All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 16, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:09
SHOW ME THE MAN… Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep644
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, I'll show how the fourth indictment of Trump is a confirmation of the Stalinist dictum, show me the man and I'll show you the crime.
I'll argue it's time for Republicans to actively resist Democratic abuses before it's too late.
I'll outline ways in which the America we grew up in has really disappeared in the last few years.
Author Carrie Gress joins me.
We're going to talk about her book, The End of Woman.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
If you're watching on Rumble, the same.
Also at Rumble, at the top, there's a little red button that says join.
If you click on that, it'll take you to check out my Locals channel.
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.
Donald Trump has now been clobbered with a total of 91 criminal charges in four separate indictments, all issued in the past six months.
Now, you might say, wow, did this guy go on a criminal spree and commit 91 separate crimes?
It turns out right away that you begin to see that all of these indictments, every single one of them, have to do with words or actions that go way back.
So, let's take, for example, the Alvin Bragg case.
When did all that business go down with Stormy Daniels?
Well, that was years and years ago.
What about the business about January 6th?
We're talking about January 6th, 2021.
We're talking about the actions immediately following the 2020 election.
Here we are, well into the middle of 2023.
So, and by the way, the same is true of the Georgia indictment.
We're talking about efforts to sort of manipulate the election result in Georgia in the days and weeks immediately following the 2020 election.
So isn't it odd, the timing, that right now, here we are in 2023, Biden is looking weak, Trump is getting ready to run again, he's the leading candidate of the Republican Party, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, 91 different charges, four separate indictments.
If that doesn't raise an eyebrow, then you don't really have a grasp of how the kind of machinations of American politics work.
All the four indictments are brought by Democratic prosecutors—these are confirmed Democrats and leftists—in four separate jurisdictions— And they are targeting the leading candidate of the Republican Party for the next election.
So this is not just about the last election.
This is about stopping the same guy for the election that's going to come up next year.
Now, looking at the Georgia indictment and reading through it, let's isolate for a minute what Trump did.
And what Trump did, by and large, was very little.
Trump made a phone call.
That seems to be the centerpiece of the indictment.
Now, I realize that that's not the whole thing because I see that there are some references to the fact that they're trying to get, you know, Twitter messages from Trump and DMs, direct messages that Trump may have sent.
This is something that Jack Smith talks about.
And we also see a hint of it in the Georgia indictment that Trump is talking to people about, I can do this or I can do that.
But again, how did Trump interfere with the election result in Georgia?
That's the question. And so let's look for a moment at this infamous phone call.
The key line in the phone call, and most of it is Trump talking about the magnitude of fraud in Georgia.
We got dead people voting.
We got people who moved out of state.
So the idea that Trump is somehow making all this stuff up is absurd.
Trump is, you can see from the call itself, sincerely pressing upon the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, hey, this is stuff you need to check out.
Now, Raffensperger, and he has a sidekick with him, are kind of pushing back and saying, well, Mr.
President, we've looked at this or we've looked at that.
So they're disputing what Trump is saying.
So what you have is really a discussion and kind of a debate over the degree and magnitude of fraud in Georgia and whether it's sufficient to tip the election.
Here's the key line from Trump.
I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
Which is one more than we have because we won the state.
Now, I guess there are a couple of ways to read this.
And of course, the left is putting the most prejudicial reading on it.
The word find is, hey, Brad Raffensperger, there are no 11,000 votes, but you go find them.
You somehow manufacture them.
You conjure them up.
But it's very clear from the context of what Trump is saying.
He won the state.
He won the state by a much bigger margin than 11,780 votes.
And that's all we need to find.
Meaning, in other words, we don't necessarily have to chase down every illegal vote.
We simply have to show that Trump had enough votes to win the state of Georgia.
Now, the fact that there is this...
I think most plausible interpretation.
And yet, when I look at leftist commentary on all this, they pretend like there's only one way to read this.
Trump was clearly demanding that Raffensperger illegally conjure up votes in Georgia.
Well, to any reasonable person, that's one way to look at it.
I suppose if you take the line in isolation, you can find that meaning in it.
But it doesn't seem to be the most plausible meaning.
read in context, it's very obvious that it's not the correct meaning at all. Now there is a separate matter in the indictment which is apparently an effort or it's charged to breach the voting system in Coffee County to presumably manipulate the results of it. But when you look more closely at what happened in Coffee County, it turns out that by and large the Trump people were like, we You want to have a chance to be able to look at the equipment.
We want to be able to look at these machines to make sure that everything is on the up and up.
And there was apparently some communication with an election official in Coffey County saying, in effect...
Yeah, we'll try to make arrangements for you to do this.
