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Sept. 29, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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GOP DERBY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep675
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Coming up, I'll expound what an incident at the Claremont University Philosophy Department tells us about the fate of philosophy in academia.
Debbie joins me for our Friday roundup.
We'll talk about the GOP horse race, the depth of Biden family corruption, how to bring the cartels to heel, the misbehavior of a former January 6th prosecutor, and whether X is really a free speech platform.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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It's Friday and on Friday I sometimes step back from the issues of the week and try to take stock of things that might seem small by themselves but often reflect something that is broader or bigger.
And I spotted this story that refers to Claremont Graduate University.
This is a prestigious graduate school and In Claremont, California.
So in Orange County, the Orange County area.
And Claremont Graduate University had a distinguished program in political philosophy.
So political philosophy is the marriage between politics and philosophy.
It is philosophy, but philosophy of a particular kind.
Normally, philosophy asks very broad questions like, what is truth?
How do I know something is true?
But a political philosophy takes the part of those questions that pertain to politics.
So it looks at things like, how should a society be organized?
What is the meaning of justice in a political sense?
Not just in an individual sense, but in a society.
And so political philosophy, and you think of political philosophers like Locke and Hobbes and Rousseau, Machiavelli, these would be some of the modern political philosophers.
Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle were both philosophers proper.
They wrote about big questions about the meaning of truth and so on, but they also wrote about political philosophy.
Aristotle has a book called The Politics, which is probably the founding work of political philosophy, although Some people would say it's obviously Plato's Republic, because what is Plato's Republic?
It is essentially a philosophical account of what a good community, a polis, a good society might look like.
All right, so back to Claremont Graduate University.
They're shutting down their program in political philosophy.
Now, I happen to know some of the people who are in this program, including one of my mentors from my younger years, a very bright political philosopher named Charles Kessler.
Now, Charles Kessler was a young man in his 30s when I first studied with him at Claremont.
This was right after I graduated from Dartmouth.
I signed up for a program called the Publius Fellowship in Claremont, California.
I studied with Charles.
And Charles himself was a student of the great Harvard scholar Harvey Mansfield.
And Charles himself went to Harvard.
In any event, he's a very eminent teacher.
And he, along with a group of other professors, Mark Blitz, James Nichols, they're teaching in the Claremont Graduate University Philosophy Department.
And then without warning and with no explanation, the administration decides we're closing down the program.
Now, when low and disgraceful people do these kinds of ideologically motivated things, they give stupid reasons.
And so, sure enough, when they finally call in Charles Kessler, they say, well, you know, we...
We made the decision to do this because the graduate school was too reliant on professors who were teaching in the undergraduate school.
What? You have a graduate school.
You've got undergraduate professors who are being paid by the undergraduate school.
So they're not even a cost on the graduate school.
But the graduate school is acting like it's somehow beneath them to have professors from the undergraduate school.
Now, this would make sense if there was some difference in credentials or degrees.
But no, the professors in the undergraduate school are fully credentialed.
They have PhDs.
They've got publication records.
In fact, these scholars are quite eminent in their field.
So they're perfectly competent and capable, and they've been doing it.
They've been producing. The Claremont Graduate University had one of the top political philosophy departments, small, but nevertheless prestigious and distinguished.
And so there's no financial explanation for why this should be done.
And the second thing is it was done kind of precipitously.
And by that I mean they shut down the department and the students who are in it are sort of stranded.
Because it's not as if normally when you shut down a department or you shut down a university, you're like, listen, I'm going to shut it down in two years because I'm going to make sure that all the students who are in the program now can all graduate.
I won't admit new students.
So Claremont Graduate University had stopped admitting new students two years ago, and the professors were sort of like, what's going on here?
But now, boom, they're like, you know what?
We don't really care about the students who are here now.
We're just going to shut this down.
And... And the reason of it, I think, is you're tempted to say it is political in the narrow sense, which is to say, oh, gee, you know, a couple of these professors might be Republicans.
One might even be a Trump supporter.
So let's eradicate them from academia.
It's actually not quite as crude as that.
