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Sept. 27, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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DOWNWARD SPIRAL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep673
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Coming up, I'll review a Rasmussen national survey showing deepening public concerns that the country is moving toward a police state.
I'll contrast the experiences of San Francisco and Chicago to reveal a paradox about crime in blue cities.
And former GOP congressional candidate Tameka Hamilton joins me.
We're going to talk about how Republicans can win even in far-left galley swella.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, watching on Rumble, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Is America becoming a police state?
That's the question explored in my new film coming out next month.
But now I want to talk about what the American people think about this topic.
And here I want to make reference to a survey.
I was about to say Rasmussen, but it's really Rasmussen survey.
I've been calling it Rasmussen.
And then the guys who run the survey were like, Dinesh, actually, he pronounced it Rasmussen.
This is Scott Rasmussen, the guy who founded the polling company.
And I was like, well, he's wrong.
It's Rasmussen, not Rasmussen.
Guy should learn to spell his own name, pronounce his own name right.
This would be like me going around calling myself Dinesh.
In any event, he apparently said Rasmussen, so we're going to kind of defer to him on it.
So, these guys did a really interesting survey a year ago on 2,000 mules.
And they looked at the people who've seen the movie.
They looked at the what do people think about election fraud.
And it was really cool to have that survey out there.
So I asked the Rasmussen guys, do you mind asking a couple of questions about police state?
And they were like, yeah, we can add it to our next national survey.
And so they formulated two very interesting questions.
The first one is simply, is America becoming a police state?
Which is the central question of the movie.
And they were careful to define it because people can interpret police state in different ways.
So they defined it as, quote, Censorship, ideological indoctrination, and targeting of political opponents.
By the way, this is a classic definition.
If you were talking about a police state abroad, North Korea, you would use this kind of a definition to say that's why we call them an unfree society.
So they were using a very classic definition.
And their second question was about the FBI, so a more particular question.
Which is, the FBI is a danger to the freedom and security of law-abiding Americans.
Agree or disagree. So, not a danger to the freedom and security of criminals, but of law-abiding Americans.
What do people think about it?
So, here are the results.
On the first question, which is, is America becoming a police state?
An amazing answer.
72% We're good to go.
I don't necessarily agree or are concerned that we're becoming a police state.
Why? Because if you think of Republicans and Democrats being roughly 50-50 in the country, how do you get to 72% without including a good 20% or so, maybe a little more chunk of Democrats?
Now, the interesting wrinkle about this, I was on Dennis Prager's radio show yesterday talking about this fact, and he mentioned the Rasmussen survey.
And he said, how could it be that the Democrats who are voting for people who are doing all this, imposing censorship, imposing indoctrination, how is it the Democrats could possibly think that we're becoming a police state?
And so what I said to Dennis was, I said, listen, I think what's going on here is not that the Democrats agree with us.
It's that the Democrats think that we are imposing a police state on them.
All you have to do is listen to their rhetoric.
Trump is an authoritarian.
Trump wants to become a dictator.
Trump wants to assassinate his opponents.
Trump wants to fire all the people who work in the government.
He wants to change the laws unilaterally on his own.
Or Republicans are taking away abortion rights, gay rights, trans rights.
So, in various ways, Republicans are under accusation by the media.
You are the guy.
So, the thing is, I started out in this movie thinking about, I'm going to I framed the issue as, is America becoming a police state?
But then I realized, many people on the left agree, yes it is, but they think we're doing it.
So, they think we're doing it, and we think they're doing it.
And the movie, in a way, then pivots and asks a different question, which is, who's right?
And I say this, look, there's only one way to answer that question, and that is to look at three or four key issues.
Number one, what is a police state?
Number two, how did it get started?
At least, how did it get started in America?
Three, how does it operate?
Who's behind it?
And finally, who's in charge?
Who's running the police?
Because if you can answer those questions, you will know decisively if the threat is coming from the left or if it's coming from the right.
Back to the Rasmussen survey and their second question.
