All Episodes
Previous Next
July 1, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:34
A TIE GOES TO THE GOVERNMENT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep865
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Folks, welcome to the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
I am Kyle Serafin, host of The Kyle Serafin Show, and a former FBI agent.
I love America.
That's why I enlisted.
It's why I got involved in government service, even though that went off the rails.
And speaking of off the rails, I kind of want to get into some topics that are close to my heart.
If you're familiar with my podcast, you may have seen some of these things.
There are some structural problems with the American Republic that go back a lot longer than Joe Biden or even Barack Obama.
They go back before my time, probably before all of our time.
I want to break them down so we have a real keen grasp of the problems.
But over the next week we're going to be talking about why we love America and what is wrong with her.
Because we have to be honest about it.
Mike Howell is going to be joining me tomorrow from the Heritage Foundation talking about the problem with the people.
And I think when we talk to Ron Coleman, who comes from the Dillon Law Firm, we're going to be talking about the problems of our values.
And lastly, we're going to be talking about what that all does with a friend of mine, Ryan Matta, who is an independent filmmaker and an investigative journalist coming out of Michigan.
We're going to start today going back to the 19-teens and see what were the underwriting issues that started shaking the foundations of our republic.
And then we're going to talk about how we can fix them.
I hope you guys stick with us.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show, and we are going to get right into it after this.
America needs this voice.
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.
Folks, before I joined the FBI, before I went out and tried to be a tough guy and joined the military, one of the things that my friends would have always known about me was my love of history and my interest in sort of obscure pieces of fact and how those thread together.
It turns out it's a pretty good skill for a podcast host to do that.
Today, we're going to get into the skeleton.
Of the American system, which is to say there is a constitution, and we've been slowly eroding the strength of said constitution for a long time.
There's this weird instinct right now, a sense of immediacy, a sense of emergency that is dwelling on the political right.
And it makes sense to me in some ways, because we're seeing prosecutions that are without precedent.
We're seeing fear from conservatives of their own government, which is not something that we've traditionally been worried about.
We've not wanted big government, but we haven't been scared that the government was coming to get us in the way that it is right now.
It's one of the reasons why I actually know Dinesh D'Souza.
Dinesh invited me to be part of his movie, The Police State.
And the message there, although very, very good, I think it's actually broader and scarier and it goes back even further than you have time to do in a documentary.
And that's no fault, that's just the media.
The nature of a documentary doesn't go that deep, because there's only so much you can cover, and this is a really big problem.
So I'm going to get into the sort of nerdy aspects of it.
If you're familiar with my podcast, you've heard some of these arguments before, but I'd like to put some dates in your head.
I'd like to hit you with a couple of touch points and how far back I think this root problem goes.
Now you probably could say it goes back to 1791 and you could probably say that from day one we have been slowly falling apart and that is the nature for many things.
Just like the day you were born is the first day that your cells start dying.
But 1913 is where I've pinpointed the closest to the modern era with the biggest problems that I think we can actually address.
It's going to take a significant amount of education And that's something that's really hard for our populace to grasp.
In fact, history is not sexy to most people, civics are not particularly interesting, and people don't really want to know.
They want quick fixes.
We want a single drug we can take that'll fix our weight problem, even though it took us many, many years to become overweight and more sedentary, and that problem builds upon itself.
So going back to 1913, we're going to talk about the 16th and the 17th amendment.
I want to move to the 1930s where the next problem was.
34 and 35 were significant years in this particular timeline that I'm interested in.
1946 is another one.
And then we're going to jump ahead to something that is relevant in the last week or so, and that's 1984.
The Chevron deference.
All these things are a movement away from the structure that our founding fathers designed.
The American system was actually set up to be somewhat elitist.
And if we're being really honest with ourselves, that's actually good.
When you look at the way the political left continues to talk about things, they always want to talk about my democracy, our democracy.
And if you are a conservative, if you're a Republican, you push back and you say, ah, we don't have a democracy.
We have a Republic.
But less and less, the original shape of the republic is remaining.
It's not the case that we have the constitutional republic that was decided in the 1790s.
What we have is this hodgepodge that also has given in more and more and more frequently to the tyranny of the majority, which is what I like to think of when I hear that term, democracy.
The reason why Democrats love democracy is a couple of reasons.
Number one, it's totally inefficient.
It doesn't work.
And the second thing is, it is tyrannical.
It's mob mentality and bullying.
If you can get 50% plus one, then you can make the rules.
And that means the 49% or the 49.9% can be irrelevant.
That's really dangerous.
That's actually what the American system was set up to hedge against.
You see, the founding fathers of this country actually knew human nature and they were well-versed in it.
They were highly educated, they had a lot at stake, and when they picked something out, some of their ideas were not even able to materialize at their time.
Let's go back to 1913 and see when things went off the rails.
In order to see when they went off the rails, we also want to quote the Constitution specifically.
So I am talking right now about Article 1, Section 3.
There's nothing more nerdy than citing Section and Article of the Constitution, but it is so important.
Most people who swear to defend the Constitution have not even read it, and it's not that long.
I used to carry it with me when I was in the FBI in my shooting bag when I went to the range.
