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Jan. 16, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:23
AND THE WINNER IS… Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep748
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Coming up, I'll talk about Trump's big win in the Iowa caucus and also what's in store for the other candidates, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis.
Vivek, of course, is now out.
And the legendary political consultant Roger Stone joins me.
We're going to talk about Iowa.
We're going to talk about election interference and also what's going to happen in the 2024 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.
And wow, a big win for Donald Trump.
He comes out at 50 plus and this leaves DeSantis around 20, Nikki Haley around 20.
There's some conflicting reports about whether DeSantis edged Nikki Haley at the end or Nikki Haley edged DeSantis.
I saw Nikki Haley giving a speech saying, it's now a two-person race.
And it puzzled me because I was thinking, two-person race?
Are you talking about you and Trump?
Are you talking about you and DeSantis?
You guys were basically tied.
So... If she means it's between her and Trump, I don't think that's really quite a fair or accurate interpretation.
But disappointing for DeSantis.
There's no other way to look at it.
I don't see...
It's not just whether he wants to push forward.
It's whether the donors, the people who back DeSantis, who are putting their money into...
No one wants to put their money into a black hole.
So I'm guessing that DeSantis is starting to feel the pressure that, look, this is not going to happen...
Well, not only Iowa, where he had put a lot of expectations and hopes, but also, where do you go next?
New Hampshire? Not exactly DeSantis country.
And then into the south, South Carolina, which happens to be Nikki Haley's home state.
So Nikki Haley might think that she has a pathway at least to hang in there.
But for DeSantis, it looks a little bit more uncertain.
Nevertheless, the DeSantis people put out a statement, we're sticking it out, and it doesn't look like there's going to be any major course correction.
Now, I saw Britt Hume on television, and he was being asked about why Trump continues to do so well.
I mean, here is a guy who doesn't take part in the debates.
He did do some campaigning in Iowa, but nothing like the kind of relentless, let me make sure to go to every county multiple times approach, which was the approach of DeSantis.
Also, by the way, the approach of Vivek Ramaswamy.
And Trump sort of just kind of like, OK, above the fray, and yet he sweeps the result.
He spends less money, and certainly less money per vote, than either DeSantis or Nikki Haley.
And so, Brit Hume was trying to understand...
How this is possible.
And Brit Hume's answer was basically that Trump has a record.
That people remember the Trump years and they remember the Biden years.
And it's one of those very clear, let's contrast the one against the other across the whole board of metrics.
I mean, whether it's the economy, whether it's foreign policy, whether it's the state of law and order in the country, whether it's how you're feeling about America, whether it's the stock market, I mean, you pick the measure, things were better under Trump.
And I think that is clearly part of the reason.
But I also think part of the reason is that this whole effort to criminalize Trump, to prosecute him, to go after him, to lock him up, Is backfiring in a huge way.
Now, the left may say, well, it hasn't backfired because it hasn't gone to trial.
Wait till we get, you know, Trump before a D.C. jury.
And yeah, they are looking to...
They want to see that guilty verdict emblazoned on the front page of the New York Times.
They want to see it headlined on CNN and ABC. So the left has its own hunker down and push ahead strategy.
But I think part of the goal of the strategy was to keep Trump off the ballot, not only sort of using the legal mechanism, but using the legal process to alienate Republican voters, to get Republicans to say, well, this is actually a reasonable expectation on the part of the left because Republicans are like this.
They tend to bury, you know, our team tends to bury our own guys.
Yeah, he has too much baggage.
Or, yeah, you know, we just can't take the risk of somebody who's so radioactive.
We need somebody who will upset the left a little bit less.
We need somebody who's safer.
This mode of thinking, and you know what?
This is the mode of thinking that characterized the Republican Party in the post-Reagan era.
But I think one of the messages of Trump's big win in Iowa is that Republicans are moving away from this.
Republicans don't think like this anymore.
The Republican view is that precisely because you're going after Trump in this way, we're going to defend Trump.
We're going to circle the wagons.
We're going to elevate this guy.
We're going to put him out front because we think ultimately that he is the guy that is needed to take you people on in the election and teach you a lesson not just in the election, but also once he takes office in January of 2025.
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Guys, we just got the results of the Iowa caucus and I'm thrilled to have the legendary political operative Roger Stone.
You know Roger Stone, seasoned political pundit, speaker, New York Times bestselling author.
