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Dec. 1, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:32
KID IN BLACKFACE? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep718
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Coming up, have you heard about the 5-year-old kid accused of wearing blackface?
I'll come to his defense.
I'll consider new evidence in the Trump New York case that vindicates Trump's evaluation of his business assets.
And author Ben Stein joins me.
We're going to talk about one of the strangest and most fascinating men to occupy the Oval Office, Richard M. Nixon.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk about the five-year-old kid who was accused of wearing blackface at a game of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Now, there was an article in a publication called Deadspin.
And it was written by, the post was written by this guy named Karron, C-A-R-R-O-N, Karron Phillips.
I look up his profile.
He is apparently a Pulitzer nominee.
He's had some awards, Journalist of the Year.
He used to work for the New York Daily News.
So this is actually a pretty accomplished, or at least established, journalist.
And you have to ask, why would a journalist go after a five-year-old kid?
Well, apparently he spotted this five-year-old kid in the game.
And if you look at his post about it, what he does is he shows the kid from the side.
You can kind of see one side of the boy's profile and it is painted on one side black.
And so, looking at it only from the profile side, it's like, wow, you've got a kid in blackface, and presumably this is not the fault of the kid, but maybe the parents did this.
So, the post that Karon Phillips puts out basically is saying that the NFL needs to speak out against this.
The NFL needs to step in because you've got a kid in blackface at a Kansas City Chiefs game.
Now, what makes all of this so deceptive and insidious is that the moment the kid turns his face, in other words, when you look at the full picture, you don't look at the distorted or half picture that was presented in Charon Phillips' post, but you look at the kid, you see that the kid has...
Well, here it is. Take a look if you're watching the podcast in video.
You can see what it is.
He's got... We're good to go.
And while he's there, even more interesting, he does the Kansas City Chief's kind of chopping sign, which I guess is the, is the, let's defeat the other side, let's chop them.
So he does the tomahawk chop.
And guess what? When you're looking at the video of it, it's very interesting because you see some of the Kansas City Chief players, in fact, the black players, and they look up at the kid, and they see him doing the chop sign, and so they do the chop sign.
So, in other words, they're familiar with the kid.
They see what he's doing.
They approve of it. He's wearing the Kansas City colors.
And they kind of join him in doing this tomahawk chop sign.
Absolutely benign.
Not a hint of racism.
And then, and this is what happens these days on X on Twitter, is that people start looking up.
They look up the kid because they're like, is this kid really a racist?
Are his parents really racist?
Well, it turns out...
That the kid is a Native American.
It turns out that he belongs to the Chumash tribe.
His dad is on the board of the Chumash tribe in Santa Inez.
And so, this is a completely benign incident that is being twisted, but twisted deliberately.
And you have to say deliberately.
Why? Because when you go to the partial photo, you get it.
Obviously, Karon Phillips saw the full photo.
He could see the kid.
He could see, now this kid's wearing, he's in the Kansas City colors.
But guess what?
If I shoot him from one side, I get only the black face.
And so this appears to be a very malicious act by an influential publication and an influential journalist against a five-year-old kid.
Now, to me, this is a worse slander than happened.
Remember that kid at Georgetown, you know, who was approached and they acted like he was somehow a racist and they were beating the drums and all this stuff.
And he won a big settlement because he filed a lawsuit.
And this is really what I think this kid's parents need to do.
They need to get a good lawyer and And they need to file a massive defamation suit against Charon Phillips and against Deadspin.
Because this talk about putting out something that could ruin a kid's life, right?
It could ruin a kid's life because imagine at the age of five being portrayed as some kind of racist in the making because you wore supposedly blackface, except you didn't, to a game...
I think that any jury, and I even think that a jury of people of different political abuse will look at this and go, this is really a kind of child abuse.
It shows the callousness of modern journalism.
And I'm looking at this Caron Phillips guy, I'm looking at his profile, and he's kind of smiling from ear to ear.
But... This is what we get these days.
We get people who put on a smile, but they act in a vicious manner.
I mean, didn't this guy think, well, whatever the kid did, he's five.
And so, does it really make sense to blast his image all over social media and use one of the most kind of vile smears that you can use against somebody that clearly can't be applicable to him no matter what he did?
The kid in that sense at 5 is going to be innocent no matter what he did.