The FBI is a danger to the freedom and security of law-abiding Americans.
Turns out 50% agree.
Wow! Think of what a number that is.
What a high number and what that tells you about the fact that public confidence in the FBI has basically dissolved.
Now, out of that 50%, 28% strongly agree.
So the FBI has essentially lost more than a quarter of the American people.
They would shut it down, I believe, if they were given the choice.
45% disagree.
So this is not as clear-cut as the first question.
But nevertheless, a police agency like the FBI should be trying to go for 80% or 90% public support.
And the fact that they're down...
That 50% of people say that they are a danger to law-abiding Americans should be very troubling to Christopher Wray and the people around him at the FBI. So, a very interesting survey.
I'm very grateful to the Rasmussen people for doing it.
I think it shows the enormous timeliness and relevance of this upcoming movie.
And by the way, if you haven't gotten your theater tickets yet, go to policestatefilm.net.
Don't wait till the last minute.
Then you're like, I can't get tickets.
They're all sold out. Move early and move quickly.
Get your tickets. Round up your extended family or your church or your conservative group.
It's kind of fun to see it in the group.
It sort of, it adds to the experience tremendously.
And this is a movie that was made for the theater.
So if you can, in some cases you may not be able to, but if you can, see it that way.
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Feel the difference. One of the ways that the Left operates is they produce a wound.
And when the wound is inflicted by them, they then show up with the bandage.
And they go, hey, we are here to solve the problem.
Very often the bandage is not much good against the wound.
You would be much better to prevent the wound from occurring in the first place.
Now, What am I talking about?
crime in Chicago. It's reached terrible levels, epidemic levels, and guess what?
Stores are closing down. Businesses are fleeing. So recently there have been six prominent store closures in the last year alone.
And one of them is Walmart, which closed four stores in Chicago.
They said we're losing tens of millions of dollars a year.
Whole Foods closed a store on the south side neighborhood of Englewood, six years after they said that this is going to be like a food mecca.
And so this is very bad news for Chicago.
And you might think that the mayor, this is Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Now, when I say you might think, it's important to remember that this guy is a far leftist, even more to the left than Lori Lightfoot, and he's the guy they voted for.
So they're actually going to get what they voted for.
Here's a guy who has no interest in reducing the level of crime at all.
Because you would think that he would go to the root of the problem.
In other words, you would think that he would try to prevent the wound.
We have a wound, and as a result, the blood is flowing, which is to say the businesses are fleeing.
Guess what his solution is?
He says maybe we should start thinking about having a city-owned grocery store.
So in other words, let's replace private grocery stores with a government grocery store.
Now, first of all, we don't have really these in America.
The government doesn't run grocery stores.
Why? Because the private sector does an excellent job, in fact, a far better job than the government.
You can only imagine what a government, what a depressing place a government-run grocery store would be.
It would be essentially the grocery store answer to the DMV. And yet, this is what Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is talking about.
He goes, he thinks it's going to be a first.
Chicago is the first major city to implement a municipally owned grocery store.
And he's working with a nonprofit group.
And stop right there. Right there, you see the problem on a feasibility study.
One of the defining features of non-profit groups is that they don't know how to make things turn a profit.
That's why they're called non-profit groups.
And a non-profit group dealing in groceries is going to be a complete disaster.
But nevertheless, these are the, quote, experts that this guy is consulting.
He, all Chicagoans deserve to live near convenient, affordable, healthy grocery options.
And this is all framed in terms of equity and entitlement.
All Chicagoans deserve to live.
Nobody deserves to live.
You live where you want.
You shop based upon the options that are available to you.
We know access to grocery stores is already a challenge for many residents.
And again, I highlight these key words.
We already know access.
This is a word that got, I guess, got its traction with the handicap movement or the disability movement.
I need to have access, so I need to have a wheelchair.
And it made sense in that context.
But in this context, the same term is recycled in a way that gives it a nonsensical, not meaning, but non-meaning.