So it's not that the Trump people are breaking in and sort of trying to grab a hold of the machines and maybe sort of reprogram them in some way.
I mean, there's a kind of public understanding that the media is pushing of this indictment, that there was some, quote, breach of the machines.
What you have is a negotiation between people basically saying, hey, guys, Is it okay if our guys come over to Georgia and Trump evidently even says, you know, I'll be happy to cover any costs involved.
And then you have a message From one of the Trump officials, quote, Now, to me, that means, hey, listen, we asked Coffee County, we asked the election people over there, can we look at the stuff?
They go, yeah, you can. Wow, great.
We're going to be allowed in.
So the Trump people here are playing by the rules.
They're working with the election officials.
They're asking if they can come take a look.
The election officials are saying yes.
The idea that any of this is criminal behavior, that's really what gets me.
It's one thing if you said, well, listen, you know, we don't want to have any of the campaigns, even after the election, doing this kind of thing.
We need to have some rules and procedures for how this matter is.
You know, the key point is this.
Obviously, it is permissible to contest an election.
So Georgia needs to state, when does contesting a close election somehow drift into illegality?
When is it okay to do X but not okay to do Y? What is that dividing line?
Whereas it turns out there's no such specified dividing line either in the law or specified in the Georgia indictment, and that's a big part of the problem.
If aches and pains are your problem, Relief Factor is your remedy.
Debbie and I started taking Relief Factor a couple of years ago, and what a 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 Relief Factor.
Now, how does it work? 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's 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 software.
The number again to call, 800-4-RELIEF or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. I'm continuing my discussion of the Georgia indictment.
Here's a statement by a fellow named Stuart Stevens.
This is basically a RICO indictment of the Republican Party, as it should be.
The whole Republican Party is under indictment, evidently.
So you can see here that when many of us say that this is an effort not just to go after Trump or even the immediate people around Trump, it's an effort to go after the political opposition.
Basically, it's an effort to create a one-party state.
Only one party is legitimate for democracy, protecting democracy.
The other party is against democracy.
Now, I saw Jonathan Turley on television a day or so ago and he was saying, look, these are people who this indictment essentially culls together a whole bunch of actions that were undertaken in many cases separately.
You have a tweet over here, a phone call over here, a meeting over there, a speech over here.
And all of this is kind of pulled together.
This is a criminal conspiracy.
As if to say that these independent actions, obviously independent actions toward a similar goal.
And the goal is, of course, challenging the legitimacy of the election result in Georgia.
But look at the stuff that's in the indictment as an act of illegality, an act in, quote, furtherance of the conspiracy.
Act 128.
This is from the indictment.
On about the 5th day of January, Donald John Trump caused to be tweeted from the Twitter account, the Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.
This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
What? That the Vice President has the right to reject fraudulent electors.
What? Well, you might think the vice president doesn't have that constitutional right, but whether you do or not, where's the conspiracy?
Who wants fraudulent electors to be casting votes?
And yet, here it's presented as an illegal act.
Act 32. On or about the 6th day of December 2020, Donald John Trump caused to be tweeted from the Twitter account, real Donald Trump, quote, Gee, what a surprise!
Has anyone informed the so-called, quote, says he has no power to do anything, Governor Brian Kemp and his puppet, Lieutenant Governor Jeff Duncan, that they could easily solve this mess and win signature verification and call a special session so easy?
So what is Trump saying here?
He's saying, hey, Brian Kemp, hey, Lieutenant Governor Duncan, you may not do this.
This is what you should do.
Call a special session and verify the signatures.
Check out the signatures on the ballot to make sure they're legit.
This is a criminal act?
What? And yet, quote, this was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
So it goes.
I mentioned yesterday that Act 22, Donald Trump, It tweets out, quote, Georgia hearings now on OANN, One America News Network.
Amazing. Quote, this was an act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
And then it goes on.
David Schaefer is reserving a room for a meeting.
Mark Meadows is sending a text message to a congressman in Pennsylvania.
I want the number for the speaker and the leader of the Pennsylvania legislature.
This is supposed to be part of this conspiracy in Georgia.
Now, I want to say a word about this whole RICO business, because...
RICO requires a criminal organization.
La Cosa Nostra, the mafia.
You have a criminal organization, and there's no criminal organization here.
You've got basically a bunch of people on a campaign, and they're trying to challenge, they're trying to investigate, they're demanding signature verification.
They believe they won the state of Georgia, and they're fighting to get that belief vindicated.
By and large, in a RICO statute, you have to have all these acts.
And some of the acts by themselves can be innocent, opening a bank account, crossing the street, and so on.
But they have to be acts in furtherance of an illegal, quote, predicate act.
So there has to be a crime at the center of the whole thing.
