All Episodes
March 7, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:40
REIGN OF THE ILLEGALS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep785
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, I'll discuss the recent victories of Trump at the national level and also Brandon Gill in Texas to argue that it's a new GOP that will be facing the Democrats in November.
Mark Krikorian, he's Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
He joins me. We're going to talk about the reign of the illegals and how we got to this distressing stage in our country's history.
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.
Guys, I did yesterday a video from Dallas, or from the Dallas suburbs.
And so you got my on-the-ground take of Super Tuesday and also Brandon Gill's race in Texas Congressional District 26.
But I thought I would offer a couple of follow-up thoughts, and then I'm going to actually bring Brandon on briefly to talk about the keys to success in his race.
Let me talk first about Trump, because Trump is, to the consternation of the left, romping his way to the nomination.
In fact, it's almost fair to say that he's already got it.
Why? Because the last of the holdouts, Nikki Haley, has dropped out.
Now, I watched Nikki Haley's dropout speech and the focus there was she didn't endorse Trump.
And while that's true, I think her tone in dropping out was not a bad tone.
What she said was gracious.
And what she said, I think, is not unfair, which is she said, look, there's been a lot of back and forth in this campaign, and if Trump wants the allegiance of my voters, the people who voted for her, he will have to earn their votes.
I think this is fair enough.
I would recommend to Trump and to the Trump campaign a very magnanimous and inclusive strategy going forward.
Let's get all the Republicans.
Let's appeal to independents.
Let's not do too much of rhino talk, and let's not talk about throwing people out of the Republican Party.
It's not as if our ranks are so overpopulated that we can afford to lose a bunch of people and still be the majority party and win electoral majorities going forward.
It's a very closely divided country, and it seems like both sides have about 40% sort of locked in.
There's a battle for the middle 20%, and so it's really important now after the The in-home skirmishing of the primaries as that subsides, that we're able to match the Democrats in being unified and coordinating all the elements on our side.
The Democrats are actually pretty unified.
Now, Biden has had some opposition, but I think Dean Phillips, even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., This has not been an opposition that has even been taken seriously in the Democratic Party.
They've, in fact, navigated their rules to make it almost impossible to beat Biden.
So, I think Trump has excellent chances going into November, but it's also up to him.
A word about Brandon Gill's race and the remarkable outcome of that race, which I want to talk to Brandon about, and I'll be doing it in just a minute or so, is that the race took on a very interesting shift as it went on.
And it started out with 11 guys in the race, all of them jostling for attention.
Obviously since it's an open seat, none of them were really well known at the outset.
And Brandon was doing extremely well.
But then, three weeks before the election day, boom, two Never Trump PACs came together and launched a coordinated strike on Brandon.
And they held back.
They did this at the last minute, almost like there's not enough time to respond.
And so the race changed completely.
It sort of became a weird two-man race, but a two-man race between Brandon Gill on the one side and the two PACs on the other.
It's almost like Brandon's opponent was two-pack.
Not two-pack Shakur, but the two packs.
And the other candidates almost faded into insignificance.
And I say this because the packs were not advocating for a rival candidate.
They were basically stop Brandon or never Brandon.
And so you had the let's go Brandon Gill side, that was our side, and the never Brandons on the other side.
And of course, I'm very happy to say that Brandon won and won decisively.
He got 57 point something.
Did he actually cross 58?
Yeah. He got 58% of the vote, and with that many candidates and that kind of opposition, it's a creditable achievement.
So without further ado, let's bring in Brandon Gill and talk to him about his remarkable victory.
Brandon, I got to begin by congratulating you on, well, not just a win, but a really big win.
And I want to highlight how big a win this is, because yes, it is a red district, a pro-Trump district, but you had in the primary 11...
People running. And I suppose that's not that unusual because it's an open seat.
And yet, it makes it almost impossible to win without a runoff.
Why? Because under Texas law, you need to have 50% plus to avoid a runoff.
Otherwise, the top two go to a runoff.
