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July 14, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:37
HANGING IN THERE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep872
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Coming up, Biden is hanging in there, and I'm going to reveal why he won't leave voluntarily.
I'll also make the case why we should encourage him to hang in there.
We like it.
I'll consider the virtues and vices of the leading vice presidential candidates that Trump may be considering, and I'll continue my discussion of Booker T. Washington's introduction to his great work, Up From Slavery.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
this is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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.
I just finished recording my podcast, this podcast.
I was about to close it out.
And then I see that there was an apparent assassination attempt on President Trump at his rally.
I mean, I'm still a little disoriented from what I saw.
Trump is at the rally, he's speaking, he's giving one of his normal Political speeches and then you hear pop pop pop bam bam bam and then apparently coming from the side and Trump drops down Now he normally would just speak be carted off, but he defiantly Raises his fist almost as if to say you didn't get me.
I'm okay, but you could see there's blood flecked on his cheek and apparently the bullet or or Projectile, whatever it is, grazed him on the ear.
He appears to be okay, but this is all we know so far.
Obviously, the Secret Service springs into action.
Trump is carted out of there.
Chaos at the rally.
So this is what we know.
But all I want to say at this point, I'll be discussing, by the way, I'll do a lot more on this tomorrow, special podcast episode on Sunday.
But this is the fruit of the kind of poisonous rhetoric that the left and the Democrats have been aiming at Trump now for really eight years straight, starting in 2016, going all the way to now.
He's Hitler circa 1933.
And this is the consequence of that.
I don't know who did this.
We don't have any information on who the shooter is.
But what we do have information on is the toxic environment that's created by the media and by the left and by the top echelons of the Democratic Party, including the President Joe Biden.
The idea is that they have to stop Trump at whatever, using all means necessary.
And so you can see that in a sense, you know, even assassination is on the table when everything else fails.
And it looks like the legal strategies are failing.
It looks like the lawfare is collapsing.
It looks like Trump is surging.
And then we have this.
So this is a dark day in American history.
I mean, my mind flashes back.
Abraham Lincoln.
JFK, and now the former president, Donald Trump, the leading candidate of the Republican Party.
So what does this tell you about the state of American politics?
It's not good.
It's very bad.
And in some ways I think Republican passivity, Republicans just kind of going along with this, in fact even pulling away from Trump, Allowing him to stand there isolated has contributed to this situation by giving the Democrats and the left just a sense of open season, a sense of impunity.
So, horrifying development in American politics and a lot more to come on this tomorrow.
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You're getting a Saturday podcast.
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I'm doing this podcast on the weekend.
You're getting a Saturday podcast and some of you might be wondering, well, why Saturday?
Doesn't Dinesh normally do Monday through Friday?
And the answer is yes.
But we had Hurricane Beryl go through blowing out our power.
And as you can probably tell from my location, our studio, which is about 15 minutes from my home, doesn't have power even now.
So power's coming back.
We got power back a couple of days later, but no power yet at the studio.
So what this shows is that even though this hurricane was just a Category 1, and of course, The larger areas around the coast in Texas have had much worse hurricanes.
I mean, Harvey was terrible a few years ago, and there have been a number of others, Cat 3, Cat 4, Cat 5, but somehow this one did a lot of damage.
A lot of trees landing on power lines, and so it's a lot of work to put everything back together.
Part of what impresses me about the mentality, the psychology of Texas, it's uncomplaining.
You've had people who have not had power for a week, And yet, you wouldn't know it.
They don't tell you if you don't ask.
And so they are getting by without electricity, without the chance to make a cup of coffee in the morning because you can't plug something in without, in some cases, internet or a fully working phone.
It's amazing.
All right.
I want to talk about Joe Biden hanging in there, because this guy is not going anywhere.
Now, think about this.
It's kind of ironic, because the Democrats love to say, oh, Trump was not willing to give up power.
He's a kind of a dictator.
By the way, if you elect him, he may never leave as if he didn't leave the last time.
Even though he thought the election was stolen, he did leave.
And who's not leaving?
Biden.
Biden will not exit the stage.
And, um...
And he is bitterly, pugnaciously, in a very determined way, trying to show, I am up to the job.
Now, every time he tries to do that, the result is at best mixed.
And I say at best mixed because he's now doing it under favorable conditions, softball questions from the media, or he's at a rally where he has a teleprompter and a script, and still he gets things flubbed up.