I mean, he could be saying Heil Hitler and he would still be a 5-year-old.
So, imagine what comprehension would a 5-year-old have of what Hitler did or anything for that matter.
So, the innocence of a 5-year-old is presumed.
It's the presumptive starting point.
This is why I'd like to see Deadspin and Ciarán Phillips really be held accountable for this clear libel.
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Donald Trump, as you know, is in a show trial in New York.
And I say a show trial because it is a trial whose outcome is already known.
The judge, an extreme leftist, he, what is it, En-Gor-On, is that the guy's name?
It rhymes with moron.
And then even this guy has already decided that Trump inflated the value of his assets.
And yet the trial kind of, it's almost like one of those things where it's plodding on even though the judge has already said what his conclusion is going to be.
Now, that's not the final word, because there'll be an appeal.
And so, I think this charade, I hope, will be shut down, if not at the appellate level, then certainly at the Supreme Court level.
But nevertheless, here we have this trial.
And it turns out Trump is putting on a really strong defense, except there's a sense of futility, at least for me, because it doesn't seem to really matter.
The judge has already made up his mind.
He's already said he's made up his mind.
And yet if you listen to the facts of the case, it's quite obvious that the judge is in a kind of la-la land.
The judge is paying no attention to facts.
So... Trump.
The Trump people brought out a witness.
And this is the executive of Deutsche Bank.
His name is David Williams.
And think about it. This is a guy who made the loans, or at least one of the key banks that made loans to the Trump organization.
And he was asked a series of very telling questions about those loans.
Question number one.
Did the Trump Organization have a strong enough balance sheet to justify the loans?
And he replies, quote, that Trump had, quote, one of the strongest balance sheets we have seen and totally unlike any of our major redeveloper clients.
A lot of the redevelopers are deep in debt, but Trump had tremendous assets that he was able to show.
So this guy is saying that compared to others, Trump's assets were better.
They were stronger. And so that's, of course, what banks are looking for.
Number two, Mr.
Williams was asked, did Trump ever default on any of the loans?
Did he not pay back?
And the guy goes, absolutely not.
He never defaulted on the loans.
The loans are all paid back.
So no one, the point being, no one has been injured by this supposed inflation of Trump's assets.
Trump got the loans. He paid back the loans.
Then he was asked...
Do banks merely rely on Trump's assertions to decide whether or not he has sufficient collateral assets?
So if Trump says, for example, that Mar-a-Lago is worth, let's just say, for example, $50 million, I'm just making these numbers up, Does the bank just go, oh, you're saying it's worth $50 million, so it must be worth $50 million, so here, we can make you a loan for X amount of money based upon the collateral of Mar-a-Lago.
And Mr. Williams goes, absolutely not.
We, the banks, do our own assessment of what these assets are worth.
We don't just rely on the client's statement of what they think they're worth.
We have our own appraisers.
We have our own evaluators.
And so, the point being, where is the fraud?
Banks are big boys.
We're not talking about Trump here, you know, trying to swindle some guy who's only worth, you know, $10,000.
No, the banks have giant resources.
They have whole teams that go out and make these sorts of assessments.
So, it bolsters the Trump organization's claim that banks do their own due diligence before making loans.
Quote, We're good to go.
And the guy goes on to say what I think everybody in the financial business knows, that there is no fixed number that you can put as to the value of something like that.
Let's take Mar-a-Lago as an example.
What is the actual value of Mar-a-Lago?
Turns out... No one exactly knows.
In fact, this is the game that real estate people play when they're trying to sell something.
They look at comps.
They look at things that are around nearby.
They decide, okay, well, if you want to go for a little longer or a little higher value to sell your property, it may take longer to sell.
You have to find the right buyer who absolutely loves this property.
Otherwise, you'd do well to sell it for a little bit less.
So clearly, the value of real estate assets is a little subjective.
So, given all of this, the idea that Trump is committing some known fraud is absurd.
It's preposterous. The fraud is coming from New York.
It's the fraud of Letitia James.
It's the fraud of this partisan hack judge, Engeron.
So, once again, we have a teaming up of a wicked and corrupt prosecutor who had campaigned, by the way, on sticking it to Trump.
And she's found a pliant judge, a like-minded judge, a judge coming from the same team, which is the left, the Democrats.