And then he goes on to say, That historic disinvestment has led to inequitable access.
So let's translate. He gives you the idea when he talks about historic disinvestment that this is some sort of a racial thing that these stores don't like.
Blacks don't like Hispanics.
So historic patterns of discrimination.
No, this has nothing to do with historic disinvestment.
This has to do with the fact that there are thugs who are looting these stores and people don't want to go in them Employees don't want to work there.
It's not a safe environment.
The company isn't making money.
So they're like, let's back up and get out of here.
So that is the result.
It's the result of his own policies or the policies of Chicago.
The left-wing policies that this guy represents are the cause of the problem, but he's locating the problem elsewhere.
Historic disinvestment.
And he then produces these studies that there are Well, this is the fruit of policies that make businesses run away.
So, there was a book that came out years ago, The Poor Pay More.
And it was one of these left-wing diatribes, the poor pay more.
Well, the reason the poor pay more is that a lot of the inner-city neighborhoods are very dangerous.
It's difficult and expensive, if not impossible, to get insurance.
So things cost more.
So it's paradoxical. You've got a poor community, you want things to cost less, but the reason that they cost more is because of the environment that is created in those neighborhoods where businesses ultimately face higher costs and have to pass those costs on to the consumer.
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Hey, did you see those videos about the crime spree in Philadelphia?
They're all over social media and they're pretty... wow.
I mean, this is like absolute chaos.
Honey, what were some of the stores?
Lululemon was one of them.
Apple was another.
You've got people just rummaging through these stores, grabbing stuff, people running everywhere.
Just a madhouse.
And I can only imagine what it's like to live in those neighborhoods or to be walking through the mall and watching this going on.
You must wonder, am I in the United States?
Is this the America that we grew up in?
Debbie goes, this is the way life is in a democratic city.
And that is true.
Although, I had Richard Hanani on the podcast several days ago.
He's a really smart researcher and has a good book out on the origins of woke.
But he had a...
A short commentary on what he calls the two different types of crime in democratic cities.
And he goes, we think of democratic cities as crime-infested, and they are.
He goes, but it's not the same type of crime.
And he contrasts, on the one hand, Chicago, and I would add here Philadelphia, on the one hand, with San Francisco and Los Angeles on the other.
And here's the point that he makes.
He goes... He goes, a lot of the defenders of San Francisco in the media, the local media in San Francisco, say, hey, listen, don't keep ragging on San Francisco because the murder rate here is pretty low.
And Richard goes, that's actually true.
And he says, that got me thinking, and there are two types of cities when it comes to crime.
There are southern, midwestern, and northeastern cities like Chicago where there are pockets of extreme violence, but the rest of the city is okay.
In other words, there are safe neighborhoods, there are prosperous areas, and you can go to them.
You won't be affected.
It's on the south side of Chicago.
It's on that side of the tracks.
It's really bad over there, but you don't have to go over there.
And then he goes, and then you have west coast cities like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle.
He goes, homelessness is everywhere.
weird homeless subcultures, people taking drugs on the street.
But he goes, but actual serious violence is pretty low.
So you're not going to have drive-by shootings in Seattle, drive-by shootings on Powell Street in San Francisco.
And so he goes, the two approaches are kind of different because in San Francisco and Seattle, you've got these white liberals and they are annoyed by the homeless, but they are not terrorized by them.
So he goes, if they were terrorized by them, then the white liberals wouldn't put up with it.
If they were getting shot and their kids were finding, you know, blood coming out of their face, then they would shut this stuff down.
But because it's just the homeless, they feel like this is sort of soft annoying.
Someone's going to come and spit on me or, you know, take a dump in front of me.
And the liberal goes, well, that's okay.
This is probably some suffering guy.
All I have to do is look the other way, pretend it didn't happen, keep walking.
So he goes, the homeless don't intrude on people's lives in a seriously threatening way.
It's noise. It's littering.
It's nuisances and so on. But he goes, but now let's turn to Chicago.
