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Aug. 5, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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KAMALOONEY TUNES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep889
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Coming up, what's this business at the Olympics of biological males with XY chromosomes seemingly pummeling biological women?
I want to discuss this issue and point out some complications involving it.
And Roger Kimball, editor, writer, author, very smart guy, brainiac, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about Kamala Harris.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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I want to talk in my opening segment about this big controversy all over social media.
In the Olympics involving boxers who are biologically male, XY chromosome, fighting against biological women and clobbering them, just pummeling them, reducing them to tears, humiliating them.
And this would appear to be a certain form of, well, let's call it the, it's the Olympic equivalent of like domestic abuse.
I don't even know what else to call it.
And so you have two of the semi-finalists in the Olympic boxing women's section who are actually biologically male, or seem to be biologically male.
We're going to dive into this a little bit more.
Now, when you look at the videos, and there was a video, the first video that came out involved the Italian woman, Angela Carini, who just quits after about 40 seconds in her fight against this guy named Khalif.
And then she just starts basically not quite bawling, but almost.
And then she doesn't shake his hand.
And in the second episode, I didn't realize there was a second kind of male boxer in the ring, in the women's section.
And this appears to be a... Let's see, this guy, the second guy is...
He just had a fight, and he pummeled a woman so badly.
This is a female boxer, Svetlana Staneva.
The guy that beat her up is called Lin Yu-Ting.
And at the end of the fight, what she does is she defiantly makes the X sign.
She does this.
And guess what it means?
She means, I have XX chromosomes.
So she's making a point.
And it's a legitimate point.
Now, interestingly, the head of the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, who appears to be this French guy, he does a press conference and he goes, well, these people are trying to own what it means to be a woman.
He goes, we don't want to be part of some kind of a culture war.
These are not trans at all.
He goes, these boxers are women.
He says they were born as women, he goes their passports say they are women, they've lived as women, and so they are women.
Now, there's a lot to say about this.
First of all, with regard to the culture war, I want to make the point that it's kind of surprising to have someone from the Olympics say, we don't want to be part of any culture war.
Remember the opening ceremony?
Have we forgotten about the parody of The Last Supper?
Have we forgotten about all the bacchanalia, the kind of The perverse exhibition that was put on as a mockery of traditional values and of Christianity, if you don't want to be part of a culture war, why would you do that?
Why would you do that and shove it in the face of everybody who's there just to watch sports?
That's point number one.
Now, I think point number two is something that's very interesting, which is that the head of the IOC is trying to get out of the issue of whether or not trans women are really women.
Because, I mean, that's the slogan of the LGBTQ community.
That's the slogan of the left.
Trans women are women.
And so, this guy could have gone down that road.
He could have said, well, Uh, these two boxers, uh, the, uh, Khalif and, uh, Yuting are women.
They might look like men, they might walk like men, but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and looks like a duck and waddles like a duck, it's not a duck.
It's, in fact, something else.
It's a crow.
Why?
Because it identifies as a crow.
So, he could have gone that way, but it's interesting that he's not doing that.
What he's really doing, in a sense, is admitting That trans women are not women.
He's admitting that if these boxers were in fact biological males who were trans, they should not be fighting against women.
But what he's saying is that they are not that.
He's saying in effect, and he's in a sense speaking for the two boxers, he's saying I'm not trans.
I'm not trans.
That is their defense.
Now, how is it possible for these two characters in the ring to be male in every outward way, male in terms of their superior strength, male evidently in terms of their chromosomes, and still
Well, it turns out that it appears in at least one case, and maybe both, that we might be dealing with a very rare condition.
And this is explained in an interesting post by a medical doctor on Twitter.
And this is what he says.
He says that basically it's testosterone that determines whether or not you go in the XX direction or the XY direction.
He goes, when you have the first few weeks of life in the womb, the external genitalia are undifferentiated.
They're neither male nor female, but the presence of androgen or testosterone essentially develops those characteristics in the womb.