And It almost doesn't matter.
Trump is putting on a case.
He's got good witnesses.
He's showing that the whole thing is ridiculous.
He's got the banks that actually made the loans saying, no, we weren't cheated.
We weren't fooled. We have our own appraisers.
The loans got paid back.
And yet, in the end, as far as this particular courtroom is concerned, none of this appears to matter.
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Claim your eligibility for free silver on There's an important case that came before the Supreme Court that will not be decided until next spring, but the arguments and the hearing is now.
and it is a case that on the surface appears pretty technical and pretty focused. It deals with one agency of the US government, the so-called SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, but the ramifications of the case are pretty big. They're pretty wide. Of course, how widely the ramifications end up being depends upon what the court says.
The court can decide we're making a decision for this case and this agency alone or the courts could say, guess what?
We are noticing here that these federal agencies...
Which supposedly have delegated power from Congress to deal with particular areas.
Like this is... We're dealing with labor relations.
We're dealing with consumer protection.
We're dealing with finances.
These agencies are out of control.
They've become lawmaking bodies in their own right.
They have departed from the focus of what Congress delegated them to do.
They're now acting like somebody elected them even though no one did.
And not only that, but they have set up their own internal courts.
I mean, think about that. You cannot actually fight these agencies because you can't go to court because the agency has its own court.
And so whether it's a wetland and they're like, we're going to take your property because it's a wetland.
You can't build on that property.
You're like, okay, let's go before a judge and see what he says or she says.
And it turns out you can't because they're like, yeah, you can come before a judge, but it's a judge.
Who's actually an employee of our agency?
They're going to hear your case and they're going to decide.
Well, I think we can see that the administrative state is way out of control.
Now, it started getting out of control almost 100 years ago, starting in the FDR period.
It then got wildly out of control under LBJ. This is a problem that has been going on for many, many decades.
And the question is whether a conservative Supreme Court...
That does want our structure of government to be aligned with the Constitution and does want the delegation of powers to be in line with what the Constitution says and allows.
Will the Supreme Court kind of come in and sort of corral these agencies and say, listen, you have gone way too far.
This is what I'm actually hoping for.
So let's look at this particular case.
It involves the SEC. And the SEC brought this guy named George Jarkessy.
They accused him of securities fraud.
And the details of the case are not important, but essentially an SEC administrative law judge said, oh yeah, this guy's guilty.
He violated the Securities Act.
He's got to pay a penalty of $300,000 and repay $685,000, so about a million dollars total.
And he also is barred from taking part in various security industry activities, including serving as an investment advisor.
So this guy, Jarkesi, has now challenged the proceedings, basically saying they violate the Constitution.
And he won in the Fifth Circuit.
That's how it's now going up to the Supreme Court.
And the Federal Appeals Court basically decided in Giacchese's favor on three separate counts.
It said, first of all, this guy has the right to go before a civil judge and jury.
In other words, the administrative agency, which obviously got its own biases, can't set up its own court.
Hey, listen, our court...
You know, it's kind of like, it's just so crazy.
If somebody sues D'Souza Media, hey, listen, you can't go to court.
We at D'Souza Media have our own court, Chief Justice Deborah D'Souza.
She'll be hearing your case and deciding on them.
I mean, this is what's going on with the government.
It's preposterous. It's absurd.
But moreover, the court also said that the idea that these administrative judges can only be removed from their position by, quote, good cause, the court goes, wait a minute, good cause?
These agencies are an extension of the executive branch of the government.
In that sense, they're under the president.
So let's say the president decides, I'm going to fire that guy.
I don't need good cause.
In fact, I don't need any cause at all.
If I'm the president, I am the boss.
I have the authority to fire people who are inside the executive branch of the government, answerable and accountable to me.
So what's great about this case is it's going before the Supreme Court, but it could affect the We're good to go.
They make their own rules and they actually claim, Congress, you stay out of it because you don't actually have the expertise in deciding what is a wetland.
That's our expertise. We've got various scientists and advisors and, you know, climatologists, and they'll tell us what a wetland really is.
That's our job, not yours.
And then similarly, if there's a dispute, no, no, it's very complex.
You don't really understand the issues involved.
We can't go before a normal judge or jury.
We need to have our own specialist jurors or our own specialist judges who are going to make that determination.