So not only are you in this densely populated race, But you also have a massive Never Trump ad spend against you.
This is coordinated seemingly between two packs.
And it's mailers, it's radio ads, it's TV ads.
And so... Both within your campaign, those of us who are sort of friends of your campaign, we all thought we would be doing really well if you got 51% or 50.5% and yet you get 58%, you sort of blow away the field, the next closest candidate gets what, 18%?
So you've got a giant chasm between number 1 and number 2.
I'd like to ask you, what were the keys to the success of the race?
If you were to sort of think of it, you're advising potential MAGA candidates who want to run in the future.
What's the key to a successful campaign?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I would also say, I mean, if we came in in the 40s, I think that would have been a strong showing given that, to your point, there were 11 people in the race and we had $2 million in direct attack ads that we took straight to the chin in the last three weeks of the race.
You know, in a race like this, common sense tells you, even before the attack ads, that in an 11-man field, you're going to go to a runoff.
Add in the attack ads.
But so we...
We had President Trump's support.
We had Senator Cruz's support.
And the reality is that Texas 26 is Trump country.
This is very big Trump support here, very big support for Senator Cruz.
It's a very conservative district.
But what I will say is whenever the attacks came in...
They were not only so outlandish that they were unbelievable.
I mean, the attacks were basically, I'm a New York Yankee who is an agent of the CCP who is coming into the district to defund the police and open the borders, which is the antithesis of every single thing I've been saying, not only for this campaign, but in my stint in conservative media.
So what we did whenever they started attacking me for wanting to, or whenever they started saying that I wanted to defund the police, for example, is we just doubled down on what my real views are, which is that we should be defunding the FBI because it's being targeted, it's being weaponized to target conservatives and Christians.
So I think the big takeaway here...
Whenever people attack you, don't back down to these liars.
It doesn't matter how much money they have.
Don't cower to them. Lean into the MAGA agenda.
Lean into President Trump's support and just swing back at these guys.
And that's what we did. It does seem, though, that you can have President Trump's support and Cruz's support.
You still have to get that message out to your district, right?
The voters need to know, hey, President Trump thinks that this guy...
Because after all, if somebody knows Brandon Gill is endorsed by Trump, then the idea that he's a Chinese spy or that he's for defund of police becomes just laugh out loud absurd, right?
So... The combination, I think, a very impressive combination you unfurled of mailers of your own, radio and TV ads of your own, door-to-door knocking in the district, and also a last-minute media blitz that you did.
You were on Bannon's War Room.
You were on Mike Gallagher, Roger Stone.
I mean, you were using the media very effectively in order to hit back at these guys and using the fact that they were making these mischaracterizations to create a dramatic news story.
That's exactly right.
I mean, it really was.
It was a full-court press against us, but we had a full-court press in response.
And I think the biggest thing here is the grassroots.
So I think that too often the political establishment ignores the grassroots.
These are your activists, your everyday local activists, and these are the people who really move the needle politically.
They don't get enough credit for it, but Take this race, for example, $2 million spent over the course of three weeks.
Now, we fought back in every way we could, but I didn't have $2 million to throw up on TV or to dump into mailers or texts or whatever.
The way we got the word out is the grassroots activists who were going door-to-door, we were going door-to-door, who were telling their friends in the district, who were calling and texting their friends, just word of mouth.
That these attacks against me were lies, that they were slanders, and they weren't true.
So I give so much credit.
I mean, the grassroots is what runs this country politically, and they are an absolute force to be reckoned with.
And I think the political establishment better wake up and realize it.
I mean, Debbie and I were out there on election day handing out flyers.
So we got a little exposure to the guys you had on the ground.
And I got to tell you, they were just absolutely fantastic.
And I remember one lady in a t-shirt, and she's like...
I don't care if they yell at me.
I don't care if they throw me off of social media.
I'm here to save my country.
Just that sense of patriotism, and I think her loyalty was to you, but also to Trump.
She thought this is the pathway, and she was willing to go.
She'd stand in the middle of these...
You know, parking lots and hail down cars as they came in.
