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May 9, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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FAILED SUPERPOWER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep829
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Coming up, I'll consider the latest developments in the New York courtroom and consider Michael Avenatti's unique take on his former client, Stormy Daniels.
Eric Prince, former Navy SEAL, founder of the military company Blackwater joins me.
We're going to talk about how the United States in the decades after the spectacular victory in the Cold War seems to have completely forgotten the How to be a superpower.
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I want to talk today about the Trump cases and...
A couple of updates from the other cases before I focus in on the Stormy Daniels so-called hush money case that is going on in New York with Stormy Daniels on the stand.
She's currently undergoing a pretty withering cross-examination.
I got a wind of some of it this morning and I'll come to that in a moment.
There is a development in the Fannie Willis case, again, piece of good news for Trump, which is that the Georgia Court of Appeals will hear a Trump appeal for Fannie Willis' disqualification.
Now, you might remember that...
The judge had ruled after this rather riveting hearing, the judge ruled, well, you know, yeah, there was the odor of mendacity and lying, and yeah, there was the appearance of conflicts of interest, but, this was a huge but, he said, I'm going to stop short of disqualifying Fannie Willis.
In fact, I'm going to give the prosecution a choice.
Either Fannie Willis steps down or Nathan Wade steps down as if the stepping down of one or the other kind of puts the matter right.
This is absurd.
If it is true that there is impropriety, the appearance of impropriety, money changing hands, and the odor of mendacity, what does that mean?
Well, that means that the two parties involved are lying through their teeth.
And the judge knows it.
Even if he can't specifically put his finger, he doesn't need to put his finger.
All he needs to decide is they're lying.
That's what he's there for.
That's what a judge is supposed to make that assessment.
Are these witnesses testifying truthfully?
And the judge goes, no.
So I think that the basis of the appeal is, let's simply start with the judge's factual conclusions.
And then let's say, if these conclusions are, as a matter of fact, correct.
And by the way, when you have an appellate court They generally don't revisit questions of fact.
There are some exceptions, but in general they don't.
They let the facts be determined at the sort of local level, meaning by the judge himself.
And then they say, all right, Given these facts, did the judge correctly apply the law?
So the general question here is, if you have a situation where you've got a district attorney engaged in this torrid affair who has been funneling money to this lawyer by the hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of which is then paid back to benefit her or used for their joint benefit, Does this constitute A, corruption?
B, the appearance of corruption?
And number two, were these people lying about it when they came to testify?
And if the answer is, yeah, I think they were, shouldn't these guys be given the boot?
Shouldn't the case be either thrown out or...
Just returned to Georgia to say, hey, look, you can't have this prosecutor.
You can't have this prosecutorial team.
If you want to get somebody else to start this from scratch, you can do that.
But otherwise, this is not going to fly.
So this is not going up to the Georgia Court of Appeals.
Unfortunately, we live in a time where it's like, okay...
If you want to figure out what the chances are that Trump's going to prevail, let's go look at who the judges are and see if they are Republican or Democratic appointees.
It's very regrettable that our system of justice has come to this.
It means it's not a real system of justice.
It's ultimately a system of institutionalized political prejudice.
Prejudice that cuts this way or prejudice that cuts that way.
But that sadly appears to be the case.
Let me turn to the Stormy Daniels testimony.
And I want to come at it from a slightly different angle.
A lot of people have been commenting about the fact that Stormy is, you know, a porn star.
And how can you believe Stormy Daniels?
And how can you believe Michael Cohen?
Pretty much the key figures in this case are all...
Unbelievable. And unbelievable in the literal meaning of the term.
Not just like unbelievable wow, but unbelievable you can't believe them.
Just that. And so Michael Cohen is probably standing in the wings or he's up next or waiting in line.
But the defense has been, you know, hitting Stormy Daniels by showing, isn't this really a big money-making scheme by you?
I mean, you have publicly denied this more than once.
And yet, you know, you have a book.
You have a kind of a semi-pornographic tour.
You are...
You engaged in an obvious shakedown.
You made the admission that when Trump began to run for president, you saw the financial opportunities get bigger.
It's a new ballgame.
So all of this is being used to tarnish the Stormy Daniels' credibility.
Now, Debbie and I were talking about this morning, and we were like, well...
