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Dec. 11, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:48
TAKING THE FALL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep724
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Coming up, I'll reveal how the Biden DOJ is covering for Joe Biden while preparing Hunter Biden to take the fall. I'll discuss how to protect free expression and at the same time guarantee a safe atmosphere for students on the American campus.
And entrepreneur Michael Seifert joins me.
We're going to talk about the parallel economy and the role of his company Public Square in helping to build it.
If you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
All in all, this is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Hunter Biden is finally facing some serious charges.
The charges have to do with tax evasion.
And the good news, although I don't think it's very good news, is that he is in principle facing many years.
What is it? Seven years? 17 years in prison.
Now, will he get 17 years?
No. Will he get even one year?
I have my doubts.
I have my doubts. But he'll get something.
And I think it will establish him as a felon and a criminal, which he is.
But he's not the only criminal.
Joe Biden is the bigger criminal.
Hunter Biden is a part of the Joe Biden scheme, as, by the way, are James Biden and Frank Biden.
So, the idea of charging Hunter Biden is really a cover for Joe Biden.
And what I mean by that is, let's find the charge that applies exclusively to Hunter Biden, and let's leave out the charge that would include Joe Biden.
Now, what's the charge that would include Joe Biden?
Well, it would be violating the laws which have to do with foreign deals.
If you pull in foreign influence peddling, then who's been doing the influence peddling?
Who has the influence to pedal?
Well, Joe Biden. So, very cunningly, the special counsel, who is kind of joined at the hip with the Biden DOJ, Let's drop that one.
Let's put that to the side. That spares Joe Biden, keeps him out of it.
And then let's charge Hunter.
But again, it's like, charge Hunter with what?
The charge of tax fraud is like basically saying that you got a guy who goes into a bank, you know, shoots up all the people in the bank, then makes off with a bunch of gold, and you don't charge him with murder, and you don't charge him even with theft.
You basically charge him with not paying taxes on the loot that he got.
Well, I mean, that is a pathetic, miserable reduction of the crime.
The crime is the influence peddling, it's the bribery scheme.
And Hunter Biden is not being charged with that.
The pretense is he had a legitimate business.
And if you read the indictment, now some of the salacious details in the indictment are being emphasized, and there are some conservatives like chortling over it, oh, he spent all his money on hookers, oh, he spent all this money on, you know, on drugs, and he spent all his money on this and that.
quote, instead of paying taxes.
Well, yeah, that's true. But as I say, the nature of the crime is that this disgusting family went into politics to make money and decided... Now, by the way, they're not the only ones. There are people who go into politics to make money, but at least they make money the legal way. It might be distasteful, but it is legal. So let's take, for example, a politician who goes into politics and decides, you know, I'm
going to kind of sell out to I don't care about my constituency.
Whether I get re-elected, I'm going to try to get re-elected, but I'm going to take all this money from the pharmaceutical industry, from the defense industry.
Well, that is distasteful, but it is legal.
Why? Because lobbyists are allowed to contribute to candidates, and they do.
But setting up...
A scheme where your dad, in this case Joe Biden, is going to sell influence in exchange for cash that will be funneled through Hunter Biden, through various LLCs, paying other LLCs.
This is a racket.
And this is a racket that dwarfs even the Clinton racket, which they set up earlier through the Clinton Foundation.
You remember all that.
So this is very bad stuff.
And so it's almost like you've got a massive iceberg of crimes and this charge is now touching only the tip of the iceberg.
And then he's going to pardon him.
And then Debbie goes, then there could be a pardon that comes down.
And then, of course, the media will be like, that just shows that Joe Biden has a soft spot.
This is Joe Biden expressing family values, guys.
You know, we may not approve of it, but it's very understandable.
It's just filial loyalty for Joe.
And he's always been that kind of a stand-up guy there for his family.
Let's remember he's gone through a lot of tragedies.
Half of them, by the way, made up.
Because you go, my sons were killed in Iraq.
They were on the battlefield when they were gunned down.
All this nonsense that this half-madman says, and yet you've got a nodding media.
That's really what disgusts me most of all.
It's almost like the courtiers in the old days of the court where the prince or the dauphins are something absurd, and all the courtiers go...