I mean, at one point, he referred to Trump as his vice president.
At another point, he's about to introduce Zelensky, and he calls him Putin.
So, I don't know if you saw the freeze frame of Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken.
The Defense Secretary was there as well.
And all these guys, you could just look at their face and see the... Jake Sullivan's the only one who makes a motion.
He kind of grabs his chin.
But the other people, you can see the dismay written all over their face.
I guess what Biden is trying to say is that I'm not all gone.
I'm half there.
I've got half a brain.
And interestingly, for some people, that seems to be sufficient.
In fact, not only does it seem to be sufficient, but they break into rhapsodies over Biden being able to do the most basic and pedestrian task.
It's sort of like, wow, he completed a sentence.
Wow, he knows that North Korea and South Korea are not the same.
Wow, he can name a couple of countries in Europe.
I mean, this is such a low bar.
That the idea that this is a sufficient criterion for someone to be the President of the United States is actually deeply shocking.
And what does it tell you?
Well, it tells you that the people who are sticking by Biden are complete, well, apparatchiks is a good way to put it.
And by that I mean, either they are being paid, they're leftists who are being paid to tout the Democratic Party line, Some of these influencers, by the way, are also paid.
Or it's Biden staff.
It's Biden officials.
And they are, of course, part of the government.
So they have self-interest in keeping Biden in there.
If somebody else came in there, they might be booted out and new people brought in.
So these are people with a vested stake.
in defending Biden, no matter what.
And so there's no integrity, there's no genuine rationality to what they're saying.
It's sort of like, it's good for us if Biden hangs in there.
But on the part of the media and some of the academic leftists, you have a very different line altogether.
And what is that line?
Well, That line is basically that Biden is not going to win.
They're not even so worried that he can't do the job.
They're not so worried that the United States is being run by this kind of unelected junta.
They're worried that people have now figured out What they had been trying, all of them, the Biden people, the media, these academic defenders, they all tried to keep this from you and from me.
But it's like the cat's out of the bag.
And so now they feel like, well, if Biden loses, when we could have swapped him out and had a better chance to win.
I mean, it's an open question whether it would be a better chance to win.
We can talk about that.
But the media and the academic leftists are more ideological.
They don't have a vested interest in the same way that, for example, Jake Sullivan does, or Anthony Blinken does, or the White House officials do.
Their paychecks are coming through Biden.
But the media wants... they're basically all in for the left.
They're in for the Democrats, and they want the Democrats to win.
Now, I think what's going on here is that there was an original bargain that was made with Biden.
And that bargain was this.
You, Joe Biden, are at the back of the pack.
We will pull you, we meaning the powers that be in the Democratic Party, we will pull you to the front.
We will essentially give you the nomination.
You will then agree to be a scripted president.
You will agree to do what we say.
Probably Biden wasn't quite as far gone in 2020 as he is now, but nevertheless he was pretty far gone even then.
But we will maintain a public facade.
We will maintain a public deception.
We will not let the American people in on the fact that you're not running the show.
You just need to appear to be running the show.
But of course this original bargain Which I think Biden agreed to.
And in fact, he has played his part.
Part of, I think, his indignation at all this is Biden is saying, well, I did my part.
You told me that this was the deal.
You didn't seem to have a problem with me not remembering things and not knowing where I am in 2020.
Maybe things are a little bit worse now, but the original bargain still holds, and I'm keeping up my end of the bargain.
I wasn't asked to be brilliant.
I wasn't asked to do, to engage in repartee and to remember all kinds of stuff.
You told me, just read the note cards.
Just go where we tell you to.
And you might remember Biden's note cards.
I mean, they were basically note cards written for like a five-year-old.
Take the first chair and sit in it.
This is the kind of thing the guy gets on the notepad.
And a lot of times when he's even reading from the teleprompter, it says, stop here.
And then Biden reads it.
He goes, stop here.
So this is an outright embarrassment on all.
But my point is that the whole thing is now kind of unraveling.
And it's unraveling because people have figured out that the emperor not just has no clothes, the emperor has no brain.
And think about it.
I mean, our whole system of government depends on the fact that we, the American people, elect leaders who are better than us.
If they weren't better than us, you wouldn't need representative democracy.
If the people themselves were fully capable of ruling, The people can rule directly.
And especially now in an age of technology, you don't need representative government.