It was in my work bag when I went on trips to go do work for surveillance on counterterrorism.
You always want to know what it is that you signed up to defend.
And it is my contention that the founding principles are actually not what most civilian employees of the federal government are trying to defend.
I actually think they're trying to defend the Bill of Rights.
That's what they should be actually swearing to.
In the same way that members of the military are trying to preserve our structure, and they're doing it from that sort of outside invasion.
Everybody says, you know, all enemies, foreign and domestic.
When you work domestically, you're mostly worried about the domestic threat, particularly your own government.
And when you work in a foreign space, like the military, you're mostly worried about the foreign threat.
But what about the threat of the American people to not see through this transparent and naked power grab?
In 1913, we had the passage of something very, very devastating.
The 17th Amendment.
The 17th Amendment allowed for the direct election of senators, which doesn't sound like a thing that would undermine everything.
And yet, it showed an instinct, and moreover, it gave a mechanism to do so.
So, the original lines from the Constitution, Section 3 of Article 1.
Article 1 describes the entirety of the legislature.
It lays out how Congress is created and how the Senate is created.
And what it says is that the Senate of the United States shall be composed of two senators from each state, and they are chosen by the legislature thereof for six years.
That's the upper house.
Each senator shall have one vote.
The only thing that the 17th Amendment does is it changes That little clause, it says that those two senators from each state elected by the people thereof.
And that is a really, really subtle change.
It takes the decision to send people to Washington DC for the upper house from the elected representatives of the people in the states, the state houses, and it puts it directly back on the people.
Now that is far more democratic.
And that is far more likely to end up in tyranny.
And if you look at the functionality of our federal government, you'll also notice that it is far less functional than it could have been.
Look at the majorities that we have right now that are built up.
It's actually getting more and more rare that there is even an overwhelming majority in the Senate at all.
Generally speaking, it's so tight that it's one to two votes, maybe no votes, and the vice president has to cast the deciding vote in order to move things along.
That's not how our founders intended it.
Because it was never supposed to be a second representative body.
The House of Representatives is supposed to be fickle.
It's supposed to change every two years.
And it is supposed to directly represent what your voice in Congress looks like.
That's why it is the House of Representatives.
Imagine kind of the British model that they were looking back on.
House of Commons and the House of Lords.
The House of Rabble and the House of People Who Know Better, maybe.
House of Representatives was supposed to be your direct voice in Congress for a specific size.
You were supposed to elect a representative who was accountable to you that was going to go to DC for a short period of time and represent your voices and then could easily be changed.
That was the idea.
They would go in.
They would make decisions, they would introduce the funding bills, they would pass it up, and then the people who were more sensible, that had more time, that had more education, that were chosen by politicians, who also understood the mechanics of what was going on, those people in the Senate would either approve or disapprove, and the final check would be the President.
But we don't have that anymore.
We've taken that intermediate step out, and we've also done the same thing for the election of the President.
Now, most people think in this country that they have a right to elect the President who represents them.
But they actually don't.
And that might be very surprising to you.
They have no right to do that.
You have no right to do that other than your state legislature has given you the opportunity to do so.
The general election that we are facing in November was not a requirement and is not even described under the constitution.
In fact, Supreme Court cases going back in the last couple of years, going back 2020, I think there was another one in 2021, have affirmed that the plenary power to decide the electors going in to select the president resides in the state houses, in the legislatures of the states, not something that the people possess.
So we're not really a democracy, not by any stretch of the imagination.
The president, so that's the head of the executive branch, is supposed to be chosen by the legislatures from each state, which makes a lot of sense.
And if we did this, by the way, conservatives should be 100% behind us, because there are far more red states than there are blue states.
We would have a much bigger push.
We would have more senators, somewhere between 60 and 70.
But we've kind of given into this idea that America is about giving more people more opportunity, but only within the scope.
When you start undermining that original piece of the puzzle, you see that that scaffolding is weakened.
The 17th Amendment did that.
It sounded really good on paper that people should have that vote.
The question is, are the results any good?
And the second thing that happened in 1913, which is equally disturbing, is the 16th Amendment, the one that predates the 17th.
And it says very, very simply, and this could be probably the end of the Republic because of it, the 16th Amendment says, the Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived without appointment among the several states and without regard to any census or enumeration.
This is the justification for the federal income tax.
It has not existed for all of time.
And yet, America still had things going on.
It was a power on the world stage in a way that maybe not the same thing you saw in World War II or World War I, but it was able to withstand invasions.
The Brits tried twice, first during the Revolution and the second during the War of 1812.
They were actually able to maintain a pretty functional system.
We did so without income taxes.
So why did they need to do that?
It centralized more power.
In the same way that they have now given more power to people below, they gave all those people that are represented more power with the purse.
Imagine a functional federalist system as we imagined it initially.
That means the states were the ones who were supposed to decide what monies went to the federal government.
You wouldn't have a Department of Education that was pushing kind of crazy ideas that didn't make sense in Alabama or Florida or Texas.
California would do California.
Idaho would do Idaho.
They would take the monies and they would do what they wanted with it.
But now we have a bigger tax burden that goes first to the federal government.
Think about your paycheck.
If you're a W-2 employee, your first cuts go to the federal government.
