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Dec. 30, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:05
THE BIG DEBATE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep990
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Thank you.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Guys, this is a special episode of the podcast and I'm delighted to have my friend Chad Prather right here in studio.
Chad is a comedian.
He is an actor.
He is a podcaster.
He is a...
Chad, are you a singer as well?
I do it all.
I think Debbie was...
Didn't you play a song to Chad?
It was really great.
Thank you.
I was like, this is a bit surprising.
The versatility of this man.
So years ago doing comedy, I've always said I'm a comedian, but I try to make a...
You try to use humor or music to make a point, okay?
Yeah.
And so I wear, you know, a dress like this and it's unassuming and people, they prejudge you.
And then they're like, wow, this guy, he knows a little bit.
And so I've always said, if I can take enough things that I'm, I'm reasonably good at mediocre things like music with mediocrity and comedy with mediocrity and commentary with mediocrity.
But if I put them all together, I'm a reasonably good Renaissance man.
Like I have enough stuff going on.
People go, wow, he's an intellectual.
I was like, you believe that.
We have a song out now called Watered Down that I did.
John Rich jumped on there and lent his vocals to the chorus of that.
It's got a great message to it.
It debuted number 19 on the country chart, so we were proud of that.
That is amazing.
And it's just kind of a commentary of where we are, how everything in our culture has been watered down and people are really hungry to get back to things that have some meaning to them again.
So we've been having fun with that type of messaging, which is kind of a break from what I normally do, which is funny music, because I always say, why tell a joke when you can sing it?
So here we are.
Here we are.
Just kind of a jack leg, jack of all trades.
Guys, you can follow Chad on social media at xWatchChad.
Really simple.
And the website is just WatchChad.com.
So Chad, yeah, you were telling, I think I was on your podcast a month or so ago in studio.
It was really cool.
Did you say at that time that you got your start kind of in the music industry initially?
Well, I like to jokingly say that, you know, I've been in some form of entertainment industry for a long time.
I like to jokingly tell people I grew up in a family of cowboys.
I was the least cowboy of all of them.
And I grew up in a family of musicians and I was the least musician of all of them.
But I was the only person that was ever able to take those two things and make any money out of it.
So it's funny how that happened.
I was on television for the first time when I was three years old.
I was a baseball player, went to the University of Georgia, went to seminary after that, then traveled all over the world, spent a lot of time in third world countries.
And I jokingly, again, tell people, but it's the truth.
I said, I met the mother of my children in Nigeria.
I went all the way to West Africa to meet a white girl from Alabama.
And what was she doing there?
She was a school teacher.
She was a school teacher.
And so I would travel.
We would disciple and train pastors and then do medical missions and ministry.
And so out of that, I've just always, you know, you'd come home and I was always on some platform or another.
You can't go on a trip like that and not go to church and tell everybody about it.
So everybody wanted you to come and talk to them.
And I was sort of the funny, motivational guy.
And then one thing led to another.
I wound up on radio and television and then developed a huge social media following years ago.
And I had people who said, why don't you do stand-up comedy?
And I said, well, I'm not a comic.
And they said, well, you're a funny guy.
I said, well, I'm witty.
I can tell a story.
And they said, who cares?
If people will buy tickets to it, that's all that matters.
And so I've been on the road nonstop for the last 11 years.
I mean, this is interesting to me because, you know, you often think of people as being either local or cosmopolitan, like one or the other.
And of course, it is often said of Americans that you got Americans who have like never left the country.
I mean, we know that here in Texas, there are Texans who have never left the state.
Some have never left the county.
It's true.
I run into these people from time to time.
So they are local to the ultimate degree, right?
Yeah.
And look, I grew up in that kind of community in India.
Most of my cousins lived within about three miles of my home.
And until I came as an exchange student to America at the age of 17, I mean, I'd only been on a plane once, and I'd never been on an international...
You got broken in quickly.
Yeah.
I got broken in quickly, and after taking the long trip, I basically never went home.
But the idea that you've traveled all over the world, you've seen it, I think lends a certain breadth to your experience.
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that about me, and it is a reason why growing up in the world that I did, I always tell people, I said I grew up I grew up in Georgia.
I grew up in the woods.
I jokingly tell people that we were so country that I got a cousin that got arrested for selling chicken salad sandwiches at a cockfight because she didn't have a food permit.
And that's not far from the truth.
My family still lives in those woods.
I've kept that persona of the Western culture, the cowboy culture, kind of the folksy down home, Will Rogers, if you will, idea, because I want people to look at you and be unassuming about what you're bringing to the table, because I think it engages.
I want you to prejudge me.
I say that jokingly, but I do mean it.
I want people to prejudge me because it disarms them a little bit.
They don't realize, here's a guy who spent a better part of 10 to 15 years in third world countries, in and out.
I've seen things all over the world.
