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Sept. 18, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza

50:46

PROTECTING BIG DADDY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep666

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	Coming up, I'll reveal how the Hunter Biden gun charge, far from showing that no one is above the law, is a sneaky way to protect Big Daddy Joe Biden.
	I'm not really alarmed by the Supreme Court putting a hold on the injunction in the Missouri versus Biden censorship case.
	I'll tell you why.
	I'll offer my postmortem on the Ken Paxton trial, and comedian Dave Smith joins me with a lighthearted take on issues of the day.
	Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, or watching on Rumble, please subscribe to my channel.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
	I'm out.
	Bye.
	you 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.
	Hunter Biden has finally been indicted.
	Hunter Biden has finally been charged.
	And yet, this is not something that should bring about immediate cheers and hurrahs on our side.
	Because, well, there's something a little off about it.
	Let's back up.
	Hunter Biden was being investigated by the Delaware attorney, David Weiss.
	Now, David Weiss has been sometimes called a Trump appointee, but he is, in fact, a Biden guy.
	He's been part of the Delaware legal structure for a long time.
	He has dealings with the Justice Department.
	He also has ties with the Biden...
	And I think this is really why he was named by Merrick Garland to investigate all this, because they kind of knew he was their man, that this is a guy who's not going to go off the reservation.
	He offered a kind of sweetheart deal to Hunter Biden, basically saying that Hunter Biden would plead to a couple of tax charges.
	He would avoid any kind of incarceration or prison.
	And they would, in a separate agreement, drop the gun charge against Hunter Biden.
	And the judge, Marianne Norielka, looks at this and goes, what is this?
	There are all kinds of people who are sitting in prison because there are people who lied when they were asked about, when you buy a gun, they ask you, are you a felon?
	Are you on drugs?
	Are you taking any illegal substances?
	And Hunter Biden was like, no.
	Even though he was addicted to crack cocaine at the time.
	So flat out lying on more than one occasion, on more than one form.
	And yet they were like, yeah, we're going to drop this.
	We're not going to make anything of it.
	And we're going to, in a sense, by the point of Hunter Biden pleading guilty on the tax charges was that they would agree not to prosecute him on anything else.
	So in other words, this is really a protection scheme for Joe Biden.
	But the judge kind of blew it up.
	And so David Weiss is now forced into a corner because the judge was basically saying, what is this?
	You're supposed to be an independent prosecutor and you're acting as if you're on the side of Hunter Biden.
	And in fact, he is. So David Weiss goes back and he thinks, well, you know, I got to pretend like I'm going against Hunter Biden.
	I've got to get him on something.
	And so he comes up with an ingenious idea, probably in conjunction with the Merrick Garland people.
	So this is how these crooks all work together.
	They're probably like, listen, let's go after Hunter Biden on the gun charge, the very charge we were going to drop, because that doesn't involve Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden's not involved in that.
	And so the left is already kind of throwing Hunter under the bus, but of course, in a desperate desire to protect Joe Biden.
	And And so, the ingenuity of charging Hunter on the gun charge is that even if they get him, there's no direct route, at least no route from here, to Joe Biden.
	Now, of course, I'm looking at the CNN article describing all this, and it's almost like an article written by someone who was born yesterday, because it pretends like this is a very surprising development.
	It's an extraordinary turn of events after his original plea deal collapsed.
	Under scrutiny from a federal judge.
	And so, as the article goes on, it talks about the fact that Hunter Biden is facing serious prison time, but he probably won't get it because he's a first-time offender.
	So, if Hunter Biden were convicted on the gun charge and the tax charges altogether, he could face as much as 25 years in prison.
	Now, let's remember that the key to getting Joe Biden off the hook is not imposing a severe penalty on Hunter Biden.
	Why? Because if Hunter takes the full rap for Joe Biden's crimes and the crimes of the Biden family, and Hunter goes to prison for a long time while his uncle James Biden and his other uncle, Joe Biden's brother Frank Biden, are living high on the hog.
	Biden is enjoying his multiple homes.
	Hunter's going to be like, wait a minute, why am I the guy paying the price?
	I'm going to rat out on these other guys to get a lesser penalty.
	So they don't want that. We're good to go.
	By the way, there's an interesting post today by Peter Schweitzer, and he goes, listen, why are we pretending as if any kind of bribery scheme somehow must involve Joe Biden personally?
	The business partners must have talked personally to Joe Biden.
	If Joe Biden was involved in the scheme, that's all you need to know, because a bribery scheme, and he goes on to recite the definition of the statute, talks about the fact that if you are either directly or Or indirectly involved in a scheme to extort money or a scheme to collect money for corrupt purposes, in this case selling public influence.
	That is the very definition of bribery.