Why is it a thoughtful statement?
Yes, Dauphin, please keep on.
Your thoughts are enlightening all of us.
Yeah, this is the spectacle to which the United States has been reduced these days.
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We're starting to see some real fallout.
From the three ugly stepsisters, namely the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, and their atrocious presentation before Congress.
Elise Stefanik tweeted out yesterday, I guess, or maybe this morning, one down, two to go.
And what she's referring to is the resignation of Liz McGill, who is the president of Penn.
Now, we'll have to see what happens with the president of Harvard.
There's Harvard board meeting going on yesterday, continuing Monday today.
But I'm hopeful that Claudine Gay, the Harvard president, will also get the boot.
And then it'll be two down and one left to go.
Interestingly, it's not just Liz McGill who has resigned, but also a guy named Bok, who is the Scott Bok.
He's the chairman of the board.
And at first, I thought, this is interesting.
The board moved in and essentially asked Liz McGill to resign.
But was she able to, like, lash back out against the board and somehow get...
But no, it looks like this Scott Bach guy was essentially a protector of McGill.
In fact, even when he issued a statement about her resignation, it was so watered down, so weak.
He's basically saying, not that DEI is bad, not even...
That anything that she said that was substantively wrong, it's just that she was kind of caught by surprise.
It's just that she misjudged the moment.
She maybe spoke in artfully.
And this, of course, has now been picked up by other law school professors at Penn who are offering absolutely preposterous apologias for Liz McGill.
Things like, you know, her PR team served her poorly.
I'm like, her PR team?
You have the leader of an Ivy League university asked a simple question and unable to give an answer, revealing complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
And then there was like a certain type of a life coach who weighs on and goes, Oh no, she got trapped by the trick question, which is similar to, you know...
When did you stop beating your wife?
She should have refused to answer the question, in a sense, denied the premise of the question.
I'm thinking, wait a minute, no.
You're asked this question, which is, is it permissible for students to call for Jewish genocide consistent with your code of conduct on your campus?
Think about it. You have a rule.
Shouldn't the rule have certain clarity around it?
If a student goes, I'm thinking of calling for genocide, am I allowed to do that or am I going to be punished?
Shouldn't the student have a yes or no answer to that question?
So this is not a trick question.
It's a hypothetical question, but it's not a trick question.
It's not the same as when have you stopped beating your wife.
In fact, it is a question that demands a clear answer.
Yes? Or no?
And if it's, then you can give an explanation for why you're saying yes or why you're saying no.
But this is what I'm getting at.
These people are captive to a toxic ideology.
And the toxic ideology is what is really on trial here.
It isn't just the ineptitude of these college presidents.
That's taken for granted. I mean, these people are intellectual mediocrities, probably with room temperature IQs.
They're probably all...
I mean, notice, first of all, this was like a diversity fest, right?
You've got basically the white woman, you've got the black woman.
By the way, the black woman, Claudine Gay, may not be gay, but her name is gay.
So maybe she's like a threefer, because I got the black, I got the woman, I got the gay, at least in my name.
So in any event, she goes, you had to go there, Dinesh, you had to go there.
This is what I do.
I go there. Okay.
Debbie says that I'm always poking the bear, but in this case, I'm not really poking a bear.
Unless Claudine Gay's view is I am a bear trapped in a human body.
I'm really a bear.
From now on, call me bear.
That's my pronouns.
Perhaps it's time to end the segment.
Well, let me just end with this kind of observation, and that is, this is Professor Robert George of Princeton.
I think making a sage comment, and perhaps we'll end on this note of sobriety.
It is critical that we derive the right message and avoid deriving the wrong one from Liz McGill's, quote, voluntary resignation.
The wrong one is that universities like Penn need more restrictions of speech.
I couldn't agree more with that.
The right one is that double standards will no longer be tolerated.
Yes. Ultimately, we're fighting for the free speech of the groups that get excluded from this kind of protective code.
The protective code exists for some groups.
Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, gays, trans, and other groups don't get the same kind of protection.
That's the double standard that Robert George is talking about.
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Here's the writer Peter Beinart.
The campaign to depose the presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT is a campaign to restrict pro-Palestinian speech on campus.
