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Sept. 17, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:30
THE REAL CULPRITS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep919
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Coming up, I'll make the case that the media, no less than the Democrats, bears heavy responsibility for Trump having faced not one but two assassination attempts.
And Ryan Gurdusky, political strategist, he's founder of the 1776 Project, he joins me.
He's going to talk about the second assassination attempt, but also about campaign strategy, the Harris campaign, the Trump campaign.
What can Trump do to get himself to the finish line successfully?
If you're watching on Rumble or YouTube or 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.
So guys, today is going to be, I believe, the day that we put up on our movie site, VindicatingTrump.com, Tickets.
Ticket sales will be available for the first time, probably a little more toward the end of the day.
And the way this works is that we have a bunch of theaters lined up, but more are going to be added this week.
So what you will be able to do is go into the movie site, go to VindicatingTrump.com.
By the way, pre-order the book if you haven't done it.
There's a tab at the bottom.
You can order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
The book is a really nice kind of companion piece to the movie, but it's also different enough from the movie.
It's not like you go, oh, well, I watched the movie, I don't need the book, or vice versa.
There are two completely different experiences.
Reading a book is a way of digesting argument, information, with supporting documentation, a kind of originality of thought.
And, you know, for most of my career, I have been a writer, so I take great pride in And the way that a book is crafted, the way that it is put together, almost look at it as a kind of piece of verbal sculpture, if you will.
And I think this book is really strong and original.
That's the thing, because so much of the Trump rhetoric, and by the Trump rhetoric, I mean the rhetoric not by Trump, but around Trump.
The things that people say that is boilerplate.
It's something that you hear frequently, you become accustomed to.
You will not be getting that from me in the book.
In fact, I don't like to write books which are a kind of regurgitation or echo of the prevailing rhetoric.
I try to go out in front of what the debate is and break some new ground.
And in this case, you'll see There are historical linkages.
There are ways of looking at Trump that are quite unique and quite original.
And some of it, it comes from Trump's own mouth.
It's bringing out an aspect of Trump that, it's not that it isn't there.
We can even sort of intuit it by watching Trump.
But it is one that, oddly enough, Trump tries to subdue or suppress.
In other words, there's a certain amount of vulnerability that Trump does not like to exhibit.
He doesn't like to psychoanalyze himself.
He doesn't like it in a way when other people try to do it to him.
And yet there are certain aspects about Trump that it is very good.
It's very good for people to see because it will strengthen their attachment, their affection, their allegiance to him.
All this stuff is in the book.
But it's also in the movie really from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
In other words, it's in the movie from Trump.
It's in the movie coming directly and you can see Trump's mind operating in a way that I think is a little different from what you have already seen.
Now, with regard to the tickets, we'll have, I don't know, maybe four or five hundred theaters up already.
But that's not our full slate of theaters.
More are going to be added all this week.
Because remember, the movie opens the end of next week, September 27th.
And remember, I said that if you can possibly, go see it that opening weekend.
Round up the gang.
Round up the troops.
Round up the book club.
Send out a notice, if you will, to your Republican club or Republican women's club.
Go see it with a bunch of people because it's fun that way.
You can discuss it afterwards.
You'll find the movie very, well, not only very provocative, not only scary in parts, which has become something of my trademark, In other words, a horror movie type of technique, if you will.
But also, I think with this one, highly entertaining.
It's going to have you chuckling and laughing and maybe even guffawing at times.
And you'll enjoy this movie.
So it's a real, it's an entertainment as much as it is a movie with a powerful idea and a powerful message.
Now, I want to talk today about the culprits of this Trump, the second Trump assassination attempt, but really both assassination attempts.
And the Trump people put out a very powerful roster.
of statements by leading Democrats aimed at portraying Trump as some kind of a Hitler, some kind of a Caesar, some kind of a threat to the country and to democracy.
And imagine saying this kind of thing to people on the left who are mentally Unhinged, who are fanatics, who have one screw loose, who are looking to be, whose lives are worthless, but are looking to be somehow heroic on the historical, on the national stage.
This stuff has, this poison has an effect, and it's not, it has a certain type of effect on a certain type of person.
And the Trump campaign had a long list of leading Democrats Elected officials who have been putting this poison into the public arena, starting, by the way, with Biden, continuing with Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the list goes on and on.