Debbie goes, you know, it's so funny because if you turn on, say, Fox News, it's like, pow, pow, pow, they're really nailing Stormy Daniels.
Then you go to MSNBC, whoa, Stormy Daniels, you know, she may be a porn star, but she's coming across with the most, you know, glittering credibility.
And so it's like, what do you believe?
And even that question of...
Of trying to sort of get it right, trying to not just go with wishful thinking and this is the way I hope it will be, but rather this is what's actually being presented to the jury.
But even then, that presumes that you have a fair jury.
If on the other hand, you have a bigoted or biased or we're going to get Trump, Trump DDS, Trump derangement syndrome jury, then...
Even a kind of honest attempt to parse the value of testimony, the credibility of it, what makes sense, what's believable, doesn't really matter in the end because the jury doesn't care about it either.
The jury's not looking to see who has the better case.
The jury's just looking to see, are there enough of us that want to get Trump?
Or are there one or two Trumpsters on the jury who go, nah, you're not going to get away with that, sorry.
So... We're good to go.
has issued a really interesting statement.
I mean, very strange.
He's talking about a producer, Sarah Gibson, and he says she requested I assist with a documentary about my former client, Stormy Daniels.
And so he talks to Gibson.
It's obviously on a recorded line because Avenatti's in prison.
And he says, I asked her a number of questions about this documentary.
I was particularly interested in knowing, is it going to be fair?
Or is it a puff piece that's kind of aimed at putting Daniels in a favorable light while trashing Donald Trump?
So Avenatti, of all people, is trying to find out what is the angle of this documentary.
And And he said, my first question to Ms.
Gibson when we spoke was whether Daniels was being paid.
And here's where things get interesting.
He says, I asked this question because if she was being paid, it would be a clear indication to me the project lacked integrity, would be one-sided and controlled by Daniels.
Ms. Gibson told me that Daniels was being paid for the documentary, but that because she owed Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars from a judgment Trump was trying to collect from Daniels, they, meaning Daniels, Gibson, and others, had come up with a plan that would allow Daniels to be secretly paid while at the same time keeping the payments away from Trump and his attorneys.
Among other things, she told me, they had fictionally, quote, optioned the rights to Daniels' book, And then rooted the money Daniels demanded through a fabricated trust that had been set up in the name of Daniels' daughter all to hide the money from Trump and avoid paying the judgment.
What I find fascinating about all this is that this is really sort of insider scoop by an attorney very close to Daniels.
Now, again, we have to hit the pause button and go, listen, we're dealing with All around, incredible characters, right?
If you can't believe Cohen, you can't believe Daniels, can you actually believe Avenatti?
I mean, this is like a festival of crooks, right?
It's like one crook telling on the other, like, no, no, you know, it was Fatty over there who pulled the trigger.
Oh, no, it was Sly over here who really did it.
You know, and it's the cops are like, well, is it Fatty or is it Sly?
One of the two of them did it.
Clearly, these are people with...
Fully capable of doing all kinds of shenanigans.
And it is true.
I mean, the background is true.
Stormy Daniels owes Trump all this money.
She's obviously pretending she doesn't have it.
It sounds like she is finding ways to make money.
And what Avenatti is alleging is that she's getting media, in this case a documentary film team, to work with her on concealing and finagling the funds.
It is, I think...
If you had told me, you know, weeks or months ago that a prominent defender of Trump from his jail cell would be Michael Avenatti, I would not have believed it.
This is a guy who has been tirading against Trump prior to his conviction.
So it's a very strange development that we're witnessing.
You know, in a certain way, and Debbie rarely sees this because I always say, this is so entertaining!
And Debbie goes, how can you say it's entertaining?
This is, you know, they're trying to get Trump on, what, 34 felonies?
And yeah, it's...
But I mean, even that is downright laughable.
The idea that...
I mean, if you think about it, what this case is coming down to is whether Trump, who makes this payment to Daniels and lists it as, quote, legal, was somehow falsifying his business expenses.
Now, who did he pay the money to?
Trump.
Not directly to Daniels.
He paid it to legal Michael Cohen and somebody else, not Trump.
It wasn't Trump himself who classified it as legal.
Somebody was looking at the books and looking at this expense and go, who is it paid to?