As Professor Nichols, who's one of the guys who was involved in this, says, you know, They don't believe in political philosophy or the kind of approach we take.
They think it's old-fashioned, unscientific, not on the cutting edge.
So, political philosophy in its foundational sense was about asking basic questions about how society should be organized.
And that's the approach taken right here at Claremont.
But apparently the deans think, well, that's not really cool.
What's cool is to talk about things like equity, about the queer theory approach to organizing a society.
So that is the sort of cutting edge.
And if you're not going to be on the cutting edge, well, we don't want to have anything to do with you at all.
And what this means is that political philosophy, in its original or classic sense...
Asking fundamental questions about human nature and the kind of society in which human nature flourishes best suddenly have no place at Claremont Graduate University.
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Debbie and I are here for our Friday Roundup, and we usually go over the topics the same morning or the previous day.
And Debbie's like, should we talk about the shutdown?
And I'm like, shutdown?
What shutdown? Yeah, I have seen news reports that they're looming shutdown.
The White House is getting ready to shut down.
Frankly, no one's going to notice.
Partly because whatever government does, they do badly.
And there are thousands of people who do, and I'm not kidding, nothing at all.
So I'm like, let's just go into our postmortem on the GOP. Well, I won't say it's the GOP candidates debate because it's missing Trump, and very deliberately so.
But... But what was your take?
I mean, there was a raucous atmosphere.
Almost like these guys are going at each other.
And yet, everyone is aware of the...
You can call him the elephant in the room, but the elephant not in the room.
No, the elephant was in the room. Chris Christie.
Oh, Chris. I'm sorry.
Oh, my God. That's right. I can't believe I just said that.
That's very... Not only is this very unlike Debbie, but this is very like Debbie to, like, get on me for saying, why do you say that to Nish?
I always have to stop him.
You are a fat-a-phobe.
Oh, my God. But Chris Christie's been doling it out as well.
And here's the thing, you know, this name-calling, right?
But, you know, Chris Christie did call Trump Donald Duck, right?
But to be fair...
Trump has called Chris Christie names as well.
So the two of them are kind of going at it.
Well, but what I don't get with Christie is not that.
It's just that what is the point of his candidacy, right?
So the point of his candidacy appears to be he is going to be the attack dog against Trump.
Because I think it's fair to say that the other candidates are not...
They may be critical of Trump.
DeSantis is critical of Trump.
But that's not the raison d'etre of their candidacy.
Yeah, yeah. With Chris Christie, he's like, I have no chance to win, but I'm going to play the approved MSNBC role.
I wonder if Chris Christie is kind of lining himself up to run for Senate in New Jersey.
And so that's why he wanted to come out, you know, and kind of be...
Everybody had forgotten who he was.
I mean, he was kind of a nobody, right?
After Obama. Yeah. Come to think of it, there's a Menendez seat that might be getting pretty vulnerable.
Exactly. So I think he might have a better chance running in that seat.
Well, obviously.
He has like 2% of the vote here.
So there's no way he's going to do that.
Let's switch to two people who I think are similar.
And that is Nikki Haley and Mike Pence.
Now, even though they're similar...
I thought Nikki Haley was actually much more sharp and came across at times as presidential.
Now at other times she got into a big squabble with Ramaswamy.
At other times she seemed to be in a sniping match.
I agree. But you know, the two of them that you just mentioned, they seem to have this thing about populism.
They bring it up pretty much at every debate.
They say Trump and DeSantis and Ramoswamy are populists versus they are true conservatives.
So they're putting a line between conservatism and populism.
And I just want to say to Nikki Haley and maybe Mike Pence, That didn't work in 2008 and 2012 when we had conservatives running, well, you know.
Yeah, you're talking about conservatives in the old sense, a kind of operational conservatives.
Because think about it, McCain wasn't that conservative philosophically and neither was Romney.
But they were conservative in the stodgy sense that they just echoed slogans.
They didn't want to rock the boat.
They were, quote, men of principle.
No, I can't do what the Democrats are doing because I'm above that.
And you're saying that formula has been tried.
That has been tried and it failed because you had a populist Obama come in office.
And he was super, well, popular.
And he said the right things to the people that were following him.
He had a huge cult following.
And the only person that came close to that was Donald Trump.
I mean, I don't understand how you can run in a democracy and have something against...
Unless you define populism in a narrow sense, and there are people who do that, populism is nothing more than attending to the sentiments of the public.
Of the people. Right? And if you're trying to be a leader, true, you need to outline an agenda, but if you don't take into account not just the ideas and interests, but the feelings of people and speak to that, why are you even...
Right. Participating in democratic politics.
Exactly. And why are you saying it's a bad thing?
I don't understand why they're saying it's a bad thing.
I think it's a really good thing.
And the other thing that I also kind of balk every time I hear someone say is their...
Bashing it on social media platforms.
Like, for example, Nikki Haley got after Ramoswami for liking TikTok or talking about TikTok.
She's like, oh, how could you possibly do that?
Are you for China? You know, this is horrible.
They're spying on us, blah, blah, blah.
But what she doesn't seem to understand is that there are a lot of kids, and I say kids meaning in their 20s, like my own daughter, Juliana, who She gets her news from TikTok.
She lives on TikTok.
So why not get on TikTok and have them see things that are perhaps a little different than they thought?
Maybe they won't think that Republicans are square and old-fashioned.
I mean, I think this was Vivek's point.
He's not praising this platform.
He recognizes there may be problems with it, but he also recognizes it is a widely used platform and the widely used platform for young people.
And so his point is, I think his broader point is we need to take our message and get it to people who don't traditionally hear it and who can really disagree with that.
Exactly. We're good to go.
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We're continuing our discussion of the GOP candidates debate.
What did you make of DeSantis, but specifically DeSantis, criticizing Trump, as some of the others did as well, for not being there?
I mean, this was the basis of Christie saying he's Donald Duck, the idea being, I guess, he's ducking the debate.
And then Christie goes, you know, I bet he's listening to it right now.
Now, We're good to go.
Well, you're asking someone that thinks that nobody should be above anyone else, right?
So I do think Trump should be in debates.
I do. He has a lot of fans and people that don't care, but I want to hear what he has to say against someone else in the Republican Party.
That's what the primary is all about.
It's not, I'm the declared winner, therefore I don't need to be in a debate.
So... So for that reason, I think that Trump should be.
I think DeSantis was right saying that he should have been there.
Now, again, though, Trump is 30 points ahead.
And I mean, that may be a good call on his part, because what if he says something that people go, oh, my gosh, and then his poll numbers will go down?
I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think Trump is right, and here's why.
Because, look, I mean, in a way, you're a more traditional Republican than I am.
And I think your point, which I don't disagree with under normal circumstances, is, hey, you know, we're all Republicans, and we're in the field, we're trying to get the best one, and you've got to play by the rules.
And these are the rules.
You get on the stage, Reagan got on the stage with all the other candidates, even though Reagan was the frontrunner.
And you kind of go through the ritual.
I think that we are not in normal times.
And I think that Trump's view of this is, number one, I should be in the White House right now.
I was cheated at the 2020 election.
That is the starting point for Trump.
And Trump's point is that given that...
I think I'm the one who deserves to be to get the shot this time.
So for all these other guys, I mean, I've been trying to understand, for example, Trump's real disdain for DeSantis.
And I think part of it is just not that you're a bad candidate, but like, why now?
It's like don't you understand that I was cheated the last time you were a MAGA guy?
I don't think he does. I think that's part of the problem.
All of these people that are on stage I don't know about Ramaswamy. I don't know how he feels about the election But they all ignore the big fat elephant in the room and that is the election, right?
They ignore it. They don't talk about it as you say yesterday. They don't talk about the fact that the deep state is actually I think that's part of the problem. Making sure that Trump doesn't run again.
They're trying to do everything in their power to stop him.
They don't talk about that.
And January 6th.
And January 6th. A huge issue in the Republican Party.
They don't talk about that at all. Exactly.
It's almost like this didn't even happen.
Yeah. And I think this really is Republican denialism.
And that could very well be why Trump is 30 points ahead.
Because we all get it.
We all understand what happened.
And they do not.
I think that is the reason, by the way.
I think it's that he is the face of the persecution of the police state.
And so people naturally, I mean, there's a sense of justice and also of indignation that rallies to the guy who's getting shafted in this way.
And you're like, no, we need to create a...
So I think these candidates would actually do better if they did...
If they talked about it. And if they did the same thing.
Exactly. In fact, a very clever argument to make for a DeSantis, for a Rama Swami B. Listen...
Ironically, because Trump is in the crosshairs of the police state, there needs to be somebody who is not Trump that's going to rush to his defense, make sure that all of this is dismantled, takes on the police state, but does it from a sideways angle.
It's almost like they're pointing their gun at Trump, we're pointing our gun at you.
Right, right. But no one's even thought of this.
No one's gone in this direction.
This is the kind of unoccupied territory.
They don't want to go in this direction because the minute they go in this direction, they're going to call them conspiracy theorists.
And they're going to discredit them.
So what you're saying then is that they're more terrified by the media than they are really...
Terrified of the Republican electorate that's going to make a decision over who's going to become the candidate.
And really, they should be concentrating on beating this weirdo, you know, senile, corrupt old man who actually, listen, I got a big chuckle out of this one when I saw this in the news the other day.
He praises the wrong group during a speech at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus annual gala.
This man doesn't know the difference between a Latino and a Black.
I know. He praises the Black Caucus.
This is fantastic.
He talks about all these values.
The Congressional Black Caucus embodies all those values.
And then looking at it, there were a bunch of Hispanics.
Yeah, I mean... But I mean, it's part of a pattern, right?
It is part of a pattern. He was apparently with Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil.
And after he finished, he shakes the hand of the guy next to Lula.
And he forgets about Lula.
And even Lula sort of like...
Throws his hand as if to say, this is the way the guy is and just walks off.
And then more recently, also his comment that African-American and Hispanics lack high school diplomas.
We're fighting for people who don't have high school diplomas like blacks and Hispanics.
As if blacks and Hispanics all lack an education.
Forget about college educated.
There are no high school educated people.
Blacks and Hispanics. Yeah, no, he is.
And you know, he did say something about, or was it Jill Biden that talked about how she likes Hispanics because she likes tacos?
Remember that? I mean, these people pander.
They live in a world of stereotypes and pandering.
And you would just hope that blacks and Hispanics increasingly look at this and go, we recognize this for what it is.
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The border crisis continues and the numbers when you add them up through the Biden years are just staggering.
We're talking now about millions of people just flowing across the border, destroying any concept of national sovereignty.
And, and all of this aided and assisted by the cartels.
And this is a topic that you, this is your topic, really, because I think you can't believe that these cartels are operating with a free hand, in a sense, although I think it would be wrong to say the Biden administration is Openly or directly conspiring with them.
It is working in coordination with them.
It recognizes that the cartels are bringing a lot of the illegals to the border.
So the political objectives of the Biden regime are being achieved in tandem with the cartels.
They are. They are. And I think the problem also stems in the fact that we put too much trust in the Mexican government to stop this.
I don't know Obrador.
I don't know his policies.
I don't know anything about him, really.
But I'm wondering if he, too, is a victim of the cartels in that they have a lot of influence in his administration.
Because think about it.
I mean, if he goes against the cartels, don't you think that his life would be in danger?
Well, there's not only that, but I mean, Mexico is a second world country and these cartels are immensely rich.
So think of the influence that they can buy in critical areas of Mexico.
So if they decide to mobilize against you, think of the resources they could bring against them.
So I think the Mexican governments, whether they are from one party or the other, make a certain peace with the cartels.
They have to. They have to, I guess, live alongside them because they're so powerful.
They encompass everything.
The economics, everything.
They take over banks.
They take over lodging.
They take over restaurants.
They take over companies, corporations.
They're everywhere.
And not only is it bad enough that they terrorize their own citizens and that Mexicans go missing every day because they're killed by these people, but they're also in cahoots with China on the drug trade and the drug trafficking that happens and the fentanyl that is brought over.
So, what ends up happening is they get, I don't know what you call it, I think it's a compound that is like a precursor to...
The raw material basically.
The raw material to fentanyl.
They get it from China, they make the fentanyl in Mexico and then they transport it to the United States.
And this is one of the biggest disasters in America right now, the fentanyl crisis.
I mean, the group that is affected by all this is not a politically influential group.
It's often small-town people, people in working-class communities.
But you were telling me tens of thousands of people have had their lives destroyed by this.
It is a massive problem in the country.
So families wrecked, communities wrecked.
And yet politicians, if they give...
Lip service to it.
That's a lot on their part.
But they're not doing anything in an aggressive way.
And that's your point. There are all kinds of things that can be done.
One simple declaration that the cartels are terrorist organizations a la ISIS and al-Qaeda.
And in fact, they use the same, didn't you say they use the same assassination techniques?
They do. They do use this and they look very similar.
I was telling you that yesterday I was looking at some articles and there's a town that borders Guatemala and apparently one cartel group fought another cartel group that was terrorizing that town and those citizens came out and gave them a parade.
A parade for the winning cartel.
I mean, how ludicrous is that, right?
And so they're standing there cheering them on and they're in these trucks, these open, you know, bed trucks with their machine guns and everything and their heads covered up.
They looked identical to the ISIS terrorists that, you know, that do the same thing in their towns, right?
You can't even tell the difference between the two.
They even look the same. They terrorize people.
I don't understand how you can't name them a terrorist organization when that's what they do.
Not only do they terrorize their own citizens, as I just said.
They kill so many.
They kidnap and murder daily.
I mean, this is just horrific.
But... They're also killing our citizens via the fentanyl.
And so for those reasons, I just don't understand what is wrong with the Republicans that actually stand for something, right?
I understand why the Democrats don't care.
Yeah, the Democrats don't care because if they went and disrupted the cartels, the effectiveness of the cartels in transporting illegals to the border would be diminished.
So when they say terrorism, they don't mean terrorism.
They're not after terrorists.
They're after us.
They're after the political opposition.
They're against school board moms.
They're against pro-life activists.
They're against conservatives. By the way, all these themes in police state.
But we have a regime that uses words that have no meaning.
Terrorist doesn't mean terrorist.
Terrorist means the people who are going against us.
Disinformation has no meaning.
Disinformation means people who are disputing the lies that we want to put out.
That's really the true meaning of disinformation in today's lexicon.
So this is a real problem.
These are terrorists, but they will never, at least not by the Biden regime, be designated as such.
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Feel the difference. There's a very interesting story out of Florida.
I was telling Debbie about it.
About a January 6th federal prosecutor who himself is now involved in a serious criminal incident.
And the way I found out about it is one of the January 6th defendants, in fact this guy, his Twitter handle on X is called Lectern Leader.
He goes, meet the guy who prosecuted me in Tampa for walking in a building on January 6th.
My crimes were so egregious, he's being sarcastic, that he demanded I wear an ankle monitor, be drug trusted at random, surrender my passport, be restricted to middle district of Florida, and given a nightly curfew, all for walking into a building, doing no other harm, not violent, etc. Who is this guy?
Well, the prosecutor is this guy named Patrick Douglas Scruggs, who worked for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa.
Well, guess what? This guy is now in a massive road rage incident, and I won't go into all the details, but let's just say he faces charges of aggravated battery, aggravated assault, and armed burglary.
So what happens is apparently some guy ran into this guy's car.
He ran into the car kind of understandably.
He was trying to avoid something else.
He hits this guy's car. This guy jumps out of the car with a knife and begins stabbing that guy.
Yeah. I mean, I can understand.
He likes his car. But to go to this extent and to engage in this kind of insane and crazy behavior is totally out of control.
Now, the interesting thing is, and we're going to have to watch this carefully, this is a guy who's been protected by the government, works for the government.
So, let's see what kind of treatment he gets.
Because, again, I think what the lectern leader, January 6th guy, is trying to say is, okay, well, let's apply some doctrine of proportionality.
I walk in the Capitol. I'm getting this kind of harsh treatment by the government.
This guy deserves ten times as much.
Oh, a lot more.
A lot more. But this just kind of goes to show you how ridiculous, even just on the face of it, how ridiculous it is that these people got put through the ringer like this, you know, when they really didn't deserve it.
I mean, my original position on all this was that there are non-violent guys, and there are violent guys, and the violent guys should have known better.
They did break the law. They should be held accountable.
That's actually not my position now, because when I see the egregious over-prosecution, when I see the outrageous prejudice on the part of judges, the bias on the part of juries, I mean, it's a massive civil rights violation of All the January 6th defendants.
And I'm talking about the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys.
It doesn't matter who it is.
I think all of them should be exonerated.
All of them should be pardoned.
All of them should be set free, no matter what they did.
Why? Not because all of them didn't do something wrong.
But when you do something wrong and the government violates your civil rights in such a fundamental way, too bad.
The government shouldn't do that.
The government should treat you...
As in a normal fashion and give you due process of law, and then if you're convicted according to a legitimate process, fine, you deserve the punishment that you get.
But this is not a legitimate process.
I think that's your point. Yeah, that's my point. We're coming to see, these are kangaroo courts, these are...
And you know, the interesting thing is, do any of the candidates, the GOP candidates, ever talk about this?
Never. Do they ever say that they're going to, when they're in office, going to pardon all of these January 6th defendants?
Do they ever mention that? No.
If asked about it, some of them will say that they will take things on a case-by-case basis and so on.
But I do not think that this issue is front and center.
And I think our point is it should be.
Why? Because these guys, look, they're not the only political prisoners in the United States.
I was about to say that they are, but it occurred to me, no, no, I can actually name people in other walks of life who have been targeted and prosecuted, people who have been involved.
We know, for example, people involved in pro-life activism.
One of them, a friend of ours who's in the movie, is facing 15 years in prison.
This is our friend Bevelyn.
But the January 6th political prisoners are the poster face, the poster boys of being political prisoners.
And I was thinking historically, have we had political prisoners in America?
Now, we have had some in wartime.
I mean, you could say arguably some of the Japanese Americans interned, and there were a lot of people interned because they opposed World War I. But that was wartime.
We actually know that civil liberties do get suspended in wartime.
But have we had political prisoners in peacetime?
And there you're much more hard-pressed to say, I mean, you could find probably regionally here and there where they went after this guy or that guy, or maybe even to some degree, blacks lived in a kind of police state in certainly parts of the Deep South.
But on a national scale, to have the organs of the federal government go after and hunt down people like this, I don't think there's any precedent for this.
This is a... An event of historic importance, but not for the reason the left says.
The left says, oh, historic importance, never before, you know, not since the Civil War was an effort to overthrow an election.
No, this was not an effort to do that at all.
This was an event that was manipulated and twisted, if it wasn't orchestrated in the first place.
Exactly. But done in a manner to criminalize political dissent and take people who are raising legitimate questions of the 2020 election and lock them up.
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Get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. Twitter is X. X is the platform, formerly known as Twitter.
Is X really a free speech platform?
Now, Elon Musk bought the platform with the intention, I think the good intention, to create a free speech platform.
And I think he thinks it is.
Recently, in fact, when Russell Brand said, we've got to fight for free speech, and then Russell Brand went on to say, you've got to follow my podcast on Rumble.
And Russell Brand did imply that Rumble is the free speech platform, and Rumble has been outstanding in protecting free speech.
By the way, if you don't have a Rumble account, you should go make one.
This is a platform we should encourage.
And Debbie and I have, for years now, tried to help build Rumble.
As have Dan Bongino and others.
But Elon Musk basically goes, wait a minute, why is he saying that Rumble is a free speech platform?
What about X? So now I come back to what about X, and your experience, which we talk about, clearly shows that X is not, at least not yet, and certainly not comprehensively, a free speech platform.
Well, as you know, back when I was conservative Latina on Twitter, I had about maybe 12,000 or so followers.
I thought that was a really good number, right?
I would tweet things and I would get thousands of likes, thousands of retweets.
I was making an impact, right?
And then through the years, obviously, after we got married and everything, my Twitter grew.
Before the election, before the 2020 election, I had about 130,000 or so followers.
And I was getting really good traction, really good.
After January 6th, the day after January 6th, so January 7th, I lost about 30,000 followers, maybe closer to 40,000 followers, just overnight.
I mean, just immediately.
And I thought, okay, that's really strange, right?
But, you know, I chalked it up as people are fed up with Twitter.
Or they're banning people left and right.
Or they're banning them or they've left, right?
Right. But I thought, well, you know, this is just the way it is.
And I would tweet something and I would get like three likes, four likes.
And I was like, this is so weird.
Is anybody seeing my tweets?
So anyway, after Elon came in and bought Twitter, I thought, okay, great.
Now my tweets are going to get traction again.
I'm going to get a good following again.
Well, it just so happens that every time I gain followers, the next day, I lose more than I gained.
And every time I tweet something, sometimes I think I tweet something really good, really cool, I get like three likes.
More tweets, retweets.
I mean, it also used to be I would share your content and you would get a bunch of new followers and this was a natural upward trajectory.
Exactly. And like when we do our segments, right, you do tag me.
I don't get any new followers at all.
And in fact, even when you retweet some of my stuff, I get a little bit better traction, but not really like I used to.
So I'm wondering now, is Debbie's experience unique?
Because obviously, this is not a segment just about her experience.
So interestingly, I start scouring through Twitter and I notice that there are a number of people A lot of people.
And she will use a word like innocence.
I mean, a very simple word, right?
Innocence of children. And then she will post the same tweet, but she will put an asterisk for all the vowels.
So it hides the word innocence, but it's the same word.
And she says that whenever I use the word innocence, that tweet is immediately demonetized.
In other words, they won't run any ads because they are searching for certain keywords.
But we're not talking about words.
These are not outlandish words.
These are simple, straightforward words.
But they've all been programmed algorithmically into X. And think of it.
This is our free speech platform.
But evidently, it's got all these code words that say that if you use certain terms, they select you out and they cut you off from access to advertising.
Now, again, you may think, well, why do you need to be?
Who cares? But no, not for you, but for other creators, it's important to be monetized as part of the way they make a living.
They create a lot of content.
So this is not an important thing for us, but I can see why it's important.
It's a deterrent to creators.
Twitter, make sure you stay safe.
Don't say anything about the innocence of children because that's taboo.
Well, I mean, I can't think of a more benign thing than singing America the Beautiful.
Oh my gosh, yes. And on my account, on my Twitter account.
Read the warning.
Yeah, so I have to go to Twitter here.
But basically, you know, I have the little video of me singing the America the Beautiful for Trump card.
And basically, this is what it says.
It says, we put a warning...
We put a warning on this post because it might have sensitive content.
This is the national anthem.
The national anthem. No, I'm sorry.
It's America the Beautiful.
I'm sorry. America the Beautiful. Yeah, I had a blast singing this beautiful arrangement of America the Beautiful by Brian Miller, the Budapest Scoring Orchestra, in our latest documentary, Trump Card, out on demand.
This is back when Trump Card was being played.
And they put a warning label.
Okay. As if it's some sort of dangerous content that you need.
But you know what, though? That's actually when my, I guess, my censorship started.
Oh. It was right then.
And it has continued.
Sorry, Elon, but...
It all began with that scary Nazi song, America the Beautiful.
I'm in Chapter 2 of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
We're talking about a chapter called The History of Our Sewage Disposal System.
And Solzhenitsyn is describing how people get targeted for arrest by the group that he calls the organs.
And the organs here are the organs of the Soviet state.
Now it's worth noting here that in Soviet times, the police state was entirely run in a centralized fashion.
The economy was directed by the government.
The government owned, in a sense, everything.