But, he says, and this is the part I found fascinating, he says, in some cases a condition called, a condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome occurs in which androgens, which is testosterone, is produced, but it cannot act effectively because of non-functional receptors.
So, Your body has the testosterone, but it doesn't manifest itself into male sex organs.
So here's the interesting thing.
He says, in these cases, although the embryo has XY chromosomes and is genetically male, the external genitalia developed is typically female.
That appears to be the case with this fellow Khalif.
And that, I think, is what the IOC chairman or president was alluding to when he says this guy was born a woman.
Now, the international Boxing Federation, interestingly, which has clashed with the IOC, has come out and made the statement, and I think this is very interesting.
They made the statement that the IOC is not, in fact, using proper medical criteria here.
They're using kind of observational criteria.
Here, have you lived as a woman?
And then they're also using the sort of passport criteria.
Let's look at your passport.
Let's see what it says.
Now, the truth of it is, when you file for a passport, they're basically going to put on your passport whatever you say.
They're not going to say, you can get a passport, particularly if you're allowed to migrate from country to country, hey listen, I want to have a passport, I want to change my name to this, I want to...
You know, list me as female and here's a picture of me with long hair.
Do I look female?
So what I'm getting at is, is the International Boxing Federation guys are saying that the IOC is using very sloppy, unscientific criteria to decide who gets to be a woman.
Now, the other thing I find interesting is that you've got these very conservative countries like Algeria.
This guy, Khalif, comes from Algeria.
And as I understand it, homosexuality is restricted in Nigeria, and being trans, I mean, forget it!
So why would the Algerians, you might ask, be kind of okay with this?
Aren't they saying this is a disgrace to the country?
I think the answer to that is that the Algerians are like... Well, I mean, this is only my speculation.
They're desperate to win an Olympic medal.
It's really hard for a country like Algeria to win a medal.
They can go the entire Olympics, no medals.
And so I think what's going on is that they're like, you know, this is crazy.
This guy is, you know, this guy is this, he's got this intermediate peculiar condition, but guess what?
If we can put Muhammad in the ring, although Muhammad now calls himself Iman or whatever, you know, a female name, and Muhammad can pulverize all the women in the ring, and we come out with a medal, that's a price that we're willing to pay.
So, Algeria gets a gold or a silver out of it, This is the only explanation I can think of for why a country like Algeria would be okay with this kind of nonsense.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast one of the real sort of conservative intellectuals of the past two or three decades or more.
It's Roger Kimball.
And I first came across Roger with his book, this goes back I think to the 1990s, Roger can correct me if I'm wrong, Tenured Radicals.
But since then he has published a great deal.
He's currently the editor and publisher of the New Criterion.
Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next?
Western Civilization at the Crossroads and also contributed to Against the Great Reset, 18 Theses Contra the New World Order.
You can follow him on X at Roger Kimball, 2Ls at Roger Kimball.
The website is newcriterion.com.
Roger, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
It's great to be with you, Dinesh.
I believe it's the first time I'm having you on the podcast, which kind of embarrasses me, because you should be a regular.
You write so much, you have so much to say.
I want to talk to you about your most recent article in American Greatness.
It's called Kamala Harris and the Mask of Magical Thinking.
But before we get there, Let me ask you a question that I think you would be... You, like me, have come out of the neoconservative and the conservative world of the Reagan years.
We were pretty close over these years to guys like Bill Kristol, guys like... Gosh, I'm just... I'm running out of names here, but you know all the names.
These are the guys who hung out at AEI and hung out as part of the Hoover Institution.
They published in commentary about John Podhoretz.
is another example.
And my question is this, there was a sharp pivot in which a number of these conservative intellectuals turned first against Trump and they began to call themselves Never Trumpers.
And many of us thought, okay, well, they're not for Trump, but they're still conservative.
They're still Republicans.
They're not gonna throw their lot in with the Democrats.
And some of them have stopped short of that.
And they'll say things now like, well, I'm not, I'm not gonna vote for Trump, but I can't bring myself to vote for Biden.
But there are others who have gone all the way and thrown their lot in with With Biden and the Democrats.