But in emphasizing the Democrats and the elected officials, The group that was left out is the pundits, the media, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and figures like Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, so many others.
So I want to highlight the The role of the media, because these are the people who get out to the American people.
Even when Democrats say things, how do people find out what the Democrats said?
They're quoted in the Dallas Morning News.
They're quoted in the Sacramento Bee.
They're shown on CNN.
That's how people find out.
So there's a sort of Collaboration between the Democrats and the media.
Those two groups seem to work almost like the two sides of a scissors.
And so both deserve a great deal of blame and both are promulgating the same message and both are obviously trying to get Kamala Harris across the finish line.
But the media is particularly cunning because every time they come into the spotlight, they try to come up with something clever to divert attention from themselves.
And one of the clever rhetorical stratagems for now is, let's tone down the rhetoric.
Let's tone down the rhetoric.
And my point is, let's.
Who's the let's?
What rhetoric have we been doing that has been poisoning people's minds in the same way against you?
There haven't been any assassination attempts of leading Democrats that I'm aware of.
No one's taken an attempt at Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer or Pelosi.
The only names I can think of are people like Steve Scalise, Rand Paul gets assaulted.
Two assassination attempts on Trump.
So, this great, generic, let's tone down the rhetoric doesn't really work.
The poisonous rhetoric has been coming from you.
So, imagine, by the way, if someone on the right, two people on the right, had tried to do this to Kamala Harris or to Obama or to Biden.
Would the press be saying, let's tone down the rhetoric?
No.
They would be saying, MAGA is responsible.
The right is to blame.
We need to demonize these people.
We need to censor them.
We need to ostracize them.
We need to call them out wherever we see them.
No more tolerance, if you will, toward their intolerance.
So this kind of rhetoric would be deafening.
Debbie was making the point a moment ago that if there had been an assassination attempt on the other side, not toward Trump, it would be all over the place.
It would be non-stop.
It would be ceaseless coverage.
The intended victim would be on The View, would be on Good Morning America, on Face the Nation.
How did it make you feel?
What actually happened?
Multiple articles about the would-be perpetrator, about the would-be perpetrator's associations.
Who are they connected with?
Let's look at their social media.
All of this.
But now, the attempt is in the opposite direction.
How do we make this go away?
Remember David Muir of ABC?
He didn't want to talk about the Assad.
Let's move on!
We don't really have time for this!
And recently the guy was on television basically saying, oh, you know, I've been criticized for my demeanor during the debate as a moderator, but that's irrelevant, that's all noise.
So either this guy has zero self-consciousness, in other words, he is the kind of of egotistical psychopath, which I think is a real possibility, where he can't turn the mirror on himself.
He genuinely can't understand what everybody else is saying about him, and to him, his behavior was just simply exemplary.
There are people like this.
They do exist.
And there's probably a greater proportion of them in the media than maybe in other industries.
So that's one possibility.
The other possibility is that the guy is just brazenly dishonest.
He's a hitman.
He understands that he's a hitman.
But he also understands that when there's criticism of the hitman, his job is to pretend that there's absolutely no matter what, what, what.
He's like the guy, the French policeman in Casablanca.
What, there's gambling going on here in the casino?
Really? I'm shocked, shocked.
So, as I say, either the guy is a kind of a sociopath, and I would put my money on that.
How about both?
Oh, Debbie goes, is it possible that he's both?
Well, it's actually not possible that he's both.
These are two, well, I guess they're two negative portraits of the guy.
Highly deserved, I would add.
But it's going to be one or the other, and I'll leave you to determine in this particular case which one it is.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Ryan Gerdusky.
Now, Ryan's been on with Brandon Gill before.
He's been on with my daughter, Danielle D'Souza-Gill, but I haven't had him on, so I'm delighted that it's first time with Dinesh.
Brian is a political strategist.
He has worked on a bunch of political campaigns, Michael Bloomberg, JD Vance for Senate, Thank you.
also the author of the book, They're Not Listening, How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution.
He's the founder of the 1776 Project.
You can follow him on X at Ryan Gurdusky or the website, RyanGurdusky.com.
Ryan, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
I haven't seen you since election night.
You know, that's right.
It was a wonderful night.
It was a great night.