They get the first look at your money.
They have the authority to lay taxes on all incomes regardless of the source.
And then they sort of just gave that up.
Why is it that the executive is the one that always proposes taxes?
We're going to talk about that too.
This movement from giving the strongest powers to Congress amongst equals, if you will, get two branches in the legislature that are supposed to be the first among the equals.
They are the ones where all of the work is supposed to get done.
We now are more and more trying to elect a king.
And you wonder, how did that happen?
It happened because of what happened in the 1930s and then again in 1946.
I want to dig deeper into those because they're steps three and four in this sort of nasty chain of events that is actually starting to be undone in our time, in the last few weeks.
We're going to talk about that right after these messages.
You might have heard Mike Lindell and MyPillow no longer have the support of their box stores or shopping channels the way they used to.
They've been part of this cancel culture.
And so they want to pass the savings directly on to you by having a $25 extravaganza.
Now, when Mike started MyPillow, it was just a one product company, just the pillow.
But with the help of his dedicated employees, Mike now has hundreds of products, some of which you may not even know about.
So to get the word out, I want to invite my viewers and listeners to check out their $25 extravaganza.
Two-pack multi-use MyPillows, $25.
MyPillow sandals, $25.
Six-pack towel sets, $25.
Brand new four-pack dish towels, you guessed it, $25.
And for the first time ever, the premium MyPillows with the all-new Giza fabric, just $25.
By the way, orders over $75 get free shipping as well.
The amazing offer won't last long.
So act now, call 800-876-0227, the number again, 800-876-0227, or go to mypillow.com.
Make sure to use the promo code, it's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
All right, now's the part that I really enjoy, because we get to take some punches at my ex-girlfriend, the FBI.
The 1930s and 40s were transformative for many reasons.
A lot of people don't realize this, but FDR got elected four times.
He's the closest thing that America's ever had to an actual dictator.
We hear all the stuff about Orange Man bad, Donald Trump is like Hitler, that he's going to seize power and never leave.
The Democrats already have an idol that did that.
And the only reason why he didn't continue on is because he died in office.
He thought all of his ideas were the best.
And some of them were objectively terrible.
Under FDR, we had some really interesting moves, and even under Truman, afterwards, we got the second worst thing, which is called the Administrative Procedures Act.
That's 1946.
So let's go into the 1930s.
First of all, in 1934, 1935, you get these two sort of related actions.
I did an entire podcast called The Governments Are Gangsters, or Government Gangsters, which are kind of the same thing.
Governments and Gangsters actually crossed lines in 1934, when the federal government looked around, saw the ability of regular people to buy machine guns.
These were things like BARs and Thompsons and so on.
And they said, we can't have that.
Criminals are going to use them to shoot up the streets.
And so then they did the most governmental thing that you can do.
They realized they had no authorities to outlaw them under the Second Amendment, so they created a tax.
A direct tax that must be collected in order to own those types of equipment.
In 1934, A Thompson submachine gun, the so-called Tommy gun, was roughly $200.
And so to make it, and that was very expensive at the time, by the way, that was not a cheap firearm.
In order to make it completely outside the realm of regular people, they added a $200 tax to it, effectively doubling the price of the Thompson submachine gun.
Do you know who was able to afford a $400 Thompson submachine gun?
The very criminals that they were supposedly going after.
So, in a classic move, the government attempted to make something safer.
They attempted to do some sort of program, and it backfired terrifically.
It backfired in such a way that they were able to justify the FBI being armed and actually being formed.
Many people credit the FBI's birthday with 1908, when it was the Bureau of Investigation, but this very enterprising young guy, J. Edgar Hoover, He actually had the name changed in 1935.
Now, that should be the real birthday of the FBI.
For some reason, they lie to you about their birthday.
And as I always say, if a woman will lie to you about her birthday, what else will she lie to you about?
The same thing is true of the FBI.
They actually started lying from the beginning.
But in 1935, the FBI was officially created under that name, and they began carrying weapons, and they started going after interstate crime.
Interestingly enough, individual citizens had less and less of an ability to resist people who were carrying these types of weapons.
as they were now effectively outlawed by this horrifically high tax.
Now, the only upside to it is, is that because they wrote the law specifically in 1934, and they wrote it to the time of 1934, it holds on to this weird anachronistic amount of money, $200, which today, because of inflation and other failed policies, it's actually not that much money comparatively.
Nobody wants to give up $200 to own their own property, but it's not nearly as debilitating as it was at the time and the way it was intended.
Now, there were discussions at the time about why attacks and whether they could ban it outright.
And they knew they couldn't ban these weapons outright.
They knew they couldn't take this power from civilians.
They also felt like a tax was the end around that they could use.
And this sort of end around mentality was something that FDR was big on.
It was like push the limit as far as you can.
This is actually fairly, fairly standard to totalitarians all across the world.
You push up until you find resistance and then you either overcome the resistance or you back off there and you do it again later.
So you get this new agency that's set up to do what?
Law enforcement?
Go after interstate gangsters?
That's an important thing.
But, if you're a student of history, you know that some of the great interstate gangster cases were actually solved by state-level troops.
State-level law enforcement.
Texas Ranger types.