And he goes, in Chicago, there is a criminal underclass that doesn't just want to take the chicken wing off your plate.
They want to carjack you.
And they want to put a gun to your head and put bullets through your head if you won't cooperate.
And so this criminal underclass is merciless.
They're ruthless. And he goes, but they're not all over Chicago.
They're in one part of Chicago.
And so the white liberal is perfectly okay with letting those guys sort of blow each other up over there.
It's like, you guys go nuts.
It's black on black. Who really cares?
We don't care about blacks per se.
Blacks are kind of a tool for us.
So the up The Upper East Side is just fine.
You can go to Gucci. Nobody's holding Gucci's up.
So the point being that in San Francisco, the criminal is some nutcase who's on drugs, but harmless.
But the typical criminal in Chicago is like a gangbanger who does drive-by shootings on other gangs.
And so the San Francisco problem is a schizo-narcotics problem.
And the white liberal doesn't have the heart to tell that guy, listen, you need to be locked up.
But in Chicago, they do, except it's not happening where they are.
So the white liberal is kind of okay with it.
He goes, I'm now quoting Richard, upper class urbanites won't tolerate the Chicago criminal in their neighborhood due to fear.
So even the most soft-hearted liberal will support policies that keep violence and disorder segregated in certain areas.
Now, I think the reason all of this is interesting is because it kind of shows why the white liberal continues to vote Democratic both in Chicago and in San Francisco.
It's for different reasons.
In San Francisco, it's that when we have all these progressive policies, we're pro-gay, we're pro-this, we're pro-that.
Yeah, we have the annoyance of crime, but it's only an annoyance.
It's not really a threat, a serious threat to our lives and security.
In Chicago, it is, but guess what?
It's not in our neighborhood.
It's occurring in some black neighborhood or some barrio over there where the gang A is trying to shoot gang B and vice versa.
And it's kind of like, have it out, you You know, have it out, you thugs.
And we're not even going to worry too much about having the police over there.
The police probably don't want to go over there, but that's okay.
That's because those neighborhoods are segregated or at least insulated from the rest of Chicago where you can live life in a more normal fashion.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
There's a big conference coming up, jointly sponsored by the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society.
And they were scheduled to have a panel called...
Let's talk about sex, baby.
Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.
Now, anthropology is the study of anthropos.
What is anthropos?
Human beings.
And human beings are studied in their historical, their biological, their sociological...
That's the point of anthropology, to look at all the various dimensions of studying human beings.
And so, it seems very appropriate that you have a panel featuring anthropologists, biologists, experts, if you will, in sexuality and sex differences, talking about the fact that sex is a biologically irreducible category.
It's a fact. And yet, these two groups, the AAA, the Anthropological Association, and the CASCA, CASCA, the Canadian Anthropology Group, they canceled the panel.
Why? Because they say it affects, quote, the safety and dignity of our members.
You're like, wait a minute, you're having an academic panel discussion.
How does it affect the safety?
You know that you're dealing here with code words.
The safety means they don't want to trigger...
Apparently gay and trans activists in the audience.
That's what they mean by safety and dignity.
Even discussing sex differences supposedly violates the dignity of trans people.
And then they kind of come out of the closet, so to speak, and they say, So that's why they're canceling the conference.
You can't have a legitimate discussion with credentialed experts on a topic of legitimate anthropological relevance and interest because...
Trans people might get upset.
And while this is done in the name of science, you can see that what is going on is that the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian group are acting in a very unscientific and even an anti-scientific manner.
Now, there were some critics, some of whom were scheduled to be on the panel, who issued a statement basically saying, what is this?
How can we purport to be a scientific society, even a social science society, if we go around suppressing debate in this way?
If we tailor our agenda to the sensitivities and sort of trigger feelings of activist groups and give them a veto power over what we can even talk about and talk about in a scientific and responsible way?
How can it be Anti-science to talk about the science of sex differences.
So I think that this is a further indication of the way in which these professional societies have become invaded, infiltrated, polluted, corrupted.
