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May 20, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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RAISI’S DOWNFALL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep836
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Coming up I'll explore the implications of the death of Iranian President Raisi in a helicopter crash.
You know about Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs.
So what did he say in a commencement speech to make the left so angry?
And author Naomi Wolf joins me.
We're going to talk about feminism and how it's evolved over the years and its impact today on young people.
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.
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In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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I want to talk in this opening segment about the...
The downfall, no pun intended, of the president of Iran.
This is Ibrahim Raisi who was killed in a helicopter accident, along with a bunch of other senior Iranian officials.
I'll come back to that.
I want to comment first about Trump, who has announced a rally in the South Bronx.
Wow. Now, I wish I could go to the rally because...
I'm going to be just fascinated to see the dynamics, the interaction of Trump with an overwhelmingly black audience.
Now, in the past, there are always a whole bunch of blacks in Trump's audiences.
But guess what? If you look at media coverage of his rallies, they always pan away from those people.
They try to show a sea of white people.
They don't want to Show black people in Trump's audience, as if to say, you know, we've been calling him a racist, and so it's going to be very embarrassing for us at CNN or MSNBC or even ABC if you see black people cheering for Trump.
There always have been. But the real question is, like, how many?
Because we know that Republicans, by and large, get about 10% of the black vote, and this has been true, really, since Reagan.
Now, Republicans, going back to Nixon's days, and I'm not talking about the Nixon even of 1968, but the Nixon of 1960, when Nixon ran against Kennedy, Nixon got about 22% of the black vote.
And... But, recent polls have shown that Trump is now polling at about 22%.
He's getting more black men than black women, but he's getting a surprising number of black women as well.
So something is stirring in the black community.
And this is actually a very good lesson to conservative intellectual types, because over the decades, I'll often be in conversations with fellow kind of conservative pundit types, and they'd be like, oh, Dinesh, well, we shouldn't be wasting our time on the blacks, because we can't get the black vote.
It's hopeless. It's lost.
Those people have been essentially bought off.
They've been corrupted by the welfare state.
Let's maybe focus on the Hispanics and the Asian Americans.
The blacks are, quote, a gone case.
Well, the blacks are not a gone case.
And this is the point about Trump, is that he's able to expand the space of what is considered possible.
Black vote, forget about it.
Black vote, we're starting to win it.
And then suddenly you realize there's opportunity there.
And the nice thing about Trump is he pushes it.
It's not just, okay, I'll see what I get in 2024, and maybe we'll do, you know, maybe Republicans can get more of these votes down in 28 and 32.
No, Trump's point is, here we go.
South Bronx, here we come.
Maybe Trump can push that number up to 25%.
I mean, this is called, this is part of why the left hates this guy, because this will break the back of the Democratic Party.
The black vote is the, it's almost like the foundation of the democratic base.
To sort of start pulling those people, this would be a little bit like Biden starting to make massive inroads among orthodox Catholics and evangelical Christians.
I mean, not happening. But with Trump, it is happening. So very significant and something to watch very closely.
Now, Iran.
The helicopter crashed on Sunday.
For a while there, they couldn't find the remains.
They couldn't find the helicopter.
And the passengers included the president of Iran, Ibrahim Raisi, the foreign minister, Hossein Abdullanian, the Ayatollah al-Hashami, who's the imam of the Tabriz Mosque, and the governor of a province, Malik Ramadi.
So, in other words, four down.
And I was talking to Debbie about this, and I was like, you know, the Iranians are saying, Israel better not have nothing to do with this because it's going to be hell to pay.
And Debbie's like, well, what if it wasn't Israel?
What if it was Israel?
Israel's God. What if it was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
What then? Or, actually, take it in a slightly different direction.
What if it was Allah?
Because the Iranians are like, whoever did this will have to pay.
I'm like, well, maybe if it was Allah.
Is Allah going to have to pay? Is there going to be jihad against Allah?
He did this to us?
Who knows? Now, Richard Grinnell...
Actually, kind of funny here because he makes the point that maybe this was an inside job.
That's a possibility.
A helicopter goes down.
Yeah, it could be a foreign enemy.
Well, what if there's a power struggle going on inside of Iran?