So I'd like you to just comment, just reflect a little bit on what do you think has happened with this group?
Well, you know, I wish I had the answer to that, Dinesh.
I can speculate.
I've given it a fair amount of thought, actually, because I find it a puzzling phenomenon.
I don't find it puzzling that People would have reacted negatively to Donald Trump when he first came on the scene.
I did.
I did too!
I probably wrote, you know, a score of articles making fun of him.
But to me...
Life never, or very rarely, presents you with a clear alternative between something that is an unalloyed good and something that is bad.
And so it was in this case.
I had been supporting Ted Cruz, a politician I continue to admire, but Ted Cruz's candidacy in 2016 ended.
It imploded.
And so the choice, the real choice, the only choice that faced anybody who was serious about these things, was Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
And so just right there, I would vote for the terrier who lives across the street from me before I would vote for Hillary Clinton.
At the time, she held the title for the most corrupt Serious politician running for president in the history of the Republic.
Probably.
Maybe you know somebody who is more corrupt.
I don't.
But I think that Joe Biden has given her a serious run for her money on that title.
But that was the choice.
Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
And then I began listening to Donald Trump and he said a lot of things that I liked.
I liked what he said about the border.
I think it's a good thing to have a border if you're a country.
I liked what he said about the inner city.
I mean, every inner city that is a disaster now, and it's many, many of them, have been run by Democrats for decades.
And it's a total disaster area.
I liked what he said about energy.
I think that what the world needs now to quote Robert Bryce, the energy specialist, is cheap, Abundant energy.
Period.
Full stop.
End of sentence and end of discussion, really.
And Donald Trump was advocating that.
What he said about our alliances.
I thought that was very important.
Why should the United States pay for NATO?
What he said about the Middle East.
I like that.
And what he said about regulation.
I like that.
And so more and more as the campaign went on, I found myself as being part of his cheerleading party, and then he became president, and lo and behold, he actually did what he said he was going to do.
In my view, he had one of the most successful terms as president of anybody in history.
He was the only major thing he was unable to accomplish.
was getting rid of Obamacare, and that was because of John McCain, in his last act of petulance before shuffling off his mortar coil, killed the vote.
So I thought he was incredibly successful, and he's also a tumultuous, there's no doubt about that.
I think he's learned a lot.
I think if he is re-elected president this year, which I am confident that he will be, his second administration will be even better.
But you began by asking about the never Trump phenomenon.
Roger, if I can jump in here, what you've said is, you know, to me, deepens the conundrum, right?
Because it raises the question, even if these guys had reasonable anxieties about Trump, They began to believe that he might be a bull in the china shop, you know, destroy our alliances, precipitate war, wreck the economy.
It would all be about himself.
He'd be preening and just taking photos of himself all day, kind of Louis XIV or Louis XVI style.
And Trump did none of that.
And if anything, he sort of made the art of governance look almost easy.
He showed that, you know, I'm an amateur.
I can come in and do a pretty good job.
So you would think that some of these guys would be like, uh-huh.
All right.
Well, we misjudged him a little.
Let's sort of swing back.
But no, they dug in even more.
Why is that?
Well, you know, I remember talking to a friend of mine.
I think you know him, too.
Jim Pearson.
We were talking about the phenomenon of Bill Kristol.
Jim knows him very well.
And, you know, earlier on, Jim said, I wonder what What would Bill say?
What does he dislike about Trump?
Is it his support for the military?
You know, he's spending a trillion dollars building up the military.
Or is it his support for Israel?
Does he dislike that?
No, of course he must like both those things, but he can't quite bring himself to say that.
Brett Stevens, a friend of mine sort of, and he wrote a piece in the New York Times after Trump had been in office, I think for a year or two, and he listed all of the things that conservatives should like about Trump.
And he said, I'd like these too, but I still don't like him because he's a man of bad character.
Well, Jonah Goldberg made the same argument.
In fact, I had a long exchange with Jonah about this.
My view is that when you're voting for president, you're not voting in the College of Cardinals for Pope or beatifying somebody.