I mean, I've seen everything from incredible blessings to incredible atrocities.
And you're right.
You use a great term, cosmopolitan.
I've always said, I said, I don't believe you should be a Christian.
You should never be a believer without a passport, because you have to be cosmopolitan if you're truly going to fulfill the Great Commission.
And we have so many provincial people.
And to summarize, a rough summary of Mark Twain, who said, Nothing destroys travel like prejudice.
And these days, we've gotten so cloistered up in our communities, whether it's an online community, our political communities, our little tribes that we've found.
And so now there's some folks out there that have just sort of become political and cultural orphans, and they don't know where they belong anymore.
And I think we've seen a huge identity crisis across the board in our society, especially amongst this new generation, this young generation that's come along, because they don't understand it's a lot bigger world out there than what we're just experiencing on TikTok.
I mean, I think another benefit of travel, you know, because people think of travel as you learn about other places.
But I think that when you have seen the world, you learn a lot more about your own place.
Because when you're growing up in rural Georgia, or when you're growing up in suburban India, in my case, you sort of take it for granted.
And you think that probably everybody in the world is like this, or there's Nothing different about where you're from.
It's like the air you breathe.
And then when you go elsewhere, you go, hmm, these people eat differently and they talk differently and their customs and their ways are different.
And then when you come back, you now have kind of a new perspective.
And many times for Americans, I think a new appreciation for their own country.
You do.
Because they're like, I can't wait to be home where I've got space to move around and I'm not in some tiny cubicle.
Right.
And I eat food I'm accustomed to, and also the American spirit.
It's true.
I always said that redneck is everywhere.
No matter where you go in the world, people are just people.
And they're going to find their ways of doing things.
And so the only colloquialism that I could come up with is I said, you know, redneck is everywhere.
Whether it's the universal use of duct tape all the way to being in Lagos, Nigeria, and they would run a wire from a house to a pole, wrap it around the pole, and go to the next pole.
And so it looked like a big dirty Q-tip at the top of a telephone pole with just a pile of wires.
We economize on how we run our electricity around here, but out there, everybody's got a wire that runs from their house.
And I saw that one time back in the 90s, and I said, wow, redneck really is everywhere.
But people are people.
And we want to marginalize and label each other.
If we can categorize each other, put people that aren't necessarily like us in a box, then we don't have to deal with them because we've classified them, right?
But people are people, and I think that's one of the things that we've got to get back to is realizing that humanity is – history is the same.
Man's inhumanity to man has worked throughout human history through all the millennia.
People are still fallen.
They're still frail.
They're still feeble.
They still deal with the same emotions.
They still deal with the same struggles.
There's this fight for survival, the fight for community.
How do we raise our children?
How do we stay in a marriage?
The problems, the issues are universal.
And I think that we've gotten so short-sighted that we miss a lot of that.
Would you agree?
I mean, I agree with all that, of course.
Would you agree that the great virtue of the redneck worldwide is that the redneck is the hardest guy to turn into an obedient serf?
Yeah, there's an independent spirit, right?
Right.
It is the nature, whether it's the cowboy spirit, the Western spirit, we're seeing a lot of a revival with that in Hollywood right now with the Western spirit.
I think that in a large way, that is the heart and soul of that independent prairie dwelling under the sky, lone troubadour that's out there.
That is, in essence, the nature of the American, right?
We have that independent, you're not going to mess with my stuff, that libertarian mindset.
I'll leave you alone, you leave me alone.
But yeah, it is.
And so what you wind up with is a mentality that's good and bad.
So you wind up with the self-made man.
If I fall down, I'm going to get up, pull myself up by my bootstraps, and I'm going to blaze my own trail.
Well, there's an element of that that's great, but there's also an element of that that shirks and shuns community, and also it's...
It's one of the reasons, as a side note, it's one of the reasons why people in the Western culture, especially men that still are in the cowboy world, they're the hardest people in the world to ever admit that they might deal with something like depression.
They don't want to admit that because it's a sign of weakness in their mind.
So there's an element to that that I think is a negative in terms of how it plays out because there still has to be an element of humility in the human experience.
I mean, and in the old Western movies, you know, whether it's John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, the Western hero, it's very difficult to see that guy as having a marriage or family and kids.
And that's very often why at the end of the movie, that's a couple of reasons why, but one reason is that's why the guy rides out of town.
He rides out of town.
Because he has to disappear.
He's a loner, and I think the assumption is that he'll remain a loner.
Yeah, like in the great words of the country music prophet Toby Keith, the late Toby Keith.
He said, you never heard Marshall Dillon say, Miss Kitty, do you ever feel like running away and settling down?
Would you marry me if I asked you twice and begged you pretty please?
She'd have said yes in a New York minute, but his heart was never in it.
And that lone cowboy that rides off in the sunset, that is that American spirit.
Yep.
It's a crazy world we're living in.