Now, I'm not smart enough to figure out the internal workings of the Iranian government.
But, you know, here is something that I see this from an Iranian expert, points out that if Raisi is dead, which he is, his first vice president was going to succeed him, but this guy is a little bit of a caretaker figure.
The real question is, who's going to be the next supreme leader of Iran?
And this is important because Iran is one of our formidable enemies.
Not the most formidable. The most formidable is China.
But Iran has been led by usually a single man for a long period of time.
For decades, it was Khomeini.
Since then, it's been a guy whose name sounds like Khomeini, but it's Khomeini.
That's the guy who's been running Iran.
He's the kind of head mullah.
And evidently, this guy is trying to pass the baton to his son, Mojtaba Khomeini.
And the thing about these Iranians too is that they live for so long that the guy goes, I'm passing it on to my son.
The son could be like 70.
And the older guy is like 95.
So this is important because it has to do with the future of the Iranian revolution.
And Iran's revolution, when it first came about in the 1970s, seemed very fragile.
It seemed like a bunch of clerics have taken over this country.
Like, how long can they even hold on to it?
Iran's a big country, by the way, 70 million people plus.
And so many people thought that this was going to be kind of short-lived and that ultimately the regime of the mullahs would collapse and something else would take its place.
Maybe not a return to the old days of the Shah, but maybe something in between.
But no, Iran has proven that they've had a genuine revolution.
A revolution is like an overturning of the waves of society.
In other words, Iran post Khomeini, completely different society than Iran before that.
That's the meaning of having a revolution.
That's kind of what Obama wants to do here in America.
Revolutions are not easy to accomplish because they involve an erasure of the old customs and then over time new generations come along and they completely forget the way it even In fact, they don't forget it.
They're never exposed to it in the first place.
The Iranians who were dissenters in the revolution have basically left Iran.
And they're now in places like Los Angeles and New York.
And so they are watching Iran now from the outside with really no prospect of ever going back.
So will there be a real change in Iran?
I don't think so. It looks that there's going to be maybe an internal leadership struggle.
But for the foreseeable future, the Iranian revolution goes on.
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Have you been following the controversy over Harrison Butker?
Harrison Butker is the world champion kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs and here's a guy who is Catholic, straight-laced, conservative, and was invited to give a commencement speech. Not the first time he's given one by the way and his commencement speeches are follow a theme. They're by and large a
exhortation to, I would say, civic virtue, to being a decent moral person with an emphasis on faith and family and country and in speaking to female graduates at a Catholic college.
Harrison Butker said this.
He said, look, many of you will go on to rewarding careers.
He goes, but I think you will...
When you look back on your life, your greatest achievement will be in creating...
In forming and sustaining families.
In other words, in being a wife, in being a mom, those things will be the most important to you.
So this was the, I'm going to call it the radioactive element of the speech.
There was other things in the speech, other good things in the speech, but this is the part that set off the left.
All kinds of shrieking and catawalling and the petition being circulated that this guy's a Neanderthal.
He needs to be fired.
Well, first of all, let's say he has Neanderthal views.
Why should he be fired? Here's a guy who's playing football.
Here's a guy who... Is it the case that if you're a football player, you can't have certain types of views?
Why? Because they're exhibited somehow in your play on the field?
What? What's the connection?
What's the point? But the point here is to enforce conformity among all kind of public figures in the culture.
And so the idea was, let's demand that the Kansas City Chiefs fire this guy.
Now, the Kansas City Chiefs, and all teams tend to be like this, they freak out at the beginning.
And so they issued a statement almost immediately.
Well, the views of Harrison Butler, he's speaking for himself.
He's not necessarily speaking for the Chiefs.
Well, of course he's speaking for himself.
He didn't go on behalf of the Kansas City Chiefs, because probably half of those guys in the Chiefs are a little depraved.
He's not going to speak on their behalf.
He's speaking on his own behalf.
He was invited to give the speech, not them.
But the...
And here's the Kansas City Star, and this shows how deranged these people are.
They're calling on the Kansas City Chiefs to fire Butler and hire a woman.
I think they're trying to, like, make a point.
Get a female kicker.
Now, there was apparently a woman named Sarah Fuller who became the first woman to play in a college football game as a kicker.