Michael Cohen.
Well, it's legal expense.
So the idea that somebody would face criminal charges and jail time, it is unthinkable.
It is insane. And yet, it is a mark of the insanity of our current moment that we're dealing with this and Trump is dealing with this.
And that the left is putting on a straight face and pretending like there's something legitimate here.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
I spoke yesterday about the encampments and about the very cunning strategies that are used by the protesters and their organizers.
These are protests, as I mentioned, that on the campus aren't just students.
Some of it is students.
Some of it is a massive network of professional activists, nonprofit groups.
Behind them stand funding groups.
And I talked about the way that the protesters seek confrontation, but confrontation that puts the university in an impossible position.
If you do nothing, we take over the building.
We take over the green.
We take over the library.
We take over the university.
If you put up resistance, You're going to have to call on the cops.
We then have ways of making the cops look like they are the harsh ones.
We put out our most innocent, wide-eyed people to say, oh, we're just trying to get food and water.
Even though we have thugs in our midst who are pushing back and engaging in coercion, blocking Jews from passing through the encampment, forming a kind of unbreakable human chain, and so on.
And today I want to...
Talk a little bit about the organizational network behind all this because...
And there's a good article here by Park McDonald...
McDougald, sorry, in Tablet Magazine.
And it talks about the fact that there is a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark money groups.
Now, what makes the whole thing paradoxical is a lot of the encampments are like, down with Biden.
Biden needs to go.
And yet... We're good to go.
Away from Israel and toward Gaza, toward Hamas, toward the Palestinians, to switch sides, if you will, in the conflict.
The writer, Park McDougald, he says, look, you notice that the protests that we're seeing now are highly similar to the protests that we saw, that we've seen before.
We've seen it in Portland, we've seen it in Seattle with the creation of these autonomous We've seen it with the way that these protests seem to be governed.
There are masks, security details that prohibit people from filming.
There are people who do media messaging and, in fact, tell the ordinary protester, don't speak to media, don't cooperate with anyone.
There are people, veterans of the Occupy movement and BLM, who are now We're good to go.
Who are the groups involved here?
In the front, there are a number of these far-left Marxist and communist groups.
There's the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party.
There's a group called the People's Forum, which is funded by a strange wealthy businessman named Neville Roy Singham.
But interestingly, behind these groups, you've got money.
Now, we shouldn't overestimate the way in which the stuff is organized.
By and large, what the groups do is they get instructions about how to operate.
I had mentioned yesterday, for example, the tents and the fact that the tents are kind of all the same color.
By the way, while I was doing that, Brian here in the studio, he kind of goes on Amazon and he just searches for tent.
And sure enough, what comes up?
The exact tent that you see in the encampments.
In other words, the tent that has the kind of, it's a green tent with a grayish flap or trim, and it's selling on Amazon, first of all, for a remarkably low price.
It's like $39 for the tent.
Normally, tents, I don't think, cost 39 bucks, but this one does.
And so, these tents are being made.
So, basically, the protest groups in the different campuses, they go on Amazon or a similar site, and they buy these tents, and they buy them in bulk.
And so the network is organized, but it's loose.
It's loose in the sense that each group is able to function pretty autonomously, even though there's all kinds of guidance available to them, legal advice available to them, bail money available to them, and so on.
One of the premier groups in the forefront is called Students for Justice in Palestine.
So SJP. And then there's a very interesting group, Jewish Voice for Peace.
So, these are far-left Jews who actually are anti-Israel.
This may seem a very strange group indeed, but there are some members of it, and these are Jews who kind of hate Israel.
These are Jews who see Israel as the occupier.
I don't know, I suppose some people would call them self-hating Jews, but behind these Jews and behind these Students for Justice in Palestine, you have the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and you have Soros and the Open Society, and you have money from a whole bunch of different foundations.
One foundation that was created by an Amazon employee.
Then you have the Tides Foundation.
The Tides Foundation is a very Obama-connected operation.
It's one of the largest progressive dark money networks in the country.
In fact, it controls upward of a billion dollars in assets.
The Tides Foundation in its list of donors You see, here we go, Soros and his son.
This guy named Peter Buffett and his Novo Foundation.
The founder of eBay, Piera Midier.
The Ford Foundation, Arabella Advisors.
