I'll show how Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada is already showing signs of working.
I'll review a new study exposing the terrible effects of DEI. No great surprise.
And Congressman-elect Brandon Gill, my son-in-law, joins me.
We're going to talk about the mood in Washington and what his hopes are for the new Trump era.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Tomorrow, guys, is Thanksgiving, and I want to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving.
We have so much to be grateful for in, of course, our own lives and with our families, but also in the new direction in which the country is now headed.
I think we can all breathe that collective sigh of not just relief, but a sense of optimism, a sense of hope.
And I honestly believe, I think Debbie agrees with me, that there's a providential hand in all this.
And so our thanks ultimately is to God for stepping in in his own way, his own distinctive way, well, saving Trump's life, but giving the country another chance.
I think that is perhaps the best way to look at it.
And there's an old saying that God looks out for little children and drunks and the United States of America.
And this seems to have been proven true one more time.
No podcast tomorrow or Friday, but we will pick up on Monday.
Now, this particular podcast is...
What's our thumbnail, honey, for this one?
There's a new tariff in town.
Not a new sheriff in town.
There is a new sheriff in town, but there's also a new tariff in town.
As you can see, Debbie and I derive a lot of pleasure from coming up with these kinds of funny titles.
And Debbie is also improving her expertise in devising the thumbnails.
In other words, in being able to do photoshops and put a sheriff's hat on Trump and give him a little sheriff's star.
So...
So we're making headway in those departments.
But what we're talking about here is a very striking post that Trump put out on Truth Social where he just announced, he said, on day one, when I get in, I'm going to slap a 25% tariff on all goods coming into the United States from China, I'm sorry, from Mexico, and another 25% tariff on all goods coming in from Canada.
And most people just jumped when they saw that.
They didn't read the rest of it.
But the rest of it was unless and until these countries do their part to stem, to stanch, to block the flow of illegals into our country.
And this was a very Trumpian move.
Notice it's a kind of...
Trump is sort of engaging in a certain type of diplomacy even before he's president.
You can almost say he's already on the job, right?
Because with a guy like Trump, his threat to do something, and it's a very credible threat.
If Trump says, I'm going to do it, I think these people know he's going to do it.
And this would, quite honestly...
Crash the Mexican economy or put a big dent in it.
Why?
Because something like 80% of all Mexican exports are to the United States.
The Mexican economy is actually a dependent economy.
It relies on the US to be the kind of consumer base that For Mexico to maintain its economic status and Mexico is the biggest trade partner with the United States followed by Canada.
So Canada too is a country with a smaller economy than ours that is to a lesser extent than Mexico.
Canada would still be a first world country without trading with America but nevertheless Canada for its prosperity is highly dependent upon Trading with and selling to the American market.
So this was a kind of shot across the bow, as they say, from Trump.
Now, Bill Ackman, the entrepreneur, makes an observation.
He says, Now, this observation is nothing more than a restatement of what Trump said.
And yet, lots of people jump in.
Here's the never-Trump attorney, Ron Filipkowski.
Ackman is trying to talk his rich friends off the ledge before the market opens tomorrow after Trump announces these massive tariffs.
So the left is acting like Trump is just this tariff man.
He wants to impose these tariffs no matter what.
The tariffs are somehow not conditional.
But Trump was very clear.
I'm imposing these tariffs because these countries have been, in a sense, taking advantage of us.
Or at least in a very indifferent way.
Hey, listen, if you want to come from South America to the US border, you can come across Mexico.
You can't stay here.
But if you want to go across the porous US border, be our guest and we'll in fact provide you with maps and other facilities and show you the way, so to speak.
And Trump is like, no, enough.
I'm going to stop that.
And here is a way to stop it in its tracks.
And guess what?
It looks like Trump's announcement is already having an effect.
I want to talk first about Canada and then about Mexico.
Because with Canada, the effect is immediate.
Basically, Trudeau, Justin Trudeau, has already kind of gotten on the bandwagon.
I'm quoting him.
I had a really good call with Donald Trump.
So he gets on the phone right away with Trump.
We talked about some of the challenges we can work on together.
It was a good call.
This is something we can do.
So what is Trudeau saying?