So, hey guys, it's okay to admit you're depressed.
We'll be right back with Chad Prather.
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Back with comedian, actor, podcaster, all-around great guy, Chad Prather.
Follow him on X at WatchChad.
Website is WatchChad.com.
Chad, I noticed when you walked in the studio today, you seemed a little depressed.
And so I thought to myself, why is that?
What is troubling, Chad?
And then it hit me.
Your fellow Georgian, Jimmy Carter, passed away.
Jimmy Carter, you know, when I was a kid, I was always the extroverted child that needed the attention, and my grandmother at her church parties would say, Chad, do your impression of Jimmy Carter.
And so we would do that.
We would talk about his brother, Bubba, who was the drunk.
Was this Billy?
Billy Carter.
Sorry, I'm mixing my bills between Bill Clinton and Bill Carter.
But we would do those things, and you just always knew.
I remember my biggest memory.
I was born in 1972, so that I'm 52 years old.
My biggest memory is I went on vacation to Jacksonville, Florida with our neighbors.
And again, we all live down in the woods, so our neighbors, we went to Jacksonville, Florida, and we could not get back home from Jacksonville, Florida because there was a gas shortage in America.
So we had to take a Greyhound bus.
The father of the family and me had to come back on a Greyhound bus because there was a gas shortage.
And that's my biggest – one of my biggest memories as a child of the Carter presidency.
Now, you could go deep down into the list.
A lot of people have said that Jimmy Carter is arguably the worst president we've ever had.
He may be the most incompetent.
I'm not saying he was a bad man per se.
There's a lot of people who look at his humanitarian works and say, listen, here's a guy who taught Sunday school.
His theology and mine probably would not line up.
But he did some good things by man's standards in regards to that.
But politically, his leadership, his ability to come up with legislation that worked was an atrocity.
I still argue that Woodrow Wilson's the worst president we ever had in the United States.
Joe Biden's climbing the charts.
So rest in peace, Jimmy Carter, but politically, wow, it's hard to defend the guy.
Yeah, let me try to say a couple of nice things about him.
Try to find the nice things to say.
It takes effort.
You have to really be ingenious in formulating it.
So here's how I'd put it.
There are, what, 160 countries in the world?
Right.
He only ruined three.
Which is Iran.
It's not a bad ratio.
That's right, exactly.
Iran, Venezuela, and the United States.
Not to say that you couldn't fix these problems because Reagan came along, and in some ways I think Carter paved the way for Reagan.
And I would argue that Taiwan right now is suffering at China's hands because of Carter.
In some ways.
I mean, that might be another argument.
Well, people would add also, especially in later life, he developed this venomous attitude toward Israel.
He met with the guy, Haniyeh, the guy from Hamas.
So, I mean, Carter has had a lot of unsavory associations.
Maybe another good thing to say about him is that That while the recent Democratic presidents, certainly I think Obama and Biden, have been sort of malevolent guys, at least to a degree, whether it's personal corruption in the case of Biden or ideological in the case of Obama, Jimmy Carter was just a good old nincompoop.
He really was.
I mean, he didn't mean badly, but he's like, I don't like the Shah, pull the rug out of the Shah, boom, he gets Khomeini.
I think he was like oops, like a major oops.
Yeah.
Didn't really know what he was doing.
Now, unlike Biden, Biden's got the bureaucrats built around him and people in his administration who are doing things on his behalf.
I think Jimmy Carter was probably the last vestige of classic liberalism post-JFK that still knew what a Democrat was before we got into the Clinton era and then the downhill progressive slide that we see today.
Jimmy was still at least trying to make his own decisions, which he probably should not have been, because there's not a lot of people that are emerging from Plains, Georgia, with a huge view for how socioeconomic geopolitics ought to function and work, and he was a perfect sign of that.
A very successful peanut farmer.
I mean, when I came to America, I came to the United States in 1978. So it was the Carter era.
Sure.
And the two things I remember most vividly, the hostage crisis, which of course I was just so stupefied that this powerful country was publicly helpless in the wake of a bunch of thugs in Iran having seized these hostages.
But the other thing is everyone kept saying that Carter was a nuclear engineer.
And every time I heard Carter himself address it, he called himself, he said, nuclear.
Nuclear.
Not nuclear, but nuclear.
And I thought, it's really odd to be a nuclear engineer and be unable to state...
Or pronounce the word nuclear.
Put an extra U in the word.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, you know, I think you're right about his personal decency.
And I just saw a little thing that Delta Airlines put out.
Apparently, because of Georgia, he took Delta everywhere he flew.
And when you get on the plane, he'd go down the aisle and apparently shake everybody's hand.
So that's, you know, classic like nice guy-ism.
Right.
But I think he put a heavy price, heavy burden on the country.
And I will say this.
There's an element to niceness that's fine, but there's got to be a demarcation because niceness isn't everything, right?
No.