And what's the crime here?
What is the crime? What is the center?
Even find me the votes is not a crime.
Find me the votes is a demand that the Georgia Secretary of State, under his own authority and through his own discretion, look at the votes and see if Trump's claims are accurate or not.
That's not a crime.
And so, how can all these other acts in furtherance of helping Trump, let's just say, prevail in Georgia, be crimes?
Where's the criminal organization?
What is the criminal conclusion that these people are trying to And how can you include in this lawyers who are advising their client about ways that they can go about these challenges?
That's the job of a lawyer.
Remember, lawyers even defend people who are guilty, defend people who have confessed to their crimes.
And what do lawyers try to do?
Get them the least sentence, in some cases even get them off if they can, be advocates for their client, and yet here they are, people like Jenna Ellis and others, Facing charges of being part of this criminal conspiracy.
It is outrageous.
Debbie and I gained some weight during COVID. We didn't want to join the fat affirmation movement.
We said, let's lose some weight.
And thankfully, PhD weight loss came to our rescue.
Debbie's already lost 24 pounds.
I've lost 27.
We are now both on maintenance.
The program is based on science and nutrition.
No injections, no pills, no long hours in the gym, no severe calorie restriction, just good, sound, scientifically proven nutrition.
It's so simple. They make it easy by providing 80% of your food at no additional cost.
They tell you when and what to eat.
And guess what? You can do this without ever being hungry.
The founder, Dr. Ashley Lucas, has her Ph.D. in chronic disease and sports nutrition.
She's also a registered dietitian.
She helps people lose weight and, most important, maintain that weight loss for life.
So, if you're ready to take the step of losing weight like Debbie and I have, call Ph.D. Weight Loss and Nutrition.
Here's the number, 864-644-9222.
You can also find them online at myphdweightloss.com.
The number again to call, 864-644-1900.
I've been talking in the last couple of segments about the Georgia indictment.
Earlier, of course, I've discussed the Jack Smith two indictments and the Bragg indictment and all the other stuff that is going on around all this and broadly in the country.
And sometimes it fills me with a sort of weariness.
And I say to myself, wow, what have we come to?
What have we come to in our political debate, the erosion of any sense of goodwill, the criminalization of political and opinion differences?
I'm thinking here also of the vast regimes of censorship that we've been living under for the last few years, censorship on mainstream digital platforms, but stoked by government complicity, government cooperation.
I say to myself, am I kind of imagining this, or are we living in a different country than the one we grew up in, the one that you grew up in, the one that I came to at the age of 17?
But we don't even have to go back 30 years because things change over 30 years and people go, well, it was 30 years ago, Dinesh, you know, it's customary for people who are 50 or 60 years old to look back at the good old days.
I'm actually not trying to do that. I'm looking at the America of, say, 10 years ago, and it seems that we have moved in a direction that has made that America a thing of the past.
Now, there's an interesting essay by Victor Davis Hanson on VictorDavishanson.com in which he says, you know what?
Those of us who feel this way are correct.
We've seen a real departure of the kind of normal way of doing business in America.
And he lists some of these and I want to highlight them.
One, his ego's free expression.
It's not just about digital censorship, per se.
It's also the fact that today, if you're in a university, you know that you can't say a whole bunch of things.
You can't discuss a whole bunch of things if you state your opinion, you're somehow triggering people or violating their safe space or making them feel uncomfortable, and there you are, hauled before the dean or in disciplinary charges.
And the same is true in corporate America.
You say the wrong thing, your career is damaged, your livelihood is damaged.
We know that we have in this country now a fake media.
Trump, I think, was, I don't know if Trump is the one who coined the phrase fake news, but you now have journalists who are absolutely committed to telling lies.
Lies in furtherance, of course, of an ideological narrative.
And you also have media that's willing to work as a kind of adjunct arm of the Democratic Party.
And in this case, with the Democratic Party in charge of the executive branch, as an adjunct of the Biden regimes.
So, what this means is that we don't really have a free press.
Well, we have a free press in the technical sense.
They're free in the sense that they are independent media organizations.
They are not formally attached to the government, with the exception of NPR or public television.
These are independent news agencies, but they have thrown in With the government.
They have thrown in with censorship.
They have become, if you will, regime propaganda.
I think it was the late Christopher Hitchens who used the phrase, the courtier press.
It's almost like the courtiers at the French court.
Their job was not to criticize the aristocracy or the French monarchy.
It was to bow, to truckle, to advance, if you will, the agenda of the aristocrats and of the monarchy.
And that's basically what our media does.
They put out lies.
When the lies are exposed, they don't issue corrections.
In fact, they're proud of the lies and they're proud of having gotten away with it for so long and they don't really worry about their credibility.