So this is the bankrolling of the far left.
And the article makes the point that This is the first time that these donor-funded radical networks have gone to war with a Democratic president.
So in other words, these are networks that generally support the Democrats.
And yet, just like there is a kind of fight in Texas and elsewhere within the Republican Party about what direction the Republican Party should go, there is also an equivalent fight inside the Democratic Party.
It's almost like the Democratic Party has traditionally been Pretty pro-Israel.
The Clintons, for example, were strongly pro-Israel.
And the Palestinian advocates were kind of a fringe.
They were on the far left, but they didn't have access to the mainstream of the party.
But it's pretty clear now That this sort of insurgent left is trying to take over the Democratic Party and take it over from Joe Biden.
In fact, I think that this is all facilitated by the fact that Obama, who's the transition between the Clinton era and the Biden era, look at Obama's politics.
Was Obama pro-Israel or was Obama pro-Palestine?
Or pro-Hamas? Answer?
Pro-Hamas.
Pro-Palestine.
Pro-Iran.
If you look at Obama's decision-making, it was consistently, how do I weaken Israel?
How do I weaken American allies?
How do I strengthen American adversaries?
And this has now become part of Biden's foreign policy.
So all of this means, I think, that we're seeing the emergence, even within the Democratic Party, of a new Democratic Party, a new Democratic Party in which, quite frankly, Israel has no place.
Now the question is, has this memo gone out to the Jews of America?
Not the handful of Jews who hate Israel, but the majority of Jews who actually like Israel.
Who still think of the Democratic Party as being on the side of Israel and are now recognizing that you've got not just movements within the party itself, but the party itself is beginning to move and move ominously against one of America's strongest allies in the Middle East, if not in the world. Guys, if you'd like to support my work, I'd like to invite you to check out my locals channel.
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On locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
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I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Eric Prince.
He's the founder of the military company called Blackwater.
He's a former Navy SEAL officer.
And you can follow him on social media on X at Real Eric, E-R-I-K, D Prince.
He also has a phone that we're going to talk about.
It's called Unplugged Phone.
It's a privacy-focused smartphone.
And the website is unplugged.com.
Eric, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
I know we had you scheduled for last week and some storms came our way, but we're delighted to have you on now.
You wrote a fairly detailed and very interesting article about American military strategy and preparedness.
And the question I take it that you set out to answer is, hey, America is supposed to be the world's sole superpower.
We were riding high at the end of the Cold War.
People started talking about the end of history, the kind of American era stretching into the 21st century.
And now it seems that things are very different.
It seems that the superpower has sort of got its wings clipped.
Things aren't going very well, really, as far as I can see, any front.
So let's walk through the kind of big waystations or signposts of what seems to be the precipitous decline of a superpower.
Thank you for having me.
I would say... What should have actually resulted in a peace dividend, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the military-industrial complex, and the Washington crowd really conspired to unnecessarily make enemies that we didn't need to.
And it's the constant default towards more government, more spending, More largesse to distribute to those politically connected has been the root of this problem.
And so this article is long because I had to detail 30 years of neocon policy failure combined with military industrial complex where they're always defaulting to a system that does not in any way regard accountability Or efficiency or innovation in any way.
It's really become the antithesis of what actually made America successful and wealthy and free in the first place.
We have tilted towards everything really reflecting the Soviet Union that we celebrated the collapse of, but boy, we're just going the wrong way in every step of the way.
Eric, you know, I think as a Reaganite in the 1980s, I was very attentive to the expansion of government, the magnitude of government waste in the domestic sector.
I think what you're saying is that the same kind of aggrandizement, in other words, bureaucracies want to grow, defense contractors want more money, you get neocon ideologues who get in there and they want more war, And the net effect of this is to expand a defense industrial complex even at a time when it seems that there was less need for it.
Isn't that what you're saying? Yes, particularly in the 90s and then with the global war on terror, the amount of money that was spent on defense just from GWAT was almost $12 trillion.
So if you look at what our national debt is, At 34, you have a huge amount of overspend in just really a very asymmetric problem.
As horrid as the 9-11 attacks were, it was not going to end the republic.
But what does end the republic is a massive overspend.
I think you and I very much agree on being small government conservatives.
And so there's always that question of guns versus butter.