I gotta say, the biggest surprise for me of Brandon's election night, this is the primary we're talking about, of course, the final election is in November.
Uh, but was the early returns, which were incredibly prophetic in setting the tone.
Brandon was around 57 or 58 with 11 candidates in the race and, uh, and he sort of held on to that.
In fact, I think he increased it slightly.
Yeah, it was great because also the campaign manager had, you know, his screen with his big Excel spreadsheet and then 60% voted early and the New York Times reported it first.
And I just sat up and screamed the numbers out because it was done at that point.
It was almost impossible for anyone to knock him under 50.
And we avoided the runoff and it was just what a wonderful night.
I mean, I know you were an advisor and friend to the campaign, and, you know, I gotta say, I talked to a number of the sort of political experts, the sort of cognoscenti, and they were like, Dinesh, you know what?
Don't get your hopes up.
There is no way that you're gonna prevail.
Brandon's gonna make it to 50 without a runoff.
You know, the runoff is sort of written into the cards, and just get ready for two more months of grueling, you know, running the ball down the field.
And you guys proved them all wrong.
I know.
I'm always a pessimist on the campaigns I work on because I just sit there.
I can't get my hopes up too much.
And beforehand, we took a little bet on what we think we're going to get.
And I was the only one to say under 50, and I was the one who was off the most because I couldn't get my hopes up that much.
I was like, I think we're going to get close to it, but I don't know if we're going to cross it.
And it far exceeded it.
But that was the last time I saw you, and it was a great night.
You know, Ryan, speaking of campaigns, since we're on the topic, it seems, and I come at this really, as you know, in my career, I've been in think tanks, I've been writing books, so I was quite unfamiliar with the mechanics of a campaign, and there are five or six key elements to it.
Of course, there's the element of money, the element of political advertising, there's the mailers that go out, there's the volunteers and the door-to-door efforts, There are so many different things that you do.
I assume you have to sort of get them all right, but give us an idea as a campaign strategist how you would rank those in importance.
In other words, if someone came to you and said, hey Ryan, I want to run for Congress.
What's the most important thing I need to focus on?
What's the top Well, if they're not an established elected official or a big name that people everywhere would know, I mean, this is sadly the truth.
Money plays a huge part in it, especially on the Republican side.
The Democrats are lucky enough that they have so many unions and organized left-wing organizations.
The right doesn't have as many.
Money does play a big part in it, and you don't have to raise the most, but you have to raise enough to be considered competitive.
And if you could have a wealthy person create a pack for you, that's also extremely helpful.
I think then how you portray yourself.
Social media is important.
It is not the most important thing.
I think a lot of people get confused and they think, oh, I have X amount of followers.
I could run for office.
Not really.
It's not worked out great for many people in the past.
Advertising is still very, very, very key.
It's to sit there and to make sure people know your name.
There's, I mean, now that people are not so consumed on necessarily television the way that they were 10, 20 years ago, you still have advertising on social media, advertising digitally.
There's text messages are very important to go direct to access, especially in a primary where you're talking about a very smaller population that's more fixed.
Primary voters are usually very special because They vote in almost every election.
That's really what matters the most.
And as far as a campaign team goes, being organized is the most essential part.
You don't want a campaign manager who is all over the place.
And it is campaigns you go from working maybe, you know, four hours a day early on because there's not that much to do aside from organizing and getting stuff ready.
To have working having to work 24 hours a day in the blink of an eye like it speeds up tremendously in a matter of days and it's just there is nothing as thrilling.
There's no high higher than winning on an election night.
It is definitely.
A junkie enthusiast, you know?
An adrenaline-addicting moment, for sure.
That is incredible.
Hey, let's talk about the second assassination attempt.
Something that the media looks to be trying to downplay.
In fact, I've actually seen some headlines saying, don't even call it that.
And on the other hand, I see that in a very interesting development, Ron DeSantis has sort of
claimed this investigation and he almost taken it away from the feds and said no listen this happened in florida uh if attempted murder is going to be one of the charges that's a state uh crime and so we're going to kind of take the lead and handle this and and he then also implied hey um i don't want to entrust this this to the very guys who are trying to prosecute trump with it without saying so he's almost implying like these people have a stake Perhaps.
In not doing a very good job here.