Let's say you were debating whether you want to raise taxes.
Okay.
Let everybody get on their phone and vote.
Should we have higher taxes or not?
Should we help send money to Ukraine?
A quick yes or no vote on Thursday, let's say.
And you can vote between 7 and 9 p.m.
and that's it.
And then that becomes the law.
That becomes the policy.
But we don't do that because we still have this idea built into our system of government that we are picking leaders more enlightened than we are.
And of course, what a joke that has become.
And Biden is the ultimate expression of this joke.
Because there are quite literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans who could do a better job in part just by being of sound mind.
And so, It's not clear to me where this is going to go.
There's a kind of wrenching battle inside the left and inside the Democratic Party.
There are some people, I just saw Bill Maher, very confident, Biden's going to be out of here.
Don't worry about it.
It's going to be a big news day, and it'll be a big news day for three days, and then people will just get over it.
Well, I'm not sure Bill Maher has the most astute assessment of the situation at all.
It's not that easy to get Biden out of there, or certainly not easy to get him out of there without his consent.
And right now, it appears that Joe Biden is absolutely not giving his consent.
It's happening right before our eyes.
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See the trailer at SalemNow.com. Coming up next week, the Republican National Convention. And the I've seen the lineup of speakers.
It looks like a pretty impressive roster.
And as you know from these conventions, there is a sort of escalating tension and buildup in these conventions.
So it starts out with a bunch of policy discussions, a bunch of sort of academic and then media types who will speak, and activists.
And then there is a momentum building up to the adoption of the platform.
The kind of keynote speakers that speak in prime time.
And I was happy, by the way, to see that DeSantis is on that list because I think it's important for DeSantis to help to unify the party at this critical stage.
In fact, DeSantis, to me, is a far more important figure than, say, Nikki Haley.
Although Nikki Haley has her followers as well.
And by the way, she's of late been behaving just fine.
She's like, let's bring the party together.
We got to beat Joe Biden.
Some of her rhetoric against Trump was pretty, pretty baleful, pretty nasty.
And I think a little bit of a bad taste from that remains.
But nevertheless, there is an attempt, I think on the part of Nikki Hale, and it will be embraced by Trump and by the GOP generally, let's try to have every Republican vote locked in.
Now, of course, there are some never Trumpers and people who are like, we will never vote for Trump.
And that group itself seems to have fragmented into two.
One is, we will never vote for Trump, and we are voting for Biden.
So that would be people, I think, like Adam Kinzinger, Former Congressman Joe Walsh.
And there are some others who are in that camp.
Bill Kristol, for example, no surprise.
But then you have other guys like Bill Barr.
Who are, well, I didn't really want Trump, but I'm going to vote for Trump.
And then you have some of the never-Trumpers who basically are saying, we can't vote for Biden, but we can't vote for Trump either.
And so they're in the, I think, really fatuous or absurd position of they're going to write in Nikki Haley or they're going to write in somebody else.
Basically, they're throwing away their vote.
And, um, But they feel, on principle, that they have to do it.
Now the highlight of the convention, I think, is going to be Well, it's going to be Trump's speech, his acceptance of the nomination.
But obviously, the issue of suspense, who's going to be the vice presidential nominee?
Now, the first question is, how important is this choice going to be?
And I think the answer is reasonably important.
I mean, obviously, it's Trump who's on the ticket.
It's not that people are voting for the vice president.
That's very rarely the case.
In some cases, the choice of the vice president is there to shore up a serious weakness on the part of the nominee.
Think, for example, about John McCain picking Sarah Palin to kind of shore up the conservative flank, which it did.
But not enough to get McCain over the top.
In this case, I think the importance is twofold.
One is Trump picking somebody who is in the Trumpian mold, and yet at the same time is going to bring something to the ticket, bring an important state, Or help to bring in people who might otherwise be a little reluctant, independent voters, maybe who are a little allergic to the GOP, maybe allergic to Trump.
And the VP helps to pull them in and go, listen, it's going to be fine.
We are going to work as a team.
And of course, the second importance of the vice presidential choice is pretty obvious.
You need somebody who can do the job if something happens to Trump, but also after Trump.
So that guy, whoever it is, or that woman, although I think it's going to be a guy, all the main candidates that have been mentioned are men.
Kristi Noem I don't think is being seriously considered.