So there was a kind of a dedication.
And what you're saying is that this is a critical factor to succeed.
There's now a Democratic nominee.
You'll have an election in November.
But it seems like it'll be an easier run because, as you say, this is a what?
I think a Trump plus 20 district candidate.
So it should be fairly smooth sailing from here on.
And Debbie says pretty soon, Dinesh, you're going to have to be calling him Congressman Brandon on the podcast.
So Brandon, thank you very much for joining me.
You're still Brandon and maybe always will be.
But congratulations on a huge win and it'll be great moving forward to November.
So thank you very much. Thanks for having me on.
These days I feel great.
One of the reasons I feel so good is because I take this.
It's Balance of Nature, fruits and veggies in a capsule, so easy to take.
They have an amazing story of how this product was developed by Dr. Douglas Howard.
It's right there on their website.
Balance of Nature receives over a thousand success stories every single month.
They have hundreds of thousands of customers who have purchased billions of capsules of their fruits and veggies over the past 20 years.
The products are gluten-free.
They're non-GMO. They contain no added sugars or synthetics.
So I think if you're looking for something to make you feel better naturally, you should definitely give Balance of Nature a try.
In fact, order today.
Whether you order online or call them direct, you got to use promo code AMERICA. You'll get the special offer, 35% off, plus $10 off any additional sets, plus free shipping and a money-back guarantee.
So go ahead and call 800-246-8751, the number again.
800-246-8751 or you can go to balanceofnature.com.
When you use discount code AMERICA, you'll get 35% off plus $10 off any additional sets plus free shipping and a money-back guarantee.
Financial experts thought we were in the clear. They were anticipating around 6 rate cuts by the Fed this year.
And then the inflation data came out higher than expected.
Friends, this isn't going away. It can't.
isn't going away, it can't. The US is $34 trillion in the hole and yet we keep printing money which pushes the prices you pay every day even higher.
The US is $34 trillion in the hole and yet we keep printing money, which pushes the prices you pay every day even higher.
So you can either bury your head in the sand or you can do something about it. What to do?
So you can either bury your head in the sand or you can do something about it. What to do? Diversify a portion of your savings into gold with Birch Gold Group. Gold is your hedge against inflation and Birch Gold makes it easy to own. They'll help you to convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered IRA in gold. You don't pay a penny out of pocket. Gold is part of our savings Debbie and I buy gold from Birch Gold.
You can too. Text Dinesh to 989898.
Get your free information kit on gold.
Then talk to a precious metals specialist on how to protect your savings from persistent inflation with gold.
Text Dinesh to 989898.
So no time to waste.
Do it now. Guys, I'm pleased to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is Mark Krikorian.
He is the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
He's been this since 1995.
The Center is an independent, nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C. that studies the impact of immigration on the United States.
You can follow Mark on XMarkSKrikorian.
Krikorian, K-R-I-K-O-R-I-A-N. Hey Mark, thank you for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
You guys have been on this issue now for a while, but it seems to have reached a whole new dimension, a whole new level under Biden.
We don't even seem to have hit this crisis point under Obama.
Is that reading of the last quarter century correct?
Has there been an unprecedented escalation?
And give us some sense of what the magnitude of it is.
Yeah, it's definitely the worst it's ever been.
In fact, sometimes I joke that I long for the good old days of the Obama administration on immigration.
And the Biden administration claims this is part of an unprecedented movement of people all around the world.
In other words, as though this is a natural phenomenon that just happens to them.
In fact, they created this border crisis.
There's always going to be pressure for illegal immigration.
You know, people that want to come here, that's just a part of being in the country business is dealing with that.
What's happened since January 20th of 2021 is this administration has essentially sent out an invitation to people around the world to come here illegally.
Even though the vice president went down to Central America and said, do not come, do not come, if you remember that from a year or two ago, actions are what people look at.
Prospective migrants, people think about coming here, they're smart people, they're going to weigh the odds.
The odds now of your being let go into the United States...
Are extremely high.
