if you look at the bottom of society, basically the dumbest people, this is now the constituency of the GOP. And it is this claim that That I set out to not just challenge, but essentially detonate and capsize.
And I'll tell you how I did it in the next segment.
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The never-Trumper Bruce Bartlett thinks that the GOP, the Republican Party, represents the stupidest people in the country, and the Democratic Party represents the smart people, the upper half of the IQ distribution, and the GOP represents the lower half.
Now, is this true?
I did a quote tweet that says the following, and I admit it's a controversial quote tweet, and I meant it to be, but it's also, I think, quite effective.
Here's what I say. Virtually every IQ study over the past half century shows that Blacks How is this compatible with your thesis?
Now, when I wrote this, I recognized it would cause a furor.
And sure enough, it has.
This tweet has gone viral over 3 million impressions, thousands of retweets and shares and likes and so on.
And Bruce Bartlett, I think, recognizing the power of the tweet, because let's think about it.
What I'm saying is that if you give IQ tests to different groups, There's one group that consistently scores the lowest, and that group is solidly Democratic.
So how does this square with your claim that the GOP represents the dumbest people?
So what does Bruce Bartlett do?
He comes back with the call of, well, you predicted it, racist.
So in other words, he doesn't challenge my data.
He knows it's lethal to his claim.
So he switches grounds as if to say the IQ tests are racist.
Well... Here's Bartlett.
Generally speaking, people who believe that black people are inherently stupid or inferior to white people are considered racists in our society.
Notice how he's actually shifted gears here because as I reply, and this is my reply, you're the one who invoked IQ tests to show the GOP is made up of stupid people.
Now you repudiate those same tests when they completely undermine your thesis on the ground that their conclusions are racist.
So, is IQ a reliable measure of intelligence or not?
In my claim about IQ, I'm just reporting what these IQ tests say.
I recognize, of course, that there is a legitimate debate over what these IQ numbers mean.
In fact, I've written fairly extensively myself, not recently, but in past years, about this debate.
In my book, The End of Racism, I offer a kind of answer or alternative to the bell curve in which I say, look, I think that what this IQ data shows and also data on academic performance and economic success, what this data really shows is not so much Differences of inherited ability or genetic capacity, but rather differences of culture, differences of learned behavior.
So the point here is that there's a big debate going on about whether IQ reflects genetic ability.
Does it reflect environmental circumstances?
Does it reflect, as I think most likely, some combination of both?
So here is Bruce Bartlett sort of taking his own notion of IQ. Let's remember he introduced it And saying people who believe blacks are inherently stupid.
I don't believe that.
I have never said that.
Or inferior to white people.
Do I believe that? Of course not.
In fact, I believe the opposite.
I believe that we are all moral equals and no group is inferior inherently or genetically or biologically to another group.
So, here's a reply from a guy.
He goes, how is this helpful, Dinesh?
And I go, well, it obliterates the premise of the original tweet.
That was the point of my rejoinder.
I used his own standard against them.
And then, of course, I get standard ad hominem.
You literally went to prison for campaign finance violations, making straw donation to your friend's campaign who lost to Kirstjen Gillibrand by 50 points regardless.
What does that say about your IQ? Well, I say, it says I acted out of misguided loyalty to a friend.
I mean, maybe one could argue I don't have a very high EQ. EQ, of course, being emotional intelligence.
But I think in this case, it's not a reflection of my IQ. So the point here is that...
Is that what I'm trying to do in this social media exchange is turn the tables on the left, and in this case, on a never-Trumper, by taking the claim that he offered.
Hey, IQ tests basically show that the Trump people are the dumbest in the country.
And I go, actually, if you look at IQ tests, what they really show is something quite different and quite incompatible with what you're saying.
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Guys, I've got on the line here, Stuart Rhodes.
You know Stuart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, January 6th political prisoner.
He's a veteran. He's also a Yale Law School grad.
He was recently sentenced to 18 years.
18 years! for seditious conspiracy to disrupt the electoral count.
Totally absurd. He's being held as a political prisoner in a DC jail.