They just basically say, we'll cover up this lie with new lies.
We'll come up with new stuff.
And as long as people don't have independent media, where else can they go?
The weaponization of justice.
Now, we've had a DOJ for a long time.
The DOJ is in fact part of the executive branch.
But nevertheless, the DOJ is always supposed to be operating under a badge of political or ideological neutrality.
And by that, it means that they should look at crimes for crimes that have actually been committed and not use the weaponry of the DOJ to go against the other party.
Well, isn't that what they've been doing?
Not just with January 6th, but going after pro-lifers, going after moms who show up at school board meetings.
So the DOJ has now become a battering ram for the Biden administration against its critics and against dissidents.
And the DOJ is responsible for the charges against Trump.
Think of it. Almost 100 indictments against the leading figure of the opposing party.
Imagine if this had come out in any other country.
This was done by India or El Salvador.
Think about the reaction of the U.S., not to mention the international community, and yet here it is going on in the United States.
Victor Davis Hanson goes on to talk about the erosion of the military, the erosion of the commonsensical distinction between male and female.
The idea, as he puts it, that debt is kind of a social construct.
In other words, we can just keep spending money.
And guess what? We never really have to think about paying it back.
It's not like if you take out a home mortgage, guess what?
You're going to have to pay it back or a bunch of guys are going to come have you move out of your house and take over the house.
No, it doesn't work like that if you're a country.
So the level of irresponsibility across the board.
And then finally, the destruction of common law.
In other words, we're not going to prosecute criminals rampaging through stores.
They can take whatever they want.
In fact, we're going to let cities become cesspools of homelessness, of aggression against passengers and drivers.
We're going to allow crime...
To reach abominable levels not seen since the 1970s.
We're actually going to put the cops on trial, if you will.
Defund the police. The cops are the problem.
This is a society in decay.
I don't really know if there's any other way to describe it.
I think Victor Davis Hanson puts his hand on it.
It's a feeling that many of us have and suspect, but here we see that we're not imagining it.
It's true. By now, I'm sure you've heard about the Durban Accords.
These are the greatest threat to the U.S. dollar's global dominance in the past 80 years.
On August 22nd, this month, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa are expected to announce the launch of a new international super currency fully backed by gold or other commodities.
It's all part of a long-term plan to supplant the U.S. and the dollar as cornerstones of the global financial system.
Well, how can you protect your savings, your IRA, your 401k from the fallout from this landmark shift?
You can diversify with gold from Birch Gold Group.
Historically, gold has been a safe haven in times of high uncertainty, which is right now.
Get a free information kit on gold IRAs.
Decide for yourself if a tax-sheltered retirement account backed by physical precious metals is right for you.
Text the word Dinesh to 989898.
There's a monumental shift happening among nations that control one-third of the world's GDPs starting August 22nd.
So protect your retirement savings.
Text Dinesh to the number 989898.
Claim your free information kit on gold from Birch Gold.
I want to talk about a school that was founded by the basketball great LeBron James.
You know LeBron James.
This guy is a leftist.
He is a Black Lives Matter guy.
And he has bought into the propaganda that the reason schools are bad is that traditional schools are racist.
They have kind of systemic racism built into them.
And this is why particularly poor black kids aren't doing very well.
And so LeBron James has, because of his wealth, an opportunity to sort of test this premise, to prove it wrong.
And he's tried to do that.
He started a school. It was called, it is called, I Promise School.
I Promise School. So you can see here, even the name of the school has the echoes of Jesse Jackson's Keep Hope Alive!
I Promise School.
So evidently the school is promising, I think, to potential students, we're going to give you opportunities like you haven't had before.
We're gonna put in resources like you haven't seen before and your kids and you are going to flourish and blossom, do very well, move on to perhaps colleges and careers.
And all of this turns out to be sadly not the case.
So the LeBron James School, I Promise School has been around for now five years.
And it turns out that not even a single one of its eighth graders can pass the state math test.
In fact, not only did every eighth grader fail the math test, they have failed it for three years straight.
This is not the same eighth graders.
These are different eighth graders for three years straight, all taking the math test and every one of them failing.
What this really means is that the school is quite clearly not delivering the results that it promised.
The I Promise School is breaking its promises.
Now, all of this goes back to 2018.
LeBron James goes, listen, I'm going to go to my home base where I grew up, Akron, Ohio, and the media was in attendance, massive media coverage for this new school that LeBron is starting, and the idea was, Now these kids are going to be given real opportunity.
Well, you just fast forward five years in a sort of mood of disappointment, frustration, even despair has set in.
You have school board members going, well, what the heck?
We have set up this school.
We've put resources into it.