	Vladimir Putin calls the U.S. dollar's drop in dominance objective and irreversible as Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa formally agree to use local currencies in trade instead of the U.S. dollar.
	It's the first shoe to fall.
	As demand for the dollar weakens, the buying power of the dollar weakens.
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	At first when I saw this I thought it was bad news, but then upon more careful scrutiny I see that it's actually not.
	The Supreme Court, acting through Justice Alito, has put a hold On the appeals court injunction that forbade the Biden administration and all the agencies of the Biden regime from telling digital platforms what they can and cannot allow.
	In other words, from engaging in this censorship industrial complex.
	The case is, of course, Missouri versus Biden.
	And a district judge issued this injunction.
	It was upheld by the appellate court.
	And the Biden DOJ went running to the Supreme Court.
	Now, I think the good news is that they're not going to fare very well at the Supreme Court.
	But the Supreme Court is a...
	An institution that proceeds in its own measured way.
	And this is the point of Alito putting the hold.
	He's in no way making a ruling on the merits.
	He's just saying, listen, I'm going to set a date in the third week of September, and I'm going to ask the two sides to submit briefs, and we will consider the issue of the injunction.
	But in the meantime, in other words, for a few days, I'm going to release the hold because this is We're good to go.
	Wait, what? Censorship has somehow now become a tool of national security.
	And shutting down what Americans say online about a whole range of topics from COVID to the climate to the trans issue to abortion is now somehow a, quote, matter of national security.
	I mean, how preposterous is this?
	Let's remember that the original injunction that was given by the appellate court was Was not an injunction that applied to criminal behavior.
	Was not an injunction that even applied to any kind of releasing of national security secrets.
	Oh, it's fine to release the Pentagon Papers or the modern-day equivalent.
	It had nothing to do with any of that.
	Basically, the court said if speech is legal, in other words, if it is protected First Amendment speech, then the government cannot be involved in suppressing it.
	It's so simple. The First Amendment protects certain types of speech.
	It doesn't protect all speech, but it protects most speech and certainly virtually all political speech.
	And And the injunction merely told the Biden administration, none of your agencies of government, not the White House, not the State Department, not the FBI, not the CDC, not the CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, none of these groups...
	And none of the key individuals who have been happily censoring Americans right and left, developing massive lists of people to be deplatformed and censored.
	You've got to stop doing this.
	You must stop doing this now.
	And yet, the Biden administration is now basically saying that we have a sort of a veto power over the First Amendment.
	If we shout national security, we should be able to keep doing it.
	It reminds me a little bit of this judge in New Mexico.
	Not judge, but governor. She's like, If I say emergency, I can override the Second Amendment.
	So, in other words, if there's been a shooting in New Mexico, and I decide, well, the Second Amendment is good in normal times and all, but if I use the word emergency, all constitutional rights are suspended, I can now override the Second Amendment.
	No, you can't. And in fact, a judge stepped in and goes, sorry, you can't do it.
	And so now she's backed off and issued a much more narrow order that basically places some restrictions only on government agencies, but doesn't apply to the general public and doesn't affect the general Second Amendment right.
	Well, I think here, the Biden administration is headed for a massive slapdown.
	But they have no place else to go.
	They lost at the district level.
	They lost at the appeals court level.
	The only place to go is the Supreme Court.
	And here, awaiting them was Justice Alito.
	And I can see Justice Alito, in a sense, going, this is actually great because we want this to go to the Supreme Court.
	Why? Because think about it.
	If you have an appellate court ruling, the appellate court, for example, will cover, let's just say, three states.
	That ruling is applicable to people in those states.
	An appellate court ruling affects that jurisdiction.
	It doesn't affect other jurisdictions.
	And so, however, a Supreme Court ruling does.
	So I'm actually delighted that this case is moving rapidly up and the Biden administration is driving the train.
	They're demanding that the Supreme Court step in.
	And I think the Supreme Court should.
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	Debbie and I, over the weekend, were in Dallas.
	We're actually visiting our little granddaughter, Marigold, and it was just a wonderful experience and so much fun.
	And yet, this was the time, I'm thinking now of Saturday, when the Ken Paxton vote was going down.
	And we had talked about it, of course, Friday on the podcast, and we kind of had our thoughts about it.
	Debbie tends to be a little more pessimistic than me, so she's like, I don't know how this is going to go down.
	There's a little too many rhinos, if you will, in the Texas legislature.
	Now, she does know that the Texas Senate is more conservative than the House.
	And so she knew that Paxton certainly had a fighting and a good chance, better chance than the Senate.
	Whereas in the House, the remarkable thing is that you have Texas representatives even from conservative districts.
	Who voted to impeach Paxton?
	And that may seem like a bit of a puzzle, but I think it reflects the power that the Texas speaker, Dave Phelan, has.
