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Nov. 28, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MISCALCULATION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep715
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about Ron DeSantis and ask the question of whether the best governor in America made the worst political decision of his career.
I'll critically examine a proposed hate speech law in Ireland that's a troubling indicator of the global police state.
An author and attorney, John Cox, joins me.
We're going to talk about how Governor Newsom converted California into Calizuela.
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this is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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I want to talk about the Republican race and the troubles of Ron DeSantis.
And that DeSantis is having problems is now quite obvious.
I do see a DeSantis team every day on X on Twitter talking about how DeSantis is doing great, how he is nailing it in every interview, that he maintains his calm, he's evidently raised a considerable amount of money, he has a political war chest.
They talk about the fact that he's doing well in Iowa, and so they kind of lay out the most positive case for DeSantis.
But even so, you can tell, even with his most enthusiastic advocates would have to admit DeSantis is not doing as well as they had hoped.
They had certainly hoped that DeSantis would be the, well if not the front-on favorite, which probably was their ultimate dream, that he would at least be the main rival to Trump with everybody else kind of way back.
So it would be Trump, it would be DeSantis, and it's going to be one or the other.
And if it's not going to be Trump, for whatever reason, it would be DeSantis.
And there would be a chance for DeSantis to make the argument that if Trump is immobilized in some way, Or even that DeSantis would be more effective in achieving the Trumpian agenda than Trump himself would be, which would be a paradoxical case, but a case that could be made.
But interestingly, none of this is happening.
That world that we may have been expected to go into is not the world we live in now.
The world we live in now is that Nikki Haley is trying to push ahead and become the main alternative to Trump.
And she is essentially making an open pitch to the DeSantis people to kind of come over to her camp so that there is an alternative to Trump.
And so Nikki Haley has been making some progress.
Vivek Ramaswamy is shown, at least for an outsider.
I mean, think of this guy. He's in his late 30s.
He has no prior political experience.
He's an incredibly dynamic and glib and effective speaker, but coming out of nowhere.
And being able to run neck and neck with people like Nikki Haley and DeSantis is amazing.
So you have to say that Haley is, at this point, outperforming expectations.
Again, maybe not her expectations, but nevertheless expectations.
And certainly Vivek is also.
So what is the deal with DeSantis?
Did DeSantis go wrong somewhere along the way?
And if so, where?
Let's look at a lot of DeSantis' obvious strengths.
I mean, he's a young guy.
He has a great family.
He's eloquent.
He gets a lot of things done, and he has proven that in Florida.
He's obviously as serious about policy.
He's got a Florida model that is a kind of sparkling contrast to, say, the Newsom, California model.
I'll talk a little later with John Cox, an attorney, about Newsom.
So you'd think that DeSantis has a lot to offer with his candidacy.
But something, as I say, has gone terribly wrong.
And I think Debbie and I were having a conversation about this.
We were actually talking about something that Julie Kelly posted on X where she was...
Kind of flaying the DeSantis candidacy and the DeSantis team for betraying the January 6th defendants.
And she goes, listen, there's a whole bunch of them.
I forget the actual number.
It's something like 50. 50 of these defendants or more are from Florida.
Some of them are clearly abused by the government.
So maybe in some cases, okay, well, this guy, you know, swung a shield at the cops or this guy punched a policeman.
All right, let's not talk about that guy.
Maybe that guy's getting his just desserts.
But... We're good to go.
We're not even talking about him pardoning them.
He doesn't have the power to do that.
We're just talking about him speaking out on their behalf.
We're talking about him meeting with the families.
We're talking about him asking for permission to visit the jail.
He's done none of that.
He's essentially, well to use the analogy from Pontius Pilate, washed his hands off of January 6th.
And in the next segment I'm going to explain why I think he felt compelled to do that.
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You get 35% off I'm continuing my discussion of Ron DeSantis, and the question I left you with in the last segment was simply this.
Why has DeSantis maintained complete silence on January 6th?
Well, I think here's the answer.
DeSantis doesn't want to validate January 6th in any way, because if he does, he's then admitting that the January 6th activists who came to Washington came to make a plausible point, and that is that the election has been stolen,
and there needs to be an accountability, there needs to be an investigation, there needs to be a court case, there needs to be a congressional hearing, and So, if DeSantis goes there, he's now opening the door to the legitimacy of the protest, because after all of the protest was legitimate, the reaction to it is excessive.