Evidently, LeBron James put resources into it.
But the foundation that runs the school LeBron's foundation supposedly also partners with other foundations.
So in addition to LeBron's contributions, there are these other foundations putting money into the school.
And the bad results are across the board.
In other words, I mentioned the math test, but they're not limited to the math test.
So... The students are in the bottom 5% of the state.
And therefore, the Ohio State Board of Education, they list schools that are, like, failing, producing horrible results.
They require targeted intervention.
And guess what? LeBron James' school is right up there.
And so... You know, there are schools that start out good, they go well for a while, and then they start slowing down, and there's bad management, or the school begins to deteriorate.
What's interesting is that this is a new school.
I mean, it's only been around for five years, so you'd think everybody coming into it would come full of vigor and promise, and they've got resources, and yet the school is turning out to be a total disaster.
Now, What do we learn from all this?
Well, one of the things we learn, number one, talk is not enough.
LeBron James is a big talker.
He loves to engage in the symbolism of racial politics.
He takes a knee.
He makes statements.
He decries white supremacy and so on.
So this bloviation is not a substitute for real achievement.
Number two, it's easier to have good intentions than to actually deliver results.
LeBron James probably thought, listen, I'm LeBron James.
I'll put resources into this school and that will do it.
I'll hire black educators who are not tainted with white supremacy.
Well, you can do that, but are these black educators good educators?
It's not so important to have a math teacher who is untainted by white supremacy.
It's really important to have a math teacher who can teach math.
And evidently, that's not what's happened at the school.
Look, I mean, I don't want to say that this is an easy task.
You're taking poor kids, mostly black, from inner-city neighborhoods.
I'm sure there are all kinds of problems with broken and dysfunctional families, poverty, and so on.
But... The fact of the matter is that's happening elsewhere also.
And so there are schools, even in inner cities, that do well.
There are schools that have high expectations of their students and deliver on those expectations, teach them real stuff.
If you watch films like Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, you get a hint of what a good school needs to look like.
And by the way, both those movies are about schools that started out terrible and then were transformed by educators.
That, in one case Black, in the other case Hispanic, that actually love the kids and put an emphasis on learning and merit and achievement.
And in fact, in those movies, you see that these educational leaders are attacked by the practitioners of race and identity politics who view them with the utmost suspicion.
So let's just say that the LeBron James ideology, which is trumpeted around by the media, gets a lot of accolades, doesn't really work when it comes to taking kids and improving their test scores so that they are ready for higher education and so they are ready for life.
Debbie and I are on a great health journey, but we still struggle to eat enough fruits, veggies, and fiber.
Now, lucky for us, we discovered Balance of Nature.
And there's no better way to get all your fruits and veggies plus fiber than with Balance of Nature.
This is Balance of Nature's fruits and veggies in a capsule, so easy, made from fresh whole produce.
The produce is powdered after an advanced vacuum-cold process.
Which stabilizes the maximum nutrient content.
And this is Balance of Nature's Fiber and Spice.
It's a proprietary blend of fiber and 12 spices for overall and digestive health.
Join Debbie and me. Start your journey to better health right now.
Call 800-246-8751 or you can go to balanceofnature.com.
You'll get 35% off your first preferred order when you use discount code AMERICA. Again, the number to call, 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com.
Get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast author Carrie Gress.
Her book is called The End of Woman.
She has a PhD in philosophy.
She's a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. She's also a scholar at Catholic University of America.
Her website, carriegress.com.
C-A-R-R-I-E-G-R-E-S-S.com.
Cary, welcome to the podcast.
You've written a really interesting book called The End of Woman.
And the theme of it appears to be that there is an attack on...
Not just women, but womanhood.
And this attack is coming from women in the name of feminism.
Explain. No, I think that's a really great articulation of it.
One of the things that I did in this book was really, first of all, ask the question, how do we get to this point where womanhood is being threatened and we're actually seeing...
You know, men be so-called the best women in many fields.
So I went all the way back to the very, very beginning of feminism and just thought, you know, initially I thought, I'm not going to find anything back here.
The movement's changed so much.
There's nothing to find here.
And of course, when I started digging in, I just found scads of information that really helped me piece together How we got here.
And I think, you know, one of the main clues that I found was really this discussion about how do we help women?
You know, this is what the feminist movement has always been about.
And I think why it appeals to so many people.
The problem, though, even from the very beginning was that they weren't asking how do we help women as women?
They were asking... How do we help women become like men?
And it was really this idealization of the masculine that has led us to the situation, you know, 200 years out, where we're still asking that question, not out loud.
I mean, but that's the premise is that men have a better life and we want to be like men.
And so that's just rolled forward.
