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Sept. 26, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:40
PARTY OF CORRUPTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep672
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Coming up, I'll compare the two cases of Bob Menendez and Joe Biden to show how the Democrats have richly earned the title party of corruption.
I'll reveal how Democrats are trying to leverage the Menendez scandal to get Clarence Thomas to resign.
And podcast host Liz Wheeler joins me.
We're going to talk about her new book, Hide Your Children.
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New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has been indicted over corruption and bribery, and it seems at least from the indictment one should always be a little bit cautious, and especially cautious these days because we really don't trust these authorities, and we don't trust them in whatever they do.
okay, they're going after a Democrat, so we should trust them, because you have to ask, well, why are they going after this Democrat?
Is Bob Menendez more corrupt than other senators?
Probably the answer to that is yes, but I say probably.
I saw a press conference with Menendez and he was explaining, well, you know, yeah, I did get all these gifts, but this guy, this Egyptian guy's a really good friend of mine and we both give each other a lot of gifts.
I'm actually waiting to see the list of gifts that Bob Menendez gave the other guy in the sort of reciprocity of gift exchange that he's describing.
And then Bob Menendez says, I think very implausibly, they're going after me because I'm Latino.
I think that is actually unlikely and in fact absurd.
But I do think Menendez does have the right to a fair trial and does have the right to due process of law.
But the thing that strikes me as I think about the Menendez indictment, and here I'm assuming the facts as stated to be largely true, I am struck by the similarities to the Biden non-indictment.
And I say non-indictment because Biden has been doing not just the same thing as Menendez, but a lot worse. Let's think about it. Yeah, Menendez has got a few gold bars. He's got some cash hidden here and there, apparently totaling some $480,000.
At least that's what it seems like the DOJ or the FBI found in its investigation into Menendez.
Joe Biden and family have collected, what, 20, 30 million dollars?
The other thing about Menendez is that he got the money from Egypt.
Now, Egypt is not a hostile country.
In fact, it's nominally speaking a U.S. ally.
And so while it's bad to sell influence to anybody, it's especially bad to sell influence to our adversaries.
China is our adversary, and that's who Joe Biden was selling influence to.
Russia is our adversary, at least to a large degree.
That's who Joe Biden was selling influence to.
Ukraine is not exactly our adversary, but nevertheless, that's also who Joe Biden was selling influence to.
So, the Biden-influence racket is on a much bigger scale than Menendez, and yet the striking fact is that not only are they not going after him, they're doing their best to protect him.
The organs of government are huddling around Biden.
And yet, and Jonathan Turley has done this work for me, so I'm just going to go through his commentary on this.
He notes the kind of eerie similarities between the two cases.
He says, in both cases, for example, there was an intermediary.
Now, in Biden's case, it was largely Hunter Biden.
In some cases, other members of the Biden family.
So Joe is running a racket through Hunter.
In the case of Menendez, it was his wife.
Apparently, his wife was the go-between.
His wife played the Hunter Biden role.
His wife apparently claimed to have known this Egyptian source even before their marriage.
And then she kind of set up this kind of influence-peddling operation, at least allegedly.
And she, at one point, evidently texted the Egyptian official saying, quote, anytime you need anything, you have my number and we will make everything happen.
Key. We will make everything happen.
There's also the clear sense that...
Even though the wife is doing the trading, so to speak, Menendez is the brand.
Menendez is the one that has the influence.
He, after all, is the senator.
And that's exactly what not just Tony Bobulinski, but Devin Archer said—this is Hunter Biden's friend and business partner—said about Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is the brand.
It's not Hunter Biden's brand.
Hunter Biden has nothing to sell.
Neither does Frank or James Biden.
They're all selling Joe Biden.
And the same is true in the case of Menendez.
Menendez got a bunch of gold bars, evidently worth up to $120,000.
Remember that Hunter Biden got a diamond allegedly worth $80,000.
I believe this was a Chinese guy.
Here's a gift. It's an $80,000 diamond.
Now think, people who do that aren't just being nice.
This is disguised bribery.
I'm going to give you a gift.
It's going to open up a relationship.
Then I'm going to have money flowing to you.
And I expect something in return.
And let's remember, Joe Biden delivered the same way that Menendez delivered.