He was featured in the Netflix documentary Get Me Roger Stone.
He's worked for Nixon and Reagan and Trump, 45-year career, 700 political campaigns.
His website, by the way, stonezone.com.
Welcome, Roger Stone.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
A runaway victory for Trump last night.
I suppose the polls were pointing in that direction, but it looks like Trump even outdid the polls.
Is this something that you expected to come out the way it did?
And what do you make of it?
Well, Dinesh, before we get to that, I want to thank you again for inviting my wife and I to the premiere of your incredibly powerful film, Police State, and tell you how much that affected us as someone who's had his home-rated family.
By 29 FBI agents at 6 o'clock in the morning.
That particular scene, which was recreated, not regard to me, but regard to a pro-life activist whose home was raided.
My wife actually had to go to the bathroom and vomit.
It was that emotionally disturbing.
It's a powerful, powerful film, and I urge people who haven't seen it to please see it as soon as possible.
I just had to say that.
Let me address your question.
I was very pleasantly surprised.
My own personal projection after studying all of the polls, both public and private, I thought Donald Trump would come in around 48 or 49.
I prayed that he would break the magic 50.
He ended up with 51.
Now, I think it's important to recognize that no Republican has ever carried the Iowa caucuses by a margin greater than 12.
That was my old boss, Senator Bob Dole, in 1988.
And of course, he was from neighboring Kansas, and he was a Midwesterner.
And he also had a strong tie to the agricultural community in the state because he was from Kansas, also a heavy corn producing state.
Trump demonstrated last night We're good to go.
That today's Republican Party is the party of America first.
It is the party of the movement to make America great again.
It's interesting to me that he got his highest percentage among not senior citizens, but first-time caucus goers.
This says great things for the future of our party.
And then in a contest in which a caucus is different than a primary, a primary you just walk in and you vote and you leave, whether it's by machine or in some rare occasions, paper ballot, a caucus requires greater dedication.
In this particular case, given the inclement weather, it's 30 degree weather some days, pressing to seven to five below zero in the nicest part of the day.
It really calls for intensity and loyalty for your supporters to come out where both frostbite and hypothermia are very real dangers.
And you not only have to come out, but you have to go to a drafty fire station or a drafty community center or a drafty public school or other facility where these caucuses are being held.
The caucus itself could take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, maybe longer, depending on how many people show up.
But these caucus centers were just flooded with Trump supporters.
And Governor Ron DeSantis, I'm not sure...
How he goes forward, it's true that he lives to fight another day by eking out a second place victory, but let's notice the gap between Trump and the second and third place finishers is 30 points.
It's immense.
And therefore, very tough for Ron DeSantis to call this a victory.
By the way, he set his own expectation levels.
He said he would win.
Well, winning to me means coming in first.
Winning to me means getting more votes than the other candidates.
So although he may have survived, he did not win.
The final polls showed Nikki Haley actually We're good to go.
It was almost all astroturf, meaning she spent, I think, more for advertising.
I believe she spent $36 million on all forms of advertising.
That would be broadcast television, cable television, digital advertising, and so on.
It boils down to about, she spent 36 million, boils down to be $1,797.84 for every vote she got.
She could have given each voter a refrigerator for that money.
Wow.
Ron DeSantis spent $34 million.
That boils down to be about $1,697.96 for every vote he got.
For Donald Trump, spent the least on advertising, almost half of what the other two spent.
He spent a mere $18.2 million and his votes cost him about $1,797.96.
$340 per vote. Final thought, I really have to say, having been a veteran of 13 national presidential campaigns, starting with Nixon, three campaigns for Ronald Reagan, and of course for Donald Trump, Donald Trump is running the single best, the single most disciplined, the single most efficient, the single best organized
presidential campaign in my lifetime.
Under the leadership of Susie Wiles and Chris Lasavita and James Blair, this is the best run, most disciplined campaign that I have seen in my 45 years in American politics.
And also, Roger, it seems that the campaign has been, you know, run against headwinds that are unprecedented in American political history.
I mean, here is a guy who's facing multiple criminal charges, over 90 charges in multiple jurisdictions.
The left, I think, had been hoping that just the existence of these charges would alienate Trump from the Republican base.
People would be like, either they would go, this guy is potentially a criminal, or they would say something like, Well, it's too much baggage because just the very possibility of a conviction, of possible incarceration.
We can't go with this guy.