And by corrupted, I don't even necessarily mean that they're ideologically swinging one way or the other.
I mean that they're standing foursquare against intellectual and academic values.
Of course, academic freedom, the right to be able to speak freely, but also the right to engage in scientific debate on disputed, maybe controversial, but nevertheless legitimate topics of anthropological interest and relevance.
So, this is the takeover of the institutions that we've heard a lot about.
And it's a real pity.
It used to be the case that there were certain disciplines that had kind of gone left, but that there were other disciplines that remained...
Kind of removed from politics.
So, anthropology being a really good example of it.
I mean, you would think about certain disciplines as not succumbing to the kind of ideological pressure that we see, for example, very commonly now in literature.
We see it in sociology.
But anthropology had maintained a certain kind of protective distance from all this.
But now it looks like, no, that the left is already kind of...
Put its big ugly footprints in here as well.
And they are going to practice the same kind of cancellation, the same kind of shutdown that they do in other fields, now in anthropology as well.
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A judge in New York has ruled that Donald Trump has engaged in fraud, in overvaluing his properties, when he went to the banks asking for loans and told them that he had assets that are worth X.
no, no, no, he doesn't have those assets.
He exaggerated the value of his assets.
Now, On the face of it, this is a strange thing for a judge to be getting into for the simple reason that the banks that Trump took loans from, the banks have assessors, they have evaluators, they have appraisers, they can look at what Trump's properties are worth and decide if they want to make the loans.
Moreover, Trump took the loans and guess what?
He paid the loans back. So the banks aren't complaining that they were defrauded or they were cheated in any way.
But even so, this judge takes it upon himself.
And by the way, there's no trial.
There's no jury. This is a guy who just decides, I'm going to evaluate the Trump properties myself.
And think of the incompetence of a judge to be able to do this, but he evidently takes it upon himself.
And we're going to focus on a single property, Mar-a-Lago, which according to this judge, Trump inflated the value of Mar-a-Lago because he says, the judge says, this is Judge Arthur N. Gorin.
I saw a picture of this guy.
You know, he looks like he's this antediluvian, you know, guy who looks like he's 300 years old.
But nevertheless, he rules that Mar-a-Lago is worth $18 million.
Now, you have to know something about Florida to realize that that is a laugh-out-loud number.
Debbie and I were in Florida in the Palm Beach area for filming.
And a friend of ours who had a home there said, you can stay in our house while you're doing the filming.
And this home was a three-bedroom home.
And Debbie looked up the home just so we could get a little sense of what it looked like and so on.
And then you get a sort of a Zillow value of it.
What was it, honey? $13.
It was $13 million.
Now, it was a great location right on the water, but guess what?
Mar-a-Lago is a great location right on the water.
Is it really possible for Mar-a-Lago to be worth $18 million?
Well, let's take, let's look, let's dive into this a little bit.
Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985.
1985. So that's 35 years ago.
For $10 million. If you just adjust that $10 million for inflation today, that would be Trump paying $28.5 million in 1985 in today's money.
So how can a property that you bought in 1985 that is a It's a magnificent property.
It's a historic property.
It's considered to be one of the most beautiful home properties in the United States.
It is right on the water.
If you just look it up and look at pictures on it, we had our premiere for 2,000 Meals at Mar-a-Lago.
It is the kind of property that looks like a massive and beautiful resort with a golf course.
And so...
So the valuation of Mar-a-Lago makes absolutely no sense.
Now, when real estate people decide value, they look at what are called comps.
A comp is a comparable.
So let's look at a property next door, a property down the street.
So there's one guy who very ingeniously looks at a property.
He says, down the road from Mar-a-Lago...
And the property is not even developed.
It's just land. But it's on the water, like Mar-a-Lago, and it's mostly trees.
I'm looking at a picture right now.
The asking price?
$150 million for this property.
No house, no resort, no golf course.
Mar-a-Lago is, in fact...
Let's look at this for a minute here.