And of course, you know, in the 70s, there was a ton of rhetoric and the radical feminists were talking then about how do we get rid of Gender altogether.
And so this is just the culmination of the whole movement is this idea of kind of just making this very abstract sort of human people, but that aren't really connected to male or female anymore.
And then there's all this fluidity of genders and we can be really whatever we want.
It's sort of this creating ourselves in our own image kind of idea.
Yeah. Kerry, some of the critics of this transgender movement, I think of people like J.K. Rowling and others, they seem to be saying that feminism is wonderful, perhaps even radical feminism is great.
But here come these male usurpers with biologically male equipment pretending to be female, and they are spoiling the advancement of women.
So they are, in a sense, critiquing the transgender extremism in the name of feminism.
As I understand it, what you're saying is, guess what, guys?
It's the very premises of feminism, right?
That have led in this direction.
And I think what I found surprising in your book is you say that this is not a phenomenon of like the 1960s, where people started burning their bras and kind of going crazy.
This goes back to early feminism.
Talk a little bit about that.
Talk about early feminism and what did the early feminists want?
Yeah, I mean, well, again, to repeat, I think that idea, they wanted women to become more like men because they just thought men had much better lives.
But there were really three pieces that I discovered that sort of carry through from almost the very beginning up to the current day.
And, you know, the first one is this idea of free love, getting rid of monogamy, getting rid of marriage and the nuclear family.
That was a main piece.
Another piece was the occult, and this was probably the most shocking part of what I found in the 1800s, because we really think of the 1800s as very Victorian and pristine, and yet everybody from certainly the very earliest feminists, but also the names that we know, people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were involved in the occult, And then we, you know, see that into the 1900s, of course, as well.
And then the third piece is really this idea that we now call smashing the patriarchy, which is this idea of getting rid of the structures of society.
And this started in the late 1790s, around 1790 itself, with Mary Wollstonecraft.
And she was really writing off a lot of the ideas of the French Revolution, and how do we get rid of the church?
How do we get rid of any kind of hierarchy?
And how do we start creating this radical equality that we see echoed throughout the era and ages?
So that was really the 1800s.
Those three pieces were there.
And then the 1900s, you take those three pieces, you know, free love, occult, and smashing the patriarchy, and they latch on to Marxism.
And so we just see sort of a new iteration of it happening in the 1900s, certainly first century.
With the communists and then with the new left in the 1960s.
So it's just kind of maturing and congealing over the years and taking on kind of a different tone and brand, especially as the movement moves on.
I mean, I've called it a brand. It's been able to renew itself over the centuries.
And I think the Barbie movie is just another great example of how, you know, feminism is branding itself anew for a younger generation.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with author Carrie Gress, the book, The End of Woman.
As most of you know by now, Debbie and I love the MyPillow products.
We have them all over our home.
Just the other day, Debbie was like, hey, we need some kitchen towels.
And wouldn't you know it, MyPillow's got a deal on them.
They have four and six piece sets.
They come in a variety of colors.
If you use promo code Dinesh, you get 25% off on all of them.
Hey, you can't have too many kitchen towels.
Now's your chance to stock up.
Just go to MyPillow.com.
Use promo code Dinesh. Save 25% off the MyPillow kitchen towels.
Or you can call the number 800-876-0227.
You've got to use the promo code Dinesh to get this special offer.
There are, by the way, sales and discounts on all the other products for MyPillow.
Discounts of up to 80%.
Call 800-876-0227.
Go to MyPillow.com.
Don't forget to use the promo code D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
I'm back with author Carrie Grass.
We're talking about her book, The End of Woman.
Kerry, I think what's striking in what you just said in the earlier segment was that, you know, we think of these early feminists as being, you know, suffragettes and that their main goal was just getting women to have a vote.
And to that degree, there's a sort of singularity and nobility to it.
But all these other elements that you're identifying are at least, well, it's almost like you have to dig, as you did in your research for this book, to find all this stuff.
And so then we can fast forward to the 1960s where we got various types of feminism that seem to have become much more mainstream.
Would you agree that the 60s was not so much about a sort of invention of feminism as a kind of grabbing on to ideas that were maybe popular in Bloomsbury in England or in Greenwich Village in New York and then making it part of mass culture?
Right. Yeah, I think that's an interesting question.
I have looked at it more from the angle of just really seeing the radical communist ideas sort of exploding.
And I think that happens with Betty Friedan in 1963, most, you know, specifically.
And this is a really shocking element that I've discovered was just how deep her communist roots were, how committed she was to this idea of getting women out of the home.