We need to go with somebody else.
And to some degree, it looks like certainly the DeSantis campaign and so on were counting on that kind of a reaction from the Republican base.
Why do you think that the Republican base...
The majority of it, anyway, has said, to heck with it.
We don't care about these indictments.
What is Trump's peculiar power that holds even in the face of all this lawfare?
I think it is the fact that the nature of the crimes that he's accused of are so ridiculous.
First of all, in 1977, the Congress passed the Presidential Records Act.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, strangely enough the same judge who sat on my trial, When I was falsely charged with lying to Congress about Russian collusion that never actually happened, I ruled that a president could do anything he wanted with his documents, including Bill Clinton, who was the subject at hand, being allowed to keep them in his sock drawer at home.
So people, I don't think, are buying this idea that Trump was holding on to classified national security documents so that he could sell them to the Russians or the Chinese.
It's nonsensical.
Secondarily, what's his crime in Washington, D.C.? What did he steal?
He didn't steal anything.
He had the audacity to exercise his First Amendment rights to challenge the outcome of a federal election.
It's not a crime. In Georgia, the indictment against him is premised on the fact that he lost the Georgia election.
That's up for grabs.
You know more about this than anyone, thanks to your film, 2000 Mules, and ongoing litigation.
There's a lot of As to whether he really did lose Georgia.
So he's again charged with knowing that he lost Georgia, believing that he lost Georgia, and then seeking to work with others to continue.
To steal that or to hold on to power.
And of course, the underlying premise of that case is falling apart, as is the corruption of the investigation into him.
Let's take a pause.
When we come back, more with the legendary political analyst Roger Stone.
His website, StoneZone.com.
You can follow him on x at Roger J. Stone Jr.
at Roger J. Stone Jr.
We'll be right back.
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I'm back with the one and only Roger Stone, his website stonezone.com.
Roger, we were talking about Trump and, of course, the results of the Iowa caucus.
Let's talk about some of the other candidates, starting with Vivek.
I think all of us have been not just surprised but really amazed at the eloquence, the sort of industriousness of Vivek, the indefatigability of Vivek, this guy who sort of doesn't stop.
And yet Vivek's campaign, in a sense, was very interesting because he ran a campaign, a lot of which was about defending Trump, saying that he would pardon Trump, saying that he would pardon the January 6th protesters, that he will...
Take down the deep state and the police state.
And now after Iowa, Vivek drops out.
Vivek endorses Trump.
Vivek is apparently going to show up with Trump in New Hampshire to campaign with Trump.
How do you analyze the phenomenon of Vivek Ramaswamy?
Well, I had him on my WABC New York radio show last weekend.
I had initial misgivings about him.
Then I kind of warmed to him because he filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court regarding opposing the efforts by the Colorado State Supreme Court to remove Trump from the ballot.
He voluntarily said that if Trump was removed from the ballot illegally in any state, he himself would not run in that state.
He evolved into an effective critic of the government's actions on January 6th.
I do think he, the stunt he pulled at the end where he made a case to Iowa voters that voting for me would somehow save Trump, which appears to have briefly aggravated Trump.
Clearly that is water under the bridge.
I think he made a very shrewd move in his decision to withdraw immediately after last night's result and endorse Trump.
He's a young man.
I think he has a great future in the party.
For those who say that he would be a good running mate for Trump, you know, Richard Nixon once told me, in looking for a vice presidential running mate, don't look for somebody who can help you.
Just try to find someone who can't hurt you.
I'm not suggesting that Vivek Ramaswamy would hurt Trump, but I am suggesting that the trick here is for Trump to, A, pick somebody who's fully qualified to be president, but then secondarily, someone who can bring him a new constituency, someone who can reach out to others, but is also at the same time still acceptable to the MAGA base.
Now, that may be easier said than done, but I really think...
That that person is probably not Vivek because of Vivek's emphasis on certain MAGA-related issues, as was demonstrated in Iowa last night, as will be demonstrated again in New Hampshire.
I think he appeals to the same voters that Trump appeals to, where it would be nice to find someone who appeals to a bit broader constituency.
That person may not exist, by the way, but it's incumbent on President Trump to think about that.
Well, if Trump were to call you and ask you for your advice, I mean, some of the names that we've heard out there, people like Kristi Noem, for example, I think I've heard the name Elise Stefanik.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on Ted Cruz, because at least in my way of thinking, Cruz is somebody who, well, he was the second highest vote-getter the last time around.