Mar-a-Lago is, in fact, ten times the size of this property.
Ten times. Forbes magazine, which did an evaluation of Mar-a-Lago in 2022, so last year, Evaluated the property as being worth $350 million.
And even that's a big understatement because Florida property values, particularly South Florida, have been going crazy in the last couple of years as people are fleeing to Florida.
Better weather, better tax policies, better run state, and so on.
And so what is Mar-a-Lago valued at?
You can argue, is it worth $350 $50 million, $400 million, $500 million, $1 billion.
One thing you can be sure of, and I think even the left can't with a straight face say, Mar-a-Lago is worth $18 million.
That gives you an idea of how corrupt and wicked this judge is, because deep down, he cannot be so stupid that he wouldn't know this.
He does know it.
But he also knows he's in a political environment where he's expected to punish Trump and he will be applauded for punishing Trump.
And so he's trying to destroy Trump's businesses in New York, essentially saying, I'm going to pull the license of these businesses.
These businesses need to be shut down.
They're trying to run Trump out of New York and on just as fraudulent a pretext as all the other cases.
Guys, with the new movie coming out next month, this is a great time to check out and subscribe, if you want to, to my Locals channel.
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Welcome to my show!
She's now an activist, a political candidate.
She ran for Congress, came really close in California's 3rd Congressional District.
She's now active with church groups, community groups, homeless veterans.
Her website, Tamika Pack.
T-A-M-I-K-A-P-A-C dot org.
And you can follow her on X at Tamika G. Hamilton.
Tamika, welcome. Great to have you.
You know, we're moving into another election season coming up next year.
Yes. And you have a close ear to the ground as to what Republicans need to do to win, particularly in states that are blue states or purple states.
Let's talk about what Republicans are doing and what Republicans need to do differently.
Yeah, so right now, as you already know, and you talked about this numerous times about censorship online, but that doesn't mean that we can't work the ground.
And that's what we did in order to get 46% in a 21% registered Republican district.
And I also want to tell you, viewers, that without your support over the past, I don't know what, four years, I wouldn't have gotten as far as I... I wouldn't have gotten that far.
you know, what people like you have done for me and helping me raise money coming out here, not just doing all the things that are necessary in order when elections meet that people with high profiles get involved.
When it comes to that groundwork, you gotta go door to door.
I stress this so much because again, Democrats are waiting for Republicans, but they don't see them.
And so we prove that it's time and that the time is right, but you actually have to put that work in.
And Democrats are working overtime in order to get the vote, and we have to match the same energy.
I mean, I always have the feeling, Tamika, that the national GOP is, like, not doing its part.
Not only is it not matching the Democrats, but they're not even doing sort of the basics.
And I think you've made the point that when you have a candidate that isn't already a multimillionaire, I mean, it's easy for them if somebody's a multimillionaire because then they go, well, gee, put your own money into the campaign.
But if it's somebody like you and you're like, I'm a good candidate, I'm making headway with Democrats, I'm the kind of candidate that the The RNC should be fully behind.
Number one, what's going on over there?
And number two, is it possible to make it without those guys?
It's possible to make it if we do it together.
I mean, you know that I started with $100 and I went on to raise $1.6 million, but that was on my own.
You know, when you lose by that small margin that I lost by, it's because the Calvary didn't step in in those times.
And you were with me when I read in 2020 and 2022 were really hard times for Republicans in general.
So... But it can be done.
We've proven it can be done, even here in California.
And if you go look at races and people go look at the history of Republicans, especially minority Republicans, I got closer than any Republican, especially minority Republican, in a long time when it comes to a brand new candidate.
You know, all the odds against me, right?
But with people like you, I'm always asking for us to come together because we can't wait on the RNC. I tell people all the time, you cannot wait for the RNC. Now, what is your strategy, Tamika?
Let's just say you go door to door, the door opens, it's a white suburban mom, let's say, but this is somebody who's been seeing through the national media, the mainstream media, oh, Republicans are extremists, they're trying to take away your rights, they're trying to establish a police state, an authoritarian government in the country.