Niceness in a lot of ways has gotten us into problems that we have today.
And I see people all the time that try to, you know, paint Jesus in man's image and say, well, Jesus wasn't nice, so I don't hold that up necessarily.
Kindness is one thing.
But again, kindness isn't everything either, but niceness is a whole other deal.
I think Jimmy Carter was nice, and I think there were a lot of people who tend to forget what 1976 to 1980 actually looked like in the United States.
And I would go even further and say I think he was a precursor to what we see in terms of Democrat politicians being placed in office because he was placed in office.
There were the powers that be behind him that placed him.
And so we start to see that puppet politician emerge in a person like Jimmy Carter.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the fact that he was a, they were able to present, he's a southerner, he's an evangelical Christian, and so they were able to portray him not only as a centrist, but as sort of a conservative.
I know there are members of Debbie's family, including her grandmom, who thought, you know, her grandmom was very devout, and she thought, God, I've got to go with Carter.
He's one of us.
And so Carter tapped into the evangelical vote, if you can believe it, And it wasn't until much later, I think, that the evangelicals pivoted over to Reagan because they realized that the values they believed in were really better represented.
And also when you don't have the gasoline to get to church, it makes a huge difference.
Yeah, exactly.
It makes a huge difference.
But yeah, you're right.
And I think in the pivotal moments after Nixon slash Ford, I think people were looking for a change.
And those yellow dog Democrats, which were in the Deep South, were a big part of that.
Yeah.
Chad, what do you make of the announcement today?
Trump puts out a post on Truth Social.
It covers a bunch of things, but I think the significant thing is he goes, I'm backing Mike Johnson 100%.
He has my full and total endorsement, to use the Trumpian phrase, to be speaker.
And Johnson was in a little bit of a precarious position because of that horrific...
the continuing resolution that went down in flames and Johnson pulled back from that.
But you could tell that was the thing he was pushing.
And so I think a lot of Republicans and conservatives and MAGA types were like, this is not our guy.
But my thought about this is that Trump knows that Johnson is not MAGA down the pike.
But maybe Trump thinks that they can make a deal with Johnson or that Johnson is willing to carry out the Trump program.
What do you think it is?
Yeah, it's interesting.
There's a lot of nuances to that.
I think you've got another nice guy, Mike Johnson, which again, there's an element that's okay, but it's not what we need necessarily right now.
There's also a razor thin margin in the House.
We're in a transition period.
Biden and Harris are going away.
It would be nice to have a Speaker of the House who's in that spot.
Trump needs somebody to ratify this new presidency that comes in.
And Mike Johnson, at the same time, I think he's anxious to hold on to power.
And so in order to do that, he's willing to say whatever he needs to say to keep that.
And I thought it was interesting, you know, whether Trump was at the Army-Navy game or he went to a UFC fight, and then there's the picture of them eating McDonald's on Air Force or Trump Force One.
There's Mike Johnson hovering around in all of these places.
And so I don't know that any of this necessarily – I hate to use the term useful idiot, but I think Trump saw in him maybe a useful idiot, maybe a guy that, hey, here's a guy that wants to keep the power, and we need the power.
So maybe we can do enough manipulation and back scratching to keep him in place.
It's almost as if who gets to bully Mike Johnson, you know?
Because, no, seriously.
It's true.
I think that in the absence of Trump, Mike Johnson was being bullied by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
Right.
And these guys would basically tell Mike Johnson, this is the way that it is.
You want to get a resolution through and you don't want to shut down the government?
This is what you have to agree to.
And so you could almost hear in Mike Johnson's voice an appeal to necessity.
Like, we have to get this through, so that's why I'm agreeing.
But maybe later we'll do better.
I mean, the classic behavioral pattern of the weak, nice guy.
Right.
I guess what's happened here, and maybe it's not the worst thing in the world, Trump is like, I'm a bigger bully than Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries put together.
Mike Johnson's going to listen to me, and that will be not ideal, but maybe sufficient.
Do you think that we're dealing with maybe a little more mature Trump this time around in terms of his...
Maybe a little less impetuousness to make a decision, or he's making his own decisions versus them throwing people at him and saying, okay, put this person in this position.
And so maybe Trump is throwing a little more of his weight around.
I just hope this doesn't backfire.
In regards to keeping Mike Johnson in that position.
Because to me, he has been a disappointment.
And not an utter and total disappointment, but it's still disappointing.
Because you're right, he's not straight down the line.
I like free thinkers.
I want critical thinkers.
I don't want yes-men.
But at the same time, America voted for a certain agenda.
And I think we need to see that implemented.
Yeah, let's take a pause.
When we're back, we'll pick this right up with Chad Prather.
I'm back with Chad Prather.
Follow him on x at WatchChad, the website WatchChad.com.
You know, Chad, I think with regard to Trump, this is a hugely different Trump than we saw in 2016.