She is speaking at the convention, and I think at one point she was on pretty much everybody's short to medium list, but it looks like she's dropped off those lists, and so she is, I think at this point, no more likely to be chosen than, for example, Nikki Haley, who is definitely not going to be chosen.
But the point is, At some point, Trump will retreat.
This is Trump's last go-around.
Even if re-elected, he can only serve one more term.
And that means that whoever he picks is going to have, it won't be a shoo-in, but they will have the sort of inside track for the future of the GOP.
So let's look at some of the candidates.
I'd like to just comment briefly on, maybe not on all of them, One of the names that comes up again and again, Marco Rubio.
What are the odds it's going to be Rubio?
I think moderate.
Probably the main disadvantage of Rubio is going to be the fact that he is close to being a neocon in foreign policy.
He is very much out of the neocon mold in that area, but he's very good in a number of other things.
He's very good on domestic issues.
He's an excellent politician.
He's a terrific speaker.
He has wonderful people skills.
Of course, he's Hispanic background, Cuban I believe, and so there's that element which is very important in this election.
The Hispanic vote could be critical for Trump, and Trump is doing better.
Trump is doing better than he does normally with blacks, but he's doing amazingly with Hispanics, and there was a chance to make real inroads in that community.
I am not down on Rubio, but I do think I'm a little ambivalent about Rubio as a choice.
Doug Burgum.
Don't know a whole lot about him.
He seems to have come sort of out of nowhere.
He's been a fairly eloquent, sagacious defender of Trump on TV, but to me that's like his only qualification.
And Trump is his own best spokesman.
He doesn't really need Doug Burgum to explain what he's all about or what the policies are all about.
So I'm a little bit thumbs down on Burgum.
I think he's very obscure.
And I also think he brings pretty much nothing to the ticket.
Vivek Ramaswamy, number three.
I like Vivek.
I think Vivek has got a real strong future in American politics.
He is dynamic, really It's hard to think of another politician that's quite as dynamic as Vivek.
He is very smart and sharp and on it.
He has an encyclopedic grasp, sometimes, of issues that are fairly obscure.
He probably knows more, for example, about AI, artificial intelligence, than any of these other candidates, maybe all of them put together.
He's an excellent debater.
He's bold.
He has a fairly detailed understanding of the workings of the government.
He comes up with very ingenious schemes to To shave down or truncate or kick back the bureaucracy.
Stuff that I, even following politics for years, if not decades, stuff I haven't heard before.
And then when I look into it, it's like, you know, he might have stumbled onto something or he might have discovered a vulnerability, a way to do things that we couldn't even do in the Reagan years going back.
A whole generation.
So I'd be excited about Vivek.
The likelihood of it being Vivek, I'm not so sure.
Question is, what is the real level of compatibility between Trump and Vivek?
Is Trump looking for a younger guy in his, what, late 30s to take the mantle?
I'm not sure about that.
DeSantis.
I would say that DeSantis would be a fantastic choice as vice president.
And I say this because I know that there are a lot of MAGA people who are like, we don't like DeSantis.
We don't like the things he said about Trump.
We don't like the fact that he ran at all.
He should have just waited it out.
His turn would have come.
And I actually agree with all that.
If I was advising DeSantis, I would have told him, sit this one out.
The sentiment for Trump is really strong because people believe that Trump won the last time.
And so they believe that Trump, at the very least, deserves his shot.
So it's almost nothing you can say is going to make them think, all right, we're going to step over Trump and pick you.
That's just not going to happen.
Amazingly, DeSantis didn't see that.
That all being said, he would bring in a faction of the GOP that has been uncertain about Trump, that actually rushed to DeSantis.
And these are people who are conservative, but they have issues of Trump as a personality.
They don't like Trump's repartee.
They don't like some of the ways he pulverizes his critics, as well as sometimes fellow Republicans.
But all that being said, I think that there was enough skirmishing between Trump and DeSantis that I'm not sure that Trump will go for it.
Trump values loyalty very, very high.
I think in Trump's view, DeSantis was being disloyal because Trump is the one who sort of pushed DeSantis over the top in the Florida race.
The governor's race.
And Trump feels that DeSantis can turn around and kind of stabbed him in the back.
So for those reasons alone, I think it's unlikely, although not impossible, unlikely for it to be DeSantis.
Tim Scott, I think, Is somebody who's mentioned.
I think mainly he's sort of the, partly the diversity candidate.