These guys were merely making a point and a valid point about the election.
They weren't just coming there because they were lunatics or seditionists or conspiracy theorists or people who wanted to overthrow the government.
None of that They were coming to make a point that we're entitled to make in a democracy.
What really happened in the 2020 election?
DeSantis doesn't want to go there.
And he doesn't want to go there because it validates the question about 2020.
And that brings us to a second point.
And that is that DeSantis not only won't touch January 6th, We're good to go.
And why doesn't he want to validate Trump on those two points?
Well, let's follow through the logic.
Let's assume that the January 6th protesters had a point.
Let's assume that the 2020 election may have been stolen or was stolen.
Well, in that case, the wrong guys in the White House.
It should be Trump.
It shouldn't be Biden.
And if it should be Trump, then...
What is the argument on the Republican side for not giving Trump a chance to reclaim what is already rightfully his now?
In other words, what is the argument for not saying that Trump, look, you have not only earned the nomination, you should be in the White House currently?
But since that's not going to be the case, we certainly think that you deserve a shot in 2024.
So that would mean that DeSantis would have to step back and wait for 2028.
But obviously, someone or some group convinced him, no, this is your chance.
You've got to do it now.
And so DeSantis has taken the view that if I'm going to do it now...
I cannot validate Trump's claims about 2020.
I can't give in to the idea that Trump may have won that election.
I can't give in to the idea that January 6th was a legitimate protest.
And so DeSantis, in a sense, you can see here by a series of logical steps, by defining himself like, okay, I want to get in the race.
If I get in the race, I can't admit that Trump...
He's won in 2020.
I've got to sort of argue that Trump's presidency was itself kind of a bungled affair, and then he lost the election, and so this is not the guy we want to go with the next time around.
So DeSantis has put himself in that sense in a very awkward position.
Now, contrast DeSantis here with Vivek Ramaswamy, who says things like, you know what?
If I get in, I'm going to pardon the January 6th.
I'm going to pardon Trump.
And I'm going to go after the police state.
So, in a sense, Vivek Ramaswamy is saying all the things that I think dissent is needed to say to actually be a viable alternative to Trump.
And if it were DeSantis rather than Ramaswamy saying those things, I think his candidacy would be doing a heck of a lot better.
I also think that, and I've been deploring some of the mutual acrimony and venom and back and forth between the Trump people and the DeSantis people, but I think from Trump's point of view, a lot of the reason he has this kind of grudge against DeSantis is, I think, because Trump thinks Well, he knows as well as I do that the 2020 election was stolen.
And he knows as well as I do that January 6th was a legitimate protest.
And so for Trump, it's not just a matter of sort of disloyalty in the personal sense, like DeSantis is disloyal to me.
I think that is part of it.
But I think the other part of it is that he thinks that DeSantis has...
Simply in order to justify his own running, forced himself into a position where he really can't take on two of the biggest issues that are on the minds of most Republicans.
A, what really happened in 2020?
And B, isn't it a fact that there is systematic civil rights abuse of the January 6th political defendants?
And this is why I think DeSantis has...
In a sense, put himself, painted himself, as they say, into a corner.
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I want to talk in this segment about Ireland, and I want to talk about it in the context of a theme that was introduced in Police State, namely the notion of a police planet.
Many of the problems described in this movie aren't just happening in the United States, they're happening abroad.
So, case in point, Ireland, public rebellion, or at least a rebellion in the streets.
A lot of people are just disgusted by the fact that an Algerian immigrant, a guy who's Now, the guy was an Irish citizen.
He had been living in Ireland for about 10 years, but he's originally from Algeria.
Goes on a stabbing spree, and people are like, enough.
They've seen the impact of illegal immigration.
They have seen the government turn a blind eye to it.
And they have seen the impact on crime, on drugs, on the ruination of cities, on schools.
And so you had people going nuts, burning buses.
This was really a riot.
It's somewhat similar, I suppose, to some of the Antifa BLM riots, except this is a riot against the illegals and against the idea that the Irish government has been Turning Ireland, ultimately, into a kind of free-for-all society, which the Irish don't want.
And by the way, in some of these other countries like France, they do this in the name of anti-colonialism.