16, Trump recognized that there was a swamp, but I don't think he recognized where exactly it was or how deep it was.
And I think Trump thought, look, I'll come in, everybody will get the message that there's like a new sheriff in town, and I'll try to work with the establishment.
I'll work with the guys in the military.
I'll bring in John Kelly as my chief of staff.
Generals do what they're told, at least so I'm told.
And so I think Trump went along with the program to a large degree and then realized that the place is full of backstabbers and underbiters and crooks.
And I don't think he expected to find these kinds of people like in the health department, the NIH. But so he realized this is a much bigger problem than I thought.
And now I'm actually just amazed at the surgical precision.
Even his appointments, each one is calculated to deliver a little missile strike on the other side.
And so I'm quite impressed with Trump.
Now, I think that some of the problems that he's dealing with are...
are inherent to the Republican Party.
And so, for example, in the House, it would be one thing, let's say the problem was that most of the Republicans were solid conservatives, but there were 20 holdout moderates.
The truth of it is you can pivot a little bit more to the center and pick those guys up and cut deals with them.
The problem is when you have on the one side a Thomas Massey, a Marjorie Taylor Greene, sort of a hard right that even finds Trump to be too much to the middle.
And then you've got on the other side, the moderates.
It's a bit tricky because if you move to the right, you lose these guys.
If you move to the center, you lose those guys.
So holding our fragile, thin majority, both in the Senate and the House, is not an easy task.
And this is really why I think Thune will work out better than Johnson because...
Thun is a bit of a snake, but he's a guy who knows how to make deals.
And he can make deals over here, I'll give you this, I'll give you that, and deals over here, and hold the Senate together, I think, better than Mike Johnson can.
And Trump probably knows that as well.
So legislatively, I think it's not clear...
We'll be able to get a whole lot done.
I'll be really impressed if these guys can deliver.
Obviously, Trump has 30 things to do before he even worries about that, and a lot of that relies on executive power.
He can shut down the border.
He can shut down most of DEI and affirmative action.
There's a lot of stuff that Trump can do just through an effective administration.
So I'm excited about that.
That's true.
There's a lot of executive decisions that need to be undone and many that need to be done.
I think the first day or two of the presidency are going to be a lot of fireworks.
And I think rightfully so.
I think it should be.
We've seen, you know, it's speculative how many bureaucrats are in Washington, D.C., anywhere between 2.5 and 4.5 million that are truly running the country.
I mean, it's a blob out there that's all consuming everything it touches.
It just eats up.
And we're watching this government grow and grow and grow.
We'll never see a smaller government.
We may be able to see a limited government.
And that's what I'm hoping we can start to move towards in the days ahead.
And you're right.
It's a precarious razor's edge position to find yourself in because you have such a weird dynamic in the GOP. You have the Marjorie Taylor Greene's and the Thomas Massey's.
I always tell people, I said, listen, what's Thomas Massey think about it?
Because that's probably going to be my opinion at this stage in the game.
Because I think he's a little more level-headed even with his...
Yeah, with his stronger conservatism.
But then you've got the old head GOP, the McConnells and the Lindsey Grahams, then the people that are emerging out to be proving themselves to be rhinos, the Dan Crenshaw's in this district.
And so I'm trying to figure out, where are we going to fall with this legislatively as we move in?
We're not there yet.
I mean, the election was one thing, but where we are in our ability to govern, we're not there yet.
Quite true.
Now, interestingly, over the last week or so, a kind of little firestorm has erupted on X. You're very familiar with it.
The ostensible frontline debate is over these H-1B visas.
Right.
And, you know, I'll be clear about my view of this whole thing.
And that is that this H-1B program is rife with abuse.
There's no question about it.
And so you got Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and sort of the tech guys on one side, the pro-Trump tech guys.
And on the other side, you got, you know, you got Bannon, you got Laura Loomer, you've got a lot of good guys in the MAGA camp.
And I think that they're talking a little bit past each other, in my opinion, because I think that what the Elon Musk's of the world are saying in Vivek are, we want to be able to bring first-rate people from around the world who are going to help us in AI, in cutting-edge technology.
Essentially, it's like saying we want to bring star basketball players to come play on our team because we want to be the number one team.
Now, the other side is saying, America is not a football team.
America is a community.
A community is based upon shared customs and ancestry, and excellence is good, but why can't we find it right here in this country?
How do you think about this kind of stuff, and where do you come out on this?
Let me say one more thing before you jump in.
I am looking for a solution that doesn't split these two camps away because I think they both bring a lot to our side.
One side brings money and coolness and a lot of energy and of course we owe a great deal to Elon Musk for what he's done personally in many ways for Trump and for the election.
So if there is a way to harmonize these camps it would be a good thing even though one of them may be more right than the other of course.
I went camping Christmas Day and I've been in the woods until Yesterday evening.
And so I've tried to disconnect.