It's not a matter of sainthood.
You want somebody who can do the job.
Even Cardinal Newman understood this.
He said some people might be great at running a government, but not so great in their personal life or whatever.
What I care about is Donald Trump's ability as a leader, and I think he's shown himself to be brilliant.
I used to think that the objection to Trump was primarily aesthetic, that Trump wasn't one of us, for somebody like Bill Kristol, but I think it goes much deeper than that.
In fact, in its less Uh, commendatory for the people who hate Trump.
I think it's that he's not one of them in a much deeper sense.
He's not part of the globalist elite.
He would be uncomfortable at Davos.
He is not interested in the Great Reset.
He wants to reset the Great Reset, which I do as well.
I think that the people who are most profoundly anti-Trump have, to some very large extent, signed on to the swamp.
to this cathedral, to use the term that I think was Curtis Yarvin coined, that contains the people who actually run the government, who have this consensus about what we should do, and the rest of us are just there sort of to be pawns in their game.
And the people who are profoundly anti-Trump are right about one thing, And that is that he represents an existential threat to their own thriving.
If Trump is re-elected, he is going to profoundly disrupt that globalist, elitist, deep state, woke consensus.
In my view, that's a good thing.
That makes me love him all the more.
But for them, they understand that the party will come to an abrupt stop if he's re-elected.
We'll be right back with Roger Kimball.
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Again, it's Dinesh.Locals.com.
I'm back with Roger Kimball, the website NewCriterion.com, follow him on X, at Roger Kimball, K-I-M-B-A-L-L.
He's editor and publisher of the New Criterion, a very urbane and erudite cultural and political magazine.
Roger, we were talking about the Never Trumpers and... Yes.
Let me offer this thought because I think you're on to something just really very powerful here and that is that, as you say, initially there was a certain sense in which these guys were on a different wavelength as Trump.
Understood the importance of the intellectuals.
Reagan sort of paid homage to Buckley and Hayek and Trump doesn't do that.
So in that sense, he's outside the world of the intellectual class.
That's true.
And you made that point yourself.
But I think the second thing is, and this is something I underestimated, the deep hubris of the intellectual class.
It's almost as if, having misjudged Trump, they couldn't bring themselves to say, you know what, we dug in, we were incredibly arrogant about it, and we were wrong.
And so, as a result, they had to kind of dig deeper and show why they were correct after all, and this has forced them to ultimately, in a sense, embrace the critique of the left.
But the third point you made, which I think is the strongest of them all, is the fact that there is in fact a rather comfortable and deep swamp and somehow the think tanks and the think tank class I mean I didn't see it when I was there myself but there was a little part of me that was aware that you know what Like where does AEI get its money?
It gets its money from a handful of corporations and some wealthy individuals and you know once a year we all go to Breckenridge or Beaver Creek and we hang out with these guys and Kissinger's there and, you know, we do a dog and pony show.
But I wasn't quite aware of the degree to which we are dependent on all that.
In fact, we are mendicants in that world.
So those guys do control you.
And that's kind of, I think, what you're saying, that they're worried that Trump will bring this gravy train somehow to an end.
An abrupt end.
And I hope he does.
You know, the people in what I call the lanyard class, they're poised to lose the most, I think.
I mean, it's a complicated phenomenon, the reaction about Trump.
I mean, he is a strange creature.
And he really is from outside the political dispensation that has been running the country.
But in my view, that political dispensation is a horrible drag.
on the future prosperity and security of the United States.
I think that they have become almost, it sounds melodramatic to say, but I think they've become, well certainly counterproductive, maybe even the enemy of prosperity and security.
And one way of judging that is to look at the way in which they deploy the word democracy, especially in the phrase which I find slightly nauseating, Our democracy.
Remember, January 6th was supposed to be an attack on our democracy.
Donald Trump's very existence is an attack on our democracy.
But what can that possibly mean?
The more we know about January 6th, just I don't want to get into that too much, but the more we understand, I believe, that it was at least in part fomented by the establishment.