State police officers.
They got in the most aggressive interactions.
Bonnie and Clyde is a really good one.
If you watch The High Women with Kevin Costner, it's really enjoyable.
It's a good retelling of it.
Does a nice little job poking fun at the FBI, who had all the resources of the federal government, who was supposed to step in the gap and solve this problem that existed back in 1935, which is to say that radios didn't line up with other radios.
That each county was responsible for law enforcement in the county, but had to stop at the jurisdictional lines.
That these things called mutual aid and a federal warrant service that would actually share whether or not somebody had a valid warrant, NCIC is what we call it, that stuff didn't exist back then.
So the FBI was the solution to those problems.
It's not terrible.
But like all things in government, the self-licking ice cream cone sort of existed to make itself exist.
The tongue exists because there's an ice cream cone.
The ice cream cone exists because there's a tongue.
And so it just serves and builds up bigger and bigger.
The FBI, like all government agencies, measured success by growth.
So they started going after civil rights.
That happened really early on.
That happened under McCarthy.
That happened during the Red Scare.
This happened during the Civil Rights Movement.
It happened during the Patriot movements in the 90s.
Like, over and over.
Oh, Intel Pro.
That's the 60s and 70s version.
All of these things were step up trying to make the agency have a purpose instead of evaluating whether or not we should keep it and throwing it out.
That's what a system that made sense would do.
We don't do that.
So you've got this bizarre moment where the federal government is given a bunch more power, and it's given to the executive.
And I think that the cherry on the cake for this, or the cherry on the top of the sundae, is 1946 with the Administrative Procedures Act.
This is the most unsexy thing in the world, and it is one of the most dangerous things, especially after 1984, because of how weaponized it became.
The Administrative Procedures Act was essentially saying that the government would give itself, this is Congress would give to the executive, broad mandates.
Make sure that we have clean air and water.
You figure out how to do it.
And then they would create this comment period.
They would give them sort of a framework, a rubric with which to evaluate how they did their job.
But it gave Congress the ability to not do legislation the way that it was supposed to be done.
They didn't have to be specific.
They didn't have to go through and hammer out the details of what would be funded and how it would be funded and who would do it and what kind of headcount would be there.
They just said, here's a certain amount of money, here is a mission set, go solve it.
Now in corporate America, that's great because your money is accountable.
But you just saw, we just gave the federal government the ability to pull taxes from All people directly.
They could independently go and say, we want to take all this money and we're going to do all these things.
And by the way, in order to do the next thing, we're going to need more money.
This is a leftist absolute dream, by the way.
I call it the unfalsifiable premise.
It's what happens when you set up the following.
If you give me enough power, then I will solve all your problems.
And then you come back and you say, listen, um, you didn't solve all my problems.
Not even close.
I said, well, That's just because you didn't give me enough power and money.
I just need more money and power, and then I can solve those problems.
And this is a circle that can repeat forever.
This is a self-licking ice cream cone.
As long as there are problems, and there will always be problems, I can always argue you just didn't give me enough authority, you didn't give me enough finances, you didn't expand my agency big enough to actually quash the issue.
And the only thing that you're going to end up losing is all of your money and your civil liberties.
See the issue?
This has been going on for a very long time.
1946 is one of those wounds that we'll never be able to heal from until we actually figure out that Congress's job is supposed to be two things.
Two separate houses that are supposed to function in the way they were designed, and more importantly, they are supposed to legislate specifically.
They are supposed to put these long bills, you know, they don't need to be that complicated, but they tend to be hiding things instead of actually doing the detailed work of legislation.
How many people are supposed to be in here?
What's the head count?
How much money are we authorizing per head?
That's not what happens.
The APA says that the government itself, on the executive branch, will propose their ideas.
We'd like to ban bump stocks.
We're just going to say we can.
Why?
Because we have a broad mandate to handle alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, and we've decided, in our infinite wisdom, that these things actually are something else.
Even though they're a mechanical design that allows for an inertia function of a firearm, what we're going to do is we're going to actually hammer home and say that this has something to do with rate of fire, even though that's never mentioned in the law.
And because Congress is used to taking a back seat to the executive, it goes forward.
And then, thankfully, you have one last check against this sort of tyrannical mandate, and that's the people suing, petitioning for the redress of grievances.
They can do so in court, and you may win.
And you may actually do it, but you have an uphill battle that costs you a lot of money, just like Mike Cargill, a gun store owner in South Austin, Texas, He stepped up and he took a suit saying that you cannot interpret laws outside of their actual meaning.
And the court, amazingly enough, agreed.
But that rule was created under the APA in 1946.
The APA got a shot of steroids in 1984.
And that also just got overturned.
In the last three weeks, we have seen a bump stock ban come out of the Supreme Court.
Failed.
Didn't hold up the legal scrutiny.
We've seen the Chevron deference, which I'm going to talk about in just a second here, turned over.
And then even lastly, and related, is this defense, the case of Fisher for January Sixers.
Many of you may be familiar with this novel interpretation of essentially a paperwork law under the Enron failure.
They took it, and they broadly interpreted the vague words in the statute, and they said, well, we can use it for what we want, and they've been using it, the disruption of an official proceeding.