This is all deeply undemocratic and even anti-democratic.
And so the Supreme Court is in the very interesting position of having an unelected branch of government, SCOTUS, Ultimately trying to put democratic accountability back in its place.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast the, well, the one and only Ben Stein.
And this is a man who has done so many things, I don't even know where to begin with an introduction.
He is an economist.
He is an author.
He is an actor.
He was an award-winning comedy central game show host, Win Ben Stein's Money.
You might have seen him in Forrest Mueller's Day Off.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off, that's right.
It's the most successful youth comedy of all time, though there you are.
And your role, extremely memorable in that, I've got to say.
And now you've written a book.
It is The Peacemaker.
It's about Richard Nixon.
Your website is MrBenStein, I like this, MrBenSteinMR, MrBenStein.com.
Ben, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. My pleasure, Dinesh.
You have written a book about, I think, perhaps the most elusive and mysterious And yet fascinating of men, Richard Nixon.
Let me just say by way of introduction that shortly after I graduated from Dartmouth, a bunch of us got together and we decided who would be the most interesting man that we could sit down and have breakfast with.
We had a small group called the Dartmouth Breakfast Club.
And we go... Let our imaginations go wild.
In other words, there's no limits.
We had, I think we had Pope John Paul II on that list.
I think we had Gorbachev.
We might have had Reagan on the list.
And yet the winner?
And by quite a bit.
Hands down, Nixon. Was Nixon.
Because we all said...
That it would really be wonderful to get a little window into the mind and personality of Richard Nixon.
Well, you have had that window.
You have written a really riveting book about Nixon.
So let's just begin by talking.
A lot of people know about Nixon, but I don't think people have much of an idea of...
Who Richard Nixon was?
So as someone who regards Nixon as a friend, in fact, as someone who just put on his Nixon tie right before this podcast, who was Richard Nixon?
He was a peace banker.
He was a man who believed that, above all, his goal was to make peace and to bequeath to the United States of America and its great people the title, the gift of a generation of peace.
And that is a hell of a gift.
And I don't think there's anyone who's done anything quite like that.
He was doing that while he was being cursed at, spit at, treated like dirt by the Bolshevik left there in America, which is very, very, very much a dominant part of the media scene.
And he was a hero.
He was a hero. And as a Jew, I can tell you, he saved Eretz Israel from the Russians and their evil, disgusting ilk.
And he's my hero.
Who is he?
He's my hero.
Ben, let's put this in context a little bit because people often forget that the 19th century was littered with bloody wars across Europe and of course we had the horrible Civil War in the United States, a very bloody war.
And then the 20th century, there were two massive wars in the first half of the 20th century, World War I and then of course World War II.
And so after World War II, the period between from the 1950s, I would say all the way to now, has been somewhat anomalous in that all of us have lived most of our life, or in fact some cases all of our life, in peace.
And that is not... It's been a miracle.
Right? It's not the norm.
That's the point. And you're saying that a key architect of that peace was Richard Milhouse Nixon.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
And especially for the United States of America, which is, to me, the world, he was the savior of peace.
He was the prince of peace.
I mean, I know what people call Christ, but to me, Nixon was the prince of peace.
His mother was a Quaker, Hannah.
She was a Quaker. She used to tell him that peace was the greatest of all gifts.
And that the best thing he could do with his life, if he achieved high office, which I guess he thought he would, and he certainly did, would be to leave to the people of America a generation apiece.
And that's a hell of a gift.
And he did that in very large measure by standing up to the Russians and by standing up to what were then the terrorists in the Middle East.
It's an astonishing thing that he could have done that while he was being reviled, treated like dirt by the vicious media, which is still vicious about Nixon.
And he was a great man to be able to do this while being dumped on.
It was incredible, just incredible.
We'll be right back with Ben Stein, author of The Peacemaker, the website MrMRBenstein.com.
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I'm back with the one and only Ben Stein, author of The Peacemaker.
Ben, when I think about Nixon and peace, I think about three different vectors of conflict that Nixon was involved in adjudicating and maybe helping to dispel.
One, of course, was the 1973 war involving Israel.
One was the Cold War involving the Soviet Union, but there was also China.
Right, exactly. So we have Nixon in China, Nixon in the Soviets, Nixon in Israel.