	This was a guy who was able to kind of strong-arm people who are even in conservative districts to, in effect, not represent their constituents and go after Paxton.
	And, of course, the pretext here was, this man is just guilty of outright corruption and so on.
	So the big question in this trial was, where's the outright corruption?
	What did Paxton actually do?
	And as the trial unfurled, it became really obvious that about the only thing that this guy did was take up with a woman who's not his wife, something he should not have done, but not something that is either illegal and not something that is also impeachable.
	And, of course, they couldn't say, we're trying to impeach you for that.
	So they had to say, well no, we had to impeach you because in order to please the donor who hired this woman so that she could come closer to Austin, you know, you got some new countertops in the process.
	You got some new countertops for the kitchen.
	And, of course, in the trial, Tony Busby was representing Paxton handle this beautifully.
	He shows a picture of the countertops, and he goes, when you were at Paxton's house, and apparently Mrs.
	Paxton was talking about the fact that she wants new countertops, was this the way that the kitchen looked at that point?
	And the guy goes, yeah, that's exactly how it looked.
	And then Busby goes, well, this photo was taken a month ago.
	In other words, Ken Paxton did not get new countertops.
	So if the whole point of your case is that this guy got a benefit, he got new countertops, and all you have is that his wife was talking about getting new countertops that evidently weren't.
	So this was just ridiculous.
	I mean, it was laugh out loud dumb.
	And the only question was, you know, sometimes something can be super dumb and yet guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
	And so there were 16 counts.
	This is really what worried me a little bit because I thought to myself, well, this is really kind of the same strategy that they're using against Trump.
	What is it? It's basically hit him with charges left and right.
	91 different counts.
	Because the idea here is that we're sure to get him on something.
	If a jury is going down 21 counts, and even if someone thinks the whole case is BS, in some ways, it's almost human nature to go, well, maybe there's one thing that he did do.
	Maybe I'll, if only to make myself look fair-minded, maybe I'll go guilty on this one, even though I'm going to go for acquittal and all the rest.
	And so this is really what I think the Paxton House managers who were pushing impeachment were hoping for, was that they would get a conviction on something because a conviction on anything, on even one charge, would mean that Ken Paxton would be out and, in effect, his career would be over.
	But interestingly, when the votes were tallied, Ken Paxton won pretty decisively on every count.
	Now, some counts were closer than others, but on no count did the guilty side get even a majority.
	And of course, they needed more than a majority.
	They needed 21 out of 30.
	They needed a two-thirds majority.
	And so this is a pretty clear vindication for Ken Paxton.
	Now, if you look at the news reports, you would think that this was not a trial about facts.
	Because all the articles about it are like, well, you know, this trial is a kind of...
	A microcosm or a metaphor for the debates within the Republican Party.
	Well, be that as it may, and sure enough, there are some rifts in the Republican Party between the establishment.
	Paxton is more of a MAGA figure.
	There are some moderate Republicans who have never liked him.
	But a trial should be, and the core of it, is about What's the really bad thing that this guy actually did?
	And when you looked at the evidence, it was very clear that there were suspicions of this and allegations of that, and I was worried about this.
	But what was really worrisome was the plotting on the part of these so-called whistleblowers.
	Things like, you know, let's cook up something against Paxton.
	Let's line up a bunch of scenarios to see what we can get him on.
	And they lay out like seven possibly.
	You can get him on this, and if that doesn't work, try to get him on that.
	So the real villain here is not Paxton.
	The real villain here are some of the really bad guys who plotted to get rid of him.
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	Feel the difference. I told Debbie this morning I want to do a segment that talks about Lauren Boebert and Russell Brand, and she's like...
	What's the connection there?
	They're two totally different circumstances.
	And I'm like, well, let's just call it our seedy revelation segment because that's what both these things are really about, trying to smear somebody with seedy revelations.
	Now, of course, there's some important differences, right?
	I mean, in the case of the Boebert situation, it was in fact true that she was vaping in this club.
	It was in fact true that the My boyfriend was apparently groping her in her seat.
	And it was, in fact, true that she made a scene as they tried to escort her out.
	But when you think about it, you say to yourself, well, what exactly is the big offense here?
	I mean, is this a little crass behavior?
	For sure. And she knows it.
	I mean, she issued a statement basically saying, listen, I shouldn't have done this.
	But the offenses here are, to me, there's nothing really outrageous here.
	First of all, vaping.
	Undesirable, but not illegal.
	Essentially, a version of smoking.
	And even the so-called fondling, which is a little distasteful to see it.
	But let's remember, and here's Debbie, she's like shaking her head because she's like, I can't believe that she's even discussing all this.
	But the point I want to make here is that it's not that this was going on in public.
	They were actually in a seat in a theater.