Stuart, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I know it's not easy for you to do this kind of stuff and they don't always let you do it.
But can you give me just a window or a statement to what happened in this preposterous trial in which you, who never even went into the Capitol, was somehow convicted of seditious conspiracy?
Well, I think the judge, at sentencing, the mask came off, and he made it very clear I was being punished for my free speech.
He ticked off my accomplishment, my military service.
I was a law school graduate, a clerk for the Arizona Supreme Court, and I was the founder of Oath Keepers.
Then he said, you are dangerous.
He said, you're smart, you're charismatic, and a compelling figure, and that's what makes you dangerous.
That's what he told me. I quoted a statement that I had made in a recent interview, even while I was incarcerated, where I said again that the election was not just stolen, but was also unconstitutional.
And he said, that's what makes you dangerous.
And so it's my political speech that he is punishing.
Stuart, it seems like in these cases when they talk about sedition, I mean, to me, the word sedition is a violent effort to overthrow the government.
Did they produce any evidence that you had a violent plot to overthrow the government?
What they did is they criminalized a speech, my political speech, that here to four has been protected under the standards set on Supreme Court in Brandenburg versus Ohio, which is the only thing that's unprotected is speech that incites imminent violence or unlawful action that is also likely to occur.
In this case, the judge gave the jury no such instruction and invited them to use my political speech as quote-unquote state of mind evidence.
And they said that the court told the jury they could infer an implied conspiracy based entirely on my political speech.
So things that were protected speech are now declared unprotected simply by tacking a label on them of conspiracy.
Stuart, how do we deal with this?
It looks like we've got a triangular alliance of sort of ruthless and sort of prosecutors who are willing to bend the rules.
You've got judges, very often Clinton appointees, Obama appointees, maybe Biden appointees.
And these are guys who, again, don't seem to view the notions of impartiality, a jury of your peers.
And then you've got these DC juries.
And so, is there any prospect of justice under these conditions?
No, there's not. As President Trump has stated about New York, you can't get a fair trial in New York.
He's not getting a fair trial there.
And no Trump supporter is going to get a fair trial in Washington, D.C., let alone Trump himself.
So no, that's what makes it a show trial.
It is a system that is set up from the very beginning to guarantee Which is why venue change has been denied to all J6 descendants, no matter what.
They don't want to have that precedent in place for anyone, because they want to continue to, this is a prosecution and conviction mill.
Very much like the Nazis set up in Germany after the Reichstag fire, a two-track system.
If you are a political prisoner, they will take you in front of, as you said, politically partisan, loyal party judges and juries who will guarantee conviction.
In fact, Washington, D.C. was described by Judge Mehta and other judges as being the victim.
So they're insisting on drawing the jury pool from the alleged victim pool.
Wow. Do you think that this means that there is, I mean, are there decent prospects here for appeal?
Is this something that can be taken?
I know Trump has said, and I think even DeSantis has implied that they can, you know, there may be a pardons down the road if they make it to the White House in 2024.
But putting the pardon option aside, is there any reasonable prospect to have this stuff overturned through the judicial system through appeal?
Well, it would go to the DC Court of Appeals first, and unfortunately the pattern has been Whether they're Republican appointees, including some appointed by Trump himself, or Democrat appointees, all the judges on the D.C. circuit, the trial judges, that then, you know, lockstep in this absurd situation.
So I don't hold out a lot of prospects to the D.C. Court of Appeal, letting it be more of the same establishment-type judges.
I don't expect much relief until we get to the Supreme Court of the United States.
I would love to be pleasantly surprised, but that's what I expect.
And do you think that the Supreme Court would take these kinds of cases?
I mean, obviously, this is something that they can accept or they can deny cert.
What do you think that the...
I mean, this is such a big issue, and they're talking about more prosecutions, arresting more people.
You've got people who've committed misdemeanors, who are facing incarceration, and in some cases, pretrial detention.
I mean, this has never happened before in the country, right?
I mean, the left says it hasn't happened before because they treat it as a unique type of insurrection, but it seems to me it hasn't happened before in the sense that we have never seen such a travesty of justice on such a mass scale.