Why don't we talk for a moment about each of those to italicize what was Nixon's accomplishment?
Let's start with China. What did Nixon accomplish and why regarding China?
Nixon had achieved reconnecting with China.
China had been ostracized, kicked out, treated badly by the United States since they beat Chiang Kai-shek and took over almost all of China.
And Nixon said, this isn't going to work.
This isn't doing it. This is not doing anyone any good.
And so he renewed relations with China.
And in so doing, he...
Isolated Russia. He made sure that Russia was the only country that was surrounded, mostly, not entirely, by hostile communist countries.
And in so doing, he said to the Russians, basically, you cannot win the Cold War.
You cannot win the Cold War if we have China And the U.S. together, and you versus NATO, you can't win.
You can't win. You might as well just give it up.
Just make peace and make friends.
And it works incredibly, unbelievably well.
I mean, the Russians are not idiots, and they realized they had been outdone by Nixon's diplomacy.
This is kind of an interesting thing.
People call him Tricky Dick.
People call him names of all kinds.
But he was essentially a diplomat and a peacemaker.
This is amazing.
What other president has ever done that?
What other president has ever stood up to the forces of history And there's a famous saying about, I'm sure you know better than I do, about William F. Buckley standing up to the train of history and saying, stop.
I'm sure you know that very well.
And I think Nixon did that better than anyone else and said, communism, you're not going to beat us.
Bolshevism, you're not going to beat us.
War, you're not going to beat us.
We're going to stand up, and we're going to stand up not to conquer Europe, not to conquer Asia, but to You bequeath peace.
And that's a very, very big, noble gift.
What do you think, Ben? It was Margaret Thatcher who said that Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.
As you know, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 right after Reagan's tenure.
The Soviet Union, of course, collapsed under George H.W. Bush.
Do you see a kind of continuity of strategy and policy between Nixon and Reagan?
It seemed at the time that there were some important differences between the two, but are you saying that with the larger vantage point of history, Reagan was continuing in the Nixonian path?
Well, I would say not the larger, the longer point of view of history.
As long as he had a long train running, saying to the Russians, Just forget about it.
You're not going to win.
And as long as we had the incredible technological breakthrough of the internet, which allowed Russians to get news about the rest of the world, limited to be sure by our standards, the Russians were told, behave yourselves.
You might be able to make something of yourselves.
You have all those great-looking girls, so you have a big start in that regard.
And you're...
Why not? Why not make peace?
What do you have to lose by making peace?
And then, unfortunately, after Nixon entered in mortality, the Democrats took over in large measure in the making of foreign policy in the United States.
And the Democrats did not understand about standing up to Russia and to Bolshevism.
And that was a disaster.
And by the way, I look at my old next-door neighbor, Carl Bernstein, wonderful next-door neighbor, charming fellow, great guitarist, and his partner in crime, Bob Wippert, and I think to myself, if they had not done evil deeds they had done, there would have been no Cambodian genocide.
And Nixon would never have allowed a Cambodian genocide.
Ford, unfortunately, did.
But Nixon would not have.
And Nixon valued life.
We'll be right back with Ben Stein, author of The Peacemaker, the website MrMRBenstein.com.
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I'm back with actor and lawyer and economics teacher and best-selling author and game show host and the book The Peacemaker by Ben Stein, the website MrMRBenstein.com.
Ben, you mentioned that if Nixon had not been done in by Watergate, maybe the Cambodian genocide could have been averted.
And of course, I think the other malign effect of Watergate, of course, was the Republicans took a tremendous beating in the 74 midterm elections, and then Carter sweeps in in 76.
So here we have another gift of the Democrats, of course, put the word gift in quote marks, Which is the U.S. pulling out the Persian rug from the Shah and giving us the Ayatollah Khomeini.
And who would have thought, you know, here, 40 years later, that the Iranian revolution would be consolidated, would be a way of life for a whole generation of Iranians, and would be the launching pad of Islamic radicalism, not just in that region, but in some respect in the world.
Well, launching pad is a terrifying word, my friend Dinesh, because who would have dreamed when we—you're too young to remember this—when we saw these carloads, truckloads of screaming Iranian kids riding through Washington, calling for the disposal of the Shah, that the next thing we're going to see would be a nuclear-armed Iran threatening the United States of America.