Just as Menendez made things easy for his Egyptian contacts, Joe Biden got the prosecutor who was looking into corruption at Burisma.
It was a supreme priority of Burisma to get rid of that guy.
Joe Biden got rid of that guy.
So, in other words, not just payment made, but services delivered.
So, this is the quid pro quo.
This is the bribery case, in a sense, open and shut.
And now...
Interestingly, in both cases, an expensive automobile was involved.
Menendez and his wife got a very nice car.
In fact, let me see.
I have it here. An expensive car.
A luxury car, if you will.
A Mercedes-Benz worth $60,000, according to the DOJ. Hunter Biden got a Fisker sports car worth $142,000.
He got a better car, worth a lot more money.
And so... In both cases, you have, this is how Democrats are.
They pretend like they're all about social justice.
Oh, I'm running for public service.
I'm a public servant.
Well, if you're a public servant, you've got to explain how you guys start off with government salaries and you all become multi-millionaires.
In the case of Joe Biden, and remember, this was also true of the Clintons, they became...
Centi-millionaires. They have tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, multiple homes, and so on.
And they're doing this on a government salary.
Right there, I think, is prima facie proof of corruption.
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The left is really waging full-scale war against Clarence Thomas.
I mean, this is all so transparent.
And they're doing it in the name of ethics.
Clarence Thomas has been violating ethics.
And there's, in fact...
And this is an interesting business, how the left gets its memos out to people.
Because I noticed on social media...
Dozens of people on the left saying the same thing.
Okay, Senator Menendez needs to resign.
And Clarence Thomas also needs to resign.
Let's have a single standard.
So it's almost as if some academic or some activist cooks this stuff up.
Then they blast it out.
And you have all these parrots.
And by parrots, I mean people with huge followings who nevertheless are perfectly willing to take these democratic talking points and just echo them.
So that you suddenly have the simultaneous thought occurring to hundreds of people, and it's obviously not independently occurring to them all, but this is the kind of latest talking point, namely Menendez and Thomas both resign.
Okay, well, we know what Menendez did, or at least we know what Menendez allegedly did, accept gold bars, accept a bunch of cash, take money in exchange for favors.
What did Clarence Thomas do?
Well, there's an organization called ProPublica that's been sort of the expose central of Clarence Thomas, and they do extensive research.
But to me, the extensive research only proves how little they got on this guy.
In fact, how much do they have on this guy?
Nothing. The kind of stuff that they're pointing out is a big ho-hum.
Let's look at it. Here's the latest.
Clarence Thomas secretly participated in events for the Koch donor network for at least a decade.
Now, these are events that the Koch group has, and quite frankly, I'm not a big fan of the Koch group.
First of all, they're aggressively hostile against Trump.
They're in no way part of the MAGA movement.
They're part of the anti-MAGA movement, but they have these donor events, and they bring in a lot of speakers.
And they've been doing this. The events are hardly secret.
And I say hardly secret in the sense that there are hundreds of people there, all representing different types of organizations.
There's media that comes to these events.
And even if certain things are off the record, it's not as if people aren't there to observe them.
So this is hardly secret.
If Clarence Thomas is giving a speech, it's in a big ballroom to a large number of people.
It's no secret at all.
And this is kind of the MO of writing these articles.
You've got to find a Republican to criticize this.
So they realize the left does it.
If we just trot out good old Lawrence Tribe, the Harvard Law professor, it's going to be no big deal.
So let's find some Republican, preferably a Republican no one's ever heard of, because then they go, wow, this guy must be really important.
It takes my breath away that he would go to a Koch network event for donors, says John E. Jones III, a retired federal judge appointed by George W. Bush.
So this is a guy, he's a placeholder, he's playing the role of the Republican who says what the Democrats think.
And he's acting like, oh, this is really unprecedented, this is really unusual for him to go to a donor event.
Well, the ProPublica report continues to say that at one of these events that Thomas spoke at, he was flown in on a private jet.
And again, the assumption is that because he was flown in a private jet, he received a benefit that he didn't disclose on his forms, on his sort of disclosure forms.
The other point is that Thomas has been attending meetings at the Bohemian Grove.
The Bohemian Grove is a kind of club in the woods of California, in the Redwoods.
I've actually been to the Bohemian Grove.
I've spoken at the Bohemian Grove.
It's a collection, a very elite collection.