You know, oh yeah, in France, we've got to take in the Moroccans and the Tunisians and the Algerians, because guess what?
Those were all colonies of France.
But listen, Ireland didn't colonize anybody.
In fact, Ireland was colonized by the British authorities.
Ireland has always been those other native people of Ireland.
They didn't come there from somewhere else and overthrow the natives or anything like that.
So you don't have the experience that you had, for example, in Australia with the aborigines or even in America with the native Indians.
Ireland is white.
Ireland is for the Irish.
And yet, amazingly, the same kind of leftist guilt attacks on white supremacy and Ireland is too white.
And I just heard the Irish prime minister Talking about how Ireland is too white.
And now they've proposed a hate speech bill, which is very extreme.
It's a hate speech bill that covers your private conduct.
And so if you don't give your password to your devices if you're suspected of committing hate speech, up to 12 months in prison.
If you don't let the state read messages between you and your spouse or you and others, 12 months in prison.
I mean, granted, Ireland doesn't have a First Amendment.
In fact, European countries in general take a little more.
They don't have as strong a free speech protection as we do in this country.
But nevertheless, they can put you in jail for memes that you have on your phone if they deem those to be threatening or if they deem those to be hate speech.
This is... This is very bad.
Much worse than anything, by the way, we're dealing with in the United States.
And then I see the Irish Prime Minister, Leo Baradkar, who I regret to say is part Indian.
He goes, our incitement to hatred legislation is not up to date, and we need to update it.
So this is the guy basically, you know, these tyrannical measures, you know, we're not up to date with the latest tyrannical stuff that's going on, the latest techniques of social repression.
We need to catch up.
And then I saw a Green Party member.
This is Pauline O'Reilly, a member of the Green Party in the Senate.
We are restricting freedom, but we are doing it for the common good.
Yes, you have rights, but they are restricted for the common good.
Now, I don't mean to utterly dismiss the idea of the common good, but this is really a kind of a Nazi slogan.
And I say this because here I have in front of me, this is a quote attributed to Hitler, but it was a common theme in the Nazi days.
Gemeinnütz geht vor Eigennütz.
Horrible German pronunciations by me, but nevertheless, the common good before the individual good.
So what is the difference between that slogan and what Pauline O'Reilly is saying?
There's no difference. They're both making the same point, which is that individual rights don't really matter.
They are subordinate to the common good.
But the second point I want to make about all this is not simply to note a similarity to something the Nazis said, but also to say, what is the common good here?
What common good?
What common good is served by repressing people from being able to speak freely about these things?
What common good is achieved by simply declaring what someone says, their own opinion, and an opinion often backed up by crime statistics, by things that you observe in the street?
What common good is served by deeming it hate speech?
Now, I grant you that you might say, well, there are certain people who feel threatened when you say things like that.
Okay, so that's their good. But why is it the common good?
The common good implies it is my good no less than your good.
So let's say, for example, I say, let's get the illegals out of the country.
Okay, that's my view.
I strongly believe it.
I have reason to believe it.
And you're saying, well, that's going to make the illegal feel bad.
Okay, well, that's his good. But my good is the opposite.
My good is allowing me to speak.
So if you're claiming that there's a common good, it should affect me and help me just like it's helping him.
But it's not. It's actually earning me and helping him.
So that's not a common good.
That's like taking money out of my pocket and putting it into his pocket and claiming I'm serving the common good.
No, you're not. You're not serving the common good.
You're serving his good at my expense.
And so the point I'm trying to make here is all of this rhetorical flim-flam about the common good is just bogus.
There is no common good being served here.
These are leftist politicians serving their own constituency at the expense of We're good to go.
For reacting to an offense perpetrated against them.
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You remember Marilyn Mosby?
This is the former Baltimore DA, the city-state attorney, Marilyn Mosby, a big leftist, in fact, very similar to Fannie Willis.
And Mosby had a lot of notoriety going back a year or two.
Now, of course, the focus is on Fannie Willis.
But there's an interesting story about Mosby that had been reported, but it was very quiet when the federal jury came in with a verdict a few days ago.
The verdict was guilty.
Another corrupt Democrat.
And Isn't it interesting because these Democrats love to portray themselves as champions of the people.
They advocate for things so that people can get benefits.
In this case, of course, we're talking about COVID benefits.