If you support it, please have the decency never to sermonize about free speech, academic freedom, or cancel culture again.
Here's my reply to Beinart.
Actually, we want to give the pro-censorship left a taste of its own medicine.
Translation, these are people who have been canceling us for years, if not decades.
So, it's really good.
For the same reason, it's really good to kick a bully in the shins.
For that reason, it's good for them to get a taste of their own medicine.
It's good for them to be cancelled.
Not because we support cancel culture across the board, but because the way to stop cancel culture is to cancel some people on the left for a change.
Here's how I continue.
Only when they find their own free speech threatened do leftists miraculously discover the virtues of free speech.
Notice, they don't consider free speech when it comes to fatophobia, Islamophobia, racism.
They don't care about free speech.
Free speech is out the window.
But, when it comes to the Palestinians, then suddenly, free speech.
John Stuart Mill, the right to speak your mind.
So, this is what this whole fight is about.
So, the removal of this vile trio, I say, is paradoxically a blow for free speech.
Why? Because the party that is restricting free speech, which is the left...
Once they get a taste of their own medicine, they go, uh-oh, this can come back to bite us too.
So maybe we need to exercise a little more tolerance to all points of view.
I think that is, it's not the goal that I dispute.
The goal is free speech.
This is the way we get to that goal.
Now, here's another.
This is from the right.
There are people who are saying, and perhaps correctly, they're saying that firing the three ugly stepsisters won't fix the problem.
The problem is bigger than that.
I see here my friend God Saad, whom I've had on the podcast.
He goes, well, I understand the desire to have the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn resign, be fired.
He goes, in a sense, it's a small and insignificant outcome.
What he's getting at is that there's a parasitic, destructive ideology.
All of them are captive to that ideology.
So his point of view is if you get rid of them, the ideology remains in place.
It's the ideology we need to take on.
And he says, look, who do you think is going to replace Liz McGill?
Probably someone like-minded.
They might get rid of the Harvard president, Claudine Gay.
Most likely, they'll have another progressive DEI type replace her.
So, this doesn't really achieve a great deal for us.
And he says, you have to attack what he calls the idea pathogen.
Now, while of course I agree that that is the ultimate target, I do not agree that it's not an important benefit to take these prominent leftists.
Think of it. These are the heads of three of the most prominent institutions in America, all, by the way, captive to this twisted, woke ideology, to this whole, you only get to be a victim if you're a member of a favored group.
And if you're a disfavored group, white and Asian, Jew, you're on the outs.
You're a bad guy. And we're not going to extend the same protections to you.
So, that's the ideology.
And in the end, that is our goal, to go after that.
But how do you go after that?
This is my point. The way you go after that is, one by one, scoring smaller victories that give you the momentum to go on to bigger victories.
Debbie and I were talking about this earlier, and I said...
Look, how do you think the civil rights movement overthrew segregation?
You think they right away filed a case, segregation is immoral?
No. What they did was they went for small victories.
And so segregation was deeply entrenched in the South.
And the civil rights movement, the NAACP basically said, okay, let's take a black school and a white school.
What's the average spending for a white school?
Let's just say I'm making these numbers up.
$5,000 a year per student.
What's the average expenditure for a black student?
Oh, $900.
Wait, you said separate but equal, but here separate is clearly not equal.
So essentially what the NAACP was doing is chipping away at the logic of segregation.
And once they had gained enough momentum, then they were like, boom, Brown versus Board of Education, we challenge segregation in principle.
Look at the pro-life movement.
How did it get to the overturning of Roe versus Wade?
Step by step. You start by passing laws that restrict partial birth abortion, late-term abortion, parental consent.
You win those victories along the way, and then, boom, you get the big one.
So, I think it is a big win to take three of the most prominent figures in academia and just ruthlessly kick them to the curb.
Why? It'll send a chilling message to all the leadership of higher education that you're not so safe spouting this toxic ideology.
And if you are exposed, ultimately condoning this kind of condoning with indifference calls for genocide against groups.
And by the way, I hope it's not just limited to Jews, but includes Asians, includes whites.
Genocide toward any group.
Then guess what? You're going to be fired also.
And there's going to be a public uproar, and you're going to be disgraced.