By the way, a lot of Republicans and a lot of Democrats go to these things.
Senators go and so on.
It's kind of a mini version, I suppose, to some degree of the World Economic Forum.
It doesn't have the same ideology.
But they have a wide range of speakers.
The time I was there, for example, I was speaking alongside Francis Ford Coppola, the guy who made The Godfather.
So Clarence Thomas went to this.
Now, let's step back and ask a big question.
Is Clarence Thomas the only Supreme Court justice who does this?
Answer, no. Who else does it?
All of them. All the Supreme Court justices give speeches.
All of them go on book tours.
All of them attend events like the Bohemian Grove.
If not the Bohemian Grove, other events like it.
This is completely normal.
It's not even required that these events be disclosed because it is actually described in part of what judges do that this is part of what they're supposed to do.
They're supposed to educate people on the law.
They're supposed to go to social gatherings.
They're supposed to go to book events.
This is not only permitted, but encouraged.
And there is, in fact, I'm just gonna read from the judicial canons.
It talks about the fact that a judge should not become isolated from the society in which the judge lives.
Judges should speak at organizations that are interested in legal issues.
That's what Clarence Thomas has been doing.
So, the problem with all these exposés is that they pretend like Clarence Thomas's activities are unique.
In fact, they're not unique. But if these journalists applied a single standard and just said, okay, let's now compare the speaking schedule of Clarence Thomas with, let's say, for example, Eleanor Kagan.
She's a former dean at the Yale Law School.
Has she not spoken at events?
Has she not traveled by private jet?
A lot of times when someone brings a justice to speak, you can't pay them.
They're not allowed to receive money, but you try to make it comfortable for them.
Listen, we'll send a plane to get you so you don't have to go through the airport and make three connections to get to the Bohemian Grove or to get to the Koch event.
This is hardly a form of bribery.
There's nothing inappropriate about this.
So this is the absurdity of trying to go after Clarence Thomas.
No. What Clarence Thomas has done, not even comparable remotely to what Menendez has done.
And the left's whole single standard is really not a single standard at all.
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The left is going berserk over a statement that Trump made on Truth Social about General Milley.
And the statement itself is so Trumpian, I need to read at least part of it.
Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, blah, blah, blah, will be leaving the military next week.
This is Trump.
He starts off with a blast.
And then he goes, this will be a time for all citizens of the USA to celebrate.
He means Milley's departure.
This guy, this is the critical line right here, this is what's giving the left hysterics.
This guy turned out to be a woke train wreck who, if the fake news reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States.
And now the crusher from Trump.
This is an act so egregious that in times gone by, the punishment would have been death.
A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act.
Boom. So now the left is like, Trump is calling for the assassination of General Milley.
Here's a... And also calling for General Milley and others to be charged with treason.
Here's an article in New Republic.
Trump goes full deranged, suggests charging people he doesn't like with treason.
Well, first of all, Trump isn't charging people he doesn't like with treason.
Trump hasn't called, for example, for Liz Cheney to be charged with treason or Romney or Marco Rubio for that matter.
Lots of people that Trump has blasted, he's not calling for them to be charged with treason.
The real question here is, and by the way, Trump is not calling for Millie to be assassinated.
Let's go back to the text.
This is what my professors would do in literature class when I would say something like, well, I think what Hamlet is trying to say and the professor would be like, well, let's go back to the text.
Let's see what Hamlet is saying or what he is thinking, and let's match it up against what you're saying.
This is an act so egregious that in times gone by, the punishment would have been death.
So Trump is saying, hey, listen...
At one time, our country took treason seriously.
At one time, there was a death penalty attached to it and they would have carried it out.
I mean, think, for example, about what Abraham Lincoln would have done if he had found out that his leading general was conspiring with the Confederacy.
How would Lincoln have responded to that?
So historically speaking, I think Trump is correct here.
And that's the point that the left always evades.
Trump is calling for the dirt penalty as opposed to Trump is making an historical claim that let's examine and see if it's true or not.
Now, the question is, is General Milley guilty of treason?
Yes or no? Did he do something that is really inappropriate and unworthy and betrays the interests of the United States and betrays his job?
Now, there's an article in the, I believe in the Atlantic, which is a defense of General Milley, which says that he called Chinese General Li Zhou Cheng, his People's Liberation Army counterpart.