So there's, like, one out there.
But we're talking about at the college level.
We're not talking about at the world championship level in professional football.
So this is kind of a joke.
Except the Kansas City star says it's not a joke.
They say, quote, it is not unrealistic and it's not a joke.
And they want it to be done for, quote, poetic justice.
I'm happy to say that the Kansas City Chiefs, the guy who owns the Kansas City Chiefs, is paying no attention to this kind of nonsense.
And in fact, this guy, which is CEO Clark Hunt, dispatched his daughter and his wife to both make it really clear that not only is Harrison Butker not going to be fired, but they all agree with him.
Here is Tavia Hunt.
I've always encouraged my daughters to be highly educated and chase their dreams.
I wanted them to know they can do whatever they want that honors God.
Notice she throws that in.
And then she says, studies show that committed married couples with children are the happiest demographic, and this has been my experience as well.
Um... I'm kind of chuckling because I saw yesterday, I guess it was, or this morning, and you get a lot of this kind of stuff these days on TikTok.
This was a woman who works for the Kansas City Chiefs, and she obviously thinks that she's more allied with the Kansas City Chiefs' power structure than Harrison Butker.
She has this tremendous attitude, and I don't really want to do a full-scale imitation, but she's like, Harrison Butker.
She's like, you know... You probably didn't forgot what they taught us all in the HR lesson.
We don't just speak for ourselves.
We speak for the Kansas City Chiefs.
Basically, her thing is, you're out of here.
No, he's not out of there.
And so, I mean, the very idea that somebody who's like, you know, some low-level clerk...
Or just junior official with the chiefs is lecturing Butker in this way really shows how entitled and arrogant these people have become.
They've become the sort of police officers of our culture.
And if you listen to this woman talking, you can check out my Twitter feed if you want to see...
Really take stock of what I'm talking about.
I mean, the whole head-wagging movement, the kind of crazy eyes, the kind of attitudinal delivery, all of this is telling us that we've created this entitled class of people who are inflamed by their own moral superiority.
Now, you might expect that because there are a lot of left-wingers in the NFL, no question about it.
Think of all the people who took a knee I think?
This trend was exacerbated by the George Floyd business.
Think of Travis Kelsey, Taylor Swift's boyfriend.
Who does he play for?
You guessed it, the Kansas City Chiefs.
So there's not a shortage of Democrats or left-wingers in the NFL. And yet, this is worth noting, how many NFL players have criticized Butker?
To my count, none.
Zero. Not a single one.
Why? There's only one reason that occurs to me.
They agree with him.
They may be all over the place politically.
They may think this or that about Trump or Biden.
They may think this or that about Black Lives Matter or the National Anthem.
But when it comes to Butker's basic statement...
That for their moms and for their wives and for their daughters, that the most important thing in their lives, quite likely, is going to be being a wife or being a mother and their role in the family, making a home. That on that critical point, on that sort of core of what Butker had to say, there appears to be in the NFL virtual unanimity.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Naomi Wolf.
She is a best-selling author and journalist.
She's written a whole bunch of nonfiction bestsellers.
She went to Yale.
She's a Rhodes Scholar.
And she's also the CEO of Daily Clout, the website, by the way, dailyclout.io.
And Naomi, welcome back.
Great to have you.
I think you were on the podcast today.
Yeah.
maybe even more. And we talked about COVID and some other things, but I got a chuckle, but it seems to me that you're someone, you're a writer who is kind of always on a journey, and it seems to me that in the years I've followed your work you're examining, you're re-examining, you're reconsidering, and you don't hesitate to shift gears if you come to believe something passionately.
You're not really in a fixed mold.
Am I describing you accurately?
Well, I hope so, but I guess it makes me sad that those are the terms we use now because that used to be called an intellectual or a writer, right?
Someone who kept thinking and didn't just settle into a label or a position on a chessboard.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Now your first book was The Beauty Myth.
And it kind of took everyone by surprise, and it came kind of out of nowhere.
And you were making a feminist argument, and yet it was a feminist argument that was not the same as some of the other stock feminist arguments that defined, for example, the 1960s.
If I can take out a slogan from the 60s, kind of one of the famous memorable slogans, a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
That was never your attitude.
Is that right? That is correct.