But we're also talking about the way, in a very sneaky manner, Marilyn Mosby claimed financial hardship during the pandemic to withdraw money from the city's retirement fund.
And this was fraudulent.
She was also guilty of perjury because she made false claims about herself.
And she took out $90,000 from her retirement fund.
See, basically, the idea was that under COVID, if you are facing financial hardship, let's say you lost your job.
Then you are allowed to tap into your retirement accounts, which are normally locked, or at least locked in the sense that you or I could go to our retirement accounts and try to tap them, but then there are going to be severe penalties.
Why? Because we got tax benefits for putting our money into SEP IRAs and IRAs.
So Mosby wanted to get around this.
She wanted to access those funds immediately.
And she wanted to access those funds by pretending that she had lost her job, she had lost her salary, or I have nowhere to turn.
So she used the pretext of COVID to do that, and she got busted for it.
Now, I'm actually a little surprised that they even prosecuted her.
A lot of times people like this, they live in a cesspool, I mean a political cesspool, and they're able to get away with this kind of thing.
It turns out that Mosby's salary was $247,000.
She got paid. She received her full paycheck, and so there was no reason for her to claim hardship.
She was not having any kind of hardship at all.
And again, what I find interesting about all this is the fact that there is virtually no national media coverage.
This was a kind of a left-wing, Soros-type prosecutor, somebody very much in the same mold as As a lot of these left-wing DAs who are going after Trump, going after so many conservatives, she is very much in that camp.
She would be doing the same thing if she was functioning as the DA. Now, she ran for re-election against a guy named Ivan Bates, and she lost in 2022.
But this is in part because she was facing this indictment, and she was up for corruption.
So she faced two counts of making...
Oh, I see.
No. So... It turns out a corruption doesn't stop there.
According to the New York Post, Mosby also faces two counts of making false mortgage applications in a pending federal case which relates to the purchase of two Florida vacation homes.
A trial date has not been set in that federal case.
So you've got another thoroughly corrupt Democrat making false statements.
Oh, I'm facing financial hardship.
And then lying on mortgage applications, at least allegedly.
We'll wait to see what's determined in that trial.
And I think the attitude of the leftist media is that we will support these guys while they are doing our bidding.
But then if they get into trouble like this...
We don't condemn them.
We just pretend it never happened.
And a lot of what we see in the news is that way.
It is a kind of carefully curated and selected pieces of information in which this is now inconvenient.
They don't want to have to, just like they don't like to talk about Jussie Smollett.
They don't like to talk about Marilyn Mosby.
She was once kind of the darling of the left.
Now she's become an embarrassment.
So it's easier for them to pretend that she never existed.
And that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to make it easier for them.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast John Cox.
He's an attorney, he's a CPA, an investment advisor, also a real estate investor and manager, and politician.
He's run for office, in fact, he's run for governor of California, and he is the author of a new book.
It's called The Newsome Nightmare.
John, welcome to the podcast.
I think your title kind of sums it up right there.
Yeah. Yep, it does.
Thank you for having me, Tinesh.
I appreciate it. Absolutely.
Let's talk about this guy, Gavin Newsom.
I mean, I think I skipped out of California before I really got a handle on Newsom.
California, you know, it seems to have moved from politicians like Nixon and Reagan at one time to somewhat more, well, there have been some moderate California governors, but now it looks...
Pete Wilson is a good example.
I mean, I guess Schwarzenegger would maybe fall into that category.
But in... Somewhat.
Somewhat. And, well, I mean, I remember Schwarzenegger coming to our neighborhood when I lived in Rancho Santa Fe, and he gave a very benign talk about after-school programs.
He was kind of trying to make sure everybody was on board with something just...
Who could argue with the idea of having an after-school program?
But it seems like with Newsom, we now have a guy who is pretty slick, very ambitious, a slippery character, and also pretty far to the left.
Now this is all my impression from a distance.
You have seen this guy up close and personal.
What's the scoop on Gavin Newsom?
Well, basically, Dinesh, he's been running for president all the way along.
And I highlighted this when I was running against him in 2018.
What he does is he hits the hot button social issues.
I mean, he's all about abortion, guns, climate change.
Immigration to some degree.
He knows that these are the hot-button issues that are going to be key to the Democratic primaries when he runs for president.
And that's, I think, been his plan all the way along.