	And in fact, it was kind of dark in there.
	So the interesting thing, no, honey, somebody was videoing these guys.
	They're videoing them in a private space.
	I think, look, I mean, in an age, first of all, look at all the perverted behavior the left is promoting in public, right?
	And if we are in a position where, like, we've got to hold our people to standard where, oh, listen, he's touching her breasts, you know, And we're talking about two adults, and this is her boyfriend.
	And so, oh no, this is horrible behavior.
	So then we make a big circle and stab our own people, while the left, I mean, to them, this is nothing.
	But they know that we are the straight-laced people who are going to be like, let's go get Boebert.
	And of course, there are people who are falling for it.
	It's also the case that this is now becoming a little bit of the...
	It's getting caught up in the whole fracas between the DeSantis people and the Trump people and because Boebert is seen as kind of a MAGA person, the DeSantis people are like, see, this is where the Republican Party is degenerating to and so on.
	And look, I think the whole thing was, I mean, it is a case of girl gone wild.
	Don't get me wrong. So this is a little out of control.
	I think Boebert realizes that, look, if you want to establish yourself, have influence, you know, you can't do this sort of thing.
	You've got to stop it. And I think she knows that.
	And she actually needs to pay more attention to her constituents.
	She almost lost the last election.
	Obviously, I think it was a wake-up call for her.
	I see from her feed on X that she's doing a lot of stuff locally now.
	And I think that's a very good thing.
	So a little bit more of that kind of stuff, which is to say cutting ribbons and going to school openings and working with people who are building jobs in your district.
	is certainly a wise move politically.
	Now, turning to Russell Brand, the Russell Brand thing is so out of control, but I think this is a case, at least it seems to me at first glance, of obvious targeting.
	This guy was a hedonist.
	He was part of the Hollywood scene.
	He was obviously part of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and who knows what else.
	I'm actually, I didn't even know who Russell Brand was until he became an influencer, But evidently he was a well-known figure.
	And then he walked away from that lifestyle.
	And all these allegations are from that lifestyle.
	And the allegations are highly suspect.
	In one case, a woman goes, you raped me.
	And I'm like, oh, he raped you.
	But turns out the two of them were dating.
	So, is this some sort of a date rape?
	And it turns out that's not even really kind of a rape per se.
	She says, well, I told him that when we have sex, he must use a condom.
	And he didn't use a condom, so therefore it strictly constitutes rape.
	And I'm like, is this a new definition that I've never heard of before?
	That somehow failing to use contraceptive protection defines a rape?
	What? And then, of course, there's a long time lapse so that now that Russell Brand is kind of a conservative-leaning influencer, now that he's taking on Ukraine, he's taking on the vaccine, suddenly it's convenient to attack him.
	Think of all the people, by the way, who are not attacked and who are basically given a pass.
	So this all looks very suspect to me.
	Frankly, I don't believe a word of it.
	And I don't believe a word of it because we're in an age where false accusations pay off big time.
	Typically, the way this works is some journalist decides, I'm going to make my reputation.
	I'm going to start calling up everybody who is associated with Russell Brand to see if I can find At least two.
	You need at least two because if it's one person and he said, she said.
	So the idea is if I get two or three or four, there you go.
	Gotcha. End of story.
	End of career. Now, of course, there are a lot of people who've known Russell Brand who were part of that same scene who are now making videos saying, I knew Russell Brand.
	And yeah, at one point he came on to me.
	I told him, no, he was a perfect gentleman.
	He walked off. End of story.
	We've been actually friends ever since.
	So all these videos are now surfacing by people saying, this is not true to the Russell Brand I know.
	The funniest thing I've seen on the whole subject, though, and it may seem odd to engage in parody on this kind of topic, but I believe that since things are already so degenerate, we need to go full Aristophanes and enjoy them.
	So here's a British newspaper doing what is a parody at an age, by the way, when the line between parody and non-parody or parody and reality is really very thin.
	She goes, this guy's, Russell Brand refused to rape me, proving he's also a racist.
	This article is by Chola Moss Shogabibu.
	So evidently this is a parody and then this is a subhead.
	Despite presenting myself to him on all fours and calling him master, he refused to take me like I was his dirty slave.
	So this is something, by the way, that only the British would dare to do in America.
	Even satirical sites won't go here, but I'm glad that they went here because the whole thing is a complete farce and a complete disgrace and should be treated as such.
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	Hey guys, I'd really like to welcome to the podcast Dave Smith.
	He's a comedian.
	He's also host of The Problem podcast.
	I've seen him a lot on social media.
	He also does political commentary.
	He's a radio and TV personality.
	And the podcast is actually called Part of the Problem.
	Dave, welcome to the show.
	Great to have you. How do you handle this pressure of being a comedian?