To give you an idea of the magnitude, there's a lot of numbers flying around.
They're not all the same thing.
A lot of the higher numbers represent the number of times the Border Patrol encountered somebody, but some of those people were bounced back, so there's double counting there.
But if you look at just the number of people this administration has taken into custody and then released into the United States, it's now something like three and a half million people over three years.
Yeah. And you add on top of that, almost two million people that are referred to as gotaways, which is self-explanatory, but it means specifically that people the Border Patrol knows, they have pictures, or some other information, they just couldn't get to them.
So under this administration, something like two million illegal aliens a year Have settled in the United States.
That's unprecedented.
Nothing like that's ever happened.
And how would those numbers compare, for example, to the Trump years or to the Obama years?
Just to get an idea of the increase under Biden.
Yeah, it was dramatically lower.
Under Trump, they still, because of loopholes in the law, had to release some people.
But I think the telling number that really struck me when I looked at that was that in December of 2020, which is the last full month that President Trump was in office, the Border Patrol took into custody and then released 17 people.
One seven. Because of some kind of extraordinary circumstances.
In December of 2023, so three years later, under Biden, the Border Patrol took into custody and released more than 190,000 So 17 people let go in a month under Trump, 190,000 in one month under Biden.
It's just nothing like this.
It's not just that we've never seen anything like this in American history.
I don't think you could really point to anything like this ever happening anywhere in the world in anybody's history.
Do you think that the primary motivation of the Biden administration doing this, creating this open invitation while kind of denying that they're doing it, is motivated by Flooding the country with newcomers that A,
can have children here, B, will be counted for the census purpose here and therefore create some political reallocation, long-term can look forward to amnesty, a pathway to citizenship, reliable voting for the Democratic Party.
Do you think that this is the motivation?
And if it is, why didn't it occur earlier to say Obama or Clinton, hey, why don't we kind of open the floodgates?
This is going to bring in Democrats and tilt the political balance in our favor.
Is this a novel insight by the Biden administration?
No, it's not. I mean, Democrats have long understood that immigration benefits them in the ways you represent it.
In the long, long-term voters, sure, but even in the shorter term, for census purposes to increase the number of congressmen or even state legislators, if you look at the state level, increases clientele for the welfare state.
All of that's true. What's different, though, is that in previous Democratic administrations, they understood that they needed to color within the lines, if you will.
In other words, accept the idea that there's supposed to be controls on immigration.
What's happened under Biden is that the people running immigration...
Do not believe that the borders are legitimate and that limits on immigration, they believe that limits on immigration are illegitimate in themselves, that it is immoral to turn away people, and the American people have no right to do that.
And so that's an ideological thing that underlies all of that other stuff, whether it's cheap labor or votes or anything.
The underlying concept is that America has no right to say no.
And that's a much more difficult thing to combat, I think, than a more cynical ploy to import voters or warm bodies.
Do you see what I mean? And what I wish is that...
The debate got to that root level.
Instead of talking about things that really are a problem, like the murder of Lake and Riley because of this administration's policies, the ability for people on the terrorist watch list to get it, all those things are bad.
But the underlying problem is that the modern Democratic Party has radicalized on immigration and they reject the very concept of having immigration laws.
That's what we need to debate.
And I think the way to tell people, the way to sort of start that is say, okay...
You want more immigration.
How much more? Let's say 10 million a year, which is ludicrous, but let's just say that.
What are you willing to do, Mr.
Democratic politician, to Mr.
10 million and one?
He's not a terrorist.
He's not a criminal. He's just a regular working guy.
Are you willing to track him down implacably?
Arrest him, take him into custody, and throw him out of the country right away.
Yes or no? And the answer, they never get faced with that question, but the answer is no.
They're not willing to do what's necessary, so they are, in fact, basically for open borders, or at least unlimited immigration.
So it seems to me that there is...
I mean, yes, this ideological commitment you describe is at odds with the existing law.
I mean, am I right that the law sets parameters for immigration?
Otherwise, the distinction between legal and illegal would be meaningless.