Why were all those undercover agents dressed up as Trump supporters inside the Capitol before anything started?
Why did the Capitol Police welcome the protesters with open arms at first?
There's a very long list of things that one can say about that.
And remember, Donald Trump urged his followers to go to the Capitol, this is a quote, to show their displeasure peacefully and patriotically.
That is completely forgotten in the vendetta that Liz Cheney and others conducted, the witch trial, the Stalinist star chamber trial that they conducted against Trump.
But let's leave that to one side.
The truth of the matter is that if you ask yourself, what was Donald Trump's What was the thing that he did that really put him beyond the pale?
Why, he was elected in a free, open, and democratic election.
We were told that that was impossible, and rather than acknowledging it, you remember after he was elected, the left went nuts.
All of those females on the mall in their pink hats, the people screaming that this was illegitimate.
I think Bill Kristol actually had a hand And convincing these B-list celebrities to go on to make an ad and beg electors to not do their duty and not vote for Donald Trump when they had pledged to do so, and on and on.
So one realizes that by our democracy, what they mean is their oligarchy.
And it's their oligarchy that they are dead set on protecting.
So, at the end of the day, Democrats seem, at least this species of Democrats, seems to believe that democracy means rule by Democrats, which is not the definition of democracy, I think, that most of us would wish to subscribe to.
I mean, there are two things that jump to mind listening to you.
One is, you know, right after Trump was elected, and this has continued throughout his term, and to this day, the idea that you can't normalize Trump.
And I'm thinking to myself, what does this actually mean?
If someone has been democratically elected, You somehow still treat them as if they weren't.
You still treat them as if they have somehow forfeited the claim that the people themselves have entrusted to them.
And the second thing about it is this...
notion of, well, you know what, it's our democracy itself that's on the ballot in 2024.
And I'm thinking to myself, wait a minute, ballots are cast within a democracy.
Democracy itself is never on the ballot.
And in fact, when democracies are established in the beginning, they're always established by force.
I mean, when the American Revolution brought democracy, it didn't put democracy on the ballot and outvote the British.
The British were overthrown and then democracy is established.
So there's a certain sleight of hand.
But now you're introducing a little bit of historical reality, Dinesh.
That's not acceptable.
Right, so what you're saying, and this really brings me to your article here because I love the title, it's Kamala Harris and the mask, M-A-S-Q-U-E, the mask of magical thinking.
So let's begin by introducing what a mask is and then talk a little bit about what you mean by the mask of magical thinking.
Yeah, okay.
So a mask was an entertainment.
It was popular in the 16th, 17th, early 18th century.
It involved dancing and costumes and singing and elaborate stage sets.
And they were courtly entertainments, and they were meant to flatter the patron of this entertainment.
So I thought, what is magical thinking?
Magical thinking is basically the belief that your thoughts constitute reality.
Everybody who's been to graduate school has been battened on this idea that somehow empirical reality doesn't really exist, objective reality doesn't really exist.
We can create it with our own thoughts, especially if they're super virtuous thoughts, which of course, we as super virtuous people who are entitled to rule, we all of our thoughts are virtuous.
And it occurred to me that that's exactly what's going on here with Kamala Harris.
You have a situation in which perhaps the most unpopular politician on the American scene, until two weeks ago, is suddenly inexplicably dusted off and inflated, like with an air pump, to become the best thing since sliced bread.
So we have the cover of New York Magazine this week with a picture of Kamala cackling, sitting on top of the world with Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and even Joe Biden, God help us, dancing underneath.
Now the idea, and it's called Kamalot.
K-A-M-A-L-O-T, of course.
And who knew, they say, that the Democrats found out that their destiny was the White House after all, or words to that effect.
Now, this is very peculiar.
Two weeks ago, Kamalot was perhaps the most unpopular politician going.
Remember in the 2020 election, she won no delegates.
None.
Zero.
We had a primary.
14 point something million people voted for Joe Biden.
That, when the Democrats understood, was not going to fly.
They somehow, in a very undemocratic process, pushed him out.