All right, I agree to Trump's terms.
I don't want to have these tariffs.
I'm going to do everything I can to block the flow.
Let's remember, it's not that there is a massive flow of Canadians coming into America, but Canada was also, in some ways for many, many years, the northern border was less secure because nobody thought that we have to worry too much about people from one first world country coming to another.
But of course, what people realized is that You know, if you're some Sikh from India or you're some Pakistani guy or some guy from the Philippines or Indonesia, just go to Montreal and then come across the border that way.
So we've been having an illegal problem even at the upper end, even at the northern border, and Trump is like, we've got to stop it at both ends.
Now, the Mexican president, Scheinbaum, was a little more irritable.
And very interestingly, I think she is kind of agreeing to Trump's terms, but she doesn't want to make it seem like she's agreeing.
Because, of course, first of all, she's a left-winger, she's a socialist, and she's the kind of person who wants to make a show of being very independent.
And so she lashes out on a bunch of fronts, but you notice that none of her lashing out has anything to do with the issue at hand.
She says, first of all, the drugs are just as much an American problem, which is true.
We obviously have lots of consumers of drugs in this country, and the drug trade wouldn't be so successful if there weren't buyers in the country.
So she is right about that.
She goes on to say that if there are tariffs, it will hurt both sides.
And to a degree, this is true.
Tariffs do, in fact, hurt both sides.
They put restrictions on one side.
If we do tariffs against Mexico, which will hurt Mexican businesses, she's like, Mexico can put some restrictions on America, which will hurt U.S. businesses.
And so she's raising the prospect, the dangers of a so-called trade war.
But let's remember, Trump is not proposing a trade war per se.
What Trump is saying is, we demand that you respect our sovereignty but not facilitating the movement of illegals into our country.
Why is it that Mexico can't do that?
And then Claudia Shanman basically goes, well, we actually can do that.
She says correctly, we have been already making some efforts to do that.
Now, my guess here is what she's referring to is that the Biden administration had asked Mexico to slow the flow because this was an electoral problem for Kamala Harris.
In other words, as long as people can see hordes of people, young males running across the border...
This is like a nightmare image to put before the American people on the eve of an election.
So my guess is that not for moral reasons, not because they care about the American people, not because they want to stem the flow of drugs, not because they want to restrict child trafficking, but simply because they wanted to improve their chances of winning the 2024 election, the Biden-Harris regime told Mexico, kind of cool it at the border.
So Claudia Sheinbaum is saying, we're already doing this.
I don't know why Trump is asking us to do it because we're already doing it.
No, you are doing it only for the temporary political gain of the Democratic Party.
And Trump's point is, you need to do this on a consistent basis over the next four years.
And Claudia Sheinbaum concludes by basically saying, quote, we need to sit down with them as soon as possible.
Another way of saying it, What Trudeau said.
We need to work it out.
We need to figure out how to keep Trump happy.
We need to avoid the imposition of these tariffs.
And so you can see here how a lot of times when economists, libertarians, they talk about tariffs, they look merely at the economic aspect of these tariffs and they go, well, Trump is not a free trade guy.
They don't realize that tariffs are also an instrument of public diplomacy.
Tariffs are also a political tool that can be used in the way that Trump has just shown they can be used to produce beneficial results, in this case, a stemming or stanching of the illegal flow across the U.S. borders.
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One of the casualties of the 2024 election, DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Now, one has to admit that prior to the election, DEI has seeped into really all aspects of American life.
It has seeped into public and private institutions alike.
It has come way beyond the educational and university precincts where all of this nonsense first began.
It began in the schools and in the law schools, but pretty soon it invaded the government sector, federal and state governments both, and then corporate America, and then other non-profit institution So you just couldn't go anywhere without hitting DEI. And you know how bad it is when airlines are even talking about DEI pilots.
They're using DEI to let people into medical schools.
They're using racial preferences and racial identification.
Hospitals are hiring doctors based on race.
This whole thing is an absolute...
Disaster.
A disaster if you believe in individual merit and achievement and people being rewarded for what they can do rather than the color of their skin or what their gender is or whether they're non-binary or whatever.
So when I say that there's good news on the DEI front, I do not mean and we should not be foolish enough to think that all of this can be rolled back overnight.