And so I think that is a lot of progress.
And when we come back, I'm going to focus in on one of the malefactors, and that's Claudine Gay at Harvard, the woman who says, Oh, I apologize.
I misspoke.
I failed to state my truth.
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Here's the Harvard president, Claudine Gay, who apologizes for her remarks.
I am sorry. Words matter.
I got caught up in what had become at that point an extended combative exchange.
I failed to convey what is my truth.
First of all, consider this sort of absolute nonsense of my truth.
When you're asked about an historical event or you're asked about a specific action, genocide against Jews...
Does this really mean you're asked about, quote, your truth?
Either you have genocide or you don't.
Either you call for it or you don't.
So, this isn't a matter of opinion.
This doesn't come down to what you choose to believe.
So, you're dealing here with a Harvard dunce, who happens to be also the president of Harvard.
Now, some people go, DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, is much worse than affirmative action because it's not just incompetence.
It comes with a malevolent, toxic ideology.
That's the problem here. The problem here isn't that you've just got somebody who's like Forrest Gump.
The problem here is that you've got this vicious...
Woman who is infused with this DEI ideology.
And so she's a malevolent mouthpiece for the view that breeds antisemitism.
She is a mouthpiece for the view that says that some groups are elevated into victim status and deserve to be protected, and other groups are downgraded into oppressor status and deserve to be victimized.
This is what Harvard has been doing relentlessly.
This is why Jewish students have to hide in their dorms.
Because people like her incite a mob atmosphere against them.
And they've been doing this for a long time.
And they've been doing it, by the way, with impunity toward white people.
But now they back up and pretend like they've not been doing it.
Now they pretend like, oh, I failed to state...
Now she acts like it was just a parsing of words.
No. Interestingly, a memo has been leaked about Claudine Gay.
It's a memo about her vision as it was supplied...
To the university.
And when you read the vision, this is like you just get the deep entrenchment of DEI ideology on the part of Claudine Gay.
And it runs so deep that she's talking ultimately about the fact that the whole university needs to be about diversity.
That's like all she cares about.
Nothing else. Merit?
I don't think the word even comes up.
Standards? I don't think the word even comes up.
So, she wants to remake Harvard from the top down, so all that matters is your skin color.
And she talks about doing this by creating task force upon task force.
She wants to make sure that the help at Harvard is diverse.
She wants to make sure that the faculty is diverse, the student body is diverse.
And not for a moment is she talking about intellectual diversity, philosophical diversity, the kind of diversity you would think a university should be all about.
None of that is even remotely interesting to her.
So this is what we are dealing with and it's going to be up to the Harvard board.
Now, the Harvard board is a lot liker.
They are left-wing, for the most part.
There might be some token non-leftists on the board, but the dominant power is left-wing.
They knew that she wanted to promote this diversity ideology.
So I don't think that if you were to ask them deep down, do you want to fire her?
Their view would be no.
We don't want to fire her.
Why? Because she's like us.
She's actually reflecting our views.
So then why would you fire her?
Well, the only answer is because we are disgracing the name of Harvard in front of the world and And because we have a lot of Jewish students, we have a lot of Jewish faculty, we have a lot of Jewish alumni and donors, and if we frighten our students and their parents and they start calling us anti-Semitic and Harvard gets the reputation of being anti-Semitic and then the Harvard donors start pulling the plug...
Well, I wouldn't say Harvard is finished.
Harvard is old and rich.
It takes a lot to finish off a place like Harvard.
I wish it took less because I like to see Harvard finished off.
The place has become a complete disgrace.
But Harvard will be tarnished.
There's no question that this, by the way, think of what the racist smear has done against so many people, their reputations, their careers.
So many institutions have been ruined by being accused of racism.
Well, Anti-Semitism has some of that same kind of power.
And when the New York Times and others say conservatives are now using this issue, guess what?
We are. Yes, I'm using the issue.
Why am I using the issue?
Because you, on the left, have, as a consequence of your own ideal, not accidentally, but as a direct expression of your ideology, proven yourself to be systematically, ideologically independent.
And the anti-Semitic charge carries a lot of emotional and political power.
In other words, it's a good way for us to be able to hit back at you.