And after receiving intelligence, the China believed Trump was going to order an attack.
So they're giving a reason for why Milley did this.
He received this intelligence.
So my first question is, okay, General Milley receives this intelligence.
Did he tell Trump about it?
No. Why not?
Trump is his superior.
The job of the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is to go to the president, whom he works for, and say, listen, I've heard this.
We need to correct this. We need to go.
He did none of this. He works behind Trump's back.
So that's insubordination.
That's treason. And what does he do?
He tells the Chinese general, quote, if we're going to attack, I'm going to call you ahead of time.
It's not going to be a surprise.
This to me is straight out treason.
Imagine calling the head of the adversary power.
The United States calls the head of the Soviet Union in the days of the Cold War.
Listen, if we launch an attack on you, I'm going to tell you in advance.
It's not going to be a surprise attack.
What? This is the chief military officer of the United States doing this.
The left knows that this is actually indefensible.
In fact, if someone did this around the back of Joe Biden, it would be outrageous.
The left would be up in arms.
You have to go through the chain of authority.
We have a civilian government.
Military officers are not in charge.
They respond to civilian authorities in a democracy.
All of this applies to Milley and Trump.
So Milley, very bad guy and goes way beyond the fact that he puts cadets in high heels and he's submitted to all kinds of woke nonsense.
This is a guy who betrayed the fundamental duty of office in an unconscionable way.
So, does that qualify as treason?
I think certainly in any commonsensical definition of treason, maybe not the legal definition, but certainly the common understanding of the meaning of the term, General Milley in this action proved himself to be a traitor.
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Very interesting development in Dallas.
The mayor, Eric Johnson, a Democrat, has decided to leave the Democratic Party.
He's becoming, he has become a Republican.
And he makes the striking statement, America's cities need Republicans, and I'm becoming one.
Now, this is an important statement to me because, number one, sometimes as Republicans, as conservatives, we depreciate the cities.
We're like, the cities are horrible.
We are the party of the country.
We are the party of rural America, not urban America.
Now, there are a couple of problems with that.
One is that the cities have enormous power in the states.
So, for example, let's look at California.
Most of California, of course, is rural, and that part of California is largely Republican.
But guess what?
The reason California is captive to the Democratic Party is just because of really two cities, LA and San Francisco.
And the density of the population in those cities has tilted California decisively to the left.
So politically, we can't afford to give up the cities.
Personally, I don't think we should give up the cities.
The cities, first of all, I like cities.
I like, if I'm not living in a city, I like living near a city.
In other words, adjoining a city, having access to the resources of a city.
So I'm a city person in that sense.
I like the country as well, but I don't think we should give up on the cities.
That's my point.
Then the second point is that there aren't that many Republican cities.
When there are Republican cities, you notice that they do a lot better than Democratic cities.
Debbie and I have given before the example on the podcast of Chattanooga in Tennessee versus Memphis.
So Chattanooga is a Republican city, Memphis is a Democratic city, and just walk in Chattanooga and walk in Memphis and it's a complete difference.
It's a difference of crime.
It's a difference of looks.
It's a difference of the homeless guys and encampments.
It's a different mood altogether.
You'll just see the mood in Memphis is sort of, you have to look over your shoulder.
Everybody's suspicious and downcast.
People kind of look like life is hard on them.
Look at Chattanooga. It's Not only a scenic beauty, of course, but it's also that people seem really upbeat.
They seem friendly. They'll say hello to you if they don't know you as you're walking down the downtown or outside a coffee shop.
So just a complete difference of life between the two types of cities.
Now, Eric Johnson is the mayor of Dallas, but it turns out that he knows what makes a city work, and he talks about it.
He says, number one...
He says what makes a city work is law and order.
City has to be lawful.
People have to feel safe in a city.
And he goes, that's really what I'm all about.
And that's what I've always been all about.
But that's not what the Democratic Party is about.
He goes, number two, a city has to be orderly and clean.
It has to look good. And that's what he's about.
But again, that's not what the Democratic Party is about.
As witness, any Democratic city walk in their Democratic cities and you see there's filth everywhere.
You got to look where your feet are landing.
I mean, there's certain places Debbie and I've gone to and Debbie's like, I don't want to come back because my shoes are like smeared with experiment.