So to be a legal immigrant, you have to do A, B, and C. There are decisions made to take in this many legal people a year.
And I think what you're saying is that the Democrats are committed to a certain kind of lawlessness on this particular issue.
Now, this as I see it creates a problem because the executive branch, which is to say the Biden administration, is in charge of enforcing the law, a law in which they evidently don't believe.
So, Kind of chew on that for a moment.
Let's take a break. When we come back, I want to ask you, how does one in the country get away with flouting the law like this?
I mean, let's say there are policemen who don't believe in arresting murderers or even stopping people on the highway.
You still have to do it because it's the law.
So how do you get away with having laws that say X and you just decide we're just not going to apply those laws?
We'll be right back with Mark Krikorian for his answer to that question.
There's no better time than right now to call our friends at PhD Weight Loss and Nutrition to start your journey to a healthier you.
As I hear from many of you about how PhD Weight Loss and Nutrition has changed your lives, I know each one of us has our own reason for starting.
I started because I was feeling kind of sluggish, tired all the time.
Debbie tried everything else, nothing would work, so we just needed some help.
I've also heard from countless listeners who did what we did and started the PhD Weight Loss and Nutrition program.
One listener went for his yearly physical.
He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
The medicine made him sick, so he says, hey, let me do PhD instead.
He has completely reversed his diagnosis.
Debbie talked to a lady who, just like her, couldn't get the menopause weight to go away.
Dr. Ashley and her team helped her lose the weight and keep it off.
So there are so many reasons to start, and honestly, I can't think of even one good reason to put it off.
So make 2020 for your year.
Call PHD Weight Loss and Nutrition today.
Here's the number, 864-644-1900 to get started, or you can go online at myphdweightloss.com.
Here's the number again to call, 864-644-1900.
Mike Lindell has a passion to help you get the best sleep of your life.
After he invented the world's best pillow, he created the famous Giza Dream Sheets.
Debbie and I love these.
They're the best sheets you will ever sleep on.
So for a limited time, you can get a queen size set for $59.98, king size just $69.98, the lowest prices in history.
Mike and the MyPillow gang continue to be canceled by big box stores, attacked by the media, They really appreciate all of your great support during these times and want to thank you by giving you the best specials on all their products.
To get the specials, go to MyPillow.com or you can call 800-876-0227.
The number again, 800-876-0227.
Use promo code Dinesh.
You'll get the famous Giza Dream Sheets.
Queen size, $59.98.
King size, $69.98.
By the way, 60% off the original MySlipper.
So check it out. Call 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com.
And don't forget to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. I'm back with Mark Krikorian.
He's Executive Director of the Center for Immigration, Center of Immigration Studies.
He's had this position since 1995.
You can follow him on X at Mark S. Krikorian.
Mark, I was asking you just before the break about how do you get away with this with being in charge of enforcement and yet engaging in blatant lawlessness?
The way this administration justifies that is prosecutorial discretion.
Now, that's sort of a fancy term for the flexibility that any law enforcement has to have.
I mean, if a police officer stops you for speeding, but you weren't going that fast, and you're not a jerk, he might just give you a warning.
That kind of flexibility has to happen, just because in the real world there's only so many resources to devote to things.
This administration is using the excuse of prosecutorial discretion to basically just exempt whole categories of people from enforcement of the immigration law.
They're saying that unless you're a terrorist or a murderer or what have you, They're really not going to bother with you.
And even that justification is kind of flimsy because we looked at the numbers of deportations from inside the country and their rationale for basically giving all illegal immigrants, most of them, kind of a free pass that they're going to ignore them.
Their rationale was we're going to focus, laser-like focus, on the worst of the worst.
And for most people, that's a talking point.
Okay, that makes sense. Obviously, you want to hunt down and deport people who are, you know, rapists and murderers first.
The thing is, the deportation even of criminals has declined under this administration.
So this idea that they are...
Focusing their resources more responsibly to go after the worst parts of the problem is total nonsense.