Let's just say that this whole situation was slightly different.
And the question posed by Elise Stefanik is, is it permissible to call for genocide against white people?
I think that these college presidents could have done their little tap dance, depends on the context, and totally gotten away with it.
And the only reason they aren't getting away with it is that the word used was not white, but Jew.
And so suddenly, there's a kind of electricity that goes through the question.
Suddenly, these college presidents, I mean, you could see they were...
Now, one of them, Liz McGill, tried a little bit of a smirk, like, you know, this is the kind of condescending smirk that you give when you think you're intellectually superior to the doofus.
I mean, I think she thought Elise Stefanik is just some uneducated twit, and she thought, oh, yeah, I'm going to handle this one.
But I'm pretty sure that her firing has wiped the smirk off her face.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Michael Seifert.
He's the founder and CEO of Public Square, and the website is publicsquare.com.
Public Square went public in July of 2023, and before launching the company, Michael hosted his own podcast, Refining Politics and Culture.
Michael, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you here.
It seems like we are in a new, not just political, but cultural and entrepreneurial environment in which the sort of old rules, which were that you just go out and shop at the store that's closest to you because why not?
You focus on price and convenience.
But now there's a kind of new reality that patriots and conservatives have to take into account.
What is that new reality?
What is the change that has inspired companies like yours?
Well, Dinesh, good to see you.
Thank you for having me on.
You're exactly right. There is a new economic civil war taking place and we didn't start it.
Conservatives did not start this.
We didn't pick this battle.
We were more than willing to say, let's separate politics and business.
Let's have these two live in separate worlds.
We'll duke it out at the ballot box for how we think society should be structured.
But then when we come to the business environment, we'll just let meritocracy and excellence and quality of products lead the way.
Unfortunately, a few decades ago, the left distorted that plan.
They decided to weaponize the world of economics against the American people in order to leverage the economic world, corporate America more broadly.
into doing their political bidding.
And so this was never seen more clearly than in 2020.
Time Magazine ran the piece about how they fortified the election.
And what they mean is that they coerced business leaders to operate in favor of the incoming Biden regime by donating in many cases, 400 millions of dollars, like in Mark Zuckerberg's case.
Mark Benioff owns Time Magazine.
He's also the founder of Salesforce.
And they've made it very clear that they want to weaponize their values and their company against conservatives.
We've seen consumer product giants like Procter & Gamble and Unilever, or consumer retail stores like Target and Walmart all come out and say very clearly, we want a woke, progressive, authoritarian America.
And if you want to stop us, it's not going to only be limited to the ballot box.
You're going to have to fight us in corporate America too.
That's the war that they started.
It looks like stakeholder capitalism.
It looks like ESG and DEI initiatives funded by the big banks, folks like Jamie Dimon on Wall Street.
And so now, as you just described, Dinesh, we're left in this environment where if we're wanting to actually fight back...
Our enemy is not just Joe Biden.
It's not just the bureaucratic state.
It is some of the CEOs of the largest corporate entities in the world that are aligned with globalist causes.
And I'll finish with this. I think it's rather ironic that the left calls us fascists.
They say that the right is fascist and they're the entity or the faction against fascism.
What's interesting is that the literal definition of fascism is big business and big government in bed together, weaponized against the population.
That is what we are seeing out of the progressive authoritarian left today.
And it's our duty as consumers and as voters to not just express our views at the ballot box, but also to express our views every time we swipe our card.
And ultimately, that's our mission.
We got to push back and it looks bigger than just voting.
It looks like every single day voting with our wallet.
What do you think, Michael, is the single biggest factor that caused this change?
In other words, if you take a company like Disney or like Walmart, and I picked those two particularly because both those companies have kind of a history of Americana in the case of Disney and conservatism in the case of Walmart, a company started by, what, the Benton family?
The Walton family, I'm sorry, in Bentonville, Arkansas.
And so, it started out, it seemed, with conservative values, but there appears to have been a sort of transformation.
Do you think that that is because of the left applying external pressure?
Do you think it's that you got left-wing woke graduates coming out of the colleges and now kind of infiltrating these companies and putting pressure from within?