You definitely have to throw them away after using them.
Yeah, I think that was our experience, believe it or not.
Where was it? Was it in...
Oh, it was actually in Louisiana.
It was in Louisiana. It was in New Orleans, which, think of it, New Orleans, it's got this great history, it's got this great music, it's got this great food, but guess what?
It also has a lot of experiment on the streets, and that's a little bit unpleasant to be able to get to the food and to be able to get to the jazz clubs and so on.
The other thing, says Eric Johnson, is that a good city is characterized by low property taxes and reasonable levels of regulation.
So, low property taxes so people can afford to live there.
Cities are generally expensive.
So, if you want people to live there, young people, if you want people to live there who are not necessarily at the top of the...
A top earning bracket.
They have to be affordable. And that means the taxes have to be reasonable.
And the regulations have to be reasonable to encourage businesses, and particularly small businesses, which often are the sort of lifeblood of a city.
A city isn't just a replica of, I mean, you go to suburbs, you'll sometimes find just there's a mall, and there are all these big stores that are national chains.
But in a city, you want variety.
You don't just want Starbucks, you want 20 different types of coffee shops, and you want a lot of different types of stores.
And to have that, you need to have low regulation and reasonable taxes.
So, law and order and fiscal conservatism.
These are the two big themes that Johnson is stressing.
And he calls himself now a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, which I think is a very interesting phrase, because Teddy Roosevelt was a New Yorker.
He was a big, fat, you know, New York guy.
He was a man of the city.
And typically, we haven't very often had presidents, Republican presidents, who are sort of city guys.
But Teddy Roosevelt was a city guy.
So he goes, American cities need Republicans, and Republicans need American cities.
I think this is beautifully put.
Both of those statements are true.
And he says that as America's cities go, so goes America.
And that's not true everywhere.
I mean, Texas, for example, is an example of a state where the cities generally are Democratic, and yet Texas is still Republican.
But nevertheless, it is true of many places.
The city controls the state.
Think of the power, for example, of Chicago in Illinois, or New York City on New York State, Or LA and San Francisco in California.
So, point being, I'm really glad to see a big city mayor recognize what makes cities work, join the Republican Party.
This is kind of a message to Republicans not to give up on the cities, but to campaign to make these cities the best that they can be.
Imagine how strong we would be as a party if we had the rural areas and the suburbs and were competitive, at least, in the cities also.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast my friend Liz Wheeler.
She is a renowned conservative commentator, author, host of The Liz Wheeler Show.
And we're going to talk about her new book, which is called Hide Your Children.
Great title, Hide Your Children, Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America's Kids.
By the way, her website, lizwheeler.com.
Liz, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
I mean... Welcome to my show!
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Dinesh.
I'm happy to be here. I wrote this book because I, like a lot of parents during COVID, saw this deliberate, relentless attack on our children.
I mean, all you had to do was look over your child's shoulder on Zoom school, and you could see that they were being just indoctrinated with critical race theory, trans ideology, revisionist history, moral relativism, all these poisonous ideologies.
And I wondered, is this New?
Is this a concerted effort?
Who's behind this? Where's this coming from?
So I dug into it and I found that, no, it's actually not new at all.
It's something that's been going on for a long time.
In fact, for nearly a century, the left has been trying to re-engineer our society.
And in large part, unfortunately, they've been very successful.
They've co-opted a lot of our cultural institutions, these foundational civil institutions.
They've captured the media, obviously.
They've captured the education system.
Sadly, they've captured a lot of religious institutions.
They've captured the law.
And now they have their sights set on the nuclear family, on children in particular.
So what I do in my book is I name the names of the people and the organizations behind the capture of these institutions, behind the attack on America's kids, and then I offer a solution that I will tell you, Dinesh, is different than the solution the Republican Party offers for how we can retake these institutions and protect our kids.
All right, let's hold off on the solution till the next segment, because I'm very actually eager to hear from you on that.
Let's talk about the problem.
You identify some institutions right up front in the book, and I just want to name a few right here.
Planned Parenthood.
You also mentioned Big Tech, Teachers Union, school counselors, Disney executives, Harvard professors, and the Center for Disease Control.
I mean, what a list. You normally wouldn't put all those groups together, and yet they are working in a coordinated fashion toward, it seems, this utterly kind of shameful end, which is transforming our children.