And then I got on X sitting around a campfire two nights ago and realized the world is at war amongst...
Our camps.
I mean, the people abusing Vivek and Elon Musk.
And the H-1B issue was not on my election bingo card.
There were other primary – the border and the economy and inflation and these types of things were what I was a little more focused on.
Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, I was a little more focused on that.
H-1B suddenly became this dividing point.
And so I asked a number of friends of mine, Sarah Gonzalez with The Blaze, Matt Kim, different folks who I've said, you know, do you have a succinct opinion on this?
No one has a succinct opinion.
And so I'll just say this.
I liked most of what Vivek said in his ex-post.
And I agree with most of what Vivek said.
But I understand the people who push back.
You know, we have glorified a culture here in this country of...
Kids playing football and being involved in cheer and tumbling and soccer.
I mean, we live in that.
You and I live in the same area of Texas.
This area, our kids are entertained to death.
I've said for years that we've taught our kids.
I tell grandparents in my live shows, I say, you better teach your grandkids discipline because your children have taught them Xbox and Amazon.com.
And so, consequently, We don't glorify certain things that I wish we did.
Things like real science.
Now, unfortunately, we live in a world where real science includes men being women and who's going to use which bathroom and climate change And gender studies and these types of things, which aren't science at all.
The COVID nonsense, the trust the science, when there was no science behind it.
And so rather than glorifying and pushing as an ideal real science and real math, and I say this from the perspective of, we homeschooled four children.
My 18-year-old son already has three college degrees.
One of them is in mechanical engineering.
He's got a free ride to any pick that he wants at an Ivy League school.
He's been ranked in the top 10 in mathematics since he was 12 years old.
The only high school he went to was when he was 14 to teach the trigonometry classes.
And I've tried to make sure that he understands that he's a big strapping boy, but he's not an athlete.
And I said, as long as you understand that God gave you a gift.
And you've pursued that.
You've disciplined your mind, and you've done a fantastic – and there's nothing that this society can say to you or do to you that takes anything away from that because the coaches said, why don't you play football?
Well, football wasn't a priority to him, but it was in that – And I'm like, no, son, you're a world changer.
You're going to change the world.
You're going to do it in a different way.
We've said, hey, our kids need to grow up and be in the NBA or play professional baseball or something like that.
When we know statistically that's not going to happen.
But it is an opportunity to, you know, rather than focus on these, and I can blame the Department of Education.
I can blame the The teachers' unions, all of these progressive narrative-driven agendas out there, which have dumbed our children down.
And now we're sitting there going, well, why don't we have the best scientists and the best mathematicians and the best rocket builders and engineers?
We don't have that because we haven't glorified that.
We haven't held that up as an ideal.
Now, at the flip side, we've lost this idea that America is a melting pot and the word assimilate has become a bad word.
And so when we think of The best and the brightest coming from, let's say, India into this country to be a part of what we're trying to build here on the tech side or the science side or the medical side or you name it.
Our first thought is they're not coming here to assimilate.
They're coming here to abuse the system.
The best bull riders, to change this to run a rabbit trail, the best bull riders in the world, they come here from Brazil.
And the reason they're the best is because they know that they're going to live in abject poverty if they stay in Brazil.
And they know their only way out is if they come up here and excel in the field of bull riding.
And they're the best of the best.
And you say, why are they so good?
Because they know what they have to go home to if they don't succeed.
Same with people coming from India, people that are coming from Asia, people who are coming over here.
They don't have anything to go home to.
So to the degree that they can come and use the system and succeed, that's fine.
But we've got to make assimilation a real thing, citizenship a real thing.
And we've also got to get past what Bannon calls it a scam.
And if it's true that statistically we're paying the people who are coming over for lower-wage jobs than it is these true higher-tech jobs, and it would appear statistically it's the lower echelon that are getting the most benefit out of this, that's got to change.
And I will agree that Elon has said, I'm saying over and over again, the system's got to be fixed.
That I agree with.
That I agree with.
Because we've said over and over again, we want immigration.
We want legal immigration.
And we want a melting pot.
We'll be right back with Chad Prather.
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Guys, I'm back with Chad Prather.
Follow him on X at WatchChad.
The website is WatchChad.com.
Chad, I think you were on the money in so many respects there because, I mean, I try to apply some of this to my own life.
And when I got the opportunity to come to America, I thought, wow, I'm in the promised land.
I'm in the land of opportunity.
Now, I recognized right away that America is for Americans.
And so I saw myself as an outsider who was being, in a sense, let in, which comes with a lot of responsibility to assimilate.
I even thought I had a responsibility to make a rapid shift from British English to American English.
So I slowly began to remove all the British pronunciations from the way I spoke.
But then in college, I noticed that...
There was a difference between me and the other students in that I had come with the relentless idea that college is a place to, like, study like crazy.
A wild idea.
Right?