	Oh, I don't know. I mean, my life is really just, I got two little kids, and so my life is, I mean, when I'm not doing stand-up or doing podcasts and stuff, I'm just with them, and they don't expect me to crack jokes.
	They just want me to play or something like that.
	So, I don't know. It is a little, like, annoying.
	Sometimes people will be like, when you meet them, they're like, tell me a joke.
	And you're like, yeah, that's not really how this works.
	I'm not just a monkey.
	I don't just perform for you.
	Right. I have a niece, and she lives in a part of India called Goa.
	She's married to a very successful Indian comedian, and he's a really normal guy and fun to be around, but he's not funny in normal life.
	Apparently, he works really hard, he does a script, and then he performs the script for a year, but he looks at it as a profession, not something that he's supposed to deliver on a daily basis.
	Right. Yeah, sometimes I think it makes you less funny as a person, because it's almost like you're getting all of that out in your show, you know?
	Like, I don't know, being funny, there's this great Jerry Seinfeld quote that I thought was like the truest thing I've ever heard, but someone asked him once, they were like, were you like the funny one when you were a kid?
	And he goes, we were all funny when we were kids, and then everybody else got jobs.
	And I feel like that's exactly it.
	We were all funny.
	Don't you remember that? That's what it was to be a kid.
	Everyone was funny. That was the whole thing.
	But yeah, doing it...
	There are comedians I know who are some of the funniest people ever offstage, but there are also comedians I know who are genuinely not funny people.
	They're just excellent at crafting jokes.
	It's kind of a different scale.
	Well, that's an interesting point.
	You used the word craft, and I was going to ask you whether, you know, when I think about things that I do, for example, writing or giving a speech or even making a documentary film, I sometimes ask myself, is this something that is kind of a given talent?
	Is it something that is innate to a degree?
	Or is it a craft, kind of like learning how to be a carpenter and make a table?
	Do you think that there's, with comedy, there's a natural element and then there's a craft element?
	Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think with all the things you just mentioned, it's a little bit of both.
	And it's different, you know, different people have different talents.
	Like, I mean, me and you both know, you know, people who are like excellent writers, but would not be good at giving a speech.
	You know what I mean? And then, you know, the opposite, like people who are like excellent at giving a speech, but probably they might need help if they're going to write a book, you know, like they'd need someone else there with them.
	So it's, you know, there's all these different things.
	But then, of course, you can develop that talent.
	Like there might be somebody who is just an excellent writer.
	But I promise you, they had to work at that, too.
	I'm sure they had some natural ability, but then they also had to, like, work on that.
	And their first, you know, article was probably not nearly as good as their 500th article or something like that.
	So it's all it's all a mix of both, like everything in life.
	It's like you have some natural ability.
	You could kind of be a natural at something, but you're still not going to be good at it unless you work at it.
	Look, comedians like Dave Chappelle, he's still popping into comedy clubs to work out a new bit because he's still got to work on it.
	Even when you're at the absolute top, you still got to figure out the timing, figure out how the punchline goes, say it a bunch of times in front of an audience.
	So it's always a mix.
	It's always a mix. What do you make of the...
	I mean, we're in a very odd state with comedy in the culture, aren't we?
	Because it always seemed to me that part of what comedy does, and what comedy is, is riding against the sort of conventional wisdom, the established opinion.
	There's a rebel element to comedy, and so much of comedy is that you laugh because somebody says something that was on your mind, but you wouldn't have thought of saying it.
	And yet we're in a culture now where, in a sense, that kind of rebel attitude is ruthlessly punished.
	People go after you. They want to cancel you.
	They want to make the improv shut you down.
	How do you navigate this peculiar environment that I think would have been, certainly to people like Don Rickles and Carlin and so on, they would have found this.
	I don't think they would have known what to make of where we are today.
	Yeah, well, look, we live in wild times on every front.
	And in these wild times, there's been like a revolution, really nothing short of a revolution, not just in the comedy world, but in the larger media world.
	It's crazy. It resembles nothing like what it used to be.
	And I know you remember the old days, where it was just...
	It was TV, or it was print media, and that was it.
	That was the only option to be able to talk.
	And of course, back then, people think of cancel culture as this new thing, but it's really not.
	And in fact, it was far more effective back in the day.
	I was just reading this thing recently about some revelations about how the ADL went after the John Birch Society.
	And how, you know, if you want to talk about groups like hardcore conservative groups who got canceled back then when you got canceled, it was over.
	There was no other outlet.
	And somebody like, say, yourself, who is, I would say, outside of the approved opinion of even Conservatism Inc.
	If this was 20 years ago, you'd just be gone and nobody would hear from you.
	Nobody would hear what you have to say.
	And now we have this whole other element.
	Now they still will attempt to censor you online.
	There still are people who get canceled and banned.