So my first question to you is, Do they think in their minds that this is good for kids?
Or do you think that this is just a cynical effort for them to just establish their power and the kids are just the fodder?
There's no concern for kids driving this at all.
Or is there? There's no concern for children whatsoever behind these efforts to co-opt our kids.
Listen, every public school teacher is not a Marxist, obviously.
That's not the contention that I'm making.
But those who are the driving forces behind these ideologies are self-avowed Marxists.
Whether it's the president of the American Library Association, Emily Drabinsky, who is a proponent of these sexually graphic books in children's schools, critical race theory in children's schools, whether it is the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement who admit that they're trained Marxists, that's Alicia Garza and Patrice Coolers.
The people who are behind these efforts are very well aware of the ramifications of their own ideology, and they simply don't care because they foresee themselves as being the elitists.
They will be in a position of power and wealth if Marxism is imposed on our nation.
And they understand the concept that you can't simply transform a free nation into a communist nation overnight.
A politician's not gonna be able to go out and sell to the American people the idea of Marxism.
If you want to transform a free nation to communism, you have to co-opt the minds of the children.
You have to train them and brainwash them into believing in communism We're good to go.
When Marxism collapsed at the end of the last century in the Soviet Union, it appeared like this ideology was dead.
Marx was like the deadest white male you could think about because even the people who had most embraced the ideology were now repudiating it.
All of Eastern Europe pulled in the opposite direction.
But I think we forget that Marxism worked really well for the Soviet ruling class.
That for the so-called elite, the nomenklatura, so-called, these guys lived high on the hog.
They had apartments in the city and dachas in the country.
They had chauffeur-driven cars.
And so I think what you're saying is that there is an American activist class that recognizes Who cares if Marxism works for the overall health or wealth of society?
It works for us because it buys us luxury homes and allows us to live, in a sense, above the law.
And is that the motivation?
You think it's just a sheer kind of a gangsterism that's driving this?
It is. I mean, every human person is fallen.
We're all prone to sin.
Everyone wants power and money.
It's just whether we make the choice to use that drive for good or for evil.
there are a lot of people in the world who choose to use their experience on Earth for evil to accumulate wealth and accumulate power at other people's expenses.
But you make a really interesting point before that I want to expound on a little bit when you say that Marxism kind of died out in the past.
It's one of the most common comments that I get about the title of my book.
People ask, Liz, you say Marxists are coming after our children.
Is it really Marxists?
Because a lot of people associate the word Marxism with Karl Marx, with the Communist Manifesto, with this working class revolting against the ruling class to overthrow capitalism.
And that feels very distant and intangible to people.
And what I found in the course of my research is that version of Marxism did essentially It wasn't the global Marxist revolution that Marx and Engels envisioned that would happen.
But then there was a Marxist by the name of Antonio Gramsci.
He was an Italian who actually co-founded the Italian Communist Party.
He was imprisoned in fascist Italy and he was studying Marxism.
And what he found is where there were successful Marxist revolutions, it wasn't sparked by a discontented working class.
It was successful because the Civil institutions, which is another word for the cultural institutions that the working class relied on, were first destroyed, which forced a society into a Marxist structure.
And he named these civil institutions, among others, he named the media, the education system, religious institutions, the law, and the nuclear family, which, Dinesh, is exactly what we're seeing play out in our culture right now.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with Liz Wheeler, the book, Hide Your Children, Exposing the Marxist Behind the Attack on America's Kids, the website, lizwheeler.com.
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I'm back with author and podcaster Liz Wheeler, host of the Liz Wheeler Show.
We're talking about the book Hide Your Children. Liz, you were talking about the Italian communist Gramsci and his view that you've got to target these civic institutions, and that's the way ultimately to get the working class and everybody else.
It seems like, however, that there is another element that also came into the American Marxist movement, so to speak, and that is we're not going to get so much mileage out of the class issue.
We'll get a lot more mileage out of the race issue and the gender issue and now the transgender issue.
So it appears like the focus of American Marxism is now identity politics rather than class politics.
Would you agree? Yes, that's correct.
And it's straight out of the Frankfurt School critical theory handbooks.
I think a lot of parents recognized when their children were being told that if you're a white child, you're inherently racist because you're white.