That was actually Gloria Steinem who sent that and popularized it.
I thought so. And maybe I was a child, actually.
And I really thought, well, that's just weird and strange and doesn't make sense.
No, the second wave feminism, as it's called sort of historically of the 60s and 70s, and then the third wave, which I'm supposed to be part of and that I'm sort of credited with helping to co-found, which is nice.
They were different.
And the second wave, the 60s and 70s, there was this very disturbing kind of anti-family, anti-male, gender war language that never resonated with me.
My dad was a very big influence on me.
He was a professor and a writer, but he was also a feminist.
And, you know, when I was learning second wave feminism as a child and early teenager, I remember saying to him, Dad, you know, there's systematic discrimination against me as a woman.
And he said, you know, I don't want to hear you talk like that.
You can do anything you want.
So there was an evolution definitely in my thinking generationally from the hostile to men position of the generation a bit older.
Naomi, you and I, we're about the same generation, for sure.
And as I sort of look now, it seems that in the younger generation, there's a sort of a re-evaluation going on.
And it's a re-evaluation, not just of feminism, but of our generation and the sort of...
The ethic that defined our generation.
It seems that there's a, well, there seems to be part of it driven by a kind of reciprocal anger, because I now see that there's a kind of a male rage, if you can call it that, that basically says, who needs women?
It almost reminds me a little bit of the attitude of Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged.
These young men who basically say, you know, we've been sort of, we're just going to live without women.
We don't need them. And this obviously is a destructive kind of reaction, and yet I can kind of see where it's coming from.
Have you noticed something similar, and what's your take on it?
I'm fascinated that you say that.
I'd love to know where you're seeing this.
I'm not surprised, but I haven't seen it.
I haven't noticed it as a kind of cultural trend.
I mean, there's certainly so much hostility between the genders and I see it in both genders, right?
Young women are being propagandized.
And a lot of this is very artificial and AI has a role now too.
They're being bombarded with memes and Movies and TV shows and messages and ads that say, you don't need romance, you don't need men, you're better off without them, love is foolish.
You know, children are a drag.
It's selfish to have children.
This is constant. I haven't seen the same messaging to young men.
That could just be my algorithm because I'm a woman and I don't see it online.
But I'm not surprised if they're even having an organic reaction against women because the feminism that...
I mean, I'm shocked to hear what women in their 30s and 40s think feminism is.
And it would alienate any man.
You know, like... And sometimes my husband, who's much younger, will kind of open a door for me or, you know, do something and I'll say, thank you, that's so nice.
Or I'll sort of do something kind of nurturing or caring and he'll say, it's so nice to have this, you know, when I'm at my age, don't do this.
And again, And I've seen that.
Yeah, but you know, I'm actually talking about something that goes way beyond.
I mean, I'm not talking about like courtesy or even things like that or pronouns.
A woman posted, Jerry Perna, whom I know, posted something recently and she was talking about one of her nephews.
And she made the point, she said, this guy is a really nice guy.
He's a college graduate, he's got a decent job.
He's 5'9", he's kind of a normal guy.
And she goes, but when he goes online, and apparently the dating sites is the place, you look, she goes, by and large, what he sees is that young women today who would normally seem to be well matched to him, they will specify, I'm looking for someone who's six feet tall.
who is a Taylor Swift fan...
Who makes six figures and she goes, what the heck?
It's almost like the average woman now considers herself way above average and the average man feels like, I don't even have a chance.
This woman is looking for like Superman and I'm not Superman.
That's really interesting.
Dinesh, that's such a reversal of how things were in the 80s and into the 90s and early 2000s when, you know, women were told, I mean, Susan Faludi's famous book, She's My Generation.
And in the 90s, the whole discourse was, if you're a single woman, you have more of Then, you know, find and to marry.
I mean, it turns out that math was wrong, but that was the discourse.
That was the messaging that men are so valuable and, you know, women have to chase after them and settle and so on.
Well, that's sad.
And again, I wonder how much of this is being gamed because I do – I do feel and I've documented that our culture, you know, is being manipulated by entities hostile to our culture.
Notably, well, big tech aligned with the World Economic Forum aligned with China and so on.
Like this is an argument I meet often, but it definitely applies to what we see online and to work.