It's simply false, but that's the excuse they're using for basically exempting almost everybody from the consequences of violating immigration law.
Isn't this kind of a risky strategy?
And I say that because if you're letting in a bunch of criminals and then potentially a decent population of terrorists into the country, you're going to have Lake and Riley type episodes happening more.
It's not going to go unnoticed that the perpetrator is illegal.
Why would the administration take that kind of a risk, which could backfire politically in a very spectacular way?
I think they are haptives of their ideology.
That's one issue, is that it's, you know, it's kind of like, you know, there's sort of a saying, better that, you know, ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be punished, that sort of thing.
That's their take on immigration, I think, their perspective, that better that a hundred people get in who shouldn't have than one person who's okay that gets kept out.
And then, I think there's also a problem that's unique to this administration, is that there is nobody in charge.
The president is kind of a figurehead president.
He's not, and I'm not making Alzheimer's jokes or whatever, but it's pretty clear he's not really running things.
What that means is, and in the absence of that, nobody else is running things.
In other words, it's not like his chief of staff is really the president, or his wife is really the president, that kind of thing.
Nobody's running things, or everybody's kind of going their own way, and so the ideologues Basically just, you know, are wound up on automatic pilot and doing whatever they feel like.
And then things blow up, like this tragedy with this girl.
But this kind of thing happens all the time.
Drunk drivers. An illegal immigrant drunk driver, for instance, who's been deported before, came back, or maybe they let him go somehow, and then he kills somebody.
This happens all the time.
And I think the administration figures...
The media's on our side.
They'll do cleanup.
They're not going to be too demanding, and we'll be able to weather it and get away with it.
So I agree with you.
If, God forbid, something really bad, some kind of 9-11 type thing happens, they're not going to be able to wiggle out of it, and it will all be their own making.
But I think they kind of figure, well, we'll keep our fingers crossed and hope that doesn't happen.
Mark, it recently came to light and I noticed that Trump was talking about this a day or so ago.
This is the reports about a secret program to fly in 350,000 illegals.
Now, the idea here is to bring them in by plane.
I have no idea how any of this would even work, but this way they don't have to cross the border.
They're actually being given international tickets to get here, and this is on top of the numbers that you're talking about, about people crossing, people being let in.
What can you tell us about this program?
Yeah, we released a report on this Monday, and people misunderstand some of these things.
We're not flying them in.
They're buying their own tickets. The government is letting them come in, is giving them authorization, even though they have no right to be here.
They can't qualify for visas, but they're justifying it under family reunification.
They're saying these people are going to sneak across the border anyway because they have relatives.
So let's just fly them directly into the United States, into airports, so that they don't cross the border, so that the border patrol statistics are lower.
I mean, that's kind of the goal, is to funnel illegal immigrants through ports of entry, either at the physical border or at airports, so that the administration can say, mission accomplished, the Border Patrol isn't catching in as many people.
Several problems with this. Number one, it doesn't really work.
It just fomets more people coming illegally.
But what really struck us the most about this report, and the reason we wanted to release it, We got this information from a Freedom of Information Act request because they weren't breaking out these numbers before until we asked them.
But what's most alarming is they would not tell us, and they still have not told us, which airports people are going to, how many people are going to...
You know, Kennedy and Miami and O'Hare.
And the excuse they gave is that the program is creating so many security vulnerabilities at these airports that if they told us bad actors, and that's the word they use, bad actors would take advantage of it.
In other words, their program is creating a security threat within the United States, which they are acknowledging But they won't tell us where they're going because people would be able to exploit that security threat.
It's just, it's unbelievable that they are continuing this program and then hiding numbers of it from it, hiding some of the information because they're telling us the program is a security threat.
Well then, stop the program.
Mark, what I'm getting from all this is you mentioned the ways in which family unification, which is a part of the legal immigrant policy.
For example, you come here legally to America or you are an American citizen.
And you marry somebody, then by family unification you can become a citizen.
If you're a citizen, you can bring your parents under family unification under certain circumstances.