It's a felony that carries up to 20 years, and that's what has been used and weaponized against members of the public who attended a political rally that turned into a riot, and some people were involved in trespassing in American government buildings.
It's fairly wild, but all these things happen only when the government has the default position of being correct.
And that's what the Chevron deference did.
In 1984, we had a Supreme Court case that essentially ruled in favor of the government's ability to be the default correct answer.
It was Chevron USA Incorporated versus the National Resource Defense Council.
And thus, the Chevron deference.
The deference is that the government has the default position of being correct.
This is a wildly un-American concept.
The men who founded this country looked around and thought of a centralized government as a real problem.
In fact, the fundamental debate whether or not we would ratify this constitution was between two groups, right?
The Federalists, you've heard a lot about those papers, and the Anti-Federalists, who actually On second look are probably correct.
They probably always were correct.
The reason why you have a Bill of Rights with the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, which say some really important things that you can speak, that you can gather, that you can worship, that you can own firearms, that you can bear firearms.
That the government cannot just put things in your home?
Put people in your home?
That you can be secure in your persons and your papers and your effects?
That you are not compelled to give in to searches by government agents outside of probable cause that has to be evaluated by a third party?
A judge is supposed to evaluate whether or not that warrant is even reasonable?
All of these things exist because the Anti-Federalists looked around and said centralized government is a problem.
So, number one, don't give them unlimited money, don't let them take the money directly, and don't trust them as the default position.
The Chevron deference actually turned all that over in 1984.
And that's why we've seen this erosion of civil liberties that continue to happen.
First Amendment, Second Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, All of these movements are in favor of the government's position because the government operates from this unfalsifiable premise that if you just gave me more power, I could solve the problems.
You didn't give me enough power, I'm going to need more.
And people who are overwhelmingly comfortable and generally are less inclined to experience more discomfort, they just passively agree.
We saw this in 2020.
We saw it in a big way.
What we saw was people will actually be bought off by the smallest amounts of money and the most meager amounts of comfort.
Sit at home.
Don't go outside.
When you do, you must wear a mask.
We're going to pay you to stay there.
We're going to take your job.
We're going to shut down the company where you actually got money.
So now the means of income are going to be gone.
We're just going to write money up from our, you know, from our, from our printers.
We're going to send off these checks.
And your job is just watch Netflix and order some money from the critical industries that are still functioning.
Instacart.
DoorDash.
Uber Eats.
And just hang out.
We got you.
That was one of those attempts to push universal basic income.
But the weirdest thing is, is where does that money come from?
It comes from the people.
Why does the government have money?
Because they are able to directly tax you.
And there are no series of 50 states that are saying, hey, that's our money and that's our citizenship.
And by the way, they're from Tennessee or from Texas or from Wisconsin first, and they are American second.
There was this overwhelming push towards a national identity.
In some ways, that is good.
But people who founded this country thought of themselves as residents of their state first.
And we do that very differently now.
And a lot of that comes from the centralization that has happened in the last 115 years.
It's been a while to think about that because it predates all of our existence.
But most Americans didn't think of themselves as Americans first.
You would have no America first movement.
You're getting to the point where I'm in the America only camp.
But I would also be in the Montana first, the Texas first camps.
I would be just fine with naming your state and looking out for it because you're going to be the best determining factor on how your money is used.
Chevron deference in 1984 gave that default position to the government and it made every single lawsuit against the government, particularly the executive agencies we're talking about here.
This is going to be everything from the EPA to the ATF.
These organizations, whether they be talking about navigable waterways or be talking about whether or not this little device inside of your, your weapon system is a machine gun.
All of these little movements made you fight the uphill battle with the presumption that the default position was the government was correct.
In a baseball analogy, the tie goes to the runner.
The runner is the government.
This is the opposite of how this country was set up, and it left us in a dangerous spot for the last 40 years.
Interestingly, 40 years to this last week, we have now seen it overturned.
And I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right.
It's either Loper or Lopper.
But the Lopper decision allowed us to finally scale back these protections that were given to the government that have no right in the government's hands back to the 1946 Administrative Procedures Act.
Congress looked at it and said, there were some safeguards that were removed in 1984.
And for the last 40 years, we've been playing by a different set of rules.
These rules are inappropriate.
It didn't undo everything that Chevron did.
But it at least gave us a fair footing to go and challenge.
And you're seeing those challenges taken up by this court, whether it be about machine guns, whether it be about people having authorities to decide on their own and the government being not involved.
The most wild thing that many of us remember from earlier this year is that we heard about the EPA going after people's gas stoves.
The reason why they think they can do that is because they've been doing that for 40 years.
That is at least one, maybe two generations of government employees that believe that the default position, the tie goes to the government.
And so why wouldn't they try to push it?
And they have been.
It's my argument.
That although there are other issues, the structural instability of our constitutional republic has been undermined for well over this hundred years.
I'm going to show you kind of the last movements forward because we are in a time where people are realizing the state of emergency that we've created.
We're actually getting to the point where there's a swing back.
I'm incredibly hopeful this July 1st, as we go into July 4th, this week where we celebrate the birthday of this country.
There's no reason not to be actually very optimistic.