And to messaging. So, I would like to know sort of what the feeds of these young women are telling them.
Let me just give you an example of this corruption of our culture.
And I think by outsiders, because this is not organic to the United States.
It's not organic to our culture.
We've been – I mean, our greatness has depended on strong families, you know, since our founding.
And our founding is, you know, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which also – Celebrates and cherishes families.
And so I was at a nail salon recently, which I rarely am at, and there was a Cosmo magazine there, which I rarely read.
So there were two major features, Dinesh.
One of them was, I mean, I can't even say this on your podcast, it's so filthy, but one of them was basically how hot it is to do a specific sex act with your best friend's husband.
That was the feature. And the other was how great it is to separate, to cut off all relations with your parents especially.
And they said 26% of young people had done that and that it was awesome.
And that the examples they gave for why you might want to cut off all relationships with your family were parents who believe in Jesus and who believe in the commandment, honor your father and mother.
And that was it for the features.
Everything else was ads. So basically what I'm trying to say is that's I mean, there's a lot of money coming in to manipulate our culture from our enemies, right?
I mean, China owns a giant chunk of Disney.
China owns a giant chunk of many of the production companies making Hollywood films.
There's money flowing to the conglomerates that own magazines and so on.
Certainly, TikTok and Instagram and the social media sites are very much manipulated by algorithms that are not necessarily in our interest.
We've seen this in the lockdowns.
I trace the money flow to big tech.
The messaging from our feeds was aimed to break us and crush our economy and transfer wealth and keep us locked in and keep our children suffocated and masked and so on.
So it wouldn't be surprising if there's very systematic messaging, I see it everywhere, that tells young women not to settle and tells young men they don't need women.
We haven't even talked about pornography, right?
I remember the 80s when – and Edwin Meese, I believe, was the guy, but liberals made fun of this.
Republicans used to say this flood of pornography that can affect our children is not a good idea.
Let's have laws to restrict it.
And such laws are not even, in many cases, violations of the First Amendment, in my view.
I've really looked into this. I support them because children should not be exposed to this.
People shouldn't be exposed to it if they don't want to.
I don't need to go back into the history of obscenity law, which was actually a subject of my thesis, but if a community wants a reasonable standard of decency, they get to have it, you know, without violating First Amendment.
Well... That vanished in the 90s and into the 2000s, and there was no discussion about it practically as this flood of digital pornography online with no paywalls, right?
I have no problem with adults looking at whatever they want to look at as long as crimes are not committed in the production, but suddenly everywhere available to minors was this unbelievably elaborate pornography and I'm almost done with this part of my rant, but I wrote a book about female sexuality.
And what pornography does is that it activates the male dopamine circuit, female too, but that's a different subject, in such a way that men need more and more and more Extreme images to stay aroused.
And this dials down men's arousal response to flesh and blood women.
And so what you're also getting now, a generation in, is young men who've been socialized from their early...
There's nothing on their phones practically that keeps...
Boys who are curious from accessing the most grotesque extreme pornography all the time getting addicted, which is what pornography is because of dopamine circuitry.
And then by the time they're young men, they really don't need women, right?
Because women are less – they've been engineered biologically to not be as excited about women.
They've seen it all a million times.
There's nothing one live woman can offer that these young men who have been literally addicted Since puberty to, not earlier, to pornography, you know, they can't compete.
Live women can't compete.
So it's a disaffection on both sides.
But I would say that that massive appearance of digital pornography with no legislation saying very basic things like, let's have a paywall, you know, to keep out minors, right?
Or let's, you You have to proactively opt in.
I mean, there's so many things digitally you could do to manage this without making it sort of saturate the whole culture, people who want it and people who don't.
I really think that was engineered in such a way as to destroy relationships between young men and young women.
And I mean, this stuff is so perverse that it almost makes you think, you know, some external evil force must be doing this to us.
And I think what's interesting is you're saying, well, in part, that's right, that you've got the enemies of America who are putting a lot of thought and a lot of money through digital platforms, through entertainment companies, almost to weaken America by poisoning America, right?
Poisoning the cultural bloodstream, so to speak.
Very scary stuff.