But this is being exploited or manipulated for a completely different end.
And it seems to me that the same is true with refugee policies, because there are genuine refugees.
I remember in the old days it was people fleeing communism.
But there is a fairly stern criteria you have to satisfy to qualify as a refugee.
It can't just be, I'm hungry, I'm poor, things aren't looking too good for me over there, so I think I'll come on over here.
That's not sufficient to be a refugee.
And yet the Biden administration is almost...
Coaching people to come to the country and say, I'm applying for refugee status, and since that requires adjudication, they get a court date two years, three years from now, and then it's like, see you later, maybe you'll show up for your court date, maybe you won't.
I mean, the flagrant, disrespectful law here, on the part of the people charged with enforcing the law, Very scandalous, isn't it?
Oh, absolutely. And the part of the sort of subset of the refugee issue is asylum is the one that we deal with.
In our law, those are basically the same yardstick, but they're geographically different.
In the law, a refugee is somebody we went overseas, picked out, and brought here.
Whether that's good or bad, it's a sovereign act of the United States.
Asylum is, as you suggest, people who just show up illegally and say, I qualify as a refugee, you have to let me stay whether you like it or not, regardless of what limits you have in immigration law.
And what is happening not just here, but in other countries, Europe, Israel, Australia, is that the elements within those societies that don't believe in national sovereignty are using asylum law as a way, sort of like a crowbar, to pry open the borders of their countries.
And that's why asylum law, which is something invented right after World War II, it's a Cold War policy, has got to change fundamentally in what is a fundamentally different world situation.
Very interesting stuff, Mark.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it. I've been talking to Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center of Immigration Studies.
Follow him on xMarkSKrikorian.
Mark, thank you very much.
Thank you. I'm continuing my discussion of Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum speech.
As discussed in Harry Jaffa's great book, Crisis of the House Divided.
And what makes the Lyceum speech so fascinating and so important, so profound, is it doesn't go in the direction that you expect it to go.
You expect Lincoln to say something like, the founders established rule of law as central to this new society.
And while there has been rule of law in the decades since the founding, now we are facing a lot of lawlessness in our society.
So let's live up to the example of the founders, and let's have rule of law once again.
That would be the, let's call it conventional way to proceed in a speech following in kind of accepted lines of development.
But this is not what Lincoln does at all.
In fact, Lincoln seems to make a kind of argument for the irrelevance of the founders, at least in his own day and time, and far from saying that we should all follow the rule of law, Lincoln goes on to make an unexpected argument about a certain type of superior man, a man that is above the law.
A man that is above the law not because he is inherently lawless, but he is so superior in his nature.
He's a kind of superman, if you will, and is not obliged to follow the law.
And what are laws to somebody who is...
Who is, in a sense, standing above the ordinary run of human nature, a kind of Napoleon or Julius Caesar type.
A person who almost, you know, with one hand smashes the laws to the side and just goes in a kind of...
Takes his own course, makes his own path, if you will.
And that's where this speech is going to go.
But let's follow how it goes there, because in this theme of the speech, we're talking not just about, hey, we don't want mob rule, we don't want mob law, let's all follow the laws.
That's a fairly mundane type of message.
Lincoln is actually going to get to a deeper message.
Which is the antagonism inside the human soul between reason on the one hand and the passions on the other.
Let's follow Lincoln's rhetoric line by line.
That our government should have been maintained in its original form from its establishment until now is not much to be wondered at.
So, Lincoln begins really by saying, well, the fact that we got the founding, and that was 60 or 70 years ago, or 80 years ago, Lincoln goes, the fact that we've hung together as a country from the founding to now, no big deal.
So, kind of a surprise.
Lincoln is saying, it's not that impressive what the founders achieved or the fact that we're still here.
That's to be expected.
Why? Because, says Lincoln...
He says, it had many props to support it through the period, which are now decayed and crumbled away.
So the founding had some support, and that support, says Lincoln, we don't have now.
Well, what is that support? Then...
All that sought celebrity and fame and distinction expected to find them in the success of that experiment.