He's a pretty good guy.
Nothing wrong with Tim Scott, but I just think he's lackluster, brings very little to the ticket.
I don't think Trump needs to have an African-American to make inroads among blacks.
So I'm not saying it's not going to be Tim Scott.
I'm hoping it's not Tim Scott.
Ben Carson, again, I like Ben Carson.
I don't know what Ben Carson adds to the ticket, even though he is a lovely guy.
He's a decent guy.
He's an eloquent guy.
He's brilliant.
I mean, this is a neurosurgeon.
So he's a very smart guy, and he's been very loyal to Trump.
And for this reason, I think he's in the mix.
Even though I'm not sure he's the strongest candidate of the ones that I've talked about.
And finally, JD Vance.
And there are some people who are a little ambivalent about Vance.
They're like, well, what has Vance really done?
I mean, basically he wrote a book, you know, the Hillbilly Elegy.
And he grew up in Appalachia, and he has made a success of himself by going to Yale and then starting a business.
He won in Ohio, but very narrowly, just barely got over the top.
But he's been a forceful and effective, I think, senator.
And he has also been a pretty eloquent defender of Maga, Make America Great Again principles.
He's very good on the kind of issues that distinguish Maga from the old kind of Republican or the traditional Republican coalition.
So if I was to make bets, and I am in no way the best sort of reader of tea leaves or the who's in and who's out and who's up and who's down, I don't pretend to be knowledgeable about those things.
But if I had to bet, I think that he has maybe the most inside track of the candidates I've mentioned.
And so if I were to be, you know, I wouldn't make a big bet.
I might probably bet $10.
But if I had to make a small bet, I would bet that JD Vance is perhaps likelier to get the nod than the other candidates that I have discussed.
But in any case, we will all find out next week.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
I'd like to talk about Project 2025 and also the draft Republican platform, which will be front and center in the proceedings of the RNC, which gets going in Milwaukee next week.
Now, Project 2025 is not the work of the GOP.
It is the work of a coalition of conservative groups that was apparently assembled by the Heritage Foundation.
So the Heritage Foundation convened Now, this is kind of what Heritage does.
of people to come together and lay out an agenda for Trump in a second term.
Now, this is kind of what Heritage does.
In fact, I remember going back to 1979, now at that time I was of course a freshman in college, but nevertheless the Heritage Foundation did this for Reagan.
They laid out a kind of, I think it was called Mandate for Leadership if I remember, a big fat 200 or maybe 300 page manual, and that was in no way binding or obligatory on the Reagan administration, but it was a kind of a useful handbook for the Reagan people to look at, to consult, to get ideas.
And I think this is the spirit in which Heritage has produced this Project 2025, but the left has jumped all over it, and Biden, too.
The White House and they're like, Project 2025 reveals the dark vision of the right.
Now, they're grossly misstating, exaggerating, twisting, manipulating what's in Project 2025.
But Trump, interestingly, made a sort of a clarification, and he basically goes, hey, listen, I didn't do Project 2025.
It's not my thing.
And he goes, some of the stuff in there may be fine, but some of it may be over the top.
He goes, that's not what I'm all about.
That's not what I'm campaigning on.
It's not my document.
What Trump is going to campaign on, and what the Republican Party in general is going to campaign on, is not Project 2025.
It is the Republican platform.
And what I have here in front of me, and I have the long version, it's 26 pages long with some elaboration, but it is the overview of what Republicans are promising and pledging to do.
And this is good to know, because this is an election that seems to be fundamentally about who you want in there, but it's also good to have a charter, a spelling out of these are the things that we are going to accomplish.
The first thing I think that's interesting is that it says right up front in the preamble, and by the way, I'm discussing now the Republican platform, not Project 2025, We are a nation in serious decline.
And that is something that I think is meant in a very different way than Reagan meant it when he said kind of the same thing in 1980.
What Reagan meant is that we are a nation that has had bad policies under Jimmy Carter, and that is what has caused what Carter himself called a national malaise.
Reagan's point is that you're the malaise.
If we get rid of you and adopt better policies, things will be okay.
I don't think that that is the underlying assumption here.
The assumption here is that the country is in a bad way, the Democrats are responsible for making it worse because of their policies, but there is a need to reverse an economic and cultural and moral if not also spiritual decline.
So right away the Republicans are saying this is a new environment.