Well, I think the Alien Sedition Act, unfortunately, is a good example of punishing free speech through prosecutions.
And fortunately, after Jefferson won the election of 1800, he did pardon people who had been convicted.
But yes, there are, unfortunately, antecedents in our history of persecution of free speech for political reasons.
Now, the Civil War itself, this is a seditious conspiracy statute that comes from the Civil War.
It's a statute that was passed during wartime, designed to make it easy to put people in prison.
It circumvented the requirements of the Treason Clause, which are much more strict, and they created the statute to make it easy to imprison people.
And that's what's being used now, is they're dusted off that old statute, and they're using it to punish free speech.
So it is a very dangerous situation.
I always hope the Supreme Court would see that in my case in particular, it is squarely a First Amendment case, and they should take it up and put that GD back in the bottle and close that door.
I certainly hope that is the case.
I mean, one can also think of violations that occurred in World War I and so on, but by and large, these are wartime violations.
I think what's striking here is that these kind of wartime standards are being applied in peacetime and are being applied really to fellow Americans.
How are you doing right now in the jail?
Are they treating you badly?
Are you being denied basic privileges?
What are the conditions in the jail as of now?
Well, right now I'm in solitary confinement, along with several other J-6 defendants, and we don't know yet why we've been put in solitary.
We've been taken out of the open bay unit with other J-6ers.
That's a J-6 unit.
That's the CTF We were there.
We were there among our brothers.
And I was in Lewisburg, an open unit also, for two months.
So this doesn't make any sense.
I think it's much more likely, once again, political persecution of selective people they consider to be particularly, quote-unquote, dangerous.
But you're right, the polymer raids in World War I is a good example of the persecution of war protesters.
Throughout our history, there's been examples of people who have been persecuted for their free speech.
And the Supreme Court strengthened free speech through a series of decisions, in particular defending the right of communists to advocate for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
And that's where Brandenburg comes in, a statute that was designed to persecute communists.
I think it was called a syndicalism statute in Ohio.
It was overturned by the Supreme Court when it was applied to a KKK leader.
They said, hey, as long as he's not advocating imminent violence, this is a protected speech.
But unfortunately, those kinds of rulings would have never been applied to the CDC statute, which lay around like a loaded gun, unused since the Civil War.
And that's why the DOJ has started to use these statutes.
Including the KKK Act, which was used recently to put a young man in prison for a meme against Hillary Clinton.
An absolute travesty of justice.
Hey, by the way, guys, if you want to support Stuart Rhodes, you can.
It's givesendgo.com, givesendgo.com slash G-A-F-5-B. So once again, givesendgo.com slash G-A-F-5-B. Hey, Stuart, thanks very much for joining me from jail to talk about your trial and the circumstances surrounding it.
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Remember high school debate?
I certainly do.
But quite evidently, high school debate is not what it used to be.
There's an interesting article by a fellow named James Fishback, a veteran of high school debate.
He used to be on the high school debate team.
It helped him, he says, to overcome a stutter.
He went on to be placed in the National Speech and Debate Association Nationals later in college, after college.
He coached a debate team for underprivileged kids in Miami.
And he says that right about that time, he noticed that high school debate began to change.
High school debate used to be, you're given a proposition, you're given a month or so to prepare.
You're not told which side of the debate you're going to be arguing.
And then they tell you, let's just say the debate's about gun control, the debate's about abortion.
Okay, you're going to take the case that abortion is...
You're going to take the case that abortion should be permitted.
And so the idea here is to rely on persuasion, on evidence, on reasoning, on making good arguments.
And the job of the judges was, and should be, to evaluate these arguments.
Who does a better job in convincing you that their case is solid?
So high school debate was an exercise, you might say, in the type of reasoning, not strictly speaking Socratic reasoning, because it's not relying on asking questions, but it's the mode of Socratic dialectic, of Socratic inquiry.
And the goal here, again, is to deploy rhetorical skill to reach persuasion and to reach truth.