And the case I'm making is we've spent way too much on butter and we're spending way too much on guns right now.
And the nature of the threat with China now is very real, but we can't keep going back to the same clown show that is Washington, D.C., where we spend massively too much on And we don't get anything for it.
And when you look at the track record of failure that I lay out over these last 30 years, we shouldn't listen to these people in Washington at all for any of this forum policy or weapons advice because they have no legacy except failure upon failure.
To take the example of Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9-11, it seems to me that one of the big fallacies, if you will, that was put out there, I don't know who came up with it, whether it was Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell, it was the idea that if you go to Afghanistan, you lick the Taliban, beat them up, throw them out of power, That somehow we now own Afghanistan.
It's now our job to rebuild that entire country, redesign its institutions, introduce democracy.
It seems to be something of the same thinking was carried over into Iraq.
Would you agree that a more surgical military operation would be basically go over there, identify the guys who allowed the al-Qaeda to use the monkey bars, pulverize them, and then come on home?
End of story. The way I described it in the article is the Afghanistan aftermath after 9-11 should have resembled a Roman-style Scipio Africanus raid.
So that's when he went down to Carthage after Carthage had been raiding and destroying Italian cities for decades, and he went down and he put an end to that, and Carthage was no longer a threat.
That's exactly what should have happened, and that's effectively what was happening for the first six months after 9-11.
But then big army and big military industrial complex and the neocons said, ah, we have a chance to do nation building.
Let's take an ancient society that's 90% illiterate with no history of representative government whatsoever and now we're going to make a Jeffersonian democracy if we can only throw enough American money at it.
It absolutely was a fool's errand.
And the same way we've lost completely for all the money, blood and treasure spent in Iraq.
We've completely watched it.
Iraq is now fully subjugated to the Iranians.
Again, because of some specific decision-making by people like Condi Rice.
Do you think, Eric, that this was the result of...
You know, people have long said that while the British had long experience with colonialism, the Americans approached the world with a certain kind of wide-eyed naivete.
So do you think that this was just sheer ignorance, the kind of foolishness that says, I can go to a tribal people and essentially make them into the same kind of people we find in Peoria, Illinois?
Or... Or do you think, rather, that the neocons essentially benefit from a kind of fully operational war machine?
That this is their bread and butter, so to speak.
So, in other words, they don't really care whether Afghanistan becomes a functioning democracy.
It's ultimately about feeding.
It's kind of like if you were talking about Biden and the border.
You know, it's one question, does he not realize that the border is vulnerable, terrorists could be coming in, gangs and drugs are coming in?
Or could it be that he's not that dumb?
He actually has a different objective, and his objective is ultimately to get long-term votes for the Democratic Party.
So I guess my question is, is it really stupidity, or is it self-interest and self-aggrandizement, or both?
I would say it's both because you have that naivety of people that live in a bubble of Washington, D.C. that don't really get to the very rough edges of civilization around the world and they just believe their own nonsense that their own think tanks in Washington put out.
And you combine that with the natural grift And desire for more money that the NGOs and the foreign policy talking head class talk about to generate more papers and more NGO work.
I mean, even when Congress appropriates money...
For example, the $13 billion that was appropriated to resettle Afghan refugees...
With really no vetting, no screening or anything else, that would have paid for the program that I recommended as a stay-behind package in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from taking over and exactly what would have happened.
So the price of resettling the refugees, four times what program I recommended would have cost them per year.
So Washington is about money, and I guess the main point I want to make in that article is if we don't like what we're doing, the only way to make the bureaucracy heal is to cut off its money in the most severe and unmistakable ways possible.
And so I think, you know, as angry as people are at Speaker Johnson right now, the Speaker of the House, I'd say the real enemies of the American people are the chairmen of these appropriations committees in Congress that continue to fund everything that is wrong in our foreign policy apparatus, with our domestic surveillance apparatus, all these problem areas.
It comes down to money and we have to stop that flow.
But how? In other words, let me put it to you slightly differently.
I'm the chairman of an appropriations committee.
Now, because I'm the chairman of the appropriations committee, every military-related lobbyist in Washington is coming to me and saying, I'll give you $500,000 for your re-election campaign.
I'll give you a million dollars.