This is not the same as a normal election circa 1980 or even circa 2000 with Bush versus Gore.
Now, when you read the 20 points of the Republican platform, and I don't intend to read all of them, but I want to read most of them and just comment briefly on them, you'll see how this is a vision that I think 80% of the country can easily get behind.
It's framed in a very broad and sensible way.
In fact, it uses in the preamble the word common sense again and again and again.
Basically, Republicans are saying that The Democrats have taken us into Crazyville.
Crazyville, USA.
Our border policy is nuts.
This defund the police, encouraging crime?
Nuts.
This idea of letting homeless people run amok in the streets and destroy the cities?
Nuts.
Or build encampments right there, right off of Rodeo Drive?
Nuts.
So, the idea of biological males using female restrooms?
Nuts.
So we've got to stop the craziness, and here's how the Republicans intend to do it.
Number one, seal the border.
I think this is something that commands very broad support, so much so that Biden pretends like he's for it too.
He just doesn't have legislative support to do it.
His hands are tied.
No, his hands are not tied.
He's misleading you.
He wants the border to be porous and open.
Number two, Now, I think it's very interesting that the Republicans put this in the platform.
You might think that they would not do that and just say, all right, we're going to seal the border and leave it kind of ambiguous as to what's going to happen to the illegals already here.
But I think it's a measure of Republican confidence that people are so sick of this.
They don't just want to seal the border and leave things as is.
They want to get a lot of the bad guys who have come across.
A lot of the smugglers and a lot of the criminals and the drug sales guys and the MS-13 guys.
But not even those guys.
Even some guys who maybe just came over because they want to Have a better life, but the point is, there's a line, buddy, and there's a system, and there's a way to come legally, and you don't get to jump the line.
Sorry.
And if you do, you're going to be sent back.
Number three, stop inflation.
We know we can do it.
We haven't had meaningful inflation in 25 years.
The inflation we have is self-inflicted.
So stop inflation.
We know how to do it.
We can do it.
Make America the dominant energy producer in the world.
We have the oil, we have the natural gas, massive reserves of natural gas.
We're just not tapping it.
And so who can really, I mean, apart from some fanatical environmentalist types, this is something that I think most Americans would be like, yeah, why would we want to be dependent on others for our oil?
A lot of our political problems on the international stage come out of that.
Turn the United States into a manufacturing superpower.
Now, this is a tough one.
This will not be that easy.
And it won't be that easy, partly for free market reasons.
You want to build steel?
Well, what if you can buy steel more cheaply from Indonesia?
You just decide, no, we're not going to do that.
Even though we could buy it more cheaply over there, we're going to make it over here.
And so this involves some tough choices.
Not just with regard to steel, but with regard to a whole bunch of things.
No tax on tips.
I need to talk more about that.
I actually haven't talked about it on the podcast, and that's a very ingenious and simple idea from Trump.
You've got waitresses, you've got waiters, people in the service industry, and not just waitresses and waiters.
All kinds of people get tips.
Doormen get tips.
People who park cars get tips.
And, you know, these guys often get paid so little.
I mean, there are nice restaurants where they pay a waiter $3 an hour.
Why?
Because they assume that guy is going to make $80 in tips.
And then the tips, though, get taxed.
So Trump's point is, hey, why don't we give these guys a break?
Don't tax your tips.
Consider the tip to be something like a bonus.
Think about it.
There are all kinds of perks that people get who work, and those are not taxed.
So, for example, if I work for a company and they give me a health care benefit, that's not taxed.
Why?
Because it's not paid in cash.
It's a tangible material benefit, but it's not paid in money, so it's not taxed.
Why can't tips be considered that way?
Smart idea.
Defenses of free speech, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, prevent World War III, and build a great Iron Dome missile defense shield.
I think this Iron Dome idea is coming from Israel, but I think it's a very interesting revival of the strategic defense idea from the Reagan years.
End the weaponization of government against the American people.
Critically important.
Stop the migrant crime epidemic.
Lock up violent offenders.
Rebuild our cities.
Strengthen and modernize our military.
So here we have a very interesting acknowledgement by Trump and by the GOP that we need a strong military.
This is not a case where we're withdrawing from the world, we don't need a military, let people pay for their own defense.
No, we want a strong military, but we also don't want to get into wars that are for the purpose of shoveling money.
To the military.