Who would have dreamed that these plunks would have been a powerful nuclear threat to the United States and to the world?
There's not going to be any peaceful world if Iran gets a nuclear bomb, and they probably already—actually, they're probably very, very close to it.
Maybe they haven't already.
A very smart friend of mine, I'm sure you know already, a girl who used to work as a spectator, Marina Molina, said a very smart thing a long time ago.
I said to her, what happens when Iran gets a nuclear bomb?
She's a terribly, terribly intelligent young woman.
And she said, Iran becomes a glass parking lot.
And maybe that's true and maybe not.
But we don't want to ride out of the bunk.
Mr. Nixon was approached by the Shah.
The Shah said, and Mr.
Nixon said, don't let the radicals take over.
Then Ford was approached by the Shah.
And Ford and his friends said, put up machine guns and just shoot them down as they come down the street.
It would have been a good idea.
It's a hard... Horrible thing to say to murder people, but it's a horrible thing to think of a state founded on murder and genocide being one of the most powerful countries in the world.
That is a horror show.
Yeah, I mean, and certainly the mullahs, despite all their clerical robes and so on, were not too squeamish to unleash a kind of orgy of terror inside of Iran the moment the Shah was...
The moment, absolutely.
Especially against us Jews.
I mean, Iran used to have a lot of Jews.
Now they all live near me in Beverly Hills.
But he had no hesitation about killing people solely because they were Jewish.
Nobody ever talks about that anymore.
Nobody ever talks about the genocide of the Iranian revolutionaries against the Jews.
That's a real thing.
It really happened. Nixon would not have let it happen.
Ben, the Kissinger just died, of course, and I was just thinking back, this was many years ago, reading Kissinger's memoirs, which were fascinating about Kissinger, but also fascinating as a window into Nixon.
And I think what really struck me reading those memoirs, and I haven't read them all, is the kind of the urbanity of Kissinger, the urbanity of Nixon, their intellectual sophistication, the fact that these were people who studied strategy, they knew who Disraeli was, they read books, they studied Sun Tzu, they talked at this level, and it appears that this whole realm of discourse has just absolutely
vanished from American politics on both sides.
It's vanished from America on both sides.
I mean, the American college student is really a disgrace to humanity.
The American students, even in graduate school, are a disgrace to humanity.
Sir, I went to Columbia as an undergrad.
Yale is a loss of an e-commerce student.
Could you have imagined demonstrations in favor of killing Jews at these elite universities?
Could you have imagined it?
And yet, it's happening. I don't think Nixon would have...
He couldn't have stopped it, but I think he would have approached it at a level that's made people realize that they're being done in by their own children.
I mean, both Nixon and Reagan were, of course, familiar with the activism of the 60s, but it seems like in their own way, they developed a very effective way, not only to counter it, Reagan, of course, in California, and Nixon while he was president, but they were able to turn it to their political advantage.
By saying to the American people, hey listen, we don't want chaos in our streets.
We don't want these bearded lunatics telling us what to do.
They can't even run their own lives.
How are they going to run the country?
Absolutely right, and it's interesting.
I imagine you know very, very well about how when there was a tremendous anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C., there was a crowd of demonstrators, I probably was one of them, hanging around at the Lincoln Memorial very, very late at night, and Nixon went out with Alderman and a couple of others and visited with him and talked about football with him, and people made fun of him.
But he approached them.
He talked to them. He could have just shot them.
Of course, he would never have done that.
But just shouted at them and called them dirty names.
He tried to make friends with them.
It didn't work very well.
But he tried.
He tried. He tried. He tried always for a peaceful way.
He always tried for a peaceful way.
But he did not believe there was any peace possible with the Palestinians.
And I remember, I had the great privilege of spending time with him by himself in his office at San Clemente.
And he went through all the troubled thoughts in the world one day, we were talking, and he said, all of them can be solved by this, by this, by this.
And then he went to the Palestinians and he said, I don't know what you can do about them except to hang them all.
And, of course, at the time, it seemed like a kind of shocking thing to say.
But he was right. Yeah, yeah.
You get a loud cheer from Debbie right here on the side.
She's been watching all the Hamas videos, so she's right on board and in the mood to carry it out herself if she had the chance.
Ben Stein, this looks like a great book.
I'm excited to read it. It's called The Peacefaker.