It's not going to be.
However, that being said, a number of prominent companies, Boeing, Ford, Lowe's, Starbucks, and now most lately Walmart, have announced that they are rolling back Welcome
to my show!
We have a long way further to go and we do not want to let up the pressure.
DEI is bad from top to bottom and it's created an industry of DEI fanatics, people who make money off of DEI and people who can use DEI to shield their own utter incompetence.
These are useless people who are good at nothing.
Or they might be good at something, but they take the shortcut and go the DEI road because it pays better and you don't have to know anything.
And pretty much the only thing you need is to mouth the appropriate slogans and start going after other people, threatening them, intimidating them, firing them, ostracizing them on the basis that they are not as enlightened as you are.
Now, interestingly, there's a new study about DEI.
It's done by the Network Contagion Research Institute in collaboration with Rutgers University.
And the findings of this study are so interesting that even though the New York Times and Bloomberg were about to write stories on it, the moment that they realized that the findings of the study undermine DEI, show what a disaster it is, they have killed the stories.
They don't want to report on it.
This gives you a window into the kind of media that we're now dealing with in the country.
By the way, if you have subscriptions to Bloomberg, New York Times, and I need to do this myself because I, just to be informed, subscribe to a bunch of these organizations, but I think we should do our best to cancel these subscriptions because why subsidize them?
The New York Times has a lot of people who just, you know, they subscribe, their businesses subscribe.
Creating a fund of money where they automatically then renew your subscription and this is really we're funding the engine of the left and as long as they've got this money coming in they're going to keep doing what they're doing.
Cutting them off at the knees financially is something that you each of us can play a small part in doing.
Let's turn to the study.
Basically, the study was very clever because what they did is they introduced these DEI themes from, you know, the usual kooks.
There's Ibram Kendi.
This is the how to be an anti-racist guy, basically an intellectual fraud.
And another equal fraud, Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, the idea that somehow whites are so fragile that they can't deal with issues of race.
So these are the Duke and the Dauphin, the kind of posturing frauds of the DEI movement.
But nevertheless, I'm going to give you a couple of examples.
There's nothing about the statement that is in any way racist.
And yet, amazingly, the people in the study pounce on the statement.
They see racism or bigotry in it, even though there's no bigotry in the statement.
And not only that, they want to punish the people who make the statement for being racist.
Let's look at a couple of these examples, which kind of show you how DEI creates a heightened sensibility that leads you in a really very unfair direction, leads you to make unfair conclusions about other people, and even worse, want to then punish them.
Showing you the authoritarian edge to these DEI people or the authoritarian sensibility that DEI cultivates in people who are subject to its propaganda.
Here's a statement in the study.
A student applies to an elite East Coast University in the fall of 2024. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer.
Ultimately, the student's application was rejected.
Okay, so, there's nothing here that implies that there's no discussion of affirmative action.
You don't know if the student is black or white.
There's no implication here that there's any racism going on.
And yet, the people subjected to DEI go, yes, this is deeply racist.
The admissions officer is racist.
There's institutional racism.
So, they're finding bigotry and microaggressions where there are none.
And then as I say, so what they're doing is the racism is in their own imagination.
They're projecting it onto the incident, and then they want to punish the people involved.
And so this is what DEI is leading to.
The researchers were very surprised to see this, and so they said, you know, this must be wrong.
Let's keep doing this.
Let's give them other examples.
And so they give a number of other examples involving Another example is in the area of Islamophobia, and they talk about two guys, George Green and Ahmed Akhtar, who are both given the same test to determine if they are capable of doing a particular job.
There's no reference to who gets the job.
There's just two guys, one with a kind of Anglo name, the other with a Muslim name, giving a test.
That's it.
There's no Islamophobia.
There's no racism.
There's nothing in it.
And yet, the DEI being subjected to DEI propaganda, people begin to see racism.
Oh, wait a minute.
Why is George Green being treated the same?
There's obviously Islamophobia here.
And again, there's a desire to punish the non-racism.
You want to punish people even though they are not racist in any way.
And so the conclusion we draw from all this is that DEI is kind of a virus of the mind.
It injects a presumption of racism even when there isn't one.