How do you get through to somebody like that when they're getting information that is coming from the media?
You know, first thing I do is introduce myself and I talk about where I come from.
I talk about, you know, what's happening in our state and if our lives are any better.
You know, then cut some time down the line after a couple of minutes, we get to the point of, you know, what party you're in.
And then once it happens, you know, if they accept it and move on to the next question or whatever, you know, then we may progress.
And obviously, you're going to have some moments where people are like, oh, my God, no, I don't want to vote for Republican.
But then I go back to like who I am.
You know, because they'll try to bring up Trump or like January 6th.
And I just moved past that.
You know, I'm not Donald Trump, right?
For example, if people want to talk about Donald Trump, I'm just, you know, I'm just Tamika and I want to serve your community.
And so we have to get to that point.
And I think that... And I pray that Republicans understand it's not a negative against, you know, the former president.
It's just that we ought to win elections on the ground.
And so that's how you have to move past it.
Like, look, just focus on me.
Focus where we're at, especially here in California.
Highest crime, highest homelessness.
People are scared to even go to the gas stations.
That can't be real.
Parents are losing when it comes to public schools.
That should not be our reality.
And so we got to put the pressure on Democrats by looking at Republicans versus the same old status quo with Democrats.
And that's how I get them to vote for me.
I've had people that had Democrats' sides in their yard, take them out and put mine in after they met me.
So it can't be done.
I mean, I think what you're saying, Tamika, is that the national controversies aside, that the fact that the Democrats are doing a horrible job on key issues that matter to people, right?
Their gas prices, the food prices, the level of safety that you can count on in the community, some of the stuff that's going on with extremism in the schools— That if Republicans just say, listen, we're going to provide a reasonable alternative to this, reasonable levels of taxation, we're going to make sure that the bad guys get put away, we're going to have a fair but strong system of justice, you're saying that is a winning message and people will listen to it if it's delivered by somebody who comes from the community.
Yes, yes. If it comes from a community, it will work.
And then again, we have to go back to the fact that Republicans have to get the activism bug in them.
They have, like, I'll give an example.
I lost by 29,000 votes and 39,000 Republicans stayed home.
And again, in a year where you would think, oh my gosh, we've got to do something.
It's getting bad out here. And then there's a lot of Republicans that I've talked to over the years that think that, oh, well, Donald Trump just has them in the back.
I didn't go out to vote. Or, you know, they are expecting a phone call.
It's like we have to teach them that, like Democrats, they don't wait on the DNC to do anything.
They activate on their own.
Yeah, so you're saying it's ultimately the Republicans need to mobilize themselves and recognize the urgency of the situation, right?
I mean, California is in bad enough shape and has basically become a one-party state.
And that's, I think, what the Democrats want to do to the whole country if we don't wake up.
Oh my gosh, absolutely.
And then here's the other part.
It's like, here on the ground, we're winning.
One of my good friends, Josh Hoover, he won against a Democrat that was a 12-year incumbent, and he won by 800 votes in the legislature for the assembly.
So we have 18 seats right now.
That's all we have. But we need nine in order to start having some say in the legislature.
But it's possible, again, if you work the ground.
So when people say California's lost, I can understand it from the vantage point.
But when you're looking at the ground and some of these blue areas where there's a lot of Republicans elected, those Republicans can in turn help elect congressional seats.
So if we all work together, we can't do this.
We can't continue to do this one man for himself type of idea.
And that's what I've been seeing.
But we're turning the tide.
We just need more help.
Guys, check out Tamika Hamilton.
You can follow her on x at Tamika G. Hamilton.
Her website, check it out.
Tamika, T-A-M-I-K-A, pack.org.
Tamika, always a pleasure to have you on the show.
Same. Thank you so much, Dinesh.
And thank you, Debbie. I appreciate your flexibility.
I'm now in the second part, the second section of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
His chapter is titled, The History of Our Sewage Disposal System.