The website, mrmrbenstein.com.
Thank you very much for joining me.
God bless you, Dinesh. Have fun.
Writing about World War II, Solzhenitsyn writes, In general, this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the world was to be a Russian.
And he's referring specifically to the Vlasov Regiment, the so-called Russian Liberation Army, That was kind of hoping that World War II would produce a liberation, not just of Russia from the Germans, but also Russia from the Soviets.
So this was the peculiar position of the Russian Liberation Army, and unfortunately it never came to pass.
It never worked. Ultimately, the Russian Liberation Army was decimated.
In the war, essentially Stalin used them as cannon fodder, to use Solzhenitsyn's own term, and the West betrayed these people.
Solzhenitsyn can kind of understand it, and yet I think the full weight of the tragedy falls very much on his shoulders.
He says the West simply had to understand the That Bolshevism is an enemy for all mankind.
In other words, the West never understood in fighting World War II that we have two enemies.
We have the Nazis, but we also have the communists.
And the Nazis may be the near enemy.
Maybe that Stalin is an enemy to be taken on after that.
Pretty much the only guy who saw this.
FDR didn't see it.
Most Americans didn't see it.
Winston Churchill did see it.
And Winston Churchill made some statements after the war to the effect that having defeated the Nazis, it may not be a bad idea to keep those armies going and in a sense overthrow the despotism of Russia.
But I think you have to realize that that was perhaps a political impossibility.
The United States is allied with Russia during the war.
I mean, think about it. When we talk about the Allies, we're counting not just France and England and the United States, but also Soviet Russia.
So is it really feasible?
Does it make any sense? Could you actually get away with it?
Could you pull it off and overthrow the Soviet Empire kind of while you're at it?
Here is Solzhenitsyn.
The Democratic West simply could not understand.
They could not understand the Russian Liberation Army.
They could not understand the Russian force that was allied, even if temporarily, with the Germans.
And this is Solzhenitsyn kind of putting on his Western accent.
If he were reading this, he would be speaking in a kind of Western accent.
What do you mean when you call yourselves a political opposition?
An opposition exists inside your country, meaning Russia?
Why is it never publicly declared its existence?
If you are dissatisfied with Stalin, go back home and in the first subsequent election, do not re-elect him.
Gotta say here, Solzhenitsyn is here highlighting the extreme ignorance and naivete of the West, acting as if Stalin even has elections, acting as if there is some internal recourse.
Well, why don't you go inside and work for reform within your own country?
Well, there's really no way to do that.
And continuing the same kind of mimicked dialogue here, Solzhenitsyn speaking as a Westerner.
Well, why did you have to take up arms?
And what is worse, German arms?
No, we have to extradite you.
It would be terribly bad form to act otherwise, and we might spoil our relations with a gallant ally.
So, this is why people in the West, and well-meaning people, it has to be said, we're like, sorry, we can't support the Russian Liberation Army.
In fact, if you end up in allied lines, let's just say as a captured political prisoner of war, we're going to send you back to the Soviet Union where you are guaranteed to end up in the Gulag.
And then Solzhenitsyn pulls back and makes a broad observation.
He goes, in World War II, the West kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself.
As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in an even more absolute and hopeless slavery.
So, this is the bitter irony of World War II. We often think of World War II as a great victory.
And it was a victory.
And it was a victory, I guess, even for Soviet Russia, because they successfully repelled the Nazi invasion.
They turned the tables on the Nazis.
They were ultimately Soviet soldiers in Berlin.
But Solzhenitsyn goes, but what about for the Russian people?
What about for the Russian people who are under Soviet tyranny?
Soviet tyranny was actually expanded after World War II. The Soviets before that didn't control Czechoslovakia.
They didn't control Hungary.
They didn't control East Germany.
So all of this fell into Soviet hands at the end of the war, and the Soviets, of course, kept it.
So, the nearsightedness of the West was condensed in what was written at Yalta.
So, you know about the Yalta Treaty.
It's ultimately where the Allies formally, in a formal way, conceded that the territories occupied by the Soviet Union toward the end of the war would stay under Soviet control.
And this was Yalta.
And I think as we look back, it was a kind of an ignominious treaty in which the West in a sense sold a whole bunch of people, captive peoples, Poles and Eastern Germans and Eastern
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