She actually had a In her notebook, a quote from Engels about how women would never be free unless they were working.
you know, she was a big, she hated Hitler. And yet, because we know, because the Marxist background of both the Nazis, as well as the communists, she was actually unwittingly using the same idea that Hitler used, if we think of that, that sign Auschwitz, you know, Arbeit macht frei, work makes you free. This is really what she in her heart of hearts believed. And she was just a genius at presenting it in a way that would really stick. You know, Simone de Beauvoir said that if we gave women the choice of leaving the home, they would never leave the home.
And so, you know, Betty Friedan comes along and says, you know, hold my beer. And, and really goes after the heart of women and makes us victims. She makes us feel like we're victims. And that's what she calls a comfortable concentration camp. That's what she called the home. Of course, remember, she's speaking to like the wealthiest women in all of human history, with appliances, and, you know, all of these things that they had in the home that women have never seen before.
And then she also really pointed to that idea of the fear of missing out, I think, that women are also really driven by.
And these things just made her book a runaway bestseller.
She's sold 3 million copies, I think, in the first couple of years of that book.
And I think that that's really where the footprint started of feminism becoming something that women...
Really wanted to be engaged in because they were motivated by these key ideas that were found in Betty's work.
I mean, do you think that a crucial factor here was, in fact, I mean, there was an ideology, but wasn't it also technology?
And what I mean is that when you hear all these attacks on patriarchy, women are kept in the home and barefoot and pregnant and so on.
Isn't it simply a fact that before the availability of widespread birth control, let alone before the availability of appliances that basically made the home An easy place to navigate.
I mean, think of all the time it took to cook, to clean the home.
So before you had the microwave oven and the vacuum cleaner and so on, housework was sort of a full-time profession, so to speak.
And so it just seems preposterous to look back to, say, the 1800s and go, gee, I'm really surprised that all these women weren't out in the workforce.
They really couldn't be, could they?
So it wasn't... Wasn't it a new environment?
And Betty Friedan, in a sense, was pretending like there was some ideology keeping women down, whereas in reality, it was a transformation of technology that paved the way for the mass female entry into the workplace.
Yeah, I think that that is a fantastic question and something that, you know, it's very easy for us to sit in our lives now where we have discretionary income and we have a lot of free time because of these life-saving or time-saving machines.
I mean, I'm always amazed that I can just push a button and there goes my laundry.
It's washed, you know. It's done.
I don't have to be out there with a washboard scrubbing it or anything like that.
I think absolutely that is something that really plays heavily into this and the morphing of society.
I know I couldn't do what I do outside the home if I was busy washing clothing all day.
We have to keep in mind that a lot of the things that happened in the past were Merely survival, storing up food for the winter, growing your crops.
Grocery stores are actually a brand new thing that came about in the 20th century.
So all of those pieces I think we have to keep in mind and really recognize contributed for good or for ill in many respects to what we're getting at.
And so not conflating the ideology with technology I think is an important thing to parse out.
The big bad word here is patriarchy, a word you use repeatedly in the book.
Can you talk sort of candidly about what was...
Are you endorsing the kind of patriarchal world that was there before feminism?
Or do you think that there were things wrong with the patriarchy that needed to be fixed, but we've gone too far in the opposite direction?
What is your take on patriarchy itself?
Right. Right. Well, I mean, I think I would agree with the idea of recognizing that patriarchy really is something that's suited to the gifts of men, that men have incredible gifts that they've offered to society, that they continue to offer to society, even though it's not popular to do so.
I mean, things like providing and protecting.
And, you know, we know Kate Millett was actually really famous for Wanting to tear down the patriarchy.
And she saw the most effective way of doing that was really destroying the family by destroying the culture.
She had this mantra that she...
And she picked up all of this, of course, from Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt School.
Reich wrote a book in 1936 called The Sexual Revolution.
And that was really just the roadmap that people like Kate Millett and Angela Davis followed.
And part of their efficacy was...
Just recognizing that if you destroy the family, the best way to do it and to destroy the authority that men have is by increasing things like prostitution and homosexuality and promiscuity.
Getting all of these things sort of in the culture and part of the culture really denigrates the role that a man can have because his family is no longer intact.
Yeah. Anyway, yes, absolutely.
I think that there have been ways in which women have been mistreated.
And I think that the feminist movement comes from that.
It's a positive impulse.
It's an effort to help women.
But you don't do that by just building up anger and resentment in women.
women. And that was the amazing piece to research was just to see how many of these women that, you know, now have been influential upon the public policies that we have in the United States, how many of them were just incredibly broken women, who really did feed off of anger and enrage. And that's that's the engine behind a lot of their efforts. And you just simply cannot build a culture on that when you've you've vilified half the civilization, you know, every male, and, and victimized,
you know, creative victims out of the other half.
It's just, there's nothing to build on.