Of course, that also enables him to get the favor of all the media, which, as you know, in California, the media is pretty famously liberal.
The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, they're all firmly on the left, and they love those social positions.
The trouble is, in the meantime, there's a lot of things that really matter to the quality of life that people have in this state.
Obviously, as you know, we have the highest taxes in the country, but we also have shortages of energy, water, housing.
We've got a homeless problem that is ridiculous, keeps getting worse.
We have an education system, Dinesh, that spends $100 billion a year.
$100 billion, with a B. We're good to go.
Pot shops and strip joints, obviously, were allowed to stay open.
It was just so uneven and so hypocritical in so many ways.
But again, he did a lot of it because, one, the special interests wanted those things done.
You've got the teachers unions.
They wanted the schools closed.
And you've got big media, which is behind him at every step of the way, especially on abortion and guns.
So, you know, you can't buy a house in the state, but you can get an abortion on almost every street corner.
I mean, it is really kind of that situation.
The weather... They can't screw up the weather.
That's why people stay.
That's why I stay. But the rest of it, if you're not in the top 1%, it really is a nightmare.
It really is difficult.
The cost of living is just crazy.
Well, It seems to be based on what you said that we have a paradox here because let's assume that you've got this large body of Californians and they want to have a good standard of living, right?
They want to have good schools.
They want to have safe streets.
You've got a governor and apparently a political class that is actively militating against that, right?
However, as you say, Gavin Newsom is lobbying sort of to the media.
He's lobbying to the interest groups that might define his own future in the Democratic Party.
But how do you get the people of California to be okay with the state that is failing on so many counts?
Is it merely a case that the propaganda of the media is such that you believe the media over your own lying eyes, so to speak?
No. Well, listen, media is very persuasive, as you know.
I mean, you're a creature of the media now with your films and things like that.
I mean, when you have mass media and it really is inundating people, it really has a pretty big effect.
You also have something else going on, Dinesh, and that is a lot of the body politic, I'm talking about voters, have tuned out.
They see all the money that's being sloshed around Sacramento, and they ask themselves, Well, these guys listen to the lobbyists.
They listen to the big money people.
My vote doesn't matter.
So they either don't vote or they just vote party, straight party line.
They don't know Elected representatives.
They really don't know a lot of what Newsom stands for.
They just get it filtered through the media.
And so they say, okay, well, he's for abortion.
I'm for, you know, a woman's choice or whatever it might be.
I'll vote for him.
And they ignore a lot of these other issues that really haven't been brought to the fore in the regular media.
That's part of the problem.
Conservatives in California and Republicans Just haven't been able to generate the amount of campaign funding, if you will, that allows them to put forth a different agenda.
And even when they do, it's a battle of television ads.
You know, a woman's right, a woman's freedom versus a baby or a religious group.
You know, it comes down to Slogans on either side, and there's no nuance.
There's no discussion of the deep policy rationales, I would say, for why these things need to be done a different way.
And that's what I'm trying to do with Hear the People.
We'll get into that a little bit later, I think.
But I'm trying to get politics back to The doorstep.
Back to smaller one-on-one conversations where we can discuss the nuance and the rationale for why a policy should be a certain way, as opposed to these just We'll be right back with John Cox,
the book, The Newsome Nightmare.
Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
This is a really good time to become an annual supporter.
If you do, you're going to get the new film Police State included with your annual subscription.
I post a lot of exclusive content on Locals, including content censored on other social media platforms.
This is a platform on which you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
On Locals, you can also interact with me directly.
Where can you do that? Anyplace else.
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I've also uploaded some cool films to Locals.
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Christmas present to yourself, dinesh.locals.com.
I'm back with attorney and investment advisor and real estate investor and author, John Cox.
The book we're talking about, The Newsome Nightmare.
You know, John, recently, as you know, San Francisco undertook a major sort of cleanup.
And it turns out that the cleanup was not really in response to, hey, let's make the city more livable for the people, but it's we've got a foreign visitor in town who happens to be named Xi, and we're going to do the cleanup sort of so we look good to the outside world.
I mean, to me, what a...
What a telling reflection of who the politicians care about.
And if I remember, Newsom even kind of admitted, he goes, you know, people say we're doing it for the outsiders.
Well, I guess that's true.