He obviously hasn't been in this race, but he has been an ally of Trump ideologically, and yet at the same time, Ted is, you know, he's also in a way part of the establishment.
He's got a base of supporters that is not identical with Trump's base.
So is that kind of what you had in mind when you were, I don't mean specifically Ted, but I mean in general, that you pick somebody who is complimentary to you, but at the same time might bring in some voters who might otherwise have concerns about you?
You know, let me say, first of all, I speak only for myself.
So any idea I put out there is just my thoughts should not be attributed to President Trump or anyone around him.
I do like Elise Stefanik very much.
I do think she might have a strong appeal to suburban women.
I also like an outside-the-box Possibility like Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard, like Vivek Ramaswamy, she's had a personal evolution in her thinking.
Yes, she was once a progressive, but now she is one of the best, most forthright critics of the neocon war machine.
She's also a decorated Iraq veteran.
I believe she's a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve, championship surfer, former Democrat, now an independent, hopefully on her way to becoming a Republican.
I think that would be an intriguing choice.
Now, when I said that, In a Twitter space the other night with Alex Jones and General Flynn and my good friend Jack Posobiec from Human Events, I got a very mixed result.
Many people love the idea.
Many other people did not love the idea.
Look, only one man's going to make this decision, and that is Donald Trump.
So I do think thinking outside the box is important.
Perhaps there's a person who is not in the world of politics, but who has the kind of depth of experience in another discipline who should be considered.
Don't ask me to name that person.
I couldn't tell you.
As far as Ted Cruz is concerned, I think he'd be a great nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.
To the extent that Trump got a Trump court vacancy, Ted Cruz, who is a fighter and a superb lawyer, and who is a member of the Senate, I think could be confirmed by the Senate, would be a great Supreme Court justice.
Roger, what would you make of, at this point, both Nikki Haley and DeSantis?
And when I think about Nikki Haley, I think of someone who is almost in a little bit of a time warp.
In other words, she would have fit beautifully into the Republican Party circa 1996.
Perhaps even in the McCain era, she comes out of that strain of the party.
She seems to reflect ideas that Republicans do talk about, but just don't seem plugged into where we are now.
With DeSantis, I'm a little bit more disheartened for the simple reason that it looked to me like this guy had an amazing future ahead of him.
Could even be the heir apparent after Trump.
And yet there's been so much acrimony now between the Trump people and the DeSantis people.
Do you think that DeSantis has sort of permanently blown it?
Or is it the case where this is a guy who could now step back even if he doesn't come close to the nomination, bide his time, finish out his term as governor of Florida, and then come 2028 he's back in the ring?
I actually think, sadly, that he's done permanent damage to his political brand simply because his candidacy is really an act of personal disloyalty.
Perhaps folks who don't live in Florida don't understand that Ron DeSantis was a relatively obscure congressman who was struggling in the race for governor against the state agriculture commissioner who had the endorsement of every Republican member of the state legislature, the Speaker of the House, the President of the Senate, every member of the congressional delegation with the exception of Matt Gaetz, every Republican member,
had the endorsement of all 62 Republican county chairman.
He was the heavy favorite.
It was only the endorsement of Donald Trump, a tweeted endorsement, which lifted Ron DeSantis out of political obscurity and catapulted him to the governor's nomination.
And then in the final weeks of the 2018 campaign, Donald Trump had to change his schedule for the last two weeks to visit Florida three times to literally drag Ron DeSantis across the finish line.
Now, I've been in politics for 45 years.
To me, loyalty is important.
Loyalty means something.
And Ron DeSantis demonstrated a lack of personal loyalty.
I think that's a character flaw.
The man is an ingrate.
But then secondarily, this campaign demonstrated, I don't know whether it's that he's an introvert in an extrovert's business or whether he just genuinely doesn't like people, but he proved in this contest to be a poor candidate.
He just doesn't connect with people.
He seems to have some odd personal habits.
This is a man who often wears earbuds when he's not listening to anything just so he can avoid talking to people.
I'm sorry, but I find that strange.
So I don't think in the end that he's going to be a strong candidate in 2028 for the same reasons that he proved not to be a strong candidate for 2024.
Nikki Haley is Dick Cheney in heels.
She represents the Uniparty.
She represents the Bush-Cheney wing of the party, which is in the descendancy.