So you're really on a road to nowhere with that kind of effort.
Let's take a pause when we come back.
A final segment with Keri Gress.
The book is called The End of Woman.
I'm back with author Carrie Gress.
We're talking about her book, The End of Woman.
By the way, her website, carriegress.com, C-A-R-R-I-E-G-R-E-S-S.com.
Carrie, it seems to me that what you're defending here is a sort of A traditional idea of the complementarity of the male and female virtues.
This is to say that, by and large, men bring something to the table, and that something is strength, maybe a certain degree of ambition, a desire to provide for the family, a willingness to defend the family to the death sometimes if necessary.
Women, conversely, also bring something to the table, and it's quite different.
Now, I'm assuming that you agree that they can be men who have some of the feminine virtues and vice versa, but you're nevertheless saying that an appreciation of this complementarity would have been a much better way for feminism to go, rather than an idea which is that women can somehow adopt and become Not men, but adopt the male virtues and sort of beat men at a masculine game.
Was that really where the anger comes from, that women are trying to do something that is almost in nature impossible?
Yeah, no, I think it's remarkable how much is driven by that.
I mean, for my whole life, that was, even as a little girl, you know, hearing just this idea of, you know, you can be better than the boys are and that whole attitude.
You know, those aren't really ordered goals.
You know, obviously, you learn things through sports and things like that that are going to You know, increase your own virtues.
But I think that the real problem is just seeing that feminism has really destroyed the culture in so many respects.
And a lot of these things that women have achieved, things like advanced degrees, which I have, and working outside the home, which I do, you know, I think we can appreciate these things and we can recognize that on a natural law level, these things could have happened.
They didn't have to happen in such a way that we destroy everything, where, you know, we're Just have ground everything down into disorder and chaos and dystopia, really.
So I think that that's really where the problem lies.
And this is, you know, one of the surprising things is just how much guilt is heaped upon those of us who don't think that feminism went about this in the right way.
And, you know, I hear things like, you should feel guilty because you have an advanced degree, because feminism gave that to you.
And it just, you know, it's incredible because it just, you realize too, like, look at all the damage that it has caused, particularly now what we're seeing with young girls transitioning and, you know, all that irreparable damage that's being done to their bodies and so on.
So anyway, I think that the guilt factor is one that's kept a lot of us silent, but that is a huge problem because we could have gotten to this point in a totally different manner.
Yeah. I mean, just listening to you, Kerry, I see now a parallel, which I don't think I'd seen before, between feminism and sort of trans ideology.
Because trans ideology is something like this.
I am biologically a male, but in my mind, I am a female.
And therefore, there's no reason I can't either become female or recognize the female in me that always was there, that somehow is not sort of corroborated by my physical parts.
So... If I think about what that is, it's sort of an attack on nature, isn't it?
It's an attack on what is biologically given.
And what you're saying is that the feminists are kind of doing the same thing.
Men and women start from a certain biological and presumably accompanying psychological given.
And if the whole message to girls from the time they grow up is you can be like a boy, you can be better than a boy, everything that a boy has you can have.
I mean, there's a certain trans element in that, isn't there?
Yeah, no, it's already been, you know, embedded into us into a certain way.
And so this is why it's so natural that the trans movement would come out of it.
So yeah, it's definitely a distortion of human nature and our desire to sort of recreate it into something that is culturally, you know, approved.
How do we get out of this?
Part of it is creating an awareness of the way things used to be, the way things ought to be.
But is there a way to deprogram the culture, so to speak, when we've had, as you say, 50 years of this and more?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of it is going to have to come from women.
And, you know, this is one of the hopes for my book is to help women understand they're not alone, because I think so many of us who don't agree with feminism just feel like the pressure from the culture is so intense that we don't realize there's actually a lot of us who feel this way.
I don't think it's going to can come from men very easily because, you know, men just have been taught that they're never going to win an argument about feminism.
This is not going to be something that they can Really engage in, unless it's in a very tactful way, like, you know, Matt Walsh is asking what a woman is.
But I think by and large, you know, men need to be the best men that they can be.
But it's really women that need to speak up more vocally and start pushing back, especially, you know, in our schools and whatnot.
I think it's exciting to see groups like Moms of America and Moms for Liberty trying to get involved in school boards and in politics and in ways that their voices can be heard, because that's just what Exactly what we haven't had.
I think there's also a lot of room among conservatives to start doing more films and doing more pop culture kinds of things with our messages because our message is actually much more beautiful and compelling.
We just have been hesitant and reluctant to get it out there on a popular level.
Guys, here's the book. It's called The End of Woman.
The author, Keri Gress.
The website, kerigress.com.
Keri, a pleasure. Thanks for joining me.
My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection