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Oct. 6, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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POLITICS OF FEAR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep680
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Coming up, I'll discuss how the Democrats use the politics of fear to impose tyranny and how my new film uses the same fear to turn people against tyranny.
Debbie and I discuss rampant criminality in Democrat-run cities, General Milley's fulmination against Donald Trump, the House Speaker controversy, and the making, of course, of our new film, Police State.
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Fear is a very powerful force in politics and this is something that has been discovered by everyone who is a student of the subject.
This goes back to figures like Machiavelli who have studied politics In a philosophical sense.
And Machiavelli is always talking about the effectiveness of the use of fear.
In fact, in a famous example, he talks about one of the Borgia princes who was very unpopular and there was a revolt that was coming up in the area of Italy known as the Romagna.
And so Cesare Borgia, who was the prince, decided, I don't want to crush the revolt because then the people there will hate me all the more.
So what Borgia did was he brought in another guy named Ramiro D'Orco, and he goes, listen, you crush all those people, smash them, destroy the revolt.
And that's what the guy did. He was a very cruel man.
He used extreme measures.
And then when the revolt had been put down and there was a mood of terror throughout the society...
What does the prince do?
He says, the next day in the morning, the head of Ramiro Diorco, the designated cruel man, was found in the town square.
And he says the people were gratified and they settled down and the province was peaceful and the prince could keep ruling it, this time without an obstinate rebellion on his hands.
But notice what he did is he used fear And then he got rid of the fear, and then he got all the credit for being the guy who got rid of the fear.
Now, all of this is a sort of prelude for me to talk about ways in which, in America, fear has been effectively deployed by the left and by the Democrats.
Now, I think the big discovery for the Democrats was in 1932 because the country had been plunged into a depression and people were fearful.
They were genuinely fearful.
This was not manufactured fear.
It was real fear. Where's my job?
Where are my savings?
My money in stocks has gone down to zero or close to zero.
And the Democrats tapped that fear and were able to enact all kinds of welfare state measures that otherwise would never have gone through.
So fear proved to be politically successful.
And since then, going all the way back now to the 1960s, for the last 50 years, the Democrats are always trying to Recreate that fear.
Except now the fear is often fictional.
It's often made up.
It's imaginary. Oh, the world is running out of food.
This was the so-called Club of Rome in the 1970s.
Or the ozone layer is being depleted.
Or, more recently, COVID. And under COVID, think of what all the stuff they're able to do using the politics of fear.
You can't go to church.
You can't keep your business open.
Now, certain businesses are exempt, and it's always the case that you have this sort of favoritism that comes into politics when these things are involved.
But nevertheless, COVID was a great pretext.
For the suppression of basic liberties, the liberty of free expression and free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion.
So think about it. They were able to get all the key protections of the First Amendment and sort of knock them out with a single...
With a single threat, namely a virus.
January 6th was used to create fear.
Again, I think a fear that's largely artificial.
Oh, there are insurrections all around us.
There are domestic terrorists who are cooking up plots.
And so we need a regime of censorship.
We need the FBI to target these people.
Fear. And then as we head into 2024, what will it be?
A revival of COVID? It could even be something totally different.
It could even be climate change.
The world is coming to an end.
Look, we've had this really scorching summer.
We're going to have perhaps a cold winter.
This is climate change. Our environment is being wrecked.
We've got to take all these measures right now.
And so fear is a very useful tool of the police state.
And yet, it is not enough for us, on the other side, the opponents of the police state, if you will, just to point that out and warn people, as we should, they're using fear to control us.
Lots of people are doing that.
But I am adopting a little bit of a technique, which is that one way to beat them is to join them.
And what I mean by that is that recognize the effectiveness of the way in which the Democrats deploy the real or, in some cases, imaginary technique of fear.
What I want to do, and this is the point of police state, is I want to use people's genuine and rational fear that their liberties are in danger and that there is a kind of an opening, a window of time in which we can block the police state.
So we need to move while time remains.
But when time runs out, Then there's nothing you can do, or very little you can do, or the only thing you can do is try to flee, try to get out of the country, try to get your money out, try to get your relatives out, try to get yourself out.
We don't want to be in that situation.
So, I want to tell you upfront and in advance that Police State is, in a way, a profoundly frightening movie.
But it's a frightening movie not because, like the climate change guys, I'm cooking it up.
It's a frightening movie because there are frightening things going on in the country.
Now, there are a lot of Americans who go, well, that's not going to happen to me.
And these are guys who are sort of like the grazing antelope who goes, well, you know, there's a movement in the trees, but I think it's got to be wind.
I don't think that there's a predator who's going to jump.
And if there is one, he's not going to jump on my back.
Well, this is the kind of naive, I would say bovinely stupid view that brings you a police state.
So the movie is intended to warn you, don't be that antelope.
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Get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. Debbie and I are here for our weekend roundup and we're gonna begin well on a little bit of a depressing topic which is this these horrific incidents of crime now I must say you are normally the tracker of these and you alert me to them and you give me the the kind of the gory details but They're shocking.
I mean, they're shocking episodes.
Let's start by talking about the attack on Representative Henry Cuellar, who's from Texas.
Yeah. He's from South Texas.
Yeah, from South Texas. 20th District.
Yeah. So, in South Texas.
What happened to him? So, he was carjacked by three young men.
He thinks they're around 16 years old.
Black men. With masks.
Now, where? In D.C., close to the Capitol.
I think they call it the Navy Yard Neighborhood.
Okay. Right? I'm not familiar with D.C., so I don't really know.
I lived in D.C. a long time, but I don't know that neighborhood.
But interesting, you have a congressman, and they want to take his car.
They wanted his car. Now, he interestingly, and I thought this was kind of cool, he's a black belt.
But he says he knows where to use the black belt and where not to.
Because when you have three armed assailants, you do not want to use your black belt skills.
I mean, you're just going to lose, right?
So he said he stayed very calm and he goes, yeah, take my car.
So they took his car and he was very appreciative that they found the car within two hours, the police did.
And the other thing that is very interesting is, of course, Henry Cuellar is a Democrat.
And as you know, his party actually wanted to defund the very police that found his car, right?
So it's ironic that that happens, but he says he's never been anti-police because he does have police officers, or he calls them peace officers in his family.
And so he's very pro-police.
And so he knows there's a problem.
He knows there's a very deep problem.
Yeah, he's not a typical Democrat, you'd have to say, and he's certainly not from the far left of the Democratic Party.
Now, but speaking about looking at this issue in the context of a certain irony or maybe even a certain hypocrisy, here we go.
This is posted by Simon and Tiba.
He goes, Democrat Washington, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelsohn, who claimed in March that there is no crime crisis in D.C., was carjacked, same as Cuellar, at gunpoint last night.
And then he says, your reaction.
Well, here's my reaction.
And that is, you get what you vote for.
I mean, here you've got these left There's no crime crisis.
When it's happening to other people, it's very easy for them to say.
It'd be really interesting to interview this guy now to see if he still believes that.
And here's another example, because I'd like to get your take on what you think is, should we feel sorry for these people?
Listen to this. This is an activist and a poet.
Killed in a post-wedding stroll with girlfriend in crazed knife attack.
And there's a video of it.
And you can see him on the pavement.
And I just read this morning on social media that the girl is actually, I wouldn't say defending the people who killed him, but she's like, he would have not wanted them to be, you know, I don't know.
Are these guys also black?
I think they are. Yeah. The really interesting...
Do you not remember the baker, the woman in San Francisco?
Yes, that's right. The same thing.
So she was apparently...
Someone went in her store or whatever and tried to steal and she went after them and they dragged her to death.
And her family's like, oh, no, no, no, no.
They were just misguided people.
Victims of society. Victims of society, you know.
And look, it's fine if these people want to do this, but...
And these criminals don't care if the person votes Democrat.
They don't care if the person votes Republican.
They're thugs and they're going to kill whoever they feel like killing.
And apparently, in this case, I saw the video.
Very disturbing. I mean, once I see it, I can't unsee it.
I mean, we have a little different kind of almost emotional reaction because my take is, I won't say serve you, right?
But you're getting what you voted for.
And I asked you, I said, do you really feel sorry for people like this who vote for these?
Think of all the women who vote for leftists and then they go on the subway and then some guy walks up to them and slaps them across the face.
Should you feel sorry for such a person when it's like, isn't this what you voted for?
Well, I still feel sorry for the person.
I don't blame the person, obviously.
Do you just think that they have just an absolute naivete?
Well, you know, a lot of people...
I always wonder, you know, and we talk about this all the time, why Latinos and Blacks vote Democrat, right?
There's a deep-rooted reason why they do.
And it's really dumb because...
Democrats have been nothing but racist towards both groups of people.
Kept them down. Kept them down.
And so I don't get it.
And I don't get this either.
I know that they now know that those policies are what is causing all this crime.
And these criminals have become so emboldened.
They don't even have any...
They don't have any, like...
They don't care. They get caught and then they get released.
It's called catch and release.
Maybe afterwards some of these people see the light.
I mean, I remember Irving Kristol many years ago at AEI, and he defined a neoconservative as a liberal who has been mugged by reality.
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We're continuing our discussion of crime in Democrat-run cities.
And it turns out that in Chicago, not the most dangerous but one of the most dangerous cities in America, there is a Democrat city leader who is speaking out.
Normally, you'd think they'd all be speaking out.
I think it's significant that when one speaks out, we do like a segment on it because it is rare.
Normally, Democrats look the other way.
They make excuses or they pretend to be outraged.
But then the moment that the public attention goes off the crime, that particular crime, they kind of move on because they still want to support those horrible policies that produce crime.
Yeah. Well, this leader, Democrat Alderman Raymond Lopez, has had enough.
He went on to do some media on this and he said, they become emboldened and the defeating cry is not- The deafening cry.
I'm sorry, I can't even read here.
The deafening cry is not heard by the politicians demanding change.
They only sit back, as you saw, and try to stick to the script, even when the public refuses to participate.
So basically, he's saying that people have had enough, and they're going to start voting that way, is what he says.
And what I like is he also says that it's socialists and ultra-progressives who are producing this so-called tone leadership.
he's not that far left apparently because he says this.
Well, what he's saying is very interesting because what he's saying is that these leaders, these progressives have a kind of explanatory script in their head.
And that is not that criminals cause crime, but that society causes criminals.
Society produces these criminals and society is to blame.
So when they see a crime, their view is, yeah, of course there's a crime, but society did it.
This guy didn't really do it.
And he goes, they can't get out of that script.
And even when the public is like, no, that guy did it.
Didn't you see him? He had a knife.
He lifted his arm. He stabbed this person.
And so the politician acts as if you don't know what you're talking about because you're missing the societal conditions.
Well, read this.
For some reason, my contacts, I cannot see.
He goes, residents have had enough.
He goes, they are often talked about for the progressive agenda, for the extreme liberal agenda that says they care, but their policies, particularly when it comes to police reform and criminal justice reform, in my opinion, are very racist because oftentimes the victims of the most heinous crimes by the repeat offenders are those same black and brown residents that the white liberals claim to care about, but truly don't.
Didn't he nail it? So he nails it right there.
And here's a second case that is disturbing.
And this is from Baltimore.
So we are now moving from Chicago to Baltimore.
Young tech executive, a female, her name is Pava LaPere, found dead in her apartment.
Evidently, she was followed into her apartment because there's security.
But, of course, when you open the door, you create a little window.
You create an opportunity for someone to come in right behind you.
And so you have this guy, Jason Dean Billingsley, African-American, sadly 32 years old, a rapist, a murderer.
This guy comes in, kills her, allegedly kills her anyway, blunt force trauma to her head.
And... Now, the point is, normally this would just be a horrific offense, but guess what?
This guy, Jason Billingsley, pleaded guilty to first-degree assault in 2009 and second-degree assault in 2011.
He also pleaded guilty to a first-degree sex offense in 2015.
He was sentenced to 30 years in prison with 16 months already served.
All right. If he's sentenced to 30 years in prison, he shouldn't be getting out until about 2040.
Why is he out now?
Billingsley was then released from prison in October 2022.
A spokesman for the Department of Public Safety said he had not been paroled but was released, quote, on mandatory supervision as required by statute.
They didn't supervise him, that's for sure.
Well, they didn't supervise him, that's for sure, but there was a statute.
This is the progressive, easygoing treatment on the criminals.
Hey, listen, you've got 30 years.
You don't have to actually do 30 years.
They were just kind of joking.
They were exaggerating.
But in reality...
Think of how, look, he got the 30-year sentence in 2015, where he are eight years later.
And there's evidently a statute that requires them to release him in eight years.
That's ridiculous. So, you know, again, the statute, the sentences are meaningless if they're not, in fact, carried out.
And sure enough, here's a guy who's clearly a recidivist.
He goes back to committing crimes.
And he, so there's going to have to be...
As many are. So either, I mean, there are two possibilities.
Either these cities are going to keep doing this, and we're going to go back to the 1970s, and then it's going to be, who knows, we might need Charles Bronson right back.
We certainly will need the Charles Bronson movies.
But, or...
There is going to be a point in which even the Democratic voters are going to go, this is too much.
I really hope so, because this is just getting out of...
I mean, it's out of control.
Whether it's the homeless people...
Doing things that are just crazy because they're lunatics.
You know, they've gone mad.
Or are these criminals that get out of prison that are repeat offenders and it doesn't matter what they do, they keep getting out of prison?
I don't know.
But it has to stop.
I mean, I know even you, I mean, we don't live right in the city, but I do know that you are, A, extremely cautious in going to cities, and number two, you'd rather not go at all.
I don't like to go. And alone?
Forget it. I don't go.
I just don't go.
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Debbie wanted to offer some thoughts about General Milley.
General Milley and his farewell, his retirement speech.
Let me read some of the things that he said, and maybe I'll have you react to them.
The headline is, quote, We don't take an oath to a wannabe...
So, very, very extreme statement here because you've got the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, somebody who normally is supposed to be a military officer who's dedicated to represent both parties, represent the country as a whole, who is really making the president that he served under A wannabe dictator, an enemy of the country.
He's acting as if, well, look at this.
He says that military people take an oath to protect the Constitution and defend it against, quote, all enemies, foreign and domestic.
And then he says he wants to emphasize the all and the and, which means it's not just foreign enemies, but we the military have also got to protect our country against domestic enemies.
And he's implying that Trump, I mean, this is just all part of the left's idea that one political party and all its supporters and its members and its leader, in this case, Trump, are threats to the country.
Right, which is ridiculous because if Trump was a, Like I've told you before, he has got to suck as a dictator.
I mean, if he was a dictator, what a horrific dictator.
He doesn't know how to dictate.
Yeah, I mean, as you know, there's a line in the film Police State where I say that Trump, even though the left keeps saying Trump's a dictator, Trump's an authoritarian, that Trump isn't running the police agencies of the government.
He's running away from them.
Exactly. And it makes it very obvious that, I mean, if you're a dictator and you don't control the police agencies of the government...
You're not a dictator. Well, and also, you know, Milley, wasn't he supposedly, like, giving, like, heads up on, you know, with some of the...
This is the key. How in the world is he following the Constitution when he's doing that?
Right. Let's think about what Milley did.
And here I'm relying on some reports in The Atlantic that came out very recently that are a more detailed account than we've had previously.
So the basic idea is that he got some intelligence that the Chinese were worried that the US is going to attack China He never shared that intelligence with Trump, which is the first Flaw or failure on his part because think of it. He works for Trump. He should go running into the Oval Office He's acting like a dictator. Well, exactly. He's taking it upon himself as if it's his job now to respond to this So what does he do again?
He decides let me call my Chinese counterpart and tell him that there's not going to be an attack or to put it differently If there's a surprise attack, it's not going to be a surprise to him Why because he general Milley is going to tip him off. Isn't that treason?
Well, this is what Trump says So Trump says that this guy is a woke train wreck Who if the fake news reporting is correct was actually dealing with China to give him a heads up on the thinking of the president The United States. I mean that is clinically accurate On Trump's part. This is an act so egregious that in times gone by, the punishment would have been death.
Now, when Trump said this, Trump is not saying that Milley should be executed.
And in fact, there was a lot of leftist things.
Trump is calling for Milley's execution.
No. Trump is saying, listen, the country has sort of lost its nerve.
And I do agree.
I mean, let's think back to the time of Abraham Lincoln.
And during the time of Lincoln, it comes to Abraham Lincoln's attention that a, let's just say a general in the Union Army is, I wouldn't say calling up because we're not, they weren't using phones in that way, was notifying the leaders of the Confederacy that there's an attack that's coming, let's say in Gettysburg.
Mm-hmm.
I think Lincoln would unhesitatingly call for that guy to be, certainly to be tried, and if convicted, executed.
So in this sense, Trump is not wrong.
Historically, he's right. This is an act so egregious that in times gone by, the punishment would have been death.
And so Milley is obviously smarting against the truthful force of that comment, and now lashing out at Trump as if Trump is a danger to the Constitution.
Trump and his supporters are the menace.
They are the ones undermining the Constitution.
When it was Milley, really, wasn't it?
Who was acting as a wannabe dictator.
Exactly. He was the wannabe dictator.
And also, in our society, there's a very important difference between the civilians and the military.
In fact, it's a little harder for a civilian to assume dictatorial powers.
But one reason we emphasize civilian control of the government is because it is not difficult for a military leader to become a dictator.
In fact, many military leaders think, for example, about Napoleon and Hugo Chavez.
Look at the Egyptian military, which essentially assumed dictatorial power in Egypt and is running the country even now.
So military coups to take over the government are a depressing feature of authoritarian societies.
Milley wants, I think, to remove the blame from himself for acting, at least in this incident.
I'm not saying Milley's been acting as a dictator through and through, but I'm saying that this was a deeply troubling action on his part.
Not to mention, it shows the deep hatred he had of his own commanding officer.
This is right. I mean, and again, if you have those sorts of feelings, you know what?
Resign. You say, I can't in good conscience serve.
I just am not clear.
I can't be dutiful in carrying out my job.
So here you've got this guy, and then again, Trump calls him a woke disaster officer.
I do think that these work policies have gravely weakened our military.
Now, whether Milley did it because he's an ideological leftist or because he thought, I don't want to get any opposition from the leftists, one way or the other, he did do it.
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We have the confusion that's been going on on the Republican side, division and some infighting at the House.
And I think it's fair to say we're both worried about it because we don't want infighting on our side.
We want a unified team that is taking on the other side.
They have remarkably little infighting.
They found a way. I mean, look at Bernie Sanders.
He plays according to the sheet music and Ilhan Omar.
So they've got all these different personalities, but they've been able to shepherd them into kind of a single block.
And we've had leadership.
I think we have to say that by this measure, Kevin McCarthy did not succeed.
I think his intentions were good.
His idea was to make promises to everybody.
I'll give you this. I'll give you this.
I'll give you that. But in the end, I think he found he couldn't keep all his promises.
Then they all turned on him and go, we can't trust you because you make all these assurances and then you don't live by them.
That's ultimately what they demand.
Yeah. Well, I'm a little confused, though, about the Democrats' role in this.
Obviously, they don't like him, but do you really think they're going to like somebody that's even more hardcore than he is?
No, I think with the Democrats, what happened was they were willing to make a short-term deal with McCarthy because McCarthy wanted to keep the government open.
McCarthy was, again, so many Republicans terrified of shutting down the government, even though when you actually shut down the government, you realize no big deal.
But McCarthy was like, the press is going to blame me. So this is the timidity that characterizes McCarthy. He's not alone in this. He wanted to keep the government open. So he knew he didn't have the Republican votes because the Republicans like we're spending too much money. We don't have a good enough deal. We're not going to go for it. So what McCarthy does is he gets a short term deal where he gets Republicans, aided by enough Democrats.
And this, I think, for Matt Gaetz was like the ultimate stab in the back.
When you have a Republican leader squelching his own side by getting enough Republicans.
I mean, we've talked about Texas and Dave Phelan.
So I think there was a nightmare scenario that we'll have a Republican leader, but only a name, who's really representing the Democrats.
So this is what caused Matt Gaetz to freak out.
Now, Interestingly, the Democrats could have bailed out McCarthy because McCarthy got the majority of Republicans, but the Democrats decided that we're not going to bail out McCarthy unless, essentially, he agrees to become a pawn of us.
So, in other words, we want him to repudiate MAGA. Right?
And then, that's the price that we will extract for us supporting him.
He wasn't willing to do that.
First of all, I think he realized that even the Republican support that he had would evaporate very quickly if he turned out to be making this—it's kind of like a Union general, again, making a backroom deal with the Confederates.
You keep me in power.
I mean, this was beyond intolerable.
So, McCarthy was sort of done in, I think, in the end, his own sort of operational cleverness.
It backfired on him.
Oh, and it's really funny.
My friend, Troy Nels, Congressman Nels, is kind of pitching for Trump to become Speaker.
He's really serious about it.
Oh, yeah, and I think so is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
So the two of them are beating the drum, and there are probably some others.
And I do think that it would be a genius move, just in the sense that the Democrats would not believe it.
Freak out. Right.
Oh my goodness. And it wouldn't stop Trump for running for president.
Trump would even say, I'm going to take the job for three months.
Yeah, but... And I'm going to temporarily serve this role.
You can only imagine. But isn't that a reason to do it?
I mean, he's capable of doing it.
He's run the country as the president.
He surely would know how to run it.
Now, Trump has not been the kind of, I would say, coalition builder where...
So I'm not sure this is something...
This is not even a job that Trump wants long term.
And I could see if this happened and if he became Speaker, I could just see Biden, the Biden people, not Biden because he's clueless really these days, but the Biden people saying, okay, we cannot have a State of the Union address because Trump behind him would be ripping things.
Oh, hilarious. And he'd be doing all kinds of stuff.
Making faces. Oh, gosh.
In fact, probably putting out messages on Truth Social Media.
That would be hilarious. So they would definitely not want to do that.
So I don't know.
Well, I think the broad point we want to make is that there are very high stakes here because we control currently, well, let's not count the Supreme Court.
When we're looking just at the legislative and executive branches, we have a House, we have a Senate, we have the presidency.
And right now we only have one of those three, and we have it by a very narrow majority, five votes.
We need a good leader who can hold our votes together.
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I thought we could talk a little bit about the making of Police State.
I say this because for many people, they don't have a sense of what it's like to make a movie.
And so let's talk about the process that we go through in doing a movie like this, sort of the first step, the second step.
And you are involved in all aspects of this.
I mean, you have certain, you know, areas of, like, expertise, and you've been supervising, for example, the music, but you're actively involved in the writing.
You're also involved in the structuring of the storyline.
Of course, I do the interviews.
But... How do you think this process gets started?
Well, I know that it always gets started by just us talking about just ideas.
Like, what do you think is the heartbeat of America right now?
What is the issue?
What is the number one issue that people are talking about?
As you know, January 6th was something that I said we have to vindicate January 6th.
That is very important because not only is it vindicating Trump, but it's vindicating all the J6ers.
It's vindicating the whole thing.
And that kind of morphed into, well, let's not just do a movie about January 6th.
Let's do a movie about What actually happened in January 6th, but the bigger picture, meaning January 6th is itself a manifestation of something larger.
And so it's that kind of an insight that gets us going.
We don't think of a movie as just messaging, because sometimes people come to us and they go, you know, you got to do a movie about this or about that.
It's, you know, you need to do some messaging.
But a movie has to have a story.
Mm-hmm. And it has to have characters.
It has to have suspense.
It has to be cinematic.
One of our challenges with 2000 Mules is we are like, you know, cell phone geotracking by itself is not cinematic.
Now we were happy to have the surveillance video.
But we still struggled with how do we make 90 minutes of this movie interesting visually?
Because that's what people are doing. They're sitting in a theater and they're watching a movie.
We didn't have that problem with this movie.
This movie is unbelievably cinematic.
It's very cinematic.
The scenes are probably the best of all the movies, in my opinion.
Maybe, you know, maybe America because of the war battle scenes and all of that.
But this actually, I mean, in fact, it's so funny because when we were doing the scenes, we're like, wait a minute, is that actual footage or is that actual footage?
You know, because it's so real that it kind of got lost and it was just amazing.
But no, definitely not just the ideas.
And then we come up with a list of all the people that could be interviewed.
And this movie has probably, wouldn't you say, the most that you've interviewed?
I think we've interviewed 22 people, but we don't go through it kind of one after the other.
There's a sort of a rapid intercutting of sources back and forth that gives the movie a kind of fast-moving quality.
So there are two types of people interviewed in the movie.
One is the insiders, the whistleblowers, the informants.
And this is to show you the evil machinations of the police state from the inside, how this actually works.
And the other is ordinary people in normal walks of life who have come face to face with the police state.
And that's really important because it shows you it can happen to anyone.
Whereas I think a lot of Americans think, it's not going to be me.
So they feel a false sense of security.
Now, in some cases, we found sources that had, unbelievably, the official footage of the FBI blasting through their door.
We had one guy who happened to record it.
And it's an amazing scene in the movie.
You can see the FBI trying to shut down the camera so no one will record what they're doing.
But he had a camera they didn't know about.
And so we have the actual footage.
Yeah, but in other cases, we have guys who tell us what happened, and then we hired FBI experts to reconstruct those scenes to the letter so that everything is completely authentic.
And in fact, I'm convinced there are people who are in law enforcement or in the military who watch this and go...
How do those guys know that this is how it goes down?
This is exactly what these people say.
These are the clothes they wear.
This is what they would do.
This is how they would surround the compound.
So this, I mean, I think we can feel proud about the way this movie has been executed and the story it tells, and it couldn't be a more timely topic.
It could not be. And, you know, and it's not just about the FBI. I know that the famous tweet that was heard around the world...
Elon Musk? Elon Musk, you know, with more than 50 million retweets.
I mean, I can't even believe that.
But, you know, he mentioned the FBI... And it goes beyond that.
Far beyond it.
Predominantly, if not exclusively, but no, this is a film that covers censorship, it covers surveillance.
Let's remember that the Department of Homeland Security, the DHS, is more than 10 times the size of the FBI. A lot of the censorship, a lot of the targeting comes out of DHS. So, FBI is a part of the story, but they're not the largest part of the story.
And then, of course, all the criminal prosecutions of Trump, the attempt to get him on this and get him on that, that's not coming directly from the FBI. Yeah, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, but the FBI wasn't directly involved in some of the other cases that we're dealing with.
So, we are dealing with a police state apparatus.
That stretches from academia to the media, the nonprofit sector, the digital platforms, and the multitudinous agencies of the government.
I mean, again, not just the FBI. We're talking about the State Department is involved.
CISA, the cybersecurity agency, is involved.
The White House is involved.
So this is a, in fact, they even call it a system-wide or a government-wide project.
It's very insidious what we're dealing with.
And this movie is, I think, the first one to put all of it together.
Because people are aware of this and they're aware of that.
But naming, understanding, defining, showing, experiencing the police state, I think it's fair to say that in that respect, this film cannot be bettered.
I'm continuing my discussion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's great masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, and writing as he does in the aftermath of Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalin.
Now, Khrushchev was, like Stalin, a dictator.
And the people who came after Khrushchev, including Brezhnev, and then Chernenko, I think so was Andropov, and then Chernenko, and then, of course, ultimately Gorbachev.
Well, all these men were, in fact, dictators.
Maybe Gorbachev was the only guy who was somewhat more benign, and he presided, of course, over the destruction and the overthrow, the disintegration of the Soviet regime.
But Khrushchev posed as the good guy.
I am distancing myself from the crimes of Stalin.
And he allowed some people to write about the horrors of the Stalin era.
But notably, a lot of those people were themselves prominent members of the Communist Party or they were allied with the Communist Party.
And so here is Solzhenitsyn.
He goes,"...today a new myth is being created." Every story of 1937 that is printed, every reminiscence that's published, relates without exception the tragedy of the communist leaders.
Now, he admits, Solzhenitsyn does, that Stalin went after other communists.
It wasn't as if communist leaders weren't targeted.
Stalin didn't brook.
He didn't allow any resistance, any rivals, communist or not.
But Solzhenitsyn This is focusing on one group of people and really missing the big picture.
It's giving importance to the people Khrushchev wants to give importance to.
Here's Solzhenitsyn. They have been assuring us, and we have unwittingly fallen for it, that the history of 1937 and 1938 consisted chiefly of the arrests of the big communists and virtually no one else.
But out of the millions arrested at that time, important state and party officials could not possibly have represented more than 10%.
So yeah, there was a good number of communists, maybe a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand, but nothing compared to the totality of the gulag.
Most of the relatives standing in line with food parcels outside the Leningrad prisons were lower-class women, the sort who sold milk.
So Solzhenitsyn is saying, we don't really have all the data on this, but let's just go look at the families that are coming over to the prison and trying to deliver a little parcel, let's say, for somebody who's behind bars.
Who are those people? You can see right away that they're not the wives of top communist officials.
They're not anything like that.
These are people of the simpler folk.
They're peasants, or they are, quote, the sort of people who sold milk.
And then says Sholzhenitsyn, how do we get these millions of people in the gulag?
The real law underlying the arrests of those years was the assignment of quotas.
The norm set, the planned allocations, every city, every district, every military unit was assigned a specific quota of arrests.
To be carried out by a stipulated time.
From then on, everything depended on the ingenuity of the security operations personnel.
So, the government gives you the target.
We want 800 people arrested in this province.
Who you arrest, how you go about arresting them, that's sort of your problem.
But you need to meet this quota.
We're going to be assessing you by this metric.
And by the way, if you think of the police state here, It operates not in an analogous or identical way, but in similar ways.
We're going to be targeting the MAGA movement.
And we want to make sure, hey, if you want to get promoted in the FBI, we want you to open up a bunch of files on these MAGA people.
The more files, the better. That shows that you're a very industrious guy and you're working really hard.
So quotas and lists are the way that a bureaucratic police state functions.
The former Czechist Alexander Kalganov recalls that a telegram arrived in Tashkent.
Send 200. They had just finished one clean-out and it seemed like there was, quote, no one else to take.
Well, true. They had just brought in about 50 more from the districts and then they had an idea.
They would reclassify as 58s.
58 is the category of the crime.
It's an article of the criminal code.
They would reclassify as 58s all the non-political offenders being held by the police.
So they need to get to a quota of 200 political offenders.
They don't have 200. They've tried getting people from the surrounding districts.
Still, they haven't gotten 200.
Listen, let's take a bunch of guys who are arrested for other things unrelated to politics.
Let's reclassify them under number 58 and voila, there we go.
We've got our 200. No sooner said than done.
But despite that, they had still not filled the quota.
At that precise moment, the police reported that a gypsy band had impudently encamped on one side of the city square and asked what to do with them.
Someone had another bright idea.
They surrounded the encampment, raked in all the gypsy men from 17 to 60 as 58s.
They had fulfilled the plan.
Wow.
So you've got a bunch of gypsies, they come in, they want to play music.
Yeah, they might be loitering, it could be they're trespassing, but you're not going to get them on trespassing.
You're going to get them as being political offenders, which let's remember, carry a minimum sentence, probably of some years, and there's no maximum sentence.
You could even be imprisoned for life.
They have to meet a quota.
We're not quite there.
Grab the gypsies!
Get all the males. Round them up.
Send them off to the gulag.
This is the sort of sheer brazen cruelty, the indifference, the lack of discrimination.
We're not even counting who's a real offender and who's not.
We've got to meet a quota. Go grab that guy.
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