But, says James Fishback, it's not like that anymore.
Now you have all these judges who are quite open about the fact that they are partisan, that they have ideologically rigid views, views that incline sharply to the left, and they're going to judge contestants on that basis.
Here is one of the judges.
Lila Lavender, I'm a Marxist-Leninist, Maoist.
I cannot judge the revolutionary proletarian science at the door.
I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I'm judging.
And then she basically says anyone who's arguing for capitalism or what she calls neoliberalism or imperialist war, she's basically going to be against them no matter what.
And then here's a judge, Shubham Gupta, sounds like an Asian Indian.
If you're discussing immigrants in a round and describe a person as illegal, I will immediately stop the round and give you the loss.
Give you a stern lecture and then talk to your coach.
I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.
And this is a kind of a consistent theme of some of these judges.
They claim that now if you make conservative arguments and you make them in a kind of candid way, you are making, I'm now quoting Lindsay Schrodek, another judge.
This is a woman who has judged 120 students at tournaments in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey.
She says that she's worried about, she's going to downgrade, quote, arguments that make marginalized communities feel unsafe in the debate space.
Now, I should point out that it is a very essence of debate to make people feel unsafe.
Because if you take view X and I take view not X or the opposite of X, I'm obviously going to challenge you.
And if you claim, well, you can't challenge me or you're triggering me or making me feel unsafe...
No, I'm not threatening you in any way.
I'm certainly not striking out at you, so your safety is assured.
But if you think you're being made emotionally unsafe, well, that's the ground that debate occupies.
Both of us go into a kind of no-man's land, you might say, and try to cross swords rhetorically to see who can make the better of the argument.
This is what debate is, and this is precisely the debate that is now being lost.
And so, says the writer of this article, during my time as a coach, he writes, I saw many students lose interest and quit.
They had had enough of being told what they could and couldn't say.
And this guy is now in the process of starting his own sort of rival debate league.
Essentially, he doesn't want to do that.
He's just saying, look, we don't have what used to be called debate, isn't being fostered by the NSDA. The NSDA is the organization that puts on These debates.
And so if the NSDA, which is the National Speech and Debate Association, is not going to do it, then somebody else, of course, has to.
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Hey guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Michael Reagan, president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation, son of President Ronald Reagan.
And he's also a New York Times bestselling author, syndicated columnist, former syndicated radio host.
By the way, the website is just reaganlegacyfoundation.org.
Michael, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
You know, there's a lot of division.
Well, there's division in the country, for sure.
But there's also a lot of division in the Republican Party and a level of ad hominem skirmishing that's going on that reminds me of something that your dad once said, something that is sometimes known as the 11th Commandment.
Talk a little bit about the 11th Commandment and what it says, what it means.
But more broadly, how your dad viewed these kinds of differences?
Well, the level of command was, thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.
And he really believed that during the campaign to 1976, 1980, when he ran for governor back in 1965, 66, and 70, if you will.
And it was really important for him, too.
He could talk about issues. But never made those attacks, personal attacks.
You didn't believe in those type of things.
At the end of the day, what happens is, if you want to be elected as a Republican, you need to understand.
You need to bring in the rhinos, per se.
You need to bring in those who are not in either party.
You need to bring in those in the other party who, in fact, might be conservative or moderates.
Because if you just count on Republicans to get elected, you'll never be elected to anything.
And he understood that.
So he brought up the 11th Commandment, didn't speak ill of other Republicans, even though they may speak ill of him.
He laughed it off.
He never returned fire, if you will, with fire.
He returned fire with facts, returned fire with his great personality, his great love of America.
At the end of the day, he wins going away in elections.
Why? Because Republicans voted for him.
Rhino Republicans voted for him.
Those who didn't belong to either party voted for him and Democrats voted for him.
And that's why he won.
And we have forgotten that, that there's other people out there listening to us when we are speaking.
This is a really, I think, important point on many levels.
I mean, when Reagan ran against Ford in 1976, Ford represented the establishment.
And to that degree, your dad was outside the establishment.