So I thought, DeSantis going out a little further than I've seen him in the past, what do you make of this DeSantis move and where do you think this is gonna go?
You know, I think it's very smart.
I mean, Florida has one, a very powerful executive, unlike many, some other states where the governor is not that strong, like necessarily in Texas, right?
The lieutenant governor is much more powerful than the governor is.
Florida has a very, very powerful executive office.
And I think that it's smart, given the level of distrust by some for the federal government, for the FBI, especially given the Secret Service is completely disastrous.
During the first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, how much they got wrong.
I think it doesn't hurt to have a second pair of eyes from the governor's office, from the state government of Florida, which You know, Florida was like the joke of the country 25 years ago as far as how their state government ran.
This is now it's one of the better ones and more efficient ones in the country.
And I think that I think governor Santa's certainly it will help people because Florida hasn't called the sunshine act.
Which, um, government documents and government briefings and even text messages and emails held by, uh, government officials have to be made public.
That's why you see so many people, um, by the way, that's why these people see so many like Florida arrest records.
Well, let's say Florida man did X, Y, and Z because they all have to be made public in a very quick period of time.
And I think that will bring a lot of illuminating ideas to what was the motive behind him.
I mean, obviously, we know the motive is Trump, but what was the motives as far as where did he feel this need to try to assassinate a former president and a nominee from a major political party?
We're in a time that we haven't really seen since the 1960s as far as political assassinations go.
We've managed to make them a thing of the past for half a century, but they're unfortunately becoming something that's more common.
It also seems to me, Ryan, that this is a kind of a shrewd move by DeSantis and almost a, he won't say it, but it's a recognition of the failed or false premise that his campaign was based upon.
So his campaign was based upon the idea that, hey, listen, we need an alternative to Trump.
And he positioned himself very much, you can say, against Trump.
Now, it's very interesting in retrospect.
Had DeSantis run a campaign, let's just say, like Vivek Ramaswamy, in other words, not the campaign he ran, but a campaign that was pro-Trump and a campaign that essentially said, vote me, I will protect Trump.
I will make sure that this stuff is shut down.
I don't know how he would have done, but I think he would have done better than he did.
Do you agree with that assessment?
And do you think DeSantis is, in some way, You know, repositioning himself a little bit after that kind of mishap of a primary by now lining himself up a little bit more pro-MAGA.
I don't necessarily agree with that assessment.
I think that after the indictments came out, remember DeSantis was beating Trump in January and he didn't announce it until May.
I think that by the time the first indictment came out, there was really nothing anyone was going to do to sit there and sway voters away from Trump Republican primary voters.
I think that his campaign made the mistake of being a Florida-centric campaign.
And I said this to the governor.
If you want to live in Michigan for the rest of your life, or Texas, or New Hampshire, or wherever, you have to tell them what you're going to do for people who live there.
The entire governor's campaign was, you know, Florida is free, or the free state of Florida.
I heard Florida 75 million times out of his mouth.
I didn't hear anything about Him as a person or what he would do for people essentially who didn't live in Florida.
And when I said to the governor was this, this was back in, I think, March.
I said to the governor, you're for as bright as you were of a student and as good of a baseball player as you were in high school.
And you got into, I think it was Yale, right?
Or yeah, I think you went to Yale.
You would have not been gotten into Yale today because of discrimination against white applicants.
And you need to talk about that because that is a real fear of middle class families that they suffer from a reverse discrimination, discrimination of any sense.
And you need to make the election and your campaign about them, not about you, not about Florida, not about wokeism.
You're going into niches that some voters very much respond to, but not all voters do.
Trump did that brilliantly in 2016.
Speaking to concerns that were outside of what mainstream Republicans were supposed to be talking about.
And he never really, never had that moment.
I mean, he did do better than Vivek Ramaswamy.
So I don't know if necessarily being pro-Trump would have been Different would have been the way, but he never really articulated a vision for voters the way I think he might have done a little better.
I don't necessarily mean this pro-Trump or anti-Trump.
I just think that it wasn't efficient.
And by the time he got indicted, I think that the voters' minds were basically made up and it was just trying to figure out who would come in second place.
Ryan, when we come back, I want to ask you about 2024, the Trump campaign, the Harris campaign, and what we can expect.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
I'm back with Ryan Gurdusky, political strategist, founder of the 1776 Project.