If you had to put your finger on one factor that's the most significant in causing these companies to sort of buckle and surrender, what is it?
Well, I think you nailed it.
It's been the weaponization of the corporate boardroom.
When you have these young activists that are reading Saul Alinsky and Rules for Radicals, and they're intrigued and enthralled with the concept of their value system, which operates as a religion.
You know, conservatives, we see our political views as compliments to our deeper convictions, but not the religious views in and of themselves.
The left is different. I think?
Or coming out of finance degrees on Wall Street, coming out of the Ivy League universities, is infiltrate the boardrooms and make sure that stakeholder capitalism is advanced.
Now, you might ask, what is stakeholder capitalism?
If you look back to the 80s, our economy used to run based upon shareholder capitalism.
The concept was simple.
It was the responsibility of a company to simply operate in a way that serves their customers and their shareholders.
That's it. But what you started to see when many of these activists were coming out of college is this move toward stakeholder capitalism.
Well, you know what? It's not enough just to serve our customers.
It's not enough to just better our communities and better our shareholders' portfolios.
We actually have to factor in these external stakeholders as well, like the climate or marginalized communities.
Corporate boardrooms started adopting this oppressor-oppressed language.
And all of a sudden, seemingly overnight, it was sort of gradual and then suddenly, We're good to go.
Has actually rebuked all of the very early principles that built a great company.
The same is true of Target.
The same is true of Anheuser-Busch.
I mean, talk about a great Americana company that was completely decimated by a DEI officer in the corporate boardroom.
People ask me often, Dinesh, do the CEOs really believe this stuff?
Do the CEOs of these companies actually buy in that woke politics is really the best way to move their businesses forward?
They don't. They don't.
But they've been hijacked by these corporate boards that are wanting to sway the businesses toward ESG and DEI initiatives.
And so you mentioned the one thing.
It's that.
It's corporate activism that has now created incentive structures as well to reward woke behavior.
For example, many banks won't give you a loan unless you have an ESG score that they deem suitable.
So if you look at how the incentive structures financially have even been built, we think, well, gosh, doesn't a business just want to make a profit?
It's so much deeper than that now.
When you have businesses like Salesforce that are cash flowing billions of dollars, profit's not their goal anymore.
Now they're focused on how they can weaponize their values against you.
And not only will they do that for their own gratification and to keep their corporate boardrooms feeling virtuous, There are actual financial structures set up to reward that type of behavior.
So I think it's a big problem that stems back a few decades, and we're just now kind of learning how bad this truly is.
We'll be right back with Michael Seifert, CEO and founder of Public Square, the website publicsquare.com.
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I'm back with Michael Seifert, CEO and founder of Public Square.
The website is publicsquare.com.
You said earlier, Michael, that this sort of activism is a religion, an ideology that is sort of now a kind of a cult or a comprehensive system of belief.
I mean, that struck me when I was watching these three college presidents in front of Congress and asked...
what couldn't be a simpler question with a yes or no answer.
And what really happened is, it's almost like common sense tells you that the answer is yes, but on the other hand you are trapped in an ideology that cannot give that answer.
So you have to find a way to dodge the answer.
And so as a result, you're going to say things like, well, we have to contextualize that.
And so the net effect of it is, I think the beauty of it is, it doesn't just expose these three moral dwarves.
It exposes the underlying ideology that compels them to answer as they did.
They were being servants of their religion, weren't they?
Yeah. They were and they knew their donors were watching and they did not care.
So if you wonder how strong the religious pull is, these folks were willing to let go of millions and millions of dollars of donor funds to their universities in order to hold fast to their religious convictions closely tied to DEI.
If you drink this Kool-Aid of this oppressor-oppressed language and you really buy into that ideology, it'll cause you to completely forego any common sense.
That's what these university presidents displayed.
They knew their jobs were on the line.
They knew that donors were watching.
They knew they were going to face retribution from the people that had built these universities.
And yet instead, they still choose to hold so fast to their DEI convictions, which is based upon absolute insanity.
And now what's happening?
Well, one of the presidents already let go.
You're seeing this massive blowback for people like Bill Ackman.
And so, yeah, Dinesh, you're exactly right.
The DEI poison, it's a dangerous drug.