The racism is not coming from the facts.
The racism is coming from your own twisted imagination, which is being twisted by people like Kendi and like Robin DiAngelo.
So we have lots of good reasons, academically supported reasons, to consider DEI to be a disaster, a creator of unnecessary social grievance.
A false identifier of racism where there is none.
This is something that we need to eject, to remove.
It's a pollutant that we want to be eradicated from our society.
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Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
If you want to support my work, a great way to do that, become an annual subscriber.
I post a lot of exclusive content on Locals, including content you won't see that's sometimes censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You can also interact with me directly.
I do a weekly live Q&A every Tuesday.
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I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
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Guys, I am delighted to welcome to the podcast, welcome back to the podcast, a familiar face, a great guy, my son-in-law, Brandon Gill, who is now, well, Debbie says, are you going to be calling him the Honorable Brandon Gill?
And I go, well, not yet.
He's still a congressman-elect.
I don't think he's actually qualified for the title yet.
Anyway, Brandon is the newly elected congressman from Texas, Congressional District 26, the northern suburbs of Dallas.
So he'll be joining, and I believe he's the youngest GOP member of Congress, but I'm going to ask him about that.
His website, brandongillforcongress.com.
You can follow him on x at realbrandongill.com.
Brandon, wow.
You know, it must be quite a feeling for you at the age of 30 to be going to the U.S. Congress.
Can you describe when did this kind of sink in?
Was it election night?
Is it something that hit you a little bit later?
I just want to talk about just the feeling of realizing, you know, I'm on a completely different path from here forward.
When did that occur to you?
Yeah, well, it's good to be here, first of all.
You know, it's funny because with my race, this is a very conservative district.
You know, it's an R plus 13. Whoever won the primary in this race was going to win at the general, and we knew that in the primary.
So I kind of knew March 5th, several months ago, that this was going to happen.
You know, in the general election, we won by 27 points.
But, you know, it really didn't hit me until we actually got there for orientation.
And I'll say we just got home from orientation in D.C. We were there for about 10 days, almost two weeks.
And one of the first nights, Speaker Johnson took all the incoming members, everybody in my congressional class and our spouses, We're good to
go.
Danielle mentioned to me something that I wanted to raise with you, which is she said that DC is different than New York, where you lived before.
New York is, in some ways, a money town.
It's got the publishing industry.
It's got Wall Street and finance.
It's got a lot of creative artists in New York.
DC is not like that.
It's a company town.
And in some ways, it is a small town.
But it's also a small town with kind of insiders and outsiders.
Can you describe, just from your brief exposure, I mean, you guys have got a rental place in DC, you've kind of set up now for life in DC. Talk a little bit about your impressions of DC and how it's different from, say, New York.
It's funny.
You're exactly right.
It is almost like a company town.
Whenever you go out to dinner in New York, for instance, or really anywhere else, in Dallas, anywhere, on a Friday night, you usually have to get reservations ahead of time.
You need to plan things out a little bit.
The funny thing is that in D.C., it's the exact opposite.
Danielle and I went out to dinner the other night.
It was a Friday.
It was after the congressional session was over.
So you could walk into pretty much anywhere you want because the town is empty.
It is a night and day difference in D.C. whenever Congress is in session versus when they're out of session.
And it does create kind of an unusual feel in D.C. There's a high time and a low time.
And we're going to be in there usually whenever Congress is in session.
But it's a government town that most of the people there...
operate around the Capitol.
They're all involved in some governmental capacity.
So it does create kind of an unusual environment to live in for the people who do stay there.
I mean, I kind of envy you in a good way when...
When I came to D.C. in the mid-'80s, it was a very upbeat place because it was flooded with young Reaganites, and Reagan brought a lot of young people into the administration, and the mood was conservative, but also optimistic in the Reaganite sense, the sense that you're going to be really changing the world.
And I haven't felt that in D.C. for a long time.
In fact, if you went to D.C. under Obama or even under the Biden regime, you just got this sense that you were in a bad place, that there were bad people there and they do bad things.
And the mood was apocalyptic, almost surreal, and I think that's going to change, and it's going to change not really because of the change in the Congress, because, of course, Congress has 400 people in Congress and 100 senators, but the administration has thousands of people.