So you would think that the ordinary San Franciscan would be like, aha, this is where I am on the totem pole, pretty low down as it turns out.
Let's look at the bigger picture.
Is there hope for California?
My wife was from Venezuela, sometimes calls it Calisuela.
She's like, oh no, this is a model for how America is being taken down.
But I assume that there's a part of you that's loyal to California, and that must mean that you see some hope for California to make a recovery.
Yeah, it was interesting you mentioned that about San Francisco, because even our famously liberal newspapers that truly love Newsom most of the time, they editorialized.
The Chronicle and the LA Times both said, what the heck?
You're cleaning up the city now because not only...
Is President Xi visiting Dinesh?
But, of course, he brings along a horde of media force, right, with him.
And so that media is going to highlight it.
And so they finally cleaned it up.
And it was profoundly hypocritical to do that when they ignore it most of the time.
Yeah, I think there is hope, Dinesh.
It's almost like, you know, when you boil a frog, right?
You know, at some point in time, the frog gets the message that they're just not going to change and they hop out and they do something about it.
And, you know, as you know, a lot of Californians have left following you to Texas or to Idaho or other places.
And I think people are finally getting the message.
I'm hoping that hearthepeople.org, which is the effort that I'm making, will key a renaissance, a rebirth of our democracy.
There's no question, I think, Dinesh, that our democracy needs a refresh.
It's gotten so much...
Well, I think we've just stated with money and interest groups and partisanship that we need to get back to just talking to each other.
Here the people is applicable to the U.S. Congress.
I'm working on it with respect to that.
But it basically subdivides our huge congressional districts into 100 little sub-districts so that a district of 750,000 people, which is what the size is now, Becomes a district with 100 sub-districts, each with 7,500 people.
And each of these tiny little sub-districts elects a person to represent them, and then those 100 people get together after the election and have a little meeting to elect one person to go to Washington, D.C. The other 99 stay home.
The upshot of this whole restructuring, Dinesh, is Basically that each little district, you don't need television ads or social media ads to get elected.
In a district of 7,500 people, you'll actually be able to meet your constituents.
You won't need to raise a ton of money.
You'll actually get a chance to discuss policy on people's doorsteps or via email or text.
And I think we'll return our politics to one where we develop consensus and we develop rationale.
And at the same time, I think we get voters more involved.
And that's why I think that's the antidote to the kind of big media politics that Gavin Newsom has used to gain power and really erode a lot of the living standards in California.
So let's talk about how you would move this forward.
You set up an organization.
You're advocating for a more decentralized system in which you create probably districts or sub-districts that are the size of what districts used to be at one time in American history.
You allow for the possibility of much more one-on-one interaction between elected leaders and their representatives.
And you want to do this throughout California and then show that California is making local kind of Tocquevillian democracy work and then have other people go, aha, maybe we should introduce this in Illinois.
Yeah. Yeah, actually, the U.S. Constitution, as you might know, in Article 1, gives the states absolute authority to decide how their congressional representatives are elected.
It has a minimum age of 25 years old, but it basically says that time, manner, and place Of the election per Congress is up to the state.
So yes, we'll try to get California.
We're looking at Arizona and Nebraska maybe as potential states, laboratories for this.
It's going to take a while.
I think people will have to understand it.
But I think it's, you know, we've done focus groups, and people love the idea.
They love the chance that they'll get to have an impact on their representative, and they love the fact that the money and the advertising is basically minimized and taken out of the equation.
And then you're right, it kind of returns our democracy to what the founders intended, and that is a Congress composed of people that are coming from You know, neighborhoods or local farmers or local business people who represent their communities.
And instead of, you know, blow dried media types like Gavin Newsom, to give a good example, you know, we'll get people that are really more knowledgeable about their local communities.
And I think that's a really good thing to save our democracy.
Very interesting. Thank you, John Cox.
I really appreciate it, guys.
The book is The Newsome Nightmare.
There's a website, thenewsomenightmare.com, and also, here are the people, H-E-A-R, here are the people, dot org.
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.
I'm going to complete today my discussion of accountability, the section of the Gulag Archipelago that's called the blue caps.
These are the people who run the prison camps of the Gulag.
And Solzhenitsyn is bemoaning the fact that none of these people, none, not one, has been held to account.