Pushed him out.
And inserted Kamala.
If you're going to talk to me about the importance of democracy, I'd like to have you explain to me about what just happened.
Now, people are absolutely giddy, they're intoxicated, they're inebriated with the thought of Kamala taking over.
But this is, in my opinion, is not going to happen.
This little, I called it a kind of sugar high.
It's a very temporary feeling that the Exaltation that is already beginning to disintegrate.
And I predict that by Labor Day, we will see that bubble has been popped.
And within a few weeks after that, it will be definitively gone.
And of course, if the stock market continues its current stringent movement, Donald Trump will probably win all the states.
But it's a very peculiar phenomenon.
And it's also, I think I said this in the article, a very predictable thing.
You see this often with utopian thinking, and the Democrats are nothing if not utopian in their approach to reality.
They think that because they are virtuous people, what they believe trumps anything, no pun intended there, trumps anything that is merely a matter of process or democratic rules, and they're perfectly willing to subvert all of that in order to get their agenda through. So what has just been happening to Donald Trump over these last many months when he was essentially the victim of a bill of
attainder, something forbidden by the Constitution, but he was singled out for special treatment. What about the Eighth Amendment that forbids not only cruel with unusual punishment, but also excessive fines.
How is it possible that a judge in New York fined him $350 million for, it is alleged, overvaluing his real estate assets?
But that's what they did.
The bank that lent Trump the money was happy to do business with him.
He paid back the money on time and with interest.
They would be happy to do business with him again.
So there were no victims of this alleged fraud, and yet they imposed a historically unprecedented fine upon him.
The same thing with all these other cases.
Somebody made a bookkeeping error, or perhaps it was deliberate in the Trump organization for Trump to pay his then lawyer.
How can you take what is at most a misdemeanor, at most a misdemeanor, and elevate it into a 34 count felony that could put Trump away in jail for the rest of his life?
And yet they did this, you know?
And then we have Jack Smith and so on.
It's incredible what they have done to this guy.
And yet, like some science fiction character, The more they attack him, the stronger he seems to grow.
I mean, I don't watch, you know, all of any of these rallies, but I try to tune in on them sometimes.
And what strikes me is the incredible enthusiasm that Trump is able to generate, not in thousands of people, but tens of thousands of people.
Day in and day out across the country.
He just went to, you know, supposedly deep blue Georgia and Atlanta and had, you know, I don't know how many people he had there, but a lot.
And they were incredibly enthusiastic.
I mean, he, whatever else you can say about Trump, he is a natural politician.
He just oozes charisma.
And that's one of the reasons that they hate him.
And it's one of the reasons that he's going to win the next election, I think.
Let's take a pause.
We come back, a final segment with Roger Kimball.
I'm back with Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, newcriterion.com.
Follow him on X at Roger Kimball.
Roger, you're talking about magical thinking and you were talking about the Trump cases.
You know, I think, isn't it so true that before the Colorado case, which was an attempt to throw him off the ballot, I remember CNN had a panel of legal experts
They might have had Judge Michael Luttig, there were all these luminaries on there, and all of them were serenely confident that the plain language of the Constitution imposed upon the Supreme Court an absolute duty to give a 9-0 decision that would throw Trump off the ballot, giving other states like Maine and others the option of doing the same, and all of them saw... In the name of democracy, of course.
In the name of democracy, and they saw No, they didn't even worry about it.
Might this open a Pandora's box?
Might Republican states throw back?
None of this even came up.
It was just as if this is a done deal, and then the Supreme Court goes 9-0 the other way.
Well, now we've got to do something about the Supreme Court, right?
Right.
Now we've got to fix the court.
No, exactly, exactly.
Let's come back to Kamala Harris, because there's a very encouraging, you know, you actually quote our buddy Jim Pearson, longtime Director of the Olin Foundation.
And Jim says Trump will win the election by six points, 49 to 43, winning 339 electoral votes, including some of the swing states, but also Democratic-leaning states like Virginia, Minnesota, New Hampshire.