So you have thousands of Democrats who will be voting.
vacating D.C., or at least going on to do something else, and thousands of conservatives and Trumpsters and MAGA people who are going to be coming to D.C., and that's going to actually change the complexion of D.C.
I sense after the election a kind of a new positive mood in the country.
Do you see that reflected already yet in D.C., or is it something that you anticipate will happen?
You definitely do.
I can only imagine what D.C. was like in the 80s under Reagan.
You know, it'd be such a cool time to be there whenever you were there with this sort of burgeoning new conservative movement under Reagan.
But I think that there's probably something comparable to that right now.
You know, we would visit Washington, D.C. occasionally whenever Trump was president between 2016 and 2020. And whenever we did, we'd always go for the March for Life or some kind of biggie that, you know, the inauguration or something.
And it felt like DC, it had that sort of upbeat, you know, very causative attitude at the time.
It felt almost like it was a party all the time.
People were really excited about what was still at times.
We're going to take this country back.
You almost get a little bit of that feel now.
It's amazing how much it changed from whenever Trump left office to Biden.
Biden gets in there and it's almost like the weather changes.
It becomes dreary, downcast.
You feel this...
buildings don't look beautiful anymore they look totalitarian because you know what's coming out of the Biden administration and you could see that whenever you looked at um you know the fencing that was around the Capitol for so many years how the the people's house was fenced off from the people under Nancy Pelosi but we're starting to see a resurgence I think or you're starting to feel it in DC um a little bit more what it was like under the first Trump administration and what I imagine
it was like whenever you were there with Ronald Reagan in the 80s I mean, people are upbeat now.
It's almost like you're allowed to say the things that everybody believes.
You're allowed to say them again.
And you can see that in the people Trump was picking for his executive branch.
You know, creating the Department of Governmental Efficiency, the Doge.
I mean, these are things that conservatives have talked about for years, decades even.
I mean, honestly, it really feels like there couldn't be a more exciting time to be coming into D.C. than right now.
I imagine it is quite similar to what it was like in the 80s when you were there.
Well, I mean, the great irony, Brandon, I think is that 2024, you might think is similar to 1984 when Reagan ran for re-election, but I think it's actually more similar to 1980. And here's what I mean.
It's a little bit of an ironic point.
Had Trump succeeded...
I obviously think he did win the election and you do too.
But nevertheless, had he retained office, let's put it that way, I don't think that we would have had the possibility of the dramatic changes that we do now.
First of all, he would not then have had both houses of Congress.
So it's almost ironic.
It's...
It's almost the case that sometimes when you've got something really bad, and remember, Reagan came in with a disastrous record from Jimmy Carter, and that created the mood that propelled early Reaganism forward.
It's almost like Trump has that now, even more so than he did in 2016. Yeah, I think that that's really the key here, which is you saw what life was like under the first Trump administration in 2016. And then Biden gets elected.
I agree that the election was stolen.
But what happened is...
Biden really had kind of carte blanche, and he did everything that Democrats and leftists wanted to do and had been wanting for a long time.
He opened the borders.
He increased spending drastically, and we saw the impact in inflation.
He weaponized the federal government in ways that we haven't seen in a very long time.
If ever.
If ever, exactly.
Exactly.
You know, he did all the things that Democrats sort of had been wanting to do but never did, and we saw the result.
And I think that the 2024 election really was a referendum on not just Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but on leftism as an ideology because we saw the fruits of it.
We lived through it.
And I think that you're right.
Once you see that, you realize it was so much, not only was life so much better under President Trump, but there's a reason I think that young people and minorities are flocking to the Republican Party, which is that they're not just rejecting Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.
They're realizing that the left-wing ideology is rotten.
And it leads to destruction, and conservatism leads to human flourishing, and that's why they're really on our side.
And I think that that helps create, again, this sense of optimism that we have, that we tried the other side, it failed, and now we're finally going to take the country back from the left, and we're going to get the country back on track, and we know exactly what we need to do.
In some ways, it's the exact opposite of what we've been doing for four years in really every respect.
Yeah.