Follow him on x at Ryan Gurdusky, his website, ryangurdusky.com.
Ryan, let's talk about 2024 and the two sort of strategies or themes of the two rival candidates.
As I read it, the Harris campaign Seems to have picked up this theme, which I guess I saw Mrs. Tim Walz talking about a couple of days ago in a video, in a very gesticulating way.
Turn the page!
Now, I guess they want to turn the page away from themselves, right?
Away from Biden, away from the Biden-Harris regime.
The implication, weirdly enough, is that somehow Trump is in, and we need to turn the page and do something new with Harris.
There seems something a little strange about that, but it looks to me like that's what they're going for.
Is that a correct perception of where Kamala Harris is, and is this something that you can really pull off, turning the page away from your own regime of the past four years?
Yeah, Kamala likes to pretend that she's just been a bystander and she really has nothing to do with Joe Biden.
It is one of the most Crazy things I've ever seen.
And she's really hoping that her gender and her race define her difference rather than her policies.
She's very rarely ever talked about her policies during the debate.
I mean, she talked about increasing child benefits and she talked about small business grants, but that was really all we got from her.
And I think that Trump was very funny and accurate when he said her policy papers are like a sentence long like see spot run.
That was actually very, very accurate on Trump's position.
Yeah, and she's really hoping that she can make this election an abortion election.
I mean, that's really what she's running on.
She's running on this as being a democracy election.
When I was on CNN earlier last week, I said, you know, she is somehow in the last thousand days at the age of 60 transformed from a Bernie Sanders Democrat to a almost George Bush Republican who's pro-choice.
She has been talking about completely different things and really trying to Run, not just as an establishment or centrist, I would say, but really as a Republican of 25 years ago, very hawkish on foreign policy and military stuff.
Really very light on a lot of other things, but just keeps saying, her staff rather, not her, but her staff keeps saying that she doesn't believe in these things anymore.
I would love to know how somebody not... I mean, at the debate, she sat there and said, I'm a new generation.
She is three years away from getting Social Security.
So I'm not exactly like, let's pump the brakes a little bit that you're this new generation.
I would love to know somebody at a very advanced age has such a transformational belief, not about one thing, not about two things, not about how they feel about a certain person, but on every major issue that they've ever talked about, aside from abortion, she has had a fundamental transformation in a thousand days and she has never discussed how she got to any of those conclusions.
Is it possible that we are in a new era in which You know when I think back we would spend a lot of time dissecting this is what John Kerry says this is what defines John Kerry as a candidate let's just say 2004 or Dukakis or even going back earlier Jimmy Carter and others.
It seems now that the Democrats have created a new system in which the regime controls the candidate.
I mean, right now, it's quite obvious that Biden isn't really the president.
He's the front man.
But what Biden thinks appears to be relatively unimportant.
Someone else is steering the canoe.
Biden is a willing collaborator.
He's a willing participant.
He's happy to sit in the canoe.
But he's not driving the canoe.
One gets the feeling that this will also be the case with Harris.
Why?
Well, first of all, in part because they didn't really have a normal primary.
Harris can't say, I've won the loyalty, you know, hard-earned of all these supporters and delegates.
These are my people.
You back off.
The regime can say, we picked you.
In fact, we pushed Biden out to make it possible for you to step in.
And so, you do the song and dance that we tell you, but it's a strategic posture for the election.
What you actually believe, we're going to be telling you the day after you're elected.
Right.
I mean, there is already this fight over, and of course her name slipped my mind now that I have to think about it, over some government positions, over if people can stay or not.
Some donors are having this fight over whether or not she can ring about the same people, some of the same people that Biden picked, that they are definitely not favorable to some of the donors' positions.
I will remember the name probably five minutes after the interview is over.
But Linda Kahn, that's it.
It's a big fight over Linda Kahn, whether Linda Kahn can come back or not.
And, um, that's a fight donors are really pushing Kamala on whether or not she will have a say necessarily in this position or that position.
And, um, especially with, with, with hires because of any, with any administration, right?
You are only ever a president is only ever who they bring about because the president doesn't run everything all the time.
They do get a final say in some stuff, but.
The people that they bring about to do transportation secretary to be, you know, Commerce Secretary or Secretary of State, they make a lot of these decisions on behalf of the president, hopefully with a similar vision and value system.