Now, although Solzhenitsyn is writing in the second half of the 20th century, let's remember that he's writing before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He lived to see the collapse.
He then returned to Russia.
He had been living in exile in Vermont.
But nevertheless, this work is written in the 19—well, this edition, I think, came out later, but the work itself written in the 1970s.
And so Solzhenitsyn knows that the Gulag is still alive, but supposedly the Gulag under Stalin had been condemned.
And then Solzhenitsyn knows also, because he lived to see it, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So his point is that when are these people who did these horrific things, things that are comparable to what the Nazis did, what the Pol Pot people did in Cambodia, I mean, what Mao did in China, when are they going to even be held to say, I am a murderer, I did something wrong?
Let's leave and leave aside whether they're going to be incarcerated, whether they're going to be tortured, whether they're going to get what's coming to them.
And maybe in an ultimate sense, Solzhenitsyn doesn't go here.
They will sort of get their karma, will get their divine punishment.
Solzhenitsyn doesn't go there, even though he was a religious man, very interested.
He was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church.
I'm sure all of this was in his mind, but I think he's also very disciplined as a writer, and he understands I'm speaking to a certain audience, and some of that audience is in the West, and some of that audience is secular, and so I want to speak that kind of secular language.
Here's Solzhenitsyn. It is clear enough that those men who turn the handle of the meat grinder, he's talking about grinding human beings into, you know, hamburger, if you will, are no longer young.
They are 50 to 80 years old.
They have lived the best years of their lives prosperously, well-nourished, and comfortable, so that it is too late for any kind of equal retribution as far as they are concerned.
So you have Solzhenitsyn's point, and Debbie makes the same point with regard to Israel and Hamas.
She goes, people keep saying, well, Israel is killing more people than the Hamas terrorists killed.
Well, if you want equal retribution, Israel would have to do to Hamas exactly what Hamas did to the Israelis, which is to say, put people in cages, rape them, torture them, chop off their limbs, make videos and put them on the internet.
You would have to match atrocity for atrocity.
And that's what Solzhenitsyn is getting at here.
He goes, we can't match the atrocities that they did.
In fact, most of these guys are now in the second half of life.
They've lived a comfortable life.
So even if you lock them up now, well, that's hardly a retribution.
They took young people.
They took young men in their 20s.
They took women and children.
They blasted them to smithereens.
So there really isn't any way to give them equal retribution.
And then he says, Solzhenitsyn does, I just want to draw attention to the kind of effectiveness of this rhetorical device.
It is the I shall not, but in saying I shall not, Solzhenitsyn is reminding us of what they did.
It's kind of like politicians sometimes do.
They'll say something like, I will not bring up my opponent's sexual infidelities.
I will not bring up the fact that he's a regular consumer of porn.
I will not bring up the fact that his son is on drugs.
Now, obviously, by saying I will not bring it up, you are bringing it up.
And so what Solzhenitsyn's doing here, kind of by analogy, is reminding us of what those guys did.
And then he goes, In burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.
This is, by the way, a warning I think that we should take heed of as well.
If we bury the truths of what's happening now in the country, The abominable prevarications and lies, the abuse of people who are essentially made into political prisoners, the solitary confinement, which is a form of torture.
All of this is going on now.
And if we don't take note of it, and we don't insist on accountability, and then we allow a little bit later, which, by the way, I can totally see Republicans doing slogans like, let's move along, let's let bygones be bygones, let's not resurrect the past.
Obviously, the scale of what's happening now is different than what happened in the Soviet Gulag.
I'm not trying to say that the scale is equivalent, but nevertheless, I'm appealing to the idea that if you let evil go unnoticed, undisputed, unchallenged, then it festers, it becomes worse, it metastasizes, it grows.
And Solzhenitsyn closes out this way.
He goes... When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we're not simply protecting their trivial old age.
We are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
And then he goes, it is going to be uncomfortable, horrible to live in such a country.
And I think that is true now of not only the Soviet Union, but even Eastern Europe.
If you just go there now, walk around, people have a certain defeated hangdog look.
It's almost like the sins of communism are still being visited upon the children.
There is a defeated mentality.
This was also true, by the way, in Nazi Germany in the aftermath of the fall of Nazism.
Of course, the Germans, to their credit, did revive the country and did revive the economy.
But it is uncomfortable.
It is horrible to live in such a country.
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