Something that confirms the point you just made is the way that Obama, who used to be treated almost reverentially, even if you had black guys or Hispanic guys, let's say, who didn't agree with Obama, they were very muted about their criticism.
But this time around, when Obama did his lecture to the brothers, you should have seen the revolt on the part of Blacks across the spectrum, including some very poor blacks from inner cities, just letting Obama have it.
And what I picked up from that was just a sense that the Democratic Party has betrayed these groups.
And they figured it out.
I mean, it wasn't that easy to figure it out because many of them, you know, they don't listen to my podcast or Breitbart.
They don't consume conservative media.
They're bombarded with propaganda from morning to night.
And so to be able to see through the fraud and the kind of smoke and mirrors that the Democrats are offering them, I think is a massive accomplishment.
Of course, it's to the credit of Trump that he was able to tap into that so effectively.
Brandon, where are we now?
I just saw an article in the Washington Examiner that mentions you and three others.
What's kind of cool is it presents you as the alternative to the squad.
And I think at one point they jokingly call you guys the quads.
You know, in other words, just moving the letters around a little bit.
Talk about who the four of you are and what was the article kind of getting at?
Yeah, well, I'll first talk about what my congressional class is like.
You know, the amazing thing is, I talked about how this election was a referendum on Joe Biden, but it was also, you know, every Republican across the country ran on the Trump agenda.
Everybody ran on securing the border, to varying extents deporting illegal aliens, unleashing America's energy sector, bringing inflation down, ending the woke and weaponized government.
I mean, every single congressional candidate on the Republican side ran on these things.
So as we're coming in, I think that we're, broadly speaking, all on the same ideological page as to what we need to be doing once we get into Congress.
I think that which creates sort of a unique environment, I think.
Everybody has their different focuses.
Some people are focused on energy.
Some people are focused on spending.
Some people are focused on the border.
But we've all got our sort of roles.
You know, during orientation, whenever we were there, I got to become close friends with three other guys, as you mentioned, in particular.
That's Brian Jack down in Georgia.
He's a former aide to President Trump.
Really, really good guy.
Not only a good political mind, as you can see from what he's done with President Trump, but also just a great guy.
Addison McDowell in North Carolina.
Another guy really focused on securing the border.
I've been ending illegal integration.
And then Riley Moore from West Virginia, also another great guy.
And I think that we're, you know, we'll see how we get labeled in D.C., but we're the youngest people in the class, I believe.
I am the youngest and 30 years old.
Addison is also 30, but just a few days older than I am and the other two are not far from us.
So...
We've got a really good, strong conservative class, and everybody is focused on the Trump agenda, and I think that's the most exciting part about it.
What would you say, Brandon, if you were to list the priorities of the new Congress, number one, number two, and number three, how would you fill in those blanks?
Yeah, I would say, and I think that this is true for most people coming in right now, the border really is the number one.
That is the thing that every single Republican ran on.
You know, the American people are so sick of the chaos that Joe Biden unleashed on the southern border.
And I think that most Republicans are aware and awake to the fact that the purpose of the border crisis was to import voters.
You know, they rigged the 2020 election, and this is just another...
And I think in many ways, more insidious way of rigging future elections by bringing voters into the country who are, you know, they thought would be very hard to get rid of.
So I think that the number one thing that we've got to do is secure a border and then start deporting illegal aliens.
After that, we've got to get the economy back on track.
And that's a function of unleashing our energy sector.
I mean, allowing energy companies to drill offshore, to drill on federal lands, stopping electric vehicle mandates.
There are a lot of things that the Biden administration has instituted over the past four years that have contributed to inflation, not to mention record spending that we've got to get under control.
And then lastly, we've got to get the weaponized federal government.
I mean, you see all of these charges that are now suddenly being dropped, the charges that have been leveled against President Trump suddenly being dropped now that he's going to be president again.
It's absurd.
And again, everybody can see through what's happening.
And it's really incumbent upon us as Republicans in Congress, as the congressional majority right now, to fight back.
And, you know, again, I think that it's amazing that not only is my class, but I think the rest of the Republican conference is on board.
Mike Johnson, the speaker, who I think has done an excellent job at bringing a pretty diverse conference together, has talked about a lot of these things.
And, you know, he's been working really closely with President Trump as well that executed on this agenda.