And when it gets you in there, it's almost like blasphemy if you speak against it.
And we're seeing it in universities.
We're seeing it in corporate boardrooms as well.
And that's why there's this need for this parallel economy.
Yeah, let's talk about the parallel economy, because it seemed like for a little while, people would simply take a kind of negative attitude.
So if Disney, for example, decides to go against us, well, I won't go to Disney or I'll cancel my subscription to Disney Plus or I'll try not to shop at Target.
But of course, the way for that to really work...
Is to positively create an alternative set of places where you can shop at and where you can see movies and when you can get stand-up comedy and entertainment and perhaps even education.
So, is it really right to say that what we're trying to do, and it's clearly a long-term task, is to build our own America inside of America and then live in it?
That's exactly right. There are 340 million Americans in this country.
It's naive to think we're all going to get along and see things exactly the same.
And so our task is simple.
There's a lot of companies. There's a lot of media outfits.
There are a lot of institutions that do not like me.
They've been telling me for years, go build your own if you don't like it.
So fine. We went and built our own.
And the network of folks that we're building our own for Literally, it's over 100 million Americans.
So many people in this great country are tired of the woke politics infused in everything.
They do not want to be lectured about gender ideology when they're just trying to buy a cup of coffee.
It feels like today, if you're trying to walk into any coffee shop, you've got to walk through a pride parade.
If you're going to purchase, you're having to think about whether or not that bank is going to cancel you for your conservative views.
It happens time and time again.
And so, what can we do?
Well, not just boycott.
We can move our money more positively.
We want to be known as a people and as a movement.
I think you'd agree with this, Dinesh.
We want to be known more for what we're for rather than what we're against.
If they want to be insane, fine.
Just don't force me to be and I'm going to go my own way.
We're going to build our own institutions, our own companies, our own media outfits that will adhere to the principles that built the greatest nation the world's ever seen.
And I am going to run with force toward that aim.
If the left then wants to keep going how they're going, eventually you're going to see this wealth transfer because Americans don't want to buy what they're selling.
They're going to pivot to these new systems.
It's why you're seeing movies like yours do so well, Dinesh.
It's why you're seeing Sound of Freedom beat Indiana Jones at the box office.
It's why you're seeing Target crumble.
Missed their first quarterly earnings in six years while companies like ours and Rumble are advancing quickly.
And I'm here for it. I think the parallel economy has a massive opportunity to shift the power structures of society back toward the values of we the people.
And the beautiful part of it all is it's very positive.
It's very hope inspiring because we have solutions now.
And that's ultimately something that I think we should all be proud to take part in.
Let me ask you as we close.
Give us a brief account of the vision behind Public Square as a company.
In other words, are you trying to be the one-stop-shop retail company that people can go to?
What is Public Square aiming at achieving or doing?
Very simply put, there are a lot of companies that don't like us and we've created the largest network in the world of companies that do.
We have over 70,000 vendors on our platform of all different industries.
We only launched 18 months ago.
And these businesses are all committed to holding fast to a set of core values that mimic the principles found in the Constitution.
And so our goal is that every time you shop, whether you're looking for coffee, a new gun, toilet paper, we've got all these different products on the platform that have all been vetted in alignment with these core values so that you as a consumer, if you're somebody that loves the country and the Constitution, more conservative values, you know with blessed assurance when you're spending money at publicsquare.com.
you're not funding your opposition.
We want to create real solutions for all of life's daily needs and we believe that ultimately commerce is our battlefield to do that.
This is awesome stuff, Michael Seifert.
Thank you very much. The website, publicsquare.com.
Really appreciate your comment on the podcast.
Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
They confessed.
They abased themselves.
They begged for punishment.
So Solzhenitsyn is asking, how do you get tough and hardy men, men who are seasoned in revolution and in battle, and And his answer is, he says, most of them weren't hardy men in the first place.
He goes, yeah, a few of them were, but those are not the people who appeared in the show trials.
Let's see what Solzhenitsyn has to say.
He goes, the most farsighted and determined of those who were doomed did not allow themselves to be arrested.
They committed suicide first.
And then he names three guys, Tomsky, Gamarnik, and Skopernik.
And he goes, it was the ones who wanted to live who allowed themselves to be arrested.