If you're a black child, you are oppressed because you're black.
They recognized that that was bad and wrong and they didn't want their children being taught that.
But they didn't immediately recognize that what their children were being taught were the principles of critical race theory.
The name is very important to recognize because critical race theory is the grandchild of critical theory, a neo-Marxist theory that was written by Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt School.
And it's exactly right.
This Marxist dialectic of oppressor versus oppressed doesn't have to be applied just along economic lines like the ruling class versus the working class.
It can be applied to any group of people that can be divided by any immutable characteristic as long as you can label one as marginalized and the other as being oppressors.
So we see that along racial lines in the United States where white people are told they're bad, black people are told they're being oppressed by white people.
We see that with the trans ideology.
Like critical race theory, this trans ideology that we hear children being taught that gender is not binary, it's not correlated to biological sex, that they can be a boy if they want to be a boy, they can be a girl if they identify as one.
This is not just a random assortment of nonsense. It's the outgrowth of another neo-Marxist theory called queer theory.
And what you have when you have critical race theory and then queer theory is you have critical race theory creating an identity crisis in children.
They feel self-loathing because they're told they're evil and bad and there's nothing they can do about it.
They start resenting their parents because their parents made them white or black.
And it creates this identity crisis.
Then you have the transgender ideology swoop in and say, actually, you can be redeemed.
You can throw off your identity as an oppressor if you choose to put on a marginalized identity.
The marginalized identity being transgender or non-binary or LGBTQIA. And in the process of these children quote-unquote redeeming themselves by becoming marginalized, they not only reject who they are, they reject their families, and they are permanently secured as being Democrat activists, if not outright Marxist revolutionaries, because otherwise they are told by society that they are evil.
It's not a coincidence that critical race theory and trans ideology appeared in our school systems almost simultaneously.
Liz, let's fast forward a little bit to how we get out of this, if we get out of it.
You say that the Republican Party has sort of one approach, but you're advocating a different approach.
What's the Republican generic approach and what's your approach?
Yeah, the Republican Party is supposed to serve as a bulwark against any kind of evil forces that threaten our liberty.
And something has gone wrong or else we wouldn't be existing in this cultural chaos that we are existing in.
The Republican Party has failed in their fight.
So I sought out to identify, well, what has gone wrong?
What are we doing that isn't working?
How can we change this?
And I realized that it's both a philosophical problem that then manifests in a practical problem.
The philosophical problem is you and I sitting here, we like to think of the United States as a free country.
But what does that mean?
What is freedom? What's the definition of liberty?
Is liberty the ultimate end of a country or is liberty the means to something greater?
And the Republican Party has embraced the idea that freedom is the ultimate end.
And if that's true, then what David French said when he said that drag queen story hour was a blessing of liberty, that would have to be true.
These grown men dressed up as sexualized versions of women gyrating in front of children.
There would have to be some kind of inherent morality in that just because they had the freedom to do it.
But I reject that premise because that's drag queen story hours grotesque.
It's evil, which means that freedom can't be the ultimate end.
It has to be the means to something greater.
And I challenge conservatives in my book to grapple with this question, what is the something greater?
What do we want our society to look like?
What is human flourishing and how do we use the just authority of government to achieve that?
Because conservatives for a long time, Republicans too, have forgotten or misunderstood that limited government doesn't necessarily mean a government that is simply as small in size as possible.
Limited government means it's constrained by enumerated powers and constrained by accountability to the people.
But there is a just authority of government to make laws that acknowledge natural law, that acknowledge a pre-existing definition of right and wrong, and help order society towards that.
If we don't, if we pretend that there is no pre-existing definitions for any objective reality, then what results is what we're existing in today, where boys are told there can be girls, they can be girls if they want to, and men are told that, you know, they can identify as a kindergartner if they want to, and white people are racist just by the nature of their skin color.
Objective reality is simply obliterated.
I mean, Liz, you're making a really critical point here, I think, which is that even when I think back to Jefferson's phrase in the Declaration, the pursuit of happiness, there are some people who think that that phrase is sort of morally empty because everybody can pursue happiness however they want.
So this comes back to your idea of freedom being the end.
But I don't think that the American founders ever believed that freedom was the ultimate end because they had a clear idea of what the good life means.
What does it mean to live out this American project, if you will?