Meanwhile, the guys in my district are writing me checks for $50 and $100.
So whose attention do I have?
Obviously, I'm going to pay more attention to the people who are writing the big checks.
And so I guess my question is, how in a democratic society do you break this dynamic?
I mean, I see why there's a need to do it, but how do you do it?
I would say that's out of my area of expertise, but they do respond to very negative pressure even at town hall meetings.
They can look, I think it's also been proven that the Washington political class loves to wash money through its coffers with a campaign consultants and the media buys and all the rest, but 50 angry men and women that show up at a town hall meeting and demand and call them out for specific votes for nonsense, I would say most politicians are scared. They're cowards, and they don't like that kind of pressure of people getting in their face.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I want to talk to Eric Prince about Pfizer, about surveillance, government run surveillance programs, and whether there might be whether he might have an antidote.
We'll be right back. I'm back with Eric Prince, the founder of the private military company called Blackwater.
Follow him on x at realericdprince, the website, and we're going to come to it in a minute, theunplugged.com.
Eric, let's pivot to the issue of government surveillance of American citizens.
Now, it seems like in the aftermath of 9-11, a lot of Americans thought there are these Foreign terrorists who are trying to kill us, and therefore we need to go along with expanded government power to monitor the bad guys over there.
But somehow this seems to have expanded into a program that includes American citizens.
In other words, spying on American citizens without a warrant...
And you mentioned in the last segment Speaker Johnson, here's a guy who seemed to be on the sort of civil liberties path, talking about the dangers of allowing spying without a warrant, and yet at the last minute he goes, I went to a briefing, they convinced me, I think it's going to be fine, this power is going to be used responsibly, and he takes the opposite position, at least without sharing the rationale for doing it.
Let's talk about the problem, and then I want to ask you about a specific solution that you have developed.
So, another reason I'm very opposed to these endless wars, because these tools that are used to probably fight a problem that may be legitimate at the time, giving bureaucracy a blank check in unlimited power, they will always expand that power in that scope, right?
FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, not domestic.
And, uh, the, the, what happened with this last FISA, uh, they say it's an extension or a renewal.
It was a massive enlargement of what it was.
So now what the federal government can do, what was just passing the law, even voted on approved by Democrats and a lot of Republicans signed the law by Biden.
Is that your phone collects all kinds of personal information on you, and big tech uses that.
They have a freemium model, right?
Remember, if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you're the product.
And so big tech, whether it's an iPhone or Google Mobile Services running on an Android, collects where you go, what you buy, who you call, and what you browse, and they organize that information and sell it to advertising.
That's why Google is such a valuable company is because they're a big advertising.
And Apple says, yeah, they're in favor of privacy and they're changing.
No. And you look at their financial projections, they're shifting to they're going to in-house that information, collecting your information and sell it.
So they're projecting the revenues from ad revenue are going to grow to $30 billion from your data.
So what happened with this FISA extension?
Is that the federal government, the feds, especially the bureau, got sick of getting beaten up when they came before Congress because they were buying all this commercial data, doing a fishing expedition to figure out people's patterns and habits of life and who they met with.
Everyone that was wrapped up from January 6th was done off the cell phone ad data, advertising information that was on their phone.
The Thousand Mules movie or Ten Thousand Mules movie was done by ad data proving how these people are moving.
So your existing cell phone has basically become a public message board where all of your data that you consented to is exported.
What I and some friends got together after the 2020 election in our frustration, complaining that big tech was never going to change unless we competed with it.
We're not going to change it by whining.
We came up with a phone that is completely independent of the Google and Apple universe.
This is called an unplugged phone.
And the difference is, this is our hardware with our operating system based on the Android kernel.
But this phone does not have an advertising ID. And whereas your phone actively collects and exports your data, this phone prevents the apps sitting on the phone from collecting where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse.
It prevents apps from turning on your microphone or your GPS or your camera.
I've had so many people I've talked to about the problems of big data collection say, yes, I was talking to my wife a few days ago about needing a new mattress in our bedroom.
While they were in the bedroom. And the next day they're getting advertising for mattresses, which means the phone was listening to their conversation.
Imagine the ramifications of that in your bedroom of your cell phone.
So this phone, this unplugged phone, does not do that, cannot do that.