Their all was staked upon it.
Their destiny was inseparably linked with it.
Their ambition aspired to display before the admiring world a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition which had hitherto been considered at best no better than problematical, namely the capability of a people to govern themselves." By the way, notice Lincoln's elastic, circuitous type of prose here.
I mean, that sentence went on for like seven lines, and yet very elegantly put together.
And Lincoln goes on to say, if they succeeded, they were to be immortalized, and then they succeeded.
The experiment is successful, and thousands have won their deathless names, being their fame, in making it so.
As I read this passage, I think of two things.
One is, Lincoln is making the point that the proposition of the American founding, which is the idea that people are able to govern themselves, he says this idea was problematic before the American Revolution.
In other words, that the great thinkers of the world had thought, this isn't really going to work.
And moreover, not only did people not think it was going to work, it was considered so unlikely to work that nobody even tried it.
You can't before 1800 or before let's say the American founding think of a single example of a society based upon the consent of the governed.
Now admittedly, all societies rely on a certain type of implicit consent, right?
I mean if there's a king, everybody sulkily goes along with the king, follows the rules, people are at liberty to revolt against the king and if you can argue that the fact that they don't do that implies that they're giving the system that is in place a sort of consent.
And so consent in that sense had been around.
But the idea of explicit consent, of saying, I am choosing to have this kind of government, I am choosing to have these people as my leaders to rule in my stead, Lincoln is saying that proposition was invented by the American founders.
And that's very significant.
But the motives for inventing it that Lincoln gives are, well, a little bit debased.
Lincoln doesn't say that the founders were trying to discover eternal truths that are available to all men at all times.
He says, basically, the founders, quote,"...sought celebrity and fame." And that their reason for setting up this new society was so that they would get the credit of creating this incredible new way of organizing human society.
And Lincoln goes, and they do get that credit because they did achieve it.
But notice that what Lincoln is suggesting is that for a constitutional democracy to work, you need these kinds of leaders.
You need these extraordinary men who are motivated by eternal fame, who want to create something completely new.
And Lincoln is implying that if you don't have these men...
Things aren't going to go that well.
In fact, he's saying, not just implying, he's asserting that we don't have that now, meaning in Lincoln's own time.
Why? Because we don't have the founders anymore.
They're gone. They've already had their fame.
We now have their system.
But, says Lincoln, the ambition, the striving for excellence that held together that system in the beginning doesn't exist now.
Now again, we might expect Lincoln at this point to say, well, that means that we have to work even harder.
The founders, in a sense, created this poetic achievement called America.
We now have to govern that society in prose, meaning we have to do the mechanical day-to-day work of preserving what the founders created.
It's not going to be as glamorous as founding a country, but But nevertheless, we have to sort of plot on, keeping in mind the greatness that the founders achieved.
But Lincoln doesn't go there at all.
In fact, he goes in a completely opposite direction by saying, hey, listen, if the founders were these ambitious men who achieved something immortal through their heroic works— Lincoln basically says, what if we get a super powerful figure,
maybe even a tyrannical figure, a kind of Napoleon, a kind of Caesar, somebody belonging, as Lincoln says, to the, quote, family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle.
Now, this is a very interesting reference because what Lincoln is basically saying is, think about it, all men are created equal doesn't apply to the law of the jungle.
In the jungle, all animals are not created equal.
The lion doesn't go, I better not eat the antelope.
After all, the antelope is created equal to me.
No, the lion is the natural ruler of the jungle.
The eagle is the natural ruler, if you will, of the sky.
And Lincoln is saying, what if we get people today?
And of course, the real power of the speech is that you are listening potentially to such a person named A. Lincoln.
What if you get a superior type of human being who is not content with just founding a country, but needs to somehow refound it, needs to take it over, needs to run it his own way, is not bound by the old rules or the old laws.
So you see here that Lincoln is raising the prospect of tyranny right in the middle of a free society.
And it is to that problem that we will turn when I pick this up tomorrow.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
Export Selection