We don't really know what, I mean Kamala keeps saying I have different opinions but the same values.
I don't know how you differentiate that.
I don't know how a woman who was for, this is what she was for, she was for a multi-trillion dollar program to do reparations for the descendants of slaves, now she's apparently against it.
I don't know how do you sit there and say that's the same values but it's just different policy.
To me it seems like either one you have new values or two you're just changing your mind constantly to fit a narrative that you didn't think you'd be the nominee ever.
I think that's a big thing.
I also think that they believe it could be a vibe election.
It's just how people make people feel on social media and other things.
That's why she's avoiding the press so aggressively.
She doesn't want to answer questions that I think are really fundamental because in a lot of...
Swing state and a lot of interviews afterwards, you saw a lot of independent voters and just, you know, voters who are of moderate perception or low propensity voters saying she, you know, stylistically, she was very good in the debate, but she refused to ever answer a question.
And I don't know what she actually believes.
And that's very problematic as we get closer to election day, if there's ever an opportunity to sit there and say, so how did you get to this position?
She did an interview the other day and they asked her about, you know, how is she going to help the middle class?
And she just talked about how her mother was a single mother who bought a home when she was 17 years old.
It made no sense.
It was totally void of any facts, any policy.
It's just the narrative to bring out this idea of who she is and the vibes that she has.
But if you're Kamala Harris and you have a kind of a receptive media, they're not going to press you on that kind of thing.
And this raises the question about Trump, because a lot of the independent voters, precisely because they're not all that political, They're not plugged into the kind of conservative network of information.
They're not Fox News types.
They're not Breitbart.
They're probably moderate consumers of mainstream media for the most part.
So, the Democrats have a big advantage because they get to bombard these people with information that goes somewhat unanswered.
Now, obviously people can watch a debate and see Kamala Harris and Trump side by side.
If Trump were to call you and say, hey Ryan, you know, What can I do from here on out?
What am I missing?
Because it is unconscionable that here you've got this horrible candidate, Kamala, you've got a horrible set of policies, and yet I seem to be running roughly tied with this woman.
Something's wrong with this picture.
Is there anything that I can do that will push me ahead at this point and expose Kamala before the very Americans who need to be able to see her exposed in that way?
What I would do at this point, given we have only so many days till the election, I would do hyper micro-targeting.
So, for instance, I'm just throwing an idea out.
I would look at communities of people who live in mobile homes, mobile home communities.
They have low propensity voters.
They don't vote very often.
They're not highly engaged overall.
There's no union representation.
They're not a part of any organized Effort to make them vote and I would discuss an issue that hyper focuses on them So I would talk about inflation being overly overly important to them I would talk about the fact that Developers and corporations are continuing to buy their property and they would jack up the rents and make them essentially homeless I would emphasize these things to these micro targeted communities and
And I would push them to get out and vote because at the end of the day, non-college educated whites, there are more of them than any other group in the country.
They just don't vote at the higher rates that blacks vote and that college educated whites vote.
But if you can get just 10% of them in places like Pennsylvania, in Georgia, in Arizona and Nevada, or North Carolina, you change an entire election Completely, because Trump is going to get more of the minority vote than he has gotten.
Kamala is the worst polling Democrat in modern history with most minorities.
College-educated whites, recent immigrants, and Generation Z, Zumara's youngest generation, are going to be the backbone of her campaign.
So, the only way to sit there and really move the needle against her would be to target low-propensity, non-college-educated white voters and really ramp up the effort to drive them to get out and go vote.
Vote in any which way you possibly can, but make sure they show up because unless you really speak to them, unless you really go to them, they don't have the same Incentives to vote.
They're never been engaged with before, but that's what I would do.
And there's a lot of energy and a lot of money on the Republican side to do effective ground game strategies.
That's what I would really essentially do.
And I would go to social media, which is how most people consume the news, and I would use that as a way to bypass the essential media.
And really focus on Kamala Harris's record of what she has said, what she has actually done, and who she pretends to be now.
And I think that that would be a way to sit there and engage people who, unless they are, you know, really very, very highly engaged, that's where they're getting their news and their information from.
Yeah, I mean, hopeful to me.
I'm sometimes on YouTube on some of these non-political sites.