	But at least you kind of have a fighting shot.
	And so that's very similar with the comedy world.
	There's this crazy woke insanity.
	People will get boycotted.
	Someone like me is not going to get a show on Comedy Central.
	Networks aren't going to get behind me.
	But I can have a podcast.
	I can have an online show.
	And I can speak directly to my fans.
	So personally, as long as I'm able to navigate this and not get completely canceled online...
	I think this is way better this way.
	I don't want to be running my jokes by some guy in a suit.
	You know what I mean? I want to just do what I want to do.
	And I think you see, even with guys like, say, Tucker Carlson, where I think a lot of us probably felt like, even when he was on Fox News, we were like, man, he's really going for it.
	He's not holding back.
	But you see the difference in him since he's been just on Twitter, where now he's like, I'm really just going for it.
	I don't care. I'm going to interview the guy who says he had sex with Obama.
	I'm just I was just thinking of that exactly, that that's not something he probably would have done on his Fox show.
	Well, because you know, I mean, you know someone would have intervened at some point.
	They wouldn't have allowed him to get that off there.
	And look, you can have, I think there's a fine debate on whether he should have done that or shouldn't have done that.
	I've heard arguments on both sides, you know, and I get it.
	But there is also, there's at least an argument that it's like, hey man, like this is what the other side would do.
	So, at a certain point, I don't know.
	I'm not saying I agree with this.
	I go back and forth. Typically, I try to say, let's not become what we hate.
	Let's not become, you know what I mean, the other side.
	But there is a point where you go, look at what they did to Kavanaugh.
	I'm not even a big fan of Kavanaugh.
	I'm more of a Gorsuch guy.
	But look at what they did to him.
	I mean, it was like disgusting. And then everybody basically just admits a few months later, like, oh yeah, those other three pylon accusations were all made up.
	And the one main one that they had, the lady who testified, was like 37 years ago, he pushed me on a bed.
	I had a date that I can't give you and a location that I can't give you.
	And we're like, what? They dragged him and his family through the mud over that?
	It's, you know, it's...
	I don't know. Look, you see what they're doing with Russell Brand right now?
	They're playing dirty. So anyway, that's kind of off topic.
	But it is at least cool that we have kind of at least a fighting chance against the regime now because we have an opportunity to counter their propaganda, which is what they rely on.
	And then with comedy, it's cool because there's this real desire.
	It's this weird thing where there's the rise of the woke insanity, but then there's still all these regular audiences out there who are like, no, we just want to hear something that's really funny.
	We don't want to hear Stephen Colbert doing a skit about how you have to take the vaccine.
	That's not what people want.
	Let's take a pause when we come back more with comedian Dave Smith.
	By the way, you can follow him on X at Comic Dave Smith.
	We'll be right back. Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel, and this is a great time to do it with the new movie coming out next month.
	I post a lot of exclusive content on Locals, content that's censored on other social media platforms.
	On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
	You can also interact with me directly.
	I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday, 8 p.m. Eastern.
	No topic is off limits.
	I've also uploaded some very cool films to Locals.
	It's called Dinesh's Movie Page.
	Documentaries, feature films, my films, films by other independent producers, and I'm doing a big new film this year.
	As you know, Police State.
	I'll be giving you the inside scoop on Locals.
	If you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch all this content for free.
	So check out my channel. It's dinesh.locals.com.
	I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
	Hey, if you're watching on Rumble, there's a little button on the top left-hand corner, a little red button that says join.
	If you click that, it'll take you to Locals or, in general, dinesh.locals.com.
	I'm back with comedian Dave Smith.
	His website, ComicDaveSmith.com.
	Dave, I saw you just did kind of a rant on Ukraine.
	You were making the point that...
	Well, I'll let you make the point for yourself.
	What were you saying about Ukraine?
	Oh. Oh, I mean, I don't think I'm overstating it when I say I think this is the most reckless policy in the history of the United States of America.
	The idea of engaging in a proxy war of choice on Russia's border.
	To actually be flirting with a direct war with the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in human history over...
	Over whether Luhansk is ruled by Kiev or Moscow, that's a deeply fundamental American interest.
	Why? Look, I... I don't agree with the whole Cold War, to be honest, okay?
	I think that is where, truly, that's where conservatism lost its way, and I think it's a big part of why we're in the mess that we're in now as a country.
	I think when William F. Buckley made his whole declaration that in order to fight a totalitarian bureaucracy abroad, we needed to embrace a totalitarian bureaucracy at home, it's like, okay, well, that's what we're living with now.
	We're living with the biggest government in the history of the world rather than what conservatives were supposed to always be protecting, which was a limited constitutional republic.
	That being said, at least the Cold War, they were fighting the Soviet Union.
	What are we even talking about here?