In other words, we don't want the military to be an economic racket against the American people.
Keep the U.S.
dollar as the world's reserve currency.
Another one that I see as being tough to do.
Why?
Because there are powerful movements underfoot to move away from the U.S.
dollar.
Those aren't going to stop just because Trump comes into office.
So just asserting that we want the dollar to stay as the world's reserve currency doesn't guarantee that it will.
Cut federal funding for schools pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology.
Thumbs up, thumbs up.
Good stuff.
Keep men out of women's sports.
Closely connected.
Excellent.
So you see here that GOP is not hesitating to emphasize cultural and moral issues, no less than economic and foreign policy issues.
And then finally, I want to mention very important, and an important theme in the movie that I'm working on now, To come out in September, by the way, keep an eye out for it.
Secure our elections, including same-day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, proof of citizenship.
So basically, I think what the GOP is saying here is, listen, we will play by the existing rules in the 2024 election, but we would like, if we have the power, if we have the House, we have the Senate, we have the presidency, to reform the rules so that we don't have all these opportunities for cheating.
Yeah, if ballot harvesting is allowed over here, we're going to do it, too.
Yeah, if early voting is permitted over there, we're going to do it, too, because we don't want to be disadvantaged under the rules that exist now.
It's kind of like saying, if you have a game of tennis and that is going to be over here, it's got to be the same for both sides.
That's true.
But we would like to have a set of rules that restores integrity to the process at a fundamental level.
And the GOP is saying, if you give us the power, we will, in fact, do that.
Big election year, guys, and big new movie coming out in September, so excellent time to check out my Locals channel and consider becoming an annual subscriber.
I post a lot of exclusive content on Locals, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You can also interact with me directly.
I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday, 8 p.m.
Eastern.
No topic is off-limits.
I've also uploaded some cool films to local documentaries, feature films.
2000 Meals is up there.
The latest film, Police State, and of course the new film will be up there as well.
By the way, if you are an annual subscriber, you can get all this content for free.
So, check out the channel.
It's Dinesh.Locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's Dinesh.Locals.com.
I'm in the opening section of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, his autobiographical classic.
And I'm sort of reading key passages from the book and then commenting on them.
Here, Booker T. is describing life under slavery, which is life he experienced as a child.
Because the Civil War, of course, ended slavery in 1865.
Booker T. Washington was then free and lived the rest of his life as is.
So this section is about the transition from slavery to freedom.
Here's Booker T. Washington.
I had no schooling, whatever, while I was a slave.
Although I remember on several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books, the picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression on me, and I had a feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.
So for Booker T. Washington, you can see here's a guy who doesn't have it, doesn't have anything, But he wants it.
And the it here isn't just stuff.
It isn't just objects.
He wants learning.
He wants to know.
He has that curiosity.
And to him, that's the meaning of freedom.
He's like, if I'm free, I'm not looking for like the hedonistic lifestyle.
I'm looking to get into a schoolhouse with some books and expand my mind.
So think about the psychology here and think about what a great recipe we have here for not just the advancement of blacks, but any group that is trying to come up from the bottom.
Booker T. Washington sadly was able to do this in his own life, but it's not a recipe that the civil rights movement, which came after him, encouraged.
The Civil Rights Movement emphasized, we want rights.
The moment we get rights, we want privileges.
We want special protections.
We want affirmative action.
We want everything except A program of self-improvement, which is what Booker T. Washington is focused on.
Notice that his is the road not taken.
He took it, but this was a road collectively sort of rejected by the leadership of the blacks that came after Booker T. Washington.
Now, he says that that the slaves followed very carefully what was happening in the war.
They didn't have any direct information.
In fact, no one gave them direct information, but somehow they got it.
He says one morning he was awakened by his mother kneeling over her children and praying that Lincoln and his armies might be successful.
He says that somehow the slaves, although ignorant, were, quote, He remembers kind of late night discussions among the slaves.
and completely informed about the great national questions that were agitating the country. He remembers kind of late-night discussions among the slaves.
And he says, even the most ignorant members of my race on the remote plantations felt in their hearts with a certainty that admitted of no doubt that the freedom of the slaves would be the one great result of the war if the northern armies conquered.
So to this day, there's a debate about slavery.
What was the motivating factor?
Was it about the Civil War?
Was it slavery?
Was it tariffs?
Was it some sort of economic divide between the North and the South?