It's amazing to me that much of her funding is coming from Democrats.
Like Larry Fink, who was one of the founders of LinkedIn.
Reid Hoffman, who has not only visited Epstein's island several times, has given millions to Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, but also financed the E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump.
So I I just think that you're right.
She's not right for today's modern Republican primary.
What I would hate to see, since DeSantis is out of resources, and I think he's going to have a hard time raising money because given this margin in Iowa, I don't think there's anyone who believes that he can win the nomination or rest the New Hampshire primary or the primaries after that from Donald Trump.
Nikki Haley, on the hand, is flush with special interest money.
And I could see a scenario in which she tries to do what George H.W. Bush did in 1980, which is to stay in the contest long after he no longer had any prospect to be nominated.
Ronald Reagan had swept New Hampshire, then swept the rest of the primaries.
There were a few small primaries late where Reagan was out of money, Trump spent, and therefore George H.W. Bush became an irritant.
But he was essentially hanging on in a bid to become vice president.
Some could argue that that works.
I don't think that President Trump will select Nikki Haley for vice president.
I think there are two factors there.
One there is, once again, the character factor.
She specifically told him that he was among our greatest presidents.
I agree with that.
And that if he ran, she would not run.
And then secondarily, Her foreign policy views, particularly, are antithetical to Trump's.
She keeps saying, the Russians have said that if they take Ukraine, then it's only a matter of time and that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe are next.
Nikki, where did the Russians say that?
Vladimir Putin has never said that.
That is an inaccurate depiction of what the Ukrainian-Russian conflict is about.
It does not reflect any recognition that when...
In 1994, when the Russians agreed to the reunification of East and West Germany, we agreed in return not to push Ukraine into NATO. We violated the Budapest Accords, which we signed.
I actually think it's called the Budapest Memorandum.
And we have been seeking to mount NATO missiles aimed at Russia on the ground in Ukraine.
Donald Trump, within a day of being president, I'm convinced, could negotiate a settlement of this extraordinarily expensive conflict, whereas I think Nikki Haley's first move would be to ship billions more to the Ukrainians so that much of it can be stolen,
but whatever isn't stolen can be used to pursue what Contrary to what the national media is telling you is a losing war against Russia.
Yeah, absolutely. Roger Stone, thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
We've been talking to Roger Stone.
His website, StoneZone.com.
Follow my next, Roger J. Stone, JR. Roger, as always, great to have you.
Thanks for joining me. Nesh, thank you so much, and God bless you.
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I want to talk about a subject that C.S. Lewis deals with, but not extensively, and that is the issue of friendship involving women.
Now, I say this because Lewis, for the most part, is describing friendship in a way that's recognizable to men, but there might be some women who listen to it and go, well, female friendship is kind of different in Debbie and I were talking about this after yesterday, I guess maybe the day before, and I had made the point that male friendship is not exclusive.
If there are two guys and they've got a common pursuit or a common interest, let's say hiking or mathematics, then We're good to go.
I don't know if that really is true of women because you have a lot of exclusivity, you have jealousy, you have she's my best friend, she's not your best friend and so there is a resistance to admitting a newcomer to the circle because the circle is like only two.
It's like me and my best friend.
And we're cool and you're not.
And so if you join the circle, the value of the circle kind of goes down, not to mention the fact that no longer do I just have a best friend, but we now have a sort of an imposter.
Welcome to my show!
And incredibly, one of the girls and then the newcomer plotted together to murder the third girl.
And as the plot unfolded, it was so unexpected because it was one of those whodunits.
And of course, the last people you suspect were the girls themselves, and they were just teenagers.
But they stabbed this other girl to death.
And when questioned about it later, they were like, we didn't like her.
We didn't like her. You got this feeling that somehow this group was a group of two.
And when it became three, kind of an unstable or a very dangerous element was introduced.
And suddenly one of the three had to be pushed out.
Now... I was thinking about this.
I'm thinking about what would C.S. Lewis say about this.
And in my view, what C.S. Lewis would say is that that situation was never friendship in the first place.
In other words, it doesn't meet the classic...
Understanding or definition of friendship.
The two girls who came together at the beginning were brought together really probably because one of them saw the other as cool and saw it as a kind of elevation of her status to be associated with the cool girl.
Uh, Welcome to my show!
In the sense of the two of us are united by shared values or shared interests or shared goals or shared religious beliefs or a particular kind of way of being that makes us different from everyone else.