	Vladimir Putin's corrupt You know, capitalist society in Russia there, an oligarchy.
	I mean, it's not a country that's poised for world domination.
	All of these ideas that they're going to take over Poland, none of this is true.
	This war was largely provoked by the West.
	The neoconservatives since the 1990s have been plotting about how we could take Ukraine.
	And I think it was all just...
	And look, we're risking World War III for nothing.
	I mean, you're making a really important point here, and we could discuss the Cold War some other time, but we see this certainly with the Patriot Act, right?
	After 9-11, there was a kind of a chill of fear that runs through the country.
	We give the government all these police powers.
	They are now able to expand their surveillance.
	And then they conveniently decide, well, we were kind of interested in Islamic terrorists from abroad back then.
	We're now interested in domestic terrorists, kind of like you, the very guys who supported all handing over all these powers to us and were like, ah, we didn't think the FBI was going to be showing up at our door.
	Yeah. And look, I mean, I think that so like a lot of people and very fairly have been a lot of people, let's say, on the right in America, the larger like right half of America have said to a lot of these liberals like, hey, you got to admit that over the last three years you got all of these covid policies wrong.
	You have to admit that none of this made sense.
	And there are frustrated sometimes when liberals won't admit that.
	But I do think if we're going to be the bigger person here, that the right half of America just has to admit that they got that all wrong and that the libertarians and even some of the good left-wingers were warning about this at the time, that you do not want to go down this path and were opposing the war in Iraq and the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the TSA, all this stuff.
	And I think there's nothing wrong with just admitting like, yeah, that that was wrong.
	And it was a really bad direction to go in.
	And in some, it's almost something out of like a Greek tragedy that the same right wingers who were like supporting the politicians who enacted those policies are now the target.
	Of the war on terrorism.
	It's just, it's like out of a play.
	And it's horrible, but it's ironic in some sense.
	But yeah, it's all, this is why I'm saying I think the libertarians are right about everything.
	And not the goofy libertarians, but the real hardcore Ron Paulians.
	Well, let me press you on that, though, because I do admit that, and I think you know about my new film, Police State.
	It's based upon—it's kind of founded on this admission, you might say.
	But let's continue.
	The libertarians, however, I think— It did instruct a lot of us that the free market would address some of these ideological problems because, after all, companies want to make money.
	But that seems to me a little incompatible with the pervasiveness of woke ideology because if Disney really wanted to make money and that was its main goal...
	It wouldn't try to antagonize half the country.
	I mean, if digital platforms wanted to maximize their reach and have the most people enthusiastically on them, they wouldn't adopt these kinds of censorship policies.
	So how do you explain the fact that these companies are willing to, but light, antagonize large parts of their own established audience in order to achieve what?
	Well, okay, look, so when you have the government, which is now – if we're talking about laissez-faire free market capitalism or something like that, we now – the government is the biggest government in the history of the world.
	There's no organization that's ever been bigger than the U.S. federal government.
	And so is it such a surprise that when that happens, the market is completely perverted?
	Look – All of this stuff, first off, the woke ideology all comes out of universities, which are essentially a government program.
	Government gives out all the loans.
	The whole thing would collapse in a day if the government got out of there.
	There's no real productivity or value to consumers from universities.
	It would be gone in a day.
	And then... If you really want to get deep into it, you have these companies like BlackRock and all of them, and this is really what's dictating now why all of these corporations want to go so woke.
	And there's actually the government, they insist that if you're going to, they'll give them the public sector pension funds, but only if they push this woke ideology and only invest in woke companies.
	So it's just, the truth is that, and this is, I would argue that the Bud Light and the Target stuff, that was almost like The free market being the last weapon that the people have, that they can boycott these companies who still do need their consumers.
	But I would argue that all of this stuff, if you just got government out of the way, all of this stuff would clean itself up in a minute.
	There is not some huge demand from the market to talk about transgenderism every single day.
	This didn't organically rise up from the people.
	This is pushed on them from the top down.
	Great stuff. Hey guys, it's been fun.
	Comedian Dave Smith, his website, ComicDaveSmith.com.
	You can follow him on x at Comic Dave Smith.
	Dave, a real pleasure having you on the podcast.
	Thanks so much, Dinesh.
	Happy to do it. I'm in the first chapter of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
	He's talking about the remarkable complicity of the target of an arrest with the arrest itself.
	And here's Solzhenitsyn, and he's describing an interior monologue in which someone is threatened with arrest and is being arrested.
	And he goes, well, why then should you run away?
	You're asking yourself. After all, you only make your situation worse.
	You'll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake.
	And it isn't just that you don't put up any resistance, he writes.
	You even walk down the stairs on tiptoe as you are ordered to do so your neighbors won't hear.