For example, I watch these chess tournaments that are played on YouTube.
And for the first time, I see the Trump commercials now popping onto those.
And I'm like, wow, that's really interesting because it does look like there's a strategy now underway Trump seems to have been slow to get into it.
When Debbie and I watched the Olympics, we're like, we see Kamala Harris commercials, we don't see any Trump commercials, but it looks like Trump is now weighing in, and I'm happy to see in places where you wouldn't be finding already highly politicized voters, you see the Trump message getting across.
Guys, I've been talking to Ryan Gurdusky, he's founder of the 1776 Project.
Follow him on X at Ryan Gurdusky, his website, RyanGurdusky.com.
Ryan, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
I'm going to pick up with Chapter 13 of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, and going to set up today something I'll talk about tomorrow, which is the most famous speech of Booker T. Washington's life.
It is his so-called Atlanta Exposition Address.
This is the address that put Booker T. Washington on the American, if not the world, stage.
It made him a national figure immediately.
It made him the most prominent and perhaps the supreme black leader in the country for the rest of his life.
He was challenged by W.E.B.
Du Bois, Monroe Trotter, a couple of the others, progressive activists from the left, but they were never able to equal his stature.
And so we'll get to the heart of the Atlanta exposition address probably tomorrow.
But here Booker T. Washington does a chapter where he sets that up.
He begins with public speaking.
He says that he never really sort of liked public speaking per se, at least not at the beginning.
He says, I've always had more of an ambition to do things than merely to talk about them.
And he says, nevertheless, he says, I started getting speaking invitations.
He has won before the National Education Association, and he said that there were close to 4,000 people there, so a huge event.
And he says that after he spoke about education, he says a number of white people came up to him and congratulated him, and they said that they had kind of expected him to get up there and abuse the South.
But he didn't do that.
And Booker T. now tells us that kind of his philosophy of dealing with the South.
And he says, on the contrary, this is what these men are telling him, the South was given credit for all the praiseworthy things that it had done.
Booker T. Washington is very eager to emphasize the good things.
Why?
Well, to encourage them.
He knows that there's a lot of bad stuff that went on in the South, and some of it is going on even then.
So he could easily do the very familiar thing that we see today, And, in fact, it would be much more justified if he did it in his time, because there was a lot to complain about.
Segregation, racism was quite strongly entrenched, well, all over the country, but especially in the South.
But, interestingly, Booker T. Washington says that it's not his goal to emphasize those things.
He's not going to praise the South falsely, but what he says is, the South was given credit for the praiseworthy things that it had done. It's kind of like if you have a very wayward student or perhaps even a wayward child and they've got a lot to criticize them for but you realize when you criticize them they don't take it well, they don't improve, they become defensive, they become angry, they
suddenly curl up if you will and you realize that even though there may not be that much to praise them for you start praising them for the little things you can praise them for.
I noticed that you're very punctual.
Hey, I noticed that you are very artistic.
Hey, I noticed that you're very good with money.
And so as you drop these little sort of pearls of praise, you notice that the person that you're talking to becomes more receptive.
Hey, I need to improve in this.
Wow, I'm being appreciated for my artistic skills.
Maybe that's something I can develop.
And so this is really what Booker T is going for.
When I came to Tuskegee, I determined I would make it my home, and I would take as much pride in the right actions of the people of the town as any white man could do.
At the same time, I would deplore the wrongdoings of the people as much as any white man.
So, here's Booker T very much trying to eradicate the racial element from his vocabulary.
He thinks that if there's something bad that's being done in the South, a white guy should be able to go, that's wrong, and he should be able to go, that's wrong, and they agree that this is wrong for the same reason.
Now, here is Booker T. I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that more is often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to the evil done.
Later in his career, Booker T. would be attacked by saying, you don't emphasize the evils of the South.
And Booker T is saying, no, yes, that's not true.
I do emphasize them.
I do bring them up, but I don't bring them up alone than by calling attention alone to all the evil done.
And then he says, and this is really the basis for his optimism, if you want to call it that, I found that there's a large element in the South that's quick to respond to straightforward, honest criticism of any wrong policy.
Now, if this didn't exist, if the Southerners were so dug in, they were so inherently evil, that even if you said to them, this is wrong and that's wrong, but by the way, I also want to commend you for this and that and that, and they just go, well, who cares what you're commending us for?