And I think for two centuries, Americans had a pretty good idea of what that freedom meant.
It was freedom, ultimately, to flourish, to have upward mobility, to start a family, to live in a community, to engage in civic engagement with your neighbors and your friends.
To participate in local government, there was a substantive content to freedom, and the laws backed that up.
And I think what you're calling for is nothing more than a sort of revival of that.
So guys, this is a book you really need to check out.
It's Hide Your Children, Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America's Kids.
Liz Wheeler, a great pleasure.
Thank you for joining me. Thanks so much, Dinesh.
I appreciate it. I've now completed the opening section of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, really focusing on the process of arrest.
And it may be time for me to step back before I keep going and take stock of where we are and how all of this relates to us.
The really striking aspect of this first chapter is the arbitrariness of arrest, the fact that they come to your house, they grab you on the street, they just get you.
And you notice that when they get you, they don't bother to say why.
They don't bother to tell you, you're being arrested for this, you're being arrested for that.
No, if there are charges, you're informed of the charges only later, maybe when you're already in prison.
So, to the degree there's even the attempt to follow the proceedings of law, it's very thin.
It's thinly veiled. It's as if the They don't have to do it.
And in fact, they don't have to do it.
Now, that's the key point, that Solzhenitsyn is describing arrest in, I would call it, a fully mature, a full-fledged police state.
And that is a key difference between the Soviet Union of Solzhenitsyn's day, which is the middle of the 20th century, the middle to the Eventually also continuing to the second half of the 20th century before the Soviet Union collapses.
We are in an emerging police state.
We're in the early stages.
And let's remember in the early stages a police state cannot afford to behave quite in the way that Solzhenitsyn's police state is behaving.
Why? Because the police state has not established itself.
It's not consolidated.
It doesn't have full control of the society.
When you have full control, you don't have to give anybody an explanation.
Think, for example, about Stalin.
Once his dictatorship is established, Stalin can wipe out his opponents.
He can grab a professor on the street and have the guy butchered.
And if anybody raises an objection, arrest them.
Now, the United States cannot do this now.
This is not to say the United States will never be able to do this ever, but it can't do it now.
And so what it needs is two things.
One is it needs a constituency to help build the police state.
This is very important because it means that there are a lot of people right now who are not directly affected by the police state.
This is a theme that will emerge in my film, Police State, because they're going to say things like, well, You know, I'm never going to be censored on social media.
I'm not going to be worried about the FBI banging down my door.
And these people are right.
They don't have to worry about that now.
They don't have to worry about it now because they're on the left.
And the left is the ones, they are the ones building the police state, the left and the Democrats.
So as a result, the party of the police state is pretty safe.
They are needed. The same thing with illegals.
You wonder why illegals are treated so, you know, almost generously.
And the answer is the illegals are also needed to build the police state.
Why? Because you need the illegals to transform the American population, to create a sustained political majority.
The Democrats haven't had that kind of majority since the days of FDR. And so the country is too precariously poised right in the middle.
It's divided 50-50.
So the Democrats are, no, we need 60-40.
We need 70-30.
So let the illegals in in droves.
So they are building the police state.
And the second point about it is that While you're building the police state, you really need to follow kind of the, I would call it the facade of law.
And this is why the Democrats are always talking about law.
In fact, they sound like the party of law.
No one is above the law.
Yes, we have to go after Trump.
It's not that we really want to, but it's our obligation because we can't allow anyone to be above the law.
We're saving democracy.
I mean, think about it. The people who are subverting democratic ideals, who are attacking our basic civil liberties, are posing as the party of democracy and the party of civil liberty.
And so, they will talk about the fact that, no, it's Republicans who are threatening our liberties.
Look at the way the Republicans are going after abortion.
Look at the way Republicans are going after gay rights and trans rights and so on.
So the left, it is necessary for them to spout this kind of rhetoric.
It's not necessary, by the way, for everyone to believe it.
But it's necessary to spout the rhetoric because they need the time for the jaws of the police state to slam shut.
So this is the point. When the jaws have slammed shut, then all pretenses are off.
You don't need to engage in this kind of fakery.
You just use the raw brutality of political power.
That's because all the organs, not some, not even most, but all the organs of the society are under your control.
And in a sense, the population becomes against you completely defenseless.
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