And Booker T. Washington says, for the slaves, It was slavery.
Slavery was whatever the stated reason.
Lincoln would say at some point, I'm fighting for the Union.
I'm not fighting to end slavery per se.
But Booker T. Washington says, we all understood that Union victory means emancipation.
Often the slaves, he said, got knowledge of the results of great battles before the white people received it.
Now, how is this possible?
Well, here's how.
This news was usually gotten from the colored man who was sent to the post office for the mail.
In our case, the post office was about three miles from the plantation.
The mail came once or twice a week.
The man who was sent to the office would linger about the place long enough to get the drift of the conversation from a group of white people who naturally congregated there after receiving their mail to discuss the latest news.
So this guy hangs out, he listens, he picks up the stuff, and he sprints back to the plantation and lets everybody know what's going on.
The mail carrier on his way back to our master's house would as naturally retail the news.
And he says very often this was before the white people at the big house got it.
Now, You remember last time I talked about the fact that Booker T says that never as a slave Child, did he even know the meaning of play?
He never played a game.
He never, not just a board game, he never played any kind of games at all.
It was just work, eat, sleep.
That's it.
And here we have something else.
I cannot remember a single instance during my childhood or early boyhood when our entire family sat down to the table together and God's blessing was asked and the family ate a meal in a civilized manner.
So here's Booker T. Washington again.
To him, civilization means learning.
It means the family.
It means what a lot of people would call a middle-class way of life, where people can sit down after a day of work, a day of study, and have a meal together, and that's their time together.
And Booker T. Washington says, we never had that.
Leave aside that his dad is not even present, even his mom and the children can't do that.
He says, on the plantation in Virginia, and even later, meals were gotten by the children very much as dumb animals get theirs.
There was a piece of bread here, a scrap of meat there, a cup of milk at one time, some potatoes at another.
He says sometimes they ate out of skillets, sometimes out of a pot.
So this was a, this is slavery.
And at one point he says, he's, I saw two of my young mistresses and some lady visitors eating ginger cakes in the yard.
He goes, it was so, the aroma of it, the sight of it, so tempting.
He says that I, I resolved that if I ever got free, the height of my ambition would be reached.
If I could get to the point where I could secure and eat ginger cakes in just the way that I saw those ladies eating.
I find all of this very moving and very powerful because as it turns out Booker T. Washington will become a truly great man.
He will be the kind of man who can get the President of the United States to come and visit him and take him out to dinner.
He becomes the kind of man who is ultimately able to interact with powerful people in the North and in the South.
And so, isn't it poignant that when he's young, the height of his ambition is, if only I can reach a point where I can get some ginger cakes and eat those.
That, to me, is living in the Garden of Eden.
And then comes a section very striking from Booker T. about the fact that during the war, suddenly the things that the plantation was accustomed to, which is to say, having meat, having vegetables for the table, having pork, having coffee, tea, and sugar.
He goes, all of this stuff became scarce.
Food became scarce.
And yet, he says, I think the slaves felt the deprivation less than the whites, because the usual diet for the slaves was cornbread and pork, and these could be raised on the plantation.
But coffee, tea, sugar, and other articles could not be raised on the plantation.
They had to be brought in from the outside, and they became scarce.
Shoes.
Booker T. Washington never had shoes.
He says the first time he got shoes, they were these large wooden shoes that he could barely walk in.
He says, think about it, when someone is not accustomed to wearing shoes, he goes, these shoes made him not only feel awkward, but he barely knew how to get by in them.
And then he says, one may get the idea from what I have said that there was a bitter feeling toward the white people on the part of my race.
Very striking observation because there is a bitter feeling toward white people on the part of a lot of blacks today.
And yet this seems really interesting because now we are, what, 175 years away from slavery?
We have no one born today or alive today who's even parents or grandparents or even great-grandparents were slaves.
And so, weirdly, we have this kind of memory of slavery, the scar doing the work of the wound, you might say.
But Booker T. Washington, who lived under slavery, was himself a slave.
He says, well, you might think that there was this bitter feeling toward the whites.
He goes, he says, there might seem to be a basis for it.
In fact, there was a basis for it.
What's the basis?
Well, he says, most of the white population was away fighting in a war, which would result in keeping the Negro in slavery.
So, even though there is very good reason for the blacks to be bitterly resentful, we will find out tomorrow why they, in fact, were not.
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