So right there, he says, the guys who were really tough are like, listen, they were like, you know, Brutus.
I don't want to be dragged through the streets of Rome.
I'll run on my sword.
And these guys were like, no, I'm not going to fall into the hands of Stalin.
I will sort of take the off-ramp myself.
But he goes, but even among those who were arrested, people behave differently.
He goes, some guys realized what was happening, meaning they're being set up, turned stubborn, and died silently, but at least not shamefully.
So it's kind of like, okay, you want to convict me?
You're going to have to convict me.
I'm not going to convict myself.
I'm not confessing. You want to torture me?
Go right ahead. And maybe I'll submit to that and collapse and die.
But Solzhenitsyn's point is at least those people died with some humanity, some dignity.
He goes, they put on trial the most compliant, the cowards, the moral wimps, the people that they knew would give in. And he goes, on the whole, Solzhenitsyn, they were weaklings and he knew, he meaning Stalin, Stalin knew one by one the particular weakness of each. Solzhenitsyn writes, therein lay his dark and special talent, his main psychological bent and his life's achievement, to
see people's weaknesses on the lowest plane of being. This is what tyrants by and large are really good at.
They're not good at math.
They're not necessarily smart people.
But they have a certain kind of low cunning.
And they're able to recognize, yeah, this guy has a fear of being bullied.
That guy is claustrophobic.
This guy doesn't like to talk about his family.
So let me grab a family member.
So all of this is a way of how do you bring people, how do you grind them into the dust?
You discover what their peculiar vulnerability is.
And the peculiar vulnerability of these famous communists, Kamenev and Bukharin and even Trotsky, is that in the end, they were communists too.
So, in other words, in the end, they didn't want to repudiate the party.
They didn't want to repudiate the whole communist system.
They might have wanted to repudiate Stalin, but Stalin knew they're not going to give up the ideology of In the name of which I'm carrying out all these crimes.
And so, notice the kind of ingenious way in which the Stalinists use this against their fellow communists.
Solzhenitsyn is right on this, and look how interesting this is.
He is replicating a typical dialogue between a figure like Bukharin, a communist like Bukharin, but now an opponent of Stalin, and the Stalinist interrogator.
So here's the interrogator.
Is it true that every opposition to the party is a struggle against the party?
So, the Stalinist is basically asking the communists, in effect, do you agree that the party is supreme?
And the guy has to say, because he's a communist, yeah, it is.
And then... The questioning goes on, but a struggle against the party cannot help but grow into a war against the party.
Because after all, if everybody struggled against the party, like you, it's ultimately a war against the party.
So, then the guy goes, yeah, I guess according to the logic of things, it does go that way.
And that means that in the end, given the existence of these oppositionist beliefs, any foul deeds can be perpetrated against the party.
Espionage, murder, sell out of the motherland.
And then the guy goes, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I didn't say that. None of these things have actually been done.
I'm not against the motherland.
And the guy goes, yeah, but you could have been.
In other words, if you encourage opposition against the party, that could easily turn into opposition against the country, against Mother Russia.
So then the guy goes, well, yeah, I suppose theoretically speaking, it could.
And then the interrogator goes, but that's what communism is.
It's a theory. It's ultimately all about understanding the world in a certain way.
That's what Marx was all about.
So, if this is a theoretical possibility, then you've got to recognize that you are on the wrong side of history.
You're against the party.
You could be fueling opposition to the party in all kinds of ways.
And so, it says...
It says, since all of this could happen, you have to give in.
You've got to recognize that the party is, you said it yourself, supreme.
And this means that you have to be executed in the name of that party.
Now, it says, this is the interrogator, well, it's clear that you yourself will not die an easy death.
But perhaps we will let you live.
We'll send you to some island, maybe the island of Monte Cristo.
You can work on the economics of socialism there.
So, they offer you sort of an off-ramp.
It's like, maybe we won't execute.
Maybe we will, but maybe we won't.
But first, you have to publicly declare that you're wrong, you're an error, you're a traitor, you're opposed to the communist principles that you have upheld all your life, and now, in the name of those very same principles, you are finally, publicly coming to terms with your own conscience and being willing to submit.
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