And I noticed that all my...
The other guys there who are super smart, many of them gone to prep schools, they had high SAT scores, but that was really not their view.
Their view is colleges here to do a lot of things and study is like one of them, but it's maybe not even the top three on the list.
Joining a fraternity is really important, Dartmouth's known for football, and I need to find a girlfriend.
And so there was a little bit of this, and I think to that degree, at least at that time, I was a little more of a stereotypical Asian.
Now, I think as my life has gone on, I began to realize that this kind of unidimensional Asian personality, which is sort of study, study, study, does leave a lot out.
And that...
So I have tried in my own life to broaden my own interests beyond college and say, look, it's very important to have friends.
It's very important to travel.
It's very important to sample good food and develop kind of tastes and different things, sports and so on.
And so that roundedness is not there in a lot of these Asian cultures.
Now, with regard to the H-1B program, I mean, I think you're right.
What's happened is these tech companies have realized, look, it's not that we need to bring some guy from India to be a cashier or a clerk.
or even to run basic code, because Americans can do that actually.
Right.
But what the tech companies say is, listen, if I can get this guy for 40 grand from India.
And he'll work 90 hours a week.
90 hours a week and he has no place to go.
I don't actually have to give him a big pay raise because he's not going to want to go back to India.
Right.
So that I think is the nub of it and I think this is where the MAGA people are right on because they're saying, listen, this is actually not even a free competition.
You're getting a sort of a quasi-surf on this side and on the other side, you know, true, an American won't behave like that because Americans want to be able to compete in a market and go elsewhere if there's a better job over here.
So give us a fair shake in this whole thing and don't bring in people that the country doesn't need.
I mean, I look at policies in places like Australia and Canada, and they're very ruthless.
I mean, they just look and see, look, what do we need?
We need pediatric nurses?
Okay, let's let in some of those, because the country needs them.
There's a shortage of them, but I don't think that's how this H-1B is working.
The way the H-1B works is that they allow these tech companies to set the agenda, and then they run a lottery system.
I mean, why would you run a lottery system if you're truly trying to choose the best and the brightest?
Yeah, that's not the best way to go.
That makes no sense, right?
Yeah, exactly.
But I think the good thing about this debate is, you know, number one, it's shown that our side can have a debate.
It was very comical to me to see the left's reaction to all this because, first of all, they were left out of it.
Wasn't it great?
I mean, the New York Times had nothing to say.
The media said nothing.
The media said nothing and no one consulted them.
No one looked at them, but what do you guys think?
Like I mentioned earlier, I texted several friends and I said, what is your succinct opinion on this?
Don't give me some big long diatribe.
What's your succinct opinion?
And it was interesting.
They didn't even ask the media.
The media had no opinion.
And then later when I see the TV people weighing in on CNN and so on, they're acting like, and this just shows out of it there, there's a civil war brewing on the right.
They literally thought this was some kind of a civil war, whereas it's what scrappy people do when they disagree.
And I think it's actually, in many ways, a sign of health, because I think this is the way forward.
We're not going to adopt the kind of uniform mentality that the left has.
We'll argue this stuff out.
Well, this was literally the biggest political comeback in the history of the world.
I think we're up to some scrap.
We can get down and dirty.
I mean, the guy that we put in office got shot, and they wanted to kill him several other times.
So we've been called everything from bigots to racists to homophobes, xenophobes, misogynists, Nazis, you name it.
We've been called all of that.
We can handle a little infighting.
On a debate topic with this.
We can even handle Elon with his strong language that he tweeted back about what to do with your face.
We were like, you know, okay.
All right.
We feel – I think we touched a nerve.
Well, this is a little bit of the combative Trumpian style, I have to say, because look, look at the way Trump and like Marco Rubio go at it in 2016, right?
Trump and Ted Cruz.
Yeah, exactly.
I would never forgive Trump for what he said about my wife.
Or your dad.
Or your dad.
Right.
But yet, here they are.
But that's the game that we've learned to play on this side of the fence.
So the Trumpian approach appears to be, let's go at it, but let's not keep lasting grievances.
I think that's the way he looks at it.
He goes, okay, that's passed.
The only time that Trump keeps the grievance is when the other side refuses to relent and they go the way of the never-Trumper types.
Or they try to do the kind of behind the scenes backstabbing.
I think that is something that really offends, you know, Trump.
Elon, look, my reading on Elon Musk is this.
This guy cares about two things.
And one is free speech.
And the other is this kind of extreme idea of merit and excellence.
Now, that does make him somewhat one-dimensional in the sense that I don't think appeals to community...
I mean, a guy who's trying to make a colony on Mars isn't particularly concerned about local community per se.
But on the other hand, if you're going to be devoted to two things, there are far worse things in the world than free speech and merit.
Both those things are really important in a successful society.
Right.
Yeah, and I think to that point, you know, you're going to have some of these things that are going to happen in the days ahead.