And that's what we find in common with each other.
So that was not the case here.
And moreover...
The very fact that there was this kind of jealousy, the jealousy tells you that it's not really about the friendship.
Because think about it. There's nothing about a common interest by itself that excludes anybody.
Let's just say, for example, I love to watch Western movies.
I'm obsessed with Westerns.
And then I find a friend, and he's obsessed with Westerns.
Welcome to my show!
And this is really why it becomes a friendship is because to everybody else, this is like crazy.
Like these two guys are nuts.
They're going into this stuff.
I mean, yeah, we like Westerns and all, but this is a level of detail that is, you may say, abnormal.
And that's really what the friends find in common with each other is Each person's individual abnormality is matched by the abnormality in the other person.
And it's like, hey, you know, we're not alone in the world in this abnormality.
We both think the same about these things.
And so that's the friendship.
Now let's imagine a third guy shows up and he goes, I'm just as obsessed with Westerns as you are, but I don't agree with you guys that John Wayne is the greatest actor.
It's really, you know, Clint Eastwood.
And so off you go.
But the two guys are like happy to pull this guy in because it only makes their circle more interesting.
So that's how friendship ought to be.
But I think Lewis would say that in this case of the three girls that I mentioned, it's a pathological relationship based upon certain types of status and envy and social exhibitionism and possessiveness.
And all of this is not really...
It's not only not what friendship is, it's somewhat antithetical.
It undermines the idea of friendship.
Now... None of this is really directly C.S. Lewis.
This is kind of my extrapolation of Lewis, my way of understanding and applying his ideas in affiliate friendship to a given situation.
Now, Lewis does discuss another situation.
Which is, and I think this is a situation you can see that he'd be more familiar with.
And he's talking about a group of male friends who, let's say, meet to smoke cigars or they meet to have conversations about medieval literature, which was Lewis's field.
And he goes, and then you have some sort of a...
Protest on the part of a woman who says, I'm being excluded from this circle.
I mean, we're very familiar with this.
I'm being excluded from this golf club.
I'm being excluded from this faculty lounge.
Not that women aren't allowed in the faculty.
The women are in the faculty, but they're not a member of this group of friends that, let's say, for example, gets together every week and discusses different medieval classics.
And so the woman basically kind of barges her way in claiming that by right she belongs in the group.
And now the men are kind of sheepish and they go, yeah, alright, sure, yeah.
But what Lewis says is that right away you notice that this group, which was not only based upon friendship, but was kind of based upon male friendship.
And that means that men in their own company talk about certain things and they're able to talk about it freely and they're not inhibited.
Everybody knows that a group of guys by themselves talks differently than, let's say, a group of guys in which two women are now present or vice versa.
A group of women by themselves will talk differently than if I show up and sit in the middle of They're going to take note of me, and then their comments are going to be a little bit tailored to what I'm going to think about the situation.
So, this is Lewis's point, is that the woman is trying to, quote, join the group.
But, Lewis goes, it ceases to be a group the moment that she shows up.
Because suddenly, the common bond that held this group together is broken.
And it's broken because the...
It's not because of sexism.
It's not because of some intrinsic bias.
It's because women aren't the same as men.
Women are psychologically differently wired than men.
They have different interests than men.
They... We approach things from a different angle, and the friendship is joined by commonality, and in this case, male commonality.
So Lewis thinks, and again, he doesn't stress this point.
I think he knew it would be somewhat controversial, even in his own time, and it might take people off track.
Lewis is trying to make points that I think will appeal to a wide audience and be recognizable.
He doesn't want to get into a fight between men and women, but I think he does think that friendship is either among men or it is among women, but a mixed company.
It can certainly be a social circle.
People can certainly get together for dinner.
Lewis is not denying that you can have acquaintances and collegiality between men and women.
He's simply saying that at the kind of tightest bond of friendship, the line between the sexes is an important line.
I hate to think of what Lewis would make of the trans phenomenon, but I don't think we need to go there.
I think we sort of know what Lewis would think.
And I think perhaps...
Lewis would take up Socrates' advice that when you hear something that's extremely foolish, the wise man's best response is to say nothing.
So I can kind of see Lewis, you bring up this topic about the trans and what does Lewis do?
He lights up his pipe and he puts in some more tobacco and he blows some smoke and then he looks away as if he didn't hear what you just said.
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