So I'm just really, really excited to see what we can accomplish in a pretty short period of time.
You know, when you mentioned about the weaponized government, it just occurred to me that the Democrats have insisted from day one that they are not doing this as a form of election interference, that Trump is a horrible criminal and he's broken the law all these different ways.
And it just occurred to me, if that's really true, why are you dropping the charges?
Because after all, if it's not about the election, it shouldn't matter to you that the election is over.
You think that you've got a wonderful case that you can push forward with a jury.
Now, it may be that the federal charges are problematic because of the DOJ now moving essentially into new executive control, but why would you consider suspending the state charges, which in theory could, in fact, push ahead?
The fact that they've dropped him after the election is a kind of a confession, right?
Isn't it a kind of confirmation That this always was about interfering with the 2024 election.
Guys, I've been talking to Brandon Gill, Congressman-elect, Texas District 26. We have high hopes for this young man.
Follow him on X at RealBrandonGill, the website brandongillforcongress.com.
Brandon, we're going to look forward to seeing you at Thanksgiving, and thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
Looking forward to seeing you all.
I'm continuing my discussion of The Big Lie, my book which is now out in paperback, and I'm talking about the ways in which the left and the Democrats after World War II redefined fascism in such a way as to really distort its true meaning.
And the way they do this is by using the accidental or incidental features of fascism to To be its core.
And it would be similar to if somebody was to be describing Dinesh.
And instead of giving valid and telling biographical details or even a physical description, well, Dinesh is from Mumbai, India.
Dinesh is brown-skinned.
Dinesh has these views.
If you were to say something like, well, Dinesh has two arms and two legs.
Or Dinesh is 5'9".
Well, that is true, but hardly an adequate description of me, not to mention the fact that there are innumerable people who have two arms and two legs, and there are plenty of males who are 5'9".
That's actually the average height in the country.
So this would be a tricky way to mislead people in giving an accurate description.
So, when the left and the Democrats define fascism, they talk about things like, fascism is racism.
False.
Fascism is nationalism.
Partly true, but a very incomplete definition.
Fascism is militarism.
Not necessarily true.
Fascism is capitalism.
Completely false.
So we're going to go through these.
I spoke yesterday about nationalism and racism.
I want to make a further point about nationalism before moving to the other kind of bogus or misleading features of fascism.
And that is that there is a difference between nationalism and patriotism.
The two terms are used somewhat interchangeably.
But nationalism is a devotion to the country, but not necessarily to the country's founding or its past or its traditional symbols.
And here's what I mean.
Mussolini said he was not a patriot.
Hitler said, I'm a nationalist but not a patriot.
And this is a very interesting distinction because what Hitler meant and Mussolini meant is we are not for old Italy.
We're not for old Germany.
We're not for the establishment.
We're not for traditional symbols of patriotism.
We're not for what we in America would call Fourth of July parades.
We're not about traditional national holidays.
We don't care about any of that.
We don't, in fact, do any of that.
What we are doing is redefining what it means to be an Italian, redefining what it means to be a German.
Our nationalism is based on the future and not on the past.
Here is A. James Gregor talking about Mussolini, quote, So for Mussolini,
the traditional Italy represented capitalism, represented the kind of thing that he, Mussolini, wanted to overthrow.
Alright, let's talk about militarism.
Now again, there is a kind of patina or a...
A facade of truth to the claim that the fascists in the middle of the 20th century were militaristic.
They indeed were.
But they were in part because of the period that they lived in, the situation in which they found themselves.
Their militarism, in other words, came out of their situation, not out of their ideology.
And here's what I mean.
Mussolini and Hitler were both veterans of World War I. In fact, World War I is critical to understanding both men.
Both men fought in World War I and derived certain lessons from World War I. And part of it was that they believed, certainly Hitler did, Mussolini did to a lesser degree, that World War I had concluded in a manner very unfair to Germany.
This is what Hitler believed.
That the Allies, even though the war was a draw, neither side really won.
But once the armistice, once the treaty was concluded by the Kaiser, the Allies, British and the French, acted like, we won the war!
And we get to now impose whatever terms we want on you.