It's the first phone actually with a privacy center with a firewall where you can hard off the various functions of the phone.
This phone even has a kill switch Which separates the battery from the electronics so that off is off.
You can't ever turn your actual phone off right now, but you can this.
Last fall, we did a beta run of 500 devices.
That went well. We have 10,000 we just received, so people order now and they can get them next week.
Again, this is not designed for governments.
This is designed for free people to be able to communicate freely We have our own secure messenger app on here, which generates a new encryption key every call.
This is designed as an answer to the pervasive surveillance state of Big Brother, really a combination of big tech, big leftist tech, and a vastly unrestricted federal government that is There's articles every day of the feds violating the Constitution, the First and Fourth Amendment ad nauseum.
I mean, we seem to be in a creepy world.
And like you say, we've given a generic consent.
I don't think that most people, when they signed up for these big tech platforms, recognized how much they were signing away, the kind of open access that they were giving up.
And I noticed that Debbie and I have been in our local mall.
And as we approach a store, we are getting all kinds of promotions from that store.
So, clearly, it's almost like the old days where you'd have somebody following you, except in this case, it's your own device that is kind of telling on you.
And even that is the private sector, right?
I mean, that is Target, or that's one of these stores that buys this data.
One can only imagine when the government, with the access to all the tools that the government has, what they can do with this kind of information.
It's downright terrifying.
Well, and what this new FISA law says is that any federal agency without a warrant can go to any private company that has that advertising data or any of the data, the exhaust that's come off of your phone, and they have to turn it over to the federal government with no probable cause and no warrant.
Just because some...
Some overzealous federal investigator wants to dig into everything that Dinesh has been doing for the last six months or six years.
He literally has an unrestricted digital look at your life.
A digital proctology exam for everything you're doing.
It's the ultimate phishing expedition for anyone that they choose to do.
This phone prevents that.
This literally gives you data sovereignty.
The sad thing is, there was a study done last fall that an average kid in America, by the time they reach the age of 13, that big tech has collected 72 million data points on them already.
All their preferences, from colors to schedules to food to friends that they're interacting with, everything, 72 million.
So in an era of AI, And an even greater pervasive Big Brother presence.
People are giving away that much data and I think they're going to regret it.
This is our answer to that, to let people restore data.
Control over the data that they're giving out to the world.
They can control what they want to do or not.
Instead of what you consent to when you buy an iPhone or an Android-running Google Mobile Services, when you read through that user agreement that no one reads, they're absolutely consenting to that.
Not the case with an unplugged phone.
You mentioned Big Brother in 1984.
Do you think that as citizens we are at the point where...
Not just with our phones, but broadly speaking.
And I'm thinking here of things like cryptocurrency.
In other words, ways of trying to protect ourselves against the unlimited surveillance state.
The phone would be probably the single most important peg of that or foundation of that.
But there are also so many other things.
There are ways that you can get debanked by people cutting you off from currency.
So perhaps the popularity of cryptocurrency is in large part due to the fact that this is a way to operate money without the same kind of full control that governments now have over the financial sector.
What the Chinese Communist Party has done in China is a social credit score where any unpopular anti-government posting that you make in social media, any anti-public behavior that you have, all of it accrues against you.
Facial recognition at every door, to get a ticket for a train or a bus, even for driving your car down the highway, there's camera stations every two kilometers.
Let me know who's in the car with you, etc.
And they'll be able to report to you if you're speeding digitally, automatically.
It is Orwellian hell.
What this FISA expansion does is it gives federal agencies that same level of authority to dig into your knickers digitally of everything you're doing online, communicating with friends, where you go, etc.
It's wrong, and so what the Feds just passed was basically the infrastructure underpinning of a digital social credit store in America, which is antithetical to the Constitution.
Yes, blockchain currencies are popular because it's not something controlled by central banks.
And cash. We need physical cash yet.
I encourage all your viewers, stay away from stores that don't take cash anymore.
Remind them on the front of a dollar bill that says, this note is legal tender for all debts public and private.
Businesses do not have the right to refuse cash as payment.
Wow. Very interesting stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to Eric Prince, the founder of the military company Blackwater.
He's been talking about the phone and give you the website, unplugged.com.
That's the website to check out the phone.
Eric, thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks for having me. Good luck to you.
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