A lot of good things are happening in a lot of different spheres.
And like I said, we're going to be talking about them all week long, but today's is about the structure.
We're going to do a little bit more in just one second.
Listen to this message.
Sales of oil have historically been predominantly in U.S.
dollars.
Recently, oil producers such as Saudi Arabia have been exploring options for sales in other currencies.
Oil sales in other currencies would lessen the demand for the U.S.
dollar.
You tracking?
So we ask you this.
If there's less demand for the U.S.
dollar, what happens to that U.S.
dollar?
This is one of the reasons why you should consider Birch Gold and why they are a valuable resource if you want to protect your investments and your assets.
For over 20 years, Birch Gold Group has helped thousands, tens of thousands of Americans protecting their savings by converting an IRA or a 401k into an IRA in physical gold.
To learn more, you can text Dinesh to 989898.
and then claim your free, no-obligation info kit on gold.
Birch Gold has earned the trust of their customers with an education-first approach.
They have thousands of happy customers and countless five-star reviews.
You can protect your savings with gold before that dollar plunges any further.
Text Dinesh to 989898 today.
Big tech, big government, and the progressives have done everything they can to silence the truth and sanity, but there is a secret weapon they can't touch.
A year ago, a new streaming platform, The Real Life Network, was launched to provide a desperate world with much-needed programming, free from the overreach of government and media.
Go to reallifenetwork.com, subscribe for free, and when you do, you'll receive an e-book, Countdown, God's Ultimate Endgame, as their way of saying thank you.
When you sign up, you'll have access to 100 programmers who deliver outstanding, truth-filled, hopeful entertainment for the whole family.
The Dinesh D'Souza is proud to be one of them.
And you can find more interviews there on Real Life Network.
Yeah, subscribe now at reallifenetwork.com and get that free digital download of Countdown.
The ebook from Real Life Network founder, Pastor Jack Hibbs.
That's reallifenetwork.com for your free ebook and access to all of this amazing content today.
During the break, Producer Brian brought something up.
$200 was a lot of money.
How much money was it?
I had to look it up for you.
It was almost $4,700.
That was the tax stamp.
Imagine if you could buy something that would cost you $4,700 and then you had to pay twice.
That's what we're talking about here.
That's what the government did to you for machine guns.
And you're thinking, Kyle, I don't own any machine guns.
This is not really that important to me.
I don't even own that many guns.
Number one, I recommend you fix yourself because tough times means you should be able to protect yourself.
But there's a fundamental American right.
And it's not just about firearm ownership.
It's about self-reliance.
This right and this sort of responsibility that goes along with it that says you and only you where the buck stops.
The minute that you cede your personal safety, your personal sovereignty over to the government, this is all inevitable.
All of these things will march along.
It might take 115 years.
But the generations that came before us ceded that comfort, right?
They accepted comfort, and they ceded their sovereignty.
And 1934 is a good marker for it.
The FBI being instituted was another.
The state law enforcement agencies should have
Resisted that but they couldn't the money was getting taken out in advance and The government just digs deeper and deeper into your pockets because they have the authority to do so because of those amendments from 1913 now 1984 Chevron defense gets established 1986 the Hughes amendment was added to a package signed in by Ronald Reagan Everyone likes to think that Ronald Reagan was this this moment of perfection in American conservative politics And he did a lot of things right, but one of the worst things that was done
was that he stopped the production of machine guns.
I'm going to tell you why I think machine guns are such an interesting little thing.
One, very few people own them right now.
That would be very different if we didn't have the National Firearms Act of 1934.
But it also tells you a little bit about how much the government's default position is trust or distrust with the citizenry.
And that's not actually something that they're allowed to determine.
The government is supposed to work for us, the people.
And yet, the default position, and I can say this definitively from working inside the FBI, the default position is that people should not be trusted with their liberties, specifically their Second Amendment liberties.
Those are the most dangerous and kinetic liberties that the American government looks at.
But they also think that your decisions are poor, as a default position.
And they don't do it based on evidence, by the way.
The evidence is that very few people use machine guns in crimes.
Think about it.
They're almost never used.
Legal machine guns cost a ton of money.
In the 1930s, it would have been over $9,000 in today's money.
But even today...
Because of the Hughes Amendment, machine guns are an outstanding investment.
They appreciate every single year because there's less and less of them.
Auto-sears and so on, these cost tens of thousands of dollars sometimes.
I had a friend who had a three-stamp gun.
It's a short-barreled rifle that was fully automatic and was suppressed.
He sold it for upwards of $50,000.
A single weapon that does very little.
Wasn't even that impressive.
HK.
An MP5.
For those of you who are keeping track.
But this was about 6 or 8 years ago.
I'm sure it's worth more than that now.
Because it's a limited and finite quantity.
But that's artificially introduced by our government.
They don't trust you to have certain liberties.
Like I said, firearms is sort of the canary in the coal mine for many others.
And now, if you keep extrapolating that long enough, after 40 years, they don't think you should have a gas stove.
Because why should you have the right to cook food the way you want?
This is a really dangerous encroachment.
And some people are thinking, well, yeah, the government's position is correct.
It's never correct.
It's always the worst answer.
And it's almost always the worst way to spend our money.