Now, obviously, this would be fantastic, because as Jim goes on to say, this will probably lead to majorities in the House and in the Senate.
I mean, this would be, if 2016 was delightful, this will be something for us to rejoice over because the left will be, I don't even know what to say, they will be beside themselves and more.
I remember my friend Taki Theodorakopoulos, when the Berlin Wall fell, he took over the Savoy Hotel and had a party for You know, 300 of his closest friends.
We should do something like that on January 6th.
That's absolutely a great idea.
No, wonderful.
So you think that Kamala... I mean, we all are, and I think rightly so, we recognize that the left does have a real stranglehold over so many institutions.
I mean, not just academia, not just the media, not just Hollywood, but now we realize the intelligence agencies of the government to a degree, the military, So even institutions that we thought of as being right-leaning or conservative are in their grasp or somewhat in their grasp.
So they're going to make an all-out effort to say that Kamala is not the silly, cackling idiot that you may have seen her to be.
I mean, think of it, they did the same with Biden, right?
They were claiming till the very end that Biden was in fact a hidden genius That in closed-door seminars, his sparkling intelligence shone through.
It's only when that became untenable that they were like, uh, oops, okay, we gotta move this guy out.
But you think the Kamala thing is likely to implode in somewhat the same way.
I do, I do.
But at the same time, I take your point.
It's not a done deal until it's done.
And you're quite right.
large swaths of the intelligence and surveillance agencies, parts of the military, certainly the media, almost 100% of academia, 110% all of these major, major institutions, the Google, the whole tech, the tech world, they are all in, not for communism,
but they're all in for the narrative.
The narrative that has been put forward by this woke ideology.
You know, Elon Musk, I think it was he who coined the phrase, mind virus, that the woke ideology is a mind virus.
I think that's quite right.
It's communicable and it's deadly.
It's a very toxic cognitive, you know, attack.
And I think that People who care about the future of the country, who care about our prosperity, our security, who care about reinvigorating essential institutions like the military, like our intelligence services, and so on, really have to
Push back as hard and as concertedly as possible against the real source of this problem, which is this woke ideology.
And it's like the Hydra, you know, it has to be, each head has to be cut off and cauterized.
It's going to be a very hard thing to do, because they have insinuated themselves right into the interstices of all of the basic institutions that run the country.
That's why I have often argued that, since the locus of this beast, the locus of this Leviathan, is Washington DC.
Washington is really the enemy.
I urge Donald Trump, when he's re-elected, to move as much of the government outside of Washington as possible, because it is, in my view, irrecoverable.
He made some gestures in that direction in his first term.
His Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt, moved much of the Interior Department to the interior.
That's a good idea.
Out of the swamp.
I think we should move the Department of Justice to Kansas, or Antarctica.
We should move, well, the IRS should be disbanded, of course, as should the Department of Education.
But the state, the government, is way too big, it's way too concentrated in this one place.
Remember, Thomas Jefferson wanted to move the capital from New York to its present location, partly to make it closer to Virginia, but partly to put it on neutral ground, a place that was neither Republican or Democrat nor Whig nor Federalist, but neutral ground. Well, it has long since ceased to be that.
It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and its business is to propagate an agenda of dependency.
And that is what they do, and in my view the only way to get rid of that is to sharply reduce their power and prestige.
And I hope that that is on the agenda for the next Trump administration.
I mean, it seems to me as we close out for today, Roger, that part of this requires showing Republicans that being junior members of the swamp is not the way to go.
In other words, they feel like if this is the only watering hole, we realize that the big dinosaurs, the Democrats, are there, but maybe we'll get a little spot to drink right over there, too.
That's exactly how they act.
Exactly how they are.
Right?
Yeah.
This is good stuff, Roger, and I'm going to have to have you back.
This was fascinating, and there's a lot more where this came from.
Guys, I've been talking to Roger Kimble, editor of the New Criterion.
Follow him on X at rogerkimble, newcriterion.com.
Roger, thank you very much for joining me.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Dinesh.
Talk soon.
Bye.
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