Naomi, when I actually, I'm kind of laughing to myself because when I first invited you on, I had seen a meme that you posted about the Shroud of Turin.
And I was going to ask you about whether you were on a spiritual journey.
We're going to have to save that topic for another day.
This has been really fascinating, guys.
I've been talking to Naomi Wolf, author and journalist.
You can follow her on x at Naomi Wolf.
Her website, dailyclout.io.
Naomi, we'll have you back, but thanks very much for joining me.
I'd love that. Thanks for having me.
Take care. We're moving on to a new section of my examination of the four British folkways that shaped America.
We've talked about the Puritans and their influence in New England.
This is one wave of British migration, the earliest one.
Then there's the second wave.
That was the cavalier wave that came from the south of England.
These are the royalists, the people who supported Charles I. And they moved to Virginia.
And they, in a sense, inaugurated the culture of the American South.
But now we're going to move to group number three.
And these are the Quakers, the Anabaptists, the sort of...
Minority religious groups that, quite honestly in England, they were hated by the Puritans and by the Anglicans.
So this would be the small groups that huddled together and And ultimately also escaped to America.
And they came in a wave that first settled in parts of New Jersey.
They founded the colony of Pennsylvania, obviously later the state of Pennsylvania, and then they pushed west through Pennsylvania into the American Midwest.
So we're now going to talk about the culture of the Midwest.
But before we even talk about the history, let's think about the Midwest for a little bit.
My impression of the Midwest is that it's a very, it's kind of a unique part of America, and you notice a lot of things about it that are different, certainly from New England, certainly from the South, and certainly from the Far West, from say California.
First of all, if you look at, let's just look at Midwestern men and women and the way they look.
You notice that the men look very kind of clean cut.
Hairstyles? There are no hairstyles in the Midwest.
All men have the same hairstyle.
If you look at a Midwestern man's tie, it will usually have the following.
A dot, dots, stripes, or nothing.
Just a plain color tie.
The idea of having, you know, little horses or penguins or something more fanciful in a tie is a little anathema to the Midwestern male in general.
We're talking about averages. We're talking about generalities.
Midwestern women, notice.
First of all, they wear the least makeup of anyone in the country.
They are the least into things like plastic surgery, which is very common in California, common also in the South.
People in the South and in the West are always redoing themselves for the most part.
Midwestern women don't.
Food. Midwesterners like boring food.
They don't find it boring.
So, by and large, you have a Midwestern guy and you say, how about some escargot?
Escargot? No.
The Midwestern guy is very happy, by and large, with beef, steak, mashed potatoes, and beans on the side.
That is Midwestern cuisine.
So, Midwesterners have not only a look, but I would also say an attitude, a certain demeanor.
Let's name a bunch of Midwestern people that we all kind of recognize and know.
Mike Pence.
Paul Ryan is a Midwesterner.
Reagan was a Midwesterner, but Reagan is a complicated figure because he went out when he was young to California, and so Reagan's Midwestern kind of aweshock, straightforward demeanor did become, over the years, transformed. Midwesterners believe in plain speech.
You rarely hear a Midwesterner engaging in ornate, kind of elliptical type of prose.
By and large, a Midwesterner is, well, I speak in the Midwest.
Hey, Dinesh, I really liked your speech.
What do you think? Yeah, it was good.
By and large, that's the Midwestern approach.
Whereas if I give the same speech, let's just say at Brown University, they'll be giving me all kinds of analyses of what I said and where I got it wrong, and I should have really emphasized this, Dinesh.
I think there was an error of logic.
So, the...
The New England culture is very disputatious, whereas the Midwestern culture is extremely polite.
Even if someone thought those things, they would be reluctant to say it.
The politics of the Midwest are moderate.
They don't swing far to the right.
They don't swing actually far to the left either.
And the right and the left in the Midwest are much closer to each other than in any part of the country.
If you find the right and the left in Texas, they can barely talk to each other.
The right outnumbers the left in Texas, but the point is they're far apart.
The right and the left in New England are very far apart.
But the right and the left in, say, Michigan or Wisconsin or Ohio are not far apart.
You take an issue like abortion.
I spoke at Michigan Right to Life I guess it was last year or the year before.
And a woman was telling me that she was a right-to-life activist.