Even when it's the only way to do certain solutions.
Like law enforcement.
Or the military.
We're getting broader here.
Because these are getting overturned.
When you have a default position that the government is correct, like we saw in 1984, thankfully overturned on Friday, you also end up with this bizarre idea that novel interpretations of law that have never been used before but are politically expedient are also appropriate and correct.
And that is what we have seen since January 6th of 2021 in this country.
I can tell you from working inside the FBI's Washington field office and seeing the way that the prosecution of January Sixers started that it was going to be a problem, a potentially genocidal problem.
And those of us who have been paying attention, the incredible pushback that continues to happen is because the government has taken it upon themselves to be the arbiter of what is good and bad.
They are making a moral judgment and they are doing something wild to the point where the Fisher decision, which came down on Friday, which overturned the use, vacated the decision of the lower court to use this obstruction of justice charge under 18 U.S.C.
1512.
There's a tiny little subsection you go through it.
1512 is broken into many, many paragraphs.
If you go and you find it online, if you go to any of the normal things like Wexlaw, you'll scroll down through and you'll see that it has a section A, a section B, a section C. Section C has two parts of it.
They were only interested in section C2.
And section C2 is very, very short.
It just says, whoever corruptly engages in obstruction, it doesn't really say much more than that.
It allows them to do it.
In fact, I probably should have the actual verbiage of it, but C2 is like one sentence long and they use it.
It tells you that they're punishable by a felony of up to 20 years and a fine or both.
It's a felony that the government has been holding over people and making them plea to things that they otherwise would not have.
Right up until the Fisher decision, which happened this Friday.
The government took a law that was written during the Enron debacle while people at Arthur Anderson were apparently shredding records and the allegations were flying.
By the way, most of those convictions have been vacated and overturned in appeal.
So for all of our memory, we kind of move on from it, but those people's lives were ruined right up until the point when the government, they were vindicated and nobody cares.
Everyone looks at Enron and they think scandal.
Even though the convictions didn't hold water as they went through the legal process.
But they took this law that was actually written in that stopped the obstruction of an official proceeding.
And they said that was written about documents, that was written about people who are shredding financial records and trying to stop this sort of investigative process.
We're going to apply it to people who marched around in a building and they disrupted a meeting of people when that meeting was held later.
And that's a felony.
It's never been done before.
Fisher rightly vacated that.
And unfortunately, because the government's default position is always that it's right, and it is not comfortable with the idea that it's not.
115 years, 110 years, have marched it along to be the default position as tie goes to the government.
You have Merrick Garland issuing the following statement in regards to Fisher v. U.S.
He says, quote, January 6 was an unprecedented attack on the cornerstone of our system of government, the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another.
I am deeply disappointed by today's decision, which limits an important federal statute that the department has sought to use to ensure that those most responsible for the attack face appropriate consequences.
He goes on, he talks about how well they've been doing going after 1400 plus defendants He said that it's not going to stop them from going after people, but he's wrong.
It actually is going to stop them from doing some things.
And how does he conclude that statement?
How do you think he has to use that word democracy, the tyranny of the majority?
He says, we will continue to use all available tools to hold accountable those criminally responsible for the January six attack on our democracy.
The problem with the word democracy is that it has a creeping definition because the mob continues to have a bigger and bigger understanding of what it is.
So when they talk about January 6, they talk about a tax on my democracy.
And I'm using that in kind of that memer term, M-U-H, it's the muh democracy, isn't it?
They're breathless about this thing.
This thing that we're not even supposed to have.
We're supposed to be a constitutional republic that is delineated out where the powers are separated dramatically.
We're supposed to have courts that fairly look at whether or not it falls into the statute.
We're supposed to look at government that is not supposed to be able to self-fund and print its own money.
It's supposed to have to appeal to get it.
And we're supposed to have presidents and we're supposed to have senators that have a buffer zone between the mood of the mob, that tyranny of the majority, the democracy.
The only part of our system that is supposed to be truly democratic is the House of Representatives.
And that's why there's so many of them.
And that's why it's not supposed to be very functional, 435 people.
Once you get to the upper house, it's supposed to be, what does the consensus of states do?
You'll notice the representative house, 435 people, it's based on population, is it not?
It broadly represents the population of the United States.
But the Senate was always designed to represent the states.
There are 50 states, there are 100 senators, This is it.
There are two from each.
It's right down the middle.
And the state house is supposed to send their representatives.
It's not how it works.
And once you start undermining the way, the mechanics of the game, it's the equivalent of why people think things are unfair.
If they haven't read the rules and somebody breaks out a new rule for monopoly, there's things that are called house rules.
And then there's things that are actually written down on the box.
You can show them and say, look, no, this is the rule.
You just didn't know it.
So you've been playing on this assumption that doesn't exist.
Americans right now are playing under this assumption.
This is always the way it's been, but it's not.
It's not new, but it's not since the beginning.
They changed the rules.
And as they changed the rules, the consequences are inevitably slipping more and more.
The question is always like, why does the Overton window shift towards the left?
Why do we always move towards the politically left, the politically left side of the spectrum?
And it's fairly obvious because they shifted the rules in their favor.