Because I've already seen the sound bites of Trump giving a speech in 2019 on this H-1B visa situation where he was saying something which is seemingly opposite from the position he's taking today.
Okay, we've already established Trump is changing.
We've seen somewhat of an evolution with Trump.
And that's okay.
I don't mind seeing a person change on their position when they come back on that.
But, you know, In Elon's defense, well, I'll say regardless of who it may be, the thing that bothers me is when we start using these leftist cancel tactics towards people that we may disagree with on the surface without getting into true critical thought and debate.
Our country was founded on the ability to discuss, to dialogue, to debate, to disagree, and to be able to still come back together and formulate something that is going to be in the best benefit for everybody.
We've lost critical thinking because we've lost common sense.
We can't dialogue with one another unless it's in 248 characters on X. And even beyond that, you're going to judge a person's entire life.
As my old pastor used to say, a slip of the lip gets you hung by the tongue.
So if you say the wrong thing and you put it on a platform, well, you can never go back on any of that.
And so I think it's worth having this critical debate on all of these issues.
And there is, back to my point, there is no succinct opinion on that.
Everybody wants this thing to be a soundbite.
They want to be able to summarize it in a soundbite.
And if you can't do that, well, then you're not on my side.
And that's a problem.
I'd like to ask your opinion as we close out on an issue of political and strategic wisdom.
I don't have any of that.
No, no, no.
You have a lot of it.
Here's how I would put it.
When you create a coalition politically and you're about to put that coalition into action, into policy, It's good to find the common ground of the coalition and march forward initially on that.
Take an example.
Abortion.
If you're trying to enact laws on abortion, you don't want to start by talking about IVF. You know, or birth control, or outlawing abortion in the case of rape and incest, where you start splitting off your coalition.
You can argue about it, and it's healthy to do that, but your idea is, I'm trying to get rid of the majority of abortion, so let me start there.
Applying this logic, we fought this election on the distinction between legal and illegal.
I couldn't agree more that there's a lot of reform that needs to come in the legal side.
And by the way, the H-1B is only part of it.
I would say that this whole chain migration, where you can use family reunification to bring like 71 relatives to America, you know, over a...
I mean, this stuff needs to be stopped.
However, we told the American people, we're going to stop illegal immigration cold in its tracks, and we're going to undertake the rather laborious project of sending a bunch of these dudes home.
So my thought is, let's not fracture our coalition.
Let's get this done.
Let's get the illegals out of here.
And then, hey, listen, then we're going to talk about legal and ways of fixing legal immigration.
But if you put the legal immigration debate out front...
You jeopardize the other one a little bit, and that's not politically smart.
This is the tactic.
This is the old leftist tactic of if your 13-year-old was raped by someone, would you still be opposed to abortion?
They take the extremes.
It becomes an argument of the extremes.
You forget the fact that 98% Arguably 98% of abortion that happens in this country is because of convenience.
It's a form of birth control.
This is what we're fighting against.
This is what we're dealing with.
We're not dealing with that 1.82% of the outliers statistically that ultimately don't exist in the larger scale of things.
And that's true with every issue that we have.
It's true with the economy.
It's true with education.
It's true with this thing we're talking about with the immigration issue, alien, illegal versus legal.
All of these things, we tend to run after the outliers, because those are the extreme debates, right?
I can remember being in seminary, and what did everybody want to talk about?
Free will versus predestination.
I mean, is that really the biggest issue?
When you're 21 years old and you read a systematic theology book, suddenly that is the most important thing to debate on a college campus, right?
It's not.
The older you get, you realize it's not.
Wisdom needs to prevail.
We've lost a lot of that.
Patience and wisdom of saying, okay.
And I go back to the critical thinking deal.
And to me, the first step of critical thinking, for me personally, is I go, okay, where am I wrong on this issue?
Where am I wrong on this issue?
Am I being extreme here?
Is this taking me somewhere that I'm just looking for clicks and reactions?
Because ultimately, that's not where the problem is going to be solved.
And so I think you make a hugely important point with that, that we're tossing something out there that's going to not only disenfranchise and disenchant a lot of people, but it's going to make the ultimate thing we're trying to get accomplished get watered down.
Which I have a song out called Watered Down.
You should go get it.
See, that's become full circle.
Chad, I think we close out with you.
Give us a line or two from the song.
Let's see.
I think I speak for everyone when I say we need a break from where we've been.
Been fed a lot of lies and fear.
So, you know, it talks about where we've been.
And, you know, it's like we've gotten God out of our lives.
And it's amazing to me.
How in this culture, we've just substituted these things, as C.S. Lewis says, just playing with mud pies, you know, instead of that holiday at sea.
That's what that song's all about.
And we poke at everything from our faith to country music.
Everything's been watered down, man.
Watered down is right.
Watered down.
Yeah.
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