	You're making it easy, in other words, for the bad guys to nab you.
	And then Solzhenitsyn continues, at what point then should you resist?
	When your belt is taken away?
	When one is ordered to face into a corner?
	When one crosses the threshold of one's home?
	And he makes the point that an arrest has many parts to it, right?
	It's the open the door.
	It's the let's put the handcuffs on you.
	It's the let's walk outside the door.
	Let's go down the street.
	Let's get into the van.
	And he goes, at each point you're asking yourself, should I do anything else?
	And at each point, everything seems so small, so trivial, so you're like, this is not the right time.
	I won't do it now. Maybe I'll do it later.
	And in the end, you never do it.
	An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter.
	There seems to be no point in arguing about any one of them individually.
	Especially when the thoughts of the person arrested are wrapped tightly around the big question, what for?
	So, instead of contesting the thing happening in front of you, you're engaged in a kind of philosophical motive type of question.
	What could be the reason that they're after me?
	So, Solzhenitsyn's point is, that is the last thing that you should be asking.
	That's not even important.
	It's not even important to them.
	The people who are arresting you don't even know.
	They've been ordered to arrest you.
	That's all that matters to them.
	They're just carrying it out.
	I don't know if you remember the scene.
	This was from, I think, The Fugitive, where the main guy is like, he's like, I'm innocent.
	And then the guy chasing him, the U.S. Marshal, goes, I don't care.
	And that's how this is.
	They don't care. They're just out to arrest you.
	Almost anything can occupy the thoughts of a person who has just been arrested, right, Solzhenitsyn?
	This alone would fill volumes.
	Let's remember that here's a guy, Solzhenitsyn, who knows what he's talking about.
	He's been arrested.
	He's been eight years with men in the gulag.
	He knows how they think, so he's describing a psychology.
	And this is part of the power of the gulag, is that this is not just a narrative account.
	It is also a plumbing of the depths of how people experience this, what goes through their mind.
	There can be feelings which we never suspected.
	When 19-year-old Evgenia Doyarenko was arrested in 1921, and three young Czechists, the Czechists are the government guys, were poking about her bed and through her underwear in her chest of drawers, she was not disturbed.
	There was nothing there. They would find nothing.
	But all of a sudden they touched her personal diary, which she would not have shown even to her mother.
	And these hostile young strangers reading the words she had written was more devastating to her than the whole Lubyanka, the whole prison, with its bars and cellars.
	So, this is a revelation that the arrest is a kind of invasion of your space and of your mind.
	I mean, if you think of it, if you have a diary where you've been recording nothing perverse, nothing out of the...
	But just your own private thoughts that are part of the things you sort of tell yourself and you've put them down.
	And here you've got three kind of laughing...
	Teenagers or guys in their 20s wearing military uniforms and they're going through it and they're reading it, maybe reading it aloud to each other and chuckling and laughing.
	The degradation, the humiliation, it's almost more than you can bear.
	There are a few bright and daring individuals who understand instantly.
	Gregoriev, the director of the Geological Institute of the Academy of Sciences, barricaded himself inside and spent two hours burning up his papers when they came to arrest him in 1948.
	So this guy actually knew what it would mean for the bad guys to get a hold of his private papers.
	So he's like, guess what? I don't care what they do to me.
	They're going to do it to me anyway.
	I'm going to barricade my door.
	I'm not going to let them in. I'm going to take the time to burn everything I have so at least it won't transfer into their hands.
	And then Solzhenitsyn says something very surprising.
	Sometimes the principal emotion of the person arrested is relief and even happiness.
	Now there are a lot of lines like this in the Gulag Archipelago and they always like jolt you because you're like, wait, somebody is actually thrilled about being arrested?
	What can that possibly mean?
	And then Solzhenitsyn proceeds to tell you, This is another aspect of human nature.
	It happened before the revolution, too.
	He says the school teacher Sarudakova, involved in the arrest of Alexander Ulyanov, felt only relief when she was arrested.
	But this feeling was a thousand times stronger during epidemics of arrests when all around you they were hauling in people like yourself and still had not come for you.
	For some reason, they're taking their time.
	After all, that kind of exhaustion, that kind of suffering is worse than any kind of arrest.
	Solzhenitsyn is saying that when there are rumors swirling around, everyone is being arrested, you expect to be arrested, you are emotionally preparing yourself for it, you've packed your stuff, you've disposed of the things that you wanted to dispose of, you've put certain things in hiding, you've maybe hidden your bank papers or whatever, and you're waiting to be arrested, and you're not arrested.
	And he goes, just this kind of draining that goes on and on and on, so that finally when somebody knocks on your door, in a perverse way, you're like, phew.
	Finally, they're here and you feel almost a, well, it's not a lasting, but at least it's a momentary sense of relief.
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