Wow. Now he's not talking about an actual sewage disposal system.
He's talking about a system for disposing of human sewage.
Sewage. Human beings treated as if they are waste material.
They are there to be gotten rid of.
The way you deal with it is you ship them off to the prison camps, otherwise collectively known as the gulag.
Now, here's Solzhenitsyn.
He starts off by addressing a debate that seems internal to Russia.
Evidently, there are a lot of Russians writing about the fact, and they're doing this now after the end of Stalin.
Stalin has already been dead.
He's been replaced by Khrushchev.
Khrushchev has done a denunciation of Stalin, so there's some freedom to talk about how bad things were under Stalin.
Yes, 1937 was a horrible year.
A lot of people got thrown into the Gulag.
And Solzhenitsyn is writing about this, and here's how he deals with it.
He goes... Although I don't have statistics on this, I'm not afraid of erring, making a mistake, when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only one nor even the main one, but only one, perhaps, of the three biggest waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting.
So Solzhenitsyn is saying, yeah, there's a lot of people talking about 1937, 1938, but guess what?
That was just one wave.
The gulag is made up of people who were deposited there in many waves.
Let's talk about those waves.
So here's Solzhenitsyn.
Before it came the wave of 1929 and 1930, which drove 15 million peasants, perhaps even more.
Out into the taiga and the tundra.
And then, says Solzhenitsyn, So, the peasants are arrested kind of in groups.
The local village communist committee goes, let's get all these guys, and they get rounded up.
No interrogations, no trials, just straight to the gulag.
That's it. This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it.
It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience." Solzhenitsyn is basically saying, look, there are victims and there are victims.
And when you get the peasants, they don't talk.
They're not literary people.
They don't keep secret diaries like me, Solzhenitsyn.
He goes, they just suffer.
And so their suffering is unrecorded.
History doesn't really mourn it.
In fact, people don't even know what happened.
Let's continue. And after it, meaning after the wave of 1937-38, there was the wave of 1944-1946 when they dumped whole nations down the sewer pipes, not to mention millions and millions of others who, because of us, had been prisoners of war or carried off to Germany and subsequently repatriated.
So, Solzhenitsyn is saying World War II is now over, and guess what?
You've got all these captive people, put them in the gulag as well!
So, the very success of Solzhenitsyn, fighting, by the way, on the side of the Red Army, and capturing people, and those guys get sent off then to the gulag as well.
So, there are huge waves, one upon another.
And he says, but in this wave, too, the people were of the simpler kind, and they wrote no memoirs.
So that's why he's saying, hey, Russians, if you don't know about these things I'm telling you about, that's because they were peasants.
That's because they were war captives.
They didn't keep a record.
He goes, but the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the archipelago people of position, people with a party past.
Yes, educated people.
And he says, and a lot of them had pen in hand.
So, this is when you capture the intellectual types, they're always going to say, I've got to write about this.
I need to record it.
And today, they're all writing, speaking, remembering, 1937, a whole Volga of people's grief.
What's the Volga? It's a river in Russia.
So, this massive river of grief.
And he goes, but it's not because they were the only people who were targeted.
It's because they are the only literate people who have the capacity to write about it.
And then he goes on to say, but just say 1937 to a Crimean, Tatar, a Chechen, and he'll shrug his shoulders.
And he goes on to say, and if sticklers for style and geography should accuse me of having omitted some Russian rivers and not...
And of not yet having named some of the waves, just give me enough paper.
There were enough waves to use up the names of all the rivers in Russia.
So Solzhenitsyn is using an extended metaphor.
Wave number one is like the Volga.
Wave number two is like the Og.
He's naming river upon river and he's going, listen, I may have skipped some rivers, but that's not because there weren't more waves.
He goes, if I had enough paper to write, I would list all the waves.
It's wave upon wave upon wave.
It's more waves than would cover all the rivers of Russia.
So this is the massive extent of the Gulag Archipelago.
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