He was an outsider. But at the same time, I don't think I ever heard him denounce so-called establishment Republicans.
And then even later, when I was in the White House...
You know, there were a lot of conservatives who talked about, well, the moderate wing, which supposedly included people like James Baker and George Shultz, and the conservative wing, which supposedly included, you know, Ed Meese.
But I don't think your dad ever saw it that way.
I think the way he saw it is you've got people who might have different perspectives who are advising him.
It was his decision to make, but all these opinions were valuable to be factored.
Am I correctly reading your dad on this?
Absolutely right. He listened to everybody.
You know, and every one of them will tell you they thought he was their best friend or they believed that they were his best friend.
He treated everybody equally, even though he may disagree with people on different issues.
You know, let's take Grenada, for example.
Has a meeting on Grenada.
There's, I think, 10 people in the room.
Should we go into Grenada? Should we not go into Grenada?
So they took a vote. The vote was 73 not to go into Grenada.
He was in the three to go in.
So they all left the room.
They thought, it's done.
We voted. We voted not to go into Grenada.
Three days later, they're in Grenada.
And one of the ones in the room called my dad on the phone and said, Mr.
President, we had a vote on this.
And the vote was seven to three, not to go into Grenada.
And we went to Grenada.
Why? He said, well, my vote canceled your seven.
But that's the way he acted and that's the way he treated it.
So you couldn't go away angry at him and mad with that kind of an answer.
And maybe it's because he was in Hollywood.
Maybe it's because he was in the media.
He understood it better than anybody else in the room.
And today, we have a lot of people in the media, but I don't think they understand it.
So there's... I mean, there were primary debates, and of course, there was a range of perspectives.
George H.W. Bush was in there with your dad.
He had different viewpoints from your dad.
So you're not saying that there shouldn't be a vigorous debate about issues within the Republican Party, but you are saying that there is an element of tone that is important, and that if you make, if you strafe The way you attack the opposition, then you're going to make some enemies that are lasting enemies.
And of course, we've seen that happen in the Republican Party now.
People sort of sink the knife into somebody else and then they never forget it.
And they do never forget it.
And you're going to need those people.
At the end of the day, you're going to need every single one of those people to get elected.
It's more than just winning the nomination.
How are you going to win the general election?
And if you stab people in the back all the way through the system and called them names and said things about them, it's hard to bring them on board.
I mean, even in 1976, with my dad losing to Gerald Ford, and Gerald Ford, I'm sorry, 1980, And him winning the nomination, my dad, myself, my sister Maureen, all went out and campaigned for Gerald Ford.
We're all there.
What can we do to help?
Can we go here? Can we go there?
And we campaigned for Gerald Ford to win.
And that doesn't happen so much today because we made so many enemies on the way to the nomination that those people don't want to help us get to the end result.
Very interesting thoughts to keep in mind as we go forward on this.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I want to talk to you about the Reagan Legacy Foundation.
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I'm back with Michael Reagan, president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation, of course, son of former President Ronald Reagan.
He's also a New York Times bestselling author, syndicated columnist, longtime syndicated radio host.
Website of the Reagan Legacy Foundation is just reaganlegacyfoundation.org.
Michael, talk about the foundation.
This is something that you are now dedicated to.
It's a way of keeping your dad's legacy alive and flourishing.
And you've got a new program that involves scholarships for sailors and airmen.
Talk about the foundation in general and then specifically about this program.
Well, the Foundation in general has always been there to really uplift my father.
And my father always uplifted the military.
Always did. I remember driving out to the ranch as a kid, sitting in the right front seat of a station wagon, eight years old, nine years old.
And my father regaling me with the military songs, the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard.
That's how I learned about America, right front seat of a station wagon, riding out to the ranch on any given Sunday.
Or Saturday. And so when the USS Ronald Reagan was commissioned and what happened back in early 2000, really, what can we do to help the sailors?
What can we do to honor my father on the ship?
And by the way, the USS Ronald Reagan sits in the middle of the South China Sea right now.
She is the head of the Seventh Fleet.
So anything that happens out there, the Reagan has got it under control.