And the Treaty of Versailles, you probably read in high school, very humiliating set of terms on Germany.
So by and large, Hitler wanted revenge.
He wanted to recover the territories that had been taken from Germany by the British and the French.
He wanted to increase German power.
So in other words, his militarism wasn't something that he would have come up with in a different circumstance.
But coming out of the humiliation of World War I, Hitler and Mussolini were very militaristic.
However, when you do a study of fascist movements around Europe, you realize many of them are Not militaristic at all.
And here's Stanley Paine, one of the leading scholars of fascism, and he says, quote, Indeed, he says, quote, Several fascist movements had little interest or even rejected new imperial ambitions, while others advocated war that was quote, generally defensive rather than aggressive.
So let's think for a moment about why fascists would reject militarism.
And the answer is pretty simple.
They realized that war might erode the power of the nation state.
And ultimately what the fascists were about is marrying socialism to the power of the nation state.
And so if you think, hey listen, war is going to cause an attrition, we're going to lose a lot of people, we're going to lose a lot of our country's wealth, it's going to leave us poorer than before, why would we want it?
Now obviously in the case of Hitler and Mussolini, they thought war might be very profitable because under war, Hitler thought, I can get Poland, I can get France.
We will increase our conquests and then we will extract resources from all these other people to the benefit of Germany and for a period of time, a short period of time, but nevertheless, that is what in fact happened.
So, for Hitler and Mussolini, war was essentially a profit-making operation.
But it's quite possible for other fascists to say, oh no, well, we're fascists in Belgium.
Belgium is a small country.
Why on earth would we want to go to war with anybody?
They'll probably pulverize us.
And so, what I'm getting at is there's nothing inside of fascism per se that leads it to be militaristic.
Now, finally, capitalism.
And this is the most outrageous kind of deception of all, which is that the left has invented a false history in which the economic powers, the business forces of Germany and Italy, somehow propelled the fascists to power.
And this is absolutely untrue both in the case of Italy and in the case of Germany.
Mussolini came out of the Marxist tradition.
He was the editor of the largest Marxist journal in Italy.
And the people around Mussolini were by and large two kinds of people.
There were scholars, lawyers, kind of intellectuals of one sort or another, including, as I've mentioned, a bunch of Jews.
And on the other side, World War I veterans.
This was Mussolini's original kind of group of agitators.
The business groups in Italy were utterly opposed to this.
They saw it as chaos on the streets, Mussolini's black shirts were thugs, and business interests were completely opposed to them.
Kind of the same story is true with Hitler.
Hitler's goons, the so-called brown shirts, were drawn from the lower middle class sectors of society.
Many of them were malcontents.
Hitler also had a lot of young people, the so-called Hitler Youth.
And then Hitler had some veterans of World War I who were part of the Nazi Party.
The business interests in Germany totally opposed.
I'm now going to quote the leading Italian scholar of fascism, quote, it is unthinkable that Italy's great economic forces wanted to bring fascism to power.
Now, of course, Renzo di Felice, the writer, says once Mussolini took a hold of the Italian state, he then figured out, I can corral the big companies of Italy and make them do my bidding.
So, although fascism is sometimes described as a marriage between corporate power and the state, it's not an equal marriage.
It's not a case where the state and the private sector kind of come together and they kind of achieve a reasonable accommodation.
Not at all.
The combination is real, but it is controlled from one end.
The state is on top and the corporate sector is underneath the state and operates at the behest or at the direction of the state.
So the point here is that fascism does differ from traditional socialism in that socialism, at least in the classic sense, the government owns everything.
In other words, as Marx puts it, everything is held in common.
Nobody owns any kind of private property.
The fascists allow for private property, but the private property and big business, which is allowed to exist, is nevertheless doing the bidding of the state.
If the state says to Volkswagen, listen, we don't want you to make cars for popular consumption for people who just drive on the road.
We want you to pivot and start making tanks, then Volkswagen is going to pivot and start making tanks.
And so, the conclusion we derive here is that fascism is very different from free market capitalism.
It does involve harnessing the power of business, but business is very much subordinate to, under the thumb of, under the control of, what turns out to be the key defining feature of fascism, and it has this somewhat in common with communism, the centralized, all-powerful state.
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