She said, well, she goes, it's really hard to convince Midwestern women that abortion should never be allowed.
She goes, therefore, all kinds of restrictions.
Parental notification? Yes.
Limitations on late-term abortion?
Yes. No partial birth abortion?
Yes. But no abortion?
No. No. So the point here being that in the Midwest, the attitude is abortion, yes, but.
And that is the Midwestern way.
It's very pragmatic.
It's almost as if it's not even...
Midwesterners are somewhat anti-philosophical.
Now again, I'm making wild generalizations, and someone's going to call me on them, hey Dinesh, you know, you can't make such kinds of rounded statements.
But the statements I'm making are true, again, in the main, on the average.
By and large, Midwestern philosophy is pragmatic.
And the attitude toward abortion, too, is pragmatic.
It's not even, well, isn't abortion a form of killing?
And if it is, how can it be allowed at all?
Shouldn't there be extreme justifications?
But the Midwestern view is, well, you know, well, what if my...
Nineteen-year-old daughter gets pregnant.
I mean, I'm trying to teach her not to, but what if she does?
Then what? So that kind of attitude that sets aside philosophical issues ultimately just tries to kind of get things done.
I mean, it's no surprise that the Midwest produces.
It was the industrial heartland of America, right?
Think of it. Pennsylvania Steel, Detroit Cars, Pennsylvania Midwesterners are people who like to build things.
A lot of what we call Yankee ingenuity, although it's attributed to the Yankees, which is the Northeasterners, that kind of attitude in the 19th century was very commonly found also in the Midwest.
Now, The Midwesterner is reliable, honest, straightforward, by and large decent, and yet there's some weaknesses that go with that.
Midwesterners, for example, you're not going to find the kind of...
You'll never get a Trump in the Midwest.
Very unlikely.
And you can see, Trump is really not a creature of the Midwest.
You'll rarely get the kind of scintillating brilliance that That you sometimes find in the Northeast and even in the West and in the South.
It's more rare in the Midwest.
Why? Because Midwesterners are plotters.
They prefer to take the safe path, the middle of the road.
And quite honestly, if you're in the middle of the road, far out ideas are not going to occur to you.
Your temperament resists them.
If the idea crosses your mind, you kind of quickly dismiss it.
You won't entertain things that seem kind of extreme or fanciful.
If you say to a Midwestern or something like, you know, here's a light beam traveling at a fantastic speed.
What if I can get on a spaceship and ride along the light beam at the same speed, ride alongside that light beam?
The Midwestern is like, what are you talking about?
What gave you such a crazy idea?
So we're now going to talk about these kinds of people.
These kinds of people that are, by and large, I would say, centrist politically.
Notice that Midwestern states are often swing states.
Ohio swinging slightly right, but it could swing for the Democrats.
Michigan swings slightly left, but Trump won Michigan in 2016.
These kinds of people trace their heritage to the Quakers.
Now, not only the Quakers.
We're not saying that the Midwest people say, well, Dinesh, wait a minute.
Aren't there large parts of the Midwest that are populated by Scandinavians and Germans?
Weren't there immigrants from those countries, those parts of the world that came and shaped the culture of the Midwest?
And the answer is yes, but here's what I'm saying.
The Quakers came first.
They shaped the culture of Pennsylvania and of...
The emerging Midwest, and then when the other immigrants came, the Germans, the Scandinavians, they assimilated to the Quaker way of life.
They adopted, if you will, the mores of the Quakers.
Now you may say, well, wait a minute, did they become Quakers?
No, they did not become Quakers.
But here's the point about the Quakers.
Unlike the Puritans and unlike the Anglicans, The Quakers weren't interested necessarily in making everyone into a Quaker.
Rather, the Quakers believed that they had an attitude, an orientation, a style, a way of thinking about society, a way of thinking that can be encapsulated in the word that is often used by the Quakers to describe themselves, friends. It's kind of like here in Ohio, here in the Midwest, we're all friends.
And so our politics can't be too combative because ultimately it's a disagreement among friends.
You might lean a little bit this way, I might lean a little bit that way, but both of us are kind of hugging the middle of the road.
And so there is the basis for creating a more, in a sense, agreeable, stable community than you might find in other parts of the country.
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