And so we came up with a scholarship program.
So why don't we provide scholarships to young men and women who serve aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, but let's go one better.
How about their family members who are at home?
They serve as well while their loved ones are on that ship.
Why don't we allow them to also fill out the paperwork and have them ask for scholarships so we give scholarships not only men and women who serve on the Reagan, but we also provide scholarships to the men and women, their families who are at home trying to better their education.
And we've been doing that now for a few years.
We set out checks twice a year, one in June, one towards the end of the year, towards Christmas and what have you.
And it's a great program.
We love it. The kids on the ship love it.
But you know who loves it more? The family members when they get a check.
Because we give $1,000 to a crew member.
Because they're helped somewhat by the government.
But the families aren't helped.
And we send them 2,000.
And right now talking about raising that on both levels.
So it really helps them.
And I think it's the least that a Reagan can do to really help the kids to serve aboard a ship whose name on the rear of it is USS Ronald Reagan, CVN 76.
I mean, this is just awesome.
And I can only imagine your dad, you know, smiling if he was here to see how...
It's not, you know, because your dad didn't care that much about his name.
I remember the sign on his desk that, you know, if you get things done, it doesn't really matter.
It doesn't really matter who gets the credit.
The important thing is the accomplishment unto itself.
But that being said, your dad also represented something.
He was one of those people whose name almost became a philosophy.
People talk about Reaganism in a way that I don't really know if you can apply that to other presidents in quite the same way.
And so you're keeping Reaganism alive in that sense.
We're certainly trying to do that.
I'm up to the library all the time.
I take people on tours in my dad's library.
I have different foundations to auction off a tour of the library with Mike Reagan.
We probably raised three, four hundred thousand dollars for different charitable causes for me doing the tour.
And I love it. And the docents love me coming up there because they say, you know, we know the stories that we're supposed to tell people, but you want to be with him because he knows the backstories to all the stories we're going to tell you.
And so I love going up there.
I'm going up there twice in a couple of weeks.
Enjoy doing that, keeping the Reagan name alive, telling stories about my dad.
When I'm on the USS Ronald Reagan, telling those kids stories about my dad.
They love hearing him. And to be able to give them scholarship money to help them and support them.
And all people have to do is go to reaganlegacyfoundation.org.
Give a dollar, give five, give ten, whatever.
We just pile it all together.
If you write us a check, write a check in the memo, put scholarship program, we'll put it all together.
And you're helping support those kids who are trying to better their lives.
And when they come home with a great education, be able to get a job and do something with it.
For so many years, Michael, you were in the thick of the political fray.
You were firing off every day.
Of course, I've been on your show many, many times with various books that I've written over the years.
It seems like you've now pivoted to a more focused, maybe less controversial life in which you're just doing something positive.
Are you happy you're doing it this way?
Are you glad to be sort of one step removed from some of the bitter environment of today, or do you miss it?
I'm on enough shows being interviewed, Newsmax and others, you, and I want to have you talking about the use of the day, which is fine.
But you know, when my sister Maureen was passing away, dying of melanoma back in 2001, and we had that brother-sister talk, and As I tear up here.
And Maureen asked me, she got everybody out of the room just talking to me, and she said, Michael, can you promise me something?
I said, what? If you get to a point where you can leave radio, Will you promise me you'll leave radio to carry on the legacy of our father?
Because if you don't, I don't know who will.
And I promised Maureen three months before she died that I would do that.
And 2009 was that year I could do it because I was out speaking enough that I was not having to use up so much time and I was doing well money-wise with the speaking engagements I was doing with Premier and you know who they are and what have you.
So I left in 2009 to really carry on a promise I made to my sister who would pass away in August of 2001.
That is downright awesome.
Michael Reagan, thank you so much for joining me.
The website, guys, ReaganLegacyFoundation.org, a great place to support the scholarship program.
Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
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Drawing on my book, What's So Great About Christianity, and specifically talking from the chapter called The Imperial Eye, when the self becomes the arbiter of morality, I'm describing secular morality, secular morality that has emerged in resistance as an alternative to traditional or Christian morality.