The media was an extension of the government.
And this is a little different from the police state that we are seeing emerging in the United States.
Our police state is a hybrid.
It's an octopus. Part of it is a deep state, but I don't like that term very much because it's a little misleading.
When people say the deep state, they mean people who are behind closed doors, making decisions in secret.
And this can sometimes give rise to unnecessary conspiracy theories because a lot of the police state is out in the open.
I mean, hey, all you have to do is go to the Google YouTube guidelines and it tells you right there that if you do these things, you will be censored.
you will be deplatformed, your channel may be shut down. If you go against them, not just on COVID, not just on election fraud, but on abortion, on climate change, on the trans, there's a whole bunch of issues. So this is the approved vocabulary and if you deviate from it, then you are a bad guy and we need to go after you. But all of this is like I say is out in the open, media indoctrination, educational indoctrination, a lot of that is out in the open and it's in the private sector.
It might be done in sync with, in coordination with government, but it has a sort of independent status.
Now, Solzhenitsyn in this chapter is talking about how people get targeted right and left, and they're not targeted as individuals.
This is what's important to realize, that the government is going after people, sometimes merely because they belong to a group, and the government doesn't approve of the group.
Look at how he deals with this.
Here's Solzhenitsyn. He goes, He goes, The action was in fact explained openly in the newspaper Red Terror.
Believe it or not, the terror was not even seen as a bad word.
Red Terror is the name of the newspaper.
November 1, 1918.
And here is Solzhenitsyn now quoting from this newspaper.
We are not fighting against single individuals.
We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.
So pay careful attention.
We're not going after you because you're Brian or John or Debbie.
We're going after you because you belong to a group.
We hate the group.
It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action.
The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to.
What is his origin, his education, and his profession?
These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused.
Now, I gotta say that even after reading these lines now, probably for the third time, they give you a little bit of a chill because they show the degree to which ideology can create villains out of thin air.
This person has done nothing wrong.
You have no objection to them.
They haven't even taken a stance against the regime.
But they are...
A member of the academic class or they are teachers and right now we're against the teachers or that this guy is related to the landowner class or the merchant class.
And so, that's it.
That's enough. That's all you need to know.
So, the interrogation takes a very odd form.
It's not, what did you do?
What were you thinking?
What made you take this action or that action?
It's just simply, what is your name?
What is your profession?
What is the name of your family?
What group can we assign you to?
And once you have been assigned to a disapproved group, and it could be the Russian Orthodox Church, it could be you are a member of the so-called Kulaks.
Who are the Kulaks? They're the independent peasants that have been targeted for relocation, and if they refuse to do it, it's kind of like what happened with the American Indians.
We're going to relocate you, and if you don't agree, we're going to destroy you.
So, similarly here, this is Stalin to the peasants.
We're going to move you to this part of Siberia.
You don't want to go? Okay, that's fine.
We're going to kill you. So, are you a member of the Gulags?
That's it. Okay, that's all.
Interrogation over. We've now determined what box to place you in, and off you go.
Typically, board a train, and you are now off to the Gulag.
And says Solzhenitsyn, in 1918, starting in 1918, by the spring of 1918, a torrent of socialist traitors had already begun that was to continue without slackening for many years.
This alone is worth reflecting on for a moment because all police states ultimately turn on themselves.
So in the beginning, it's like, okay, we are the socialists.
We're fighting against the bourgeoisie.
They're the enemy. We're the good guys.
And no, the moment that you got rid of the bourgeoisie, suddenly it's like, oh, well, we're the socialists, but not all socialists are the same.
This is a socialist who's trying to usurp power.
That guy just said something that's out of line with what we just said yesterday in the Socialist Party newspaper.
So he's not really a socialist, or he is a socialist, but the wrong type of socialist.
We need to arrest him.
So this is a message ultimately to people right now in America on the left who think, well, I don't have to worry about a police state.
It's never going to come for me.
I'm never going to get censored.
The FBI is never going to come to my door.
And my answer is, yeah, that may be true now while you're helping to build the police state.
But eventually, just you wait and see.
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