We don't want to listen to you at all.
We're going to keep doing what we're doing.
If they were recalcitrant, if they were stubborn, if they were deaf to any kind of influence, then Booker T's strategy would make no sense.
But Booker T's point is that he says, I find I can get through to these people.
Moreover, as a rule, the place to criticize the South when criticism is necessary is in the South, not in Boston.
Think about the kind of wisdom of this statement.
Think of how offended people get if you criticize them in some other place, particularly some place that is already hostile to them.
Then you are seen as giving aid and comfort, if you will, to the enemy.
On the other hand, if you criticize them in a constructive way to their face or in a setting where they are receptive, then they're going to go, hey, maybe I should reconsider.
And that's what Booker T is saying.
If you want to criticize this out, Sit the Southerners down, talk to them as a fellow Southerner, and talk to them about how we in the South can make things better over here.
Don't become an instrument of the Northeast, of Boston, so to speak.
Don't give, don't put arrows in the quiver of those New Englanders who think the South is just a bunch of redneck racists.
So in this address, Booker T. Winau is continuing talking about his address at the National Education Association, I said that the whole future of the Negro rested largely upon the question as to whether or not He should make himself, through his skill, intelligence and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he lived, that the community could not dispense with his presence.
I said that any individual who learned to do something better than anybody else, learned to do a common thing in an uncommon manner, had solved his problem, regardless of the color of his skin.
And that in proportion as the Negro learned to produce what other people wanted and must have, In the same proportion would he be respected?
It is a very interesting question to fast forward from this statement by Booker T. Washington to ask this question.
Isn't it true today that racism, which I think is far diminished, much less than it was, now it hasn't gone away.
It exists, in fact, perhaps most strongly in the policies of the Democratic Party and in the implicit assumptions, the sort of bigotry of soft expectations The idea that you have to give blacks preferences because they can't otherwise make it.
So I would never claim that racism has been eradicated, but it has clearly been subdued.
It's not the same as it was a hundred years ago.
But here's my point.
Think of what the reputation of the black community would be today if Booker T. Washington's formula had been widely adopted.
So what's the formula?
The formula is basically this, that when you think of a black person, you think about somebody who is law-abiding, You think about somebody who is decent.
You think about somebody who is productive.
You think about somebody that you can call upon, whether in a professional capacity.
Hey, I need a plumber.
Hey, I need a lawyer.
Hey, I need a real estate agent.
Or even in a neighborly fashion.
Hey, I've got a guy who lives down the street who's black.
Let me go and see if I can chat with him.
Or let me see if I can borrow His lawnmower.
The point I'm getting at is that Booker T is basically saying that if you make yourself helpful...
Useful, productive, show your commitment to not just your own race, but to the community that you live in, then you're going to get a good reputation.
I mean, think about it.
This is nothing unique to blacks.
Every community kind of knows this.
I mean, think about Italian communities in New York.
Where the grandmother says to an Italian immigrant, hey, listen, you know, don't be a thug.
I mean, you're going to give Italians a bad name.
Try to be like your, you know, your uncle, Mario Cuomo.
Look, he's the governor.
I'm not literally suggesting one try to emulate Mario Cuomo, but you know what I mean?
Be educated.
Be normal, be decent, be someone that people can respect and say hello to people on the street.
And what will happen?
Not just you individually, but we Italians will get a good image, will get a good reputation, will be seen as valuable members of the community.
Every immigrant community instinctively knows this.
In fact, every group knows this.
And yet, this simple advice that is being given by Booker T. Washington, it turns out, is challenged, is later criticized, is twisted into something that it's not.
It's made to seem like Booker T. Washington is some kind of Uncle Tom, he's some kind of shuffling sellout, he's some kind of play by the white man's rules, surrender to the man.
Notice that Booker T. Washington is saying nothing like this.
There is very much of a manly independence about this man, and yet he understands what gets individuals and groups appreciated and respected.
And the difference between him and a lot of the black activists of our own time, and subsequent times to Booker T. Washington, is they want respect by demand.
Give us respect!
We demand respect!
Whereas Booker T. Washington's point is respect is never given in that way.
If it's given grudgingly in that way, it's insincerely given.
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