And I began by quoting last time the philosopher Charles Taylor, but I only gave part of the quote, so I'm going to give you the full one now.
This is what he says, and what he's doing is he's articulating the premise, the underlying outlook of secular morality.
I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me rather than being shaped by external influences.
Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.
Self-determining freedom demands that I break the hold of external impositions and decide for myself alone.
So, don't ultimately listen to demons.
Don't ultimately decide on the basis of what other people say, other codes or commandments say.
Dig within yourself and look to the inner self to be the ultimate judge, the referee, the arbiter of morality.
And of course, the idea here is that this inner self is good.
The inner self becomes the source of unity and of wholeness.
Now, Where have we heard this?
There's an echo here.
And I want to argue that today's secular morality is rooted in the Romantic philosophy of Rousseau.
This is Jean-Draque Rousseau, the French philosopher.
And in Rousseau's thought, we discover a deeper schism.
Between liberal morality on the one hand and Christianity on the other.
See, in the Christian view, human nature is bent.
It's warped. It's corrupted by original sin.
Not that it doesn't have a good side, but the good side is complemented or challenged by a bad side.
Original sin doesn't just refer to what Adam and Eve did.
It refers to the fact that our natures are from the start sinful.
Now, Augustine asks us to look at the example of the infant, even the tiny newborn babe.
He says, look how self-absorbed it is.
All that the infant cares about is, well, itself.
And look how petulantly it strikes out at the nurse.
Augustine makes the wry comment.
He goes, if babies don't do any harm, he goes, it's not for lack of will, but only for lack of strength.
So in the Christian understanding, the inner self is corrupt.
And so we need God's grace to enter from the outside and transform our fallen human nature.
Christianity in this sense is a religion of self-overcoming.
But in Rousseau's understanding, it's the opposite.
It's different. Human beings were originally good.
Who corrupted them?
Society. So Rousseau doesn't deny corruption, but he says that the corruption comes from outside of us.
Basically, society made us do it.
We're not really to blame for our failings.
Society has, in a sense, recreated us in its own image, and we are doing the bidding of society.
So, consequently, says Rousseau, in order to discover what's good and true, we must dig within ourselves.
We must recover the voice of nature in us.
Now, some people have interpreted Rousseau to be saying, we need to kind of go back to the primitive state.
We need to sort of become like the animals and the bears.
This is what Voltaire understood Rousseau to be saying, but this is not what Rousseau is saying.
What Rousseau says is it's not a matter of going back to nature in the original sense.
He says we can recover man's original state as now a state of mind.
So this is not a physical return to nature, but it's a return to the voice of nature within us.
So within us dwells an original being that is our true natural self.
Uncorrupted by the pressures of society.
And the problem, says Rousseau, is that the voice of this inner self has been rendered inaudible by the din of convention and artificially generated desires.
By connecting with the inner self and giving its voice an authoritative role in our lives, we avoid kind of selling out or conforming to a mercenary society.
We can recover, if you will, our original essential goodness.
So, in the secular ethic, and I'm now quoting the writer James Byrne, he goes, So, this is a dramatic contrast between traditional or religious morality and secular morality.
Don't think that the secular morality is just a simple or complete repudiation of morality.
Let's remember, it preserves the distinction between the is and the ought.
In secular morality, nature is the way that we are.
But it also provides the model for the way that we ought to be, we should follow.
The call of our inner selves.
And if we don't, we are not being true to ourselves and we are missing out on the goal of self-fulfillment.
Now, there's an element here of subjectivism.
Why? Because each of us has a distinctive way of being ourselves.
You can't decide what it is like for it to be me.
I've got to decide that for myself and you've got to decide that for yourself.
But this is not relativism, because there's no suggestion here, no suggestion in Rousseau or in liberal morality that anything goes.
In other words, in the secular ethic, there is an inner self, and it is speaking clearly and definitively, and we are obliged to follow it.
Secular morality differs from Christianity not in rejecting the idea of the good, but in positing a self-sufficient inner source for what is good.
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