And they did so during times when people were most likely to not pay attention.
The difference is, and I think this is the advent of this new era, this is why I have a lot of hope, not only are the justices on the Supreme Court and those in the federal courtship, which Trump got a really good foothold in, but just the average person has more ability and now more willingness as they see it coming at them.
They are more interested in what is the nature of this problem?
What is the root of it?
Where did it come from?
And can it be solved?
And the answer to a lot of these is actually yes.
They could choose, they being the legislature, they could choose to outlaw machine guns at this point.
But it's so dysfunctional, they probably can't.
In fact, there was actually some movement to ban bump stocks, and you even got guys like Lindsey Graham coming out against it, saying, no, we're not going to put that legislation forward.
They know that the jig is up.
Americans have seen behind the veil.
Between the internet, between what happened during COVID, between these decisions, where a couple of brave people stand on principle and fight for it, at great personal cost.
If you're a conservative and you're wondering, where does the money need to go?
Political campaigns are good, but these lawfare campaigns, whether they be for gun rights, whether they be for free speech, whether they be for religious liberties, this is where the modern fight is happening.
We're setting legal precedent.
So find whatever cause it is.
If you divide yourself, you'll be scattered.
That's the other thing, too.
People have found all the fights.
They say, well, how come you can't get involved in all of them?
Well, you can't because you can't be good at everything.
If you notice, the most incredible athletes don't play multiple sports.
Outside of Bo Jackson, who played everything well, including archery, apparently.
Most of us are lucky if we get good at one thing in our lives.
So you gotta focus your attention on a single thing.
Pick that cause and ride it.
And know that others will have other causes and other interests and they will ride those causes.
There will be a Michael Cargill who goes and pushes against Merrick Garland.
who pushes against the ban of bump stocks.
Just like there'll be a defendant named Fisher who says, I will take on the burden.
For these five defendants, we will push forward against the United States Justice Department.
It's a big animal.
It's a scary thing to fight.
I've likened being an FBI whistleblower with my friends as being a guy with a pocket knife trying to fight Godzilla.
And we're doing two things at once.
One, we're trying not to get smashed and stomped under a big foot.
And the other thing is we're trying to cut little places on a foot that bleed enough for it to matter.
to distract or to slow or to shut down.
And my hope is, and this is what continues to bear out, more people are taking their pocket knives to this ugly beast that's been kind of squashing us.
But that beast didn't grow up overnight.
It didn't just rise out of the ocean.
It's been slowly cultivated and it's been fed and it's been unleashed on us by our own doing, by generations past, not paying attention.
But this is a message of hope.
We've seen almost all of the decisions go in our way.
As this podcast was being taped right now, the wildest thing is, is that we're also seeing presidential immunity, which we'll probably talk about a little bit tomorrow.
I hope you guys stick around with us on that because we're going to talk to Mike Howell from Heritage Foundation.
Three things that are going on with Joe Biden.
One is a messaging campaign.
Two is like the mechanics and the logistics of trying to replace him.
And third is sort of like what everybody thinks is going on and the outrage and hysteria.
I want you to kind of hold your thoughts on this and think about what the best arguments are.
Because after that disastrous debate, which happened last week, A lot of people are thinking things that don't make sense when you understand the mechanisms.
You gotta understand those skeleton, the rules.
And there are 50 individual states that decide whether or not a person's gonna be on the ballot and how that election's gonna be done.
They all have different rules.
Just like America has rules, the states do too.
And the states still, at this point, have the plenary power when it comes to presidential elections.
So I hope you guys will Kind of keep whatever thoughts you have in abeyance, all your questions and all of your, uh, your concerns about whether or not Biden's going to run or he's going to get swapped out for someone.
And give me a chance to talk to Mike Howell tomorrow, who's doing two things.
Number one, he's probably going to debunk a lot of the thoughts that you've heard, but more importantly, he's, he and the folks that he works with have a plan to make sure that that horse of, uh, if it's going to be changed out at this point, if you want to swap horses in the middle of the race, we're going to make that transition really, really, really hard.
That's all coming up tomorrow.
I hope you guys stick around for that.
I hope you guys enjoyed our post today.
I hope you have a lot of hope.
I really do.
I hope for your hope.
Because America is still a great nation.
It's the same nation that I signed up to serve.
Would I serve in the same way?
No.
Many of you who are veterans are thinking that this 4th of July, we've got friends that died.
We've got friends that are destroyed because of it.
Friends that took their own lives.
This is the first Fourth of July in the last couple that feel like the swing is in favor of all people and all freedoms that actually sort of mirrors that sense of hope under the Declaration of Independence when five men got together and signed their own death warrant saying that they were going to go toe-to-toe with the King of England, an incredibly big force, a military, not like today, but the most powerful military at the time.
And they said, we're going to stand because we think that there are some bigger Bigger issues at play.
Americans right now are facing the same kinds of bigger issues, and they come from inside our own house, which means we're gonna be the experts on them if we wanna be.
Stick around for this week.
You guys are gonna get a lot more of this.
I'm Kyle Serafin.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
Thanks for joining us as a guest host here.
I really appreciate you guys lending me your ears, and we'll see you tomorrow.
▲
Export Selection