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Jan. 22, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MALE AND FEMALE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1005
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Thank you.
I also want to discuss the left's attempt to accuse Elon Musk of making a Nazi salute.
And I'll reveal the full significance of Trump's executive order ending transgender rights.
Gerard Filitti, Senior Counsel at the Lawfare Project, he joins me.
We're going to talk about the Biden and Trump pardons, as well as the ceasefire deal on the hostages.
Hey, if you are watching on Rumble or YouTube, please make sure you subscribe to my channel.
Also, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please share the podcast so others can find out about it.
And hey, this is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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.
Yesterday, you might have noticed that the podcast had a slightly different background, and that was because I was home.
We've had some pretty heavy snow, believe it or not, here in this, well, we think we're pretty far south.
But nevertheless, when the snow comes, everything grinds to a halt.
So I recorded from home, but I'm back in the studio, back in the studio now.
Yesterday I talked about Trump's pardon of January 6th.
Hostages, as he called them.
And some of you might have seen, I posted on this on my X feed, the remarkable interview with the young fellow who turned in his own dad to the FBI. His dad was Guy Reffet, so this is the Reffet kid.
And the kid looks like a complete delinquent.
But sure enough, there he is on CNN. And they are, you know...
They're saying, what do you think now that your dad is going to be released?
It's just so disheartening to watch.
The kid is like, yeah, I've moved.
I've gotten myself a gun.
What does this tell you?
This is a kid who...
First of all, claims to be afraid of his dad.
And initially you think, is your dad some kind of just a total psycho?
And you are genuinely and legitimately afraid of him?
Well, as the interview goes on, just in a couple of minutes, it becomes obvious that no, the kid is the one.
Who is the problem?
Because he goes on to say, oh no, my mom is supporting my dad.
She's out there helping him get out now.
And my two sisters are there too.
So the whole family is unified against this rat.
And I'm using the term rat here in the kind of sense of someone who ratted out his own dad.
So think of what twisted setup you have here.
And it seems to me that the family is just...
Rightly outraged at the behavior of somebody who has obviously been sustained by this dad and sustained by this family over all these years.
Let me say a word about the Episcopal bishop.
This is a female bishop who was some, I don't know how this really happened, but there's Trump, Melania.
In the back row, you've got Jared Kushner, and you've got Ivanka, and you've got the whole, you've got JD Vance, and here's this short-haired female bishop lecturing these guys about, you need to have compassion, you need to have mercy.
Transgender people and gay people are really scared.
The usual tedious boilerplate.
In other words, just pure intellectual garbage.
Because when you scrutinize these statements, you realize that they are coming out of nowhere.
What does a trans person really have to be afraid of?
By and large, what trans people really have to be afraid of right now is pretty much their own psychological disorders.
So yes, the suicide rate is pretty high among trans people.
That's because they're mighty screwed up.
And so there is a reason to be scared of yourself because you don't know what you might do.
You are not right in the head.
And people who are not right in the head do sometimes bad things to themselves and sometimes to others.
But does a trans person really have to fear?
Like, okay, I'm a biological male.
I can't now go in the women's bathroom.
Why should that scare me?
Or I'm a male convict.
No, I can't be put in the women's prison where I can, at the best, leer at, but at the worst, assault and rape female inmates.
That's a reason for them to fear, but not a reason for me to fear.
So the moment you subject this to any kind of critical scrutiny, you realize, and you know, of course Trump didn't say anything, but you could see he looked annoyed.
And then today he issued a blistering statement.
I mean, I love the fact that this guy is not just a policymaker.
He's not just a kind of a great negotiator, the art of the deal.
But he is also like a culture critic.
And so he goes on to talk about how rude this female so-called bishop is and how inappropriate it is for her to be using her sermon in this way.
And J.D. Vance was just giving the whole J.D. Vance look, which was like, I can't believe I'm listening to this.
None of them, of course, got up and walked out, which would have been an interesting gesture.
But this is really why the Episcopal Church is such a mess.
It's because it's full of just tiresome people like this.
Self-righteous, irritating, people who think that they're somehow morally superior to you.
Just disgusting individuals who inspire, I think, genuine and deserved revulsion in the rest of us.
Now, Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is hitting the ground.
I've said this of Trump, and I'll say the same of Elon Musk.
It looks like Doge is going to be quite effective.
And I say this because, in general, you can have these commissions to examine waste and fraud.
And there have been these before.
Under Reagan, there was something called the Grace Commission.
Which tabulated a lot of waste, but not a whole lot happened to it.
Why?
Because there are powerful institutional forces that generate this kind of waste.
You might think, for example, a bridge that doesn't serve any purpose, that nobody drives over, is a waste, and it is.
But some congressman thinks, well, I want to get 1,000 people in my district working on that bridge, and they're going to all get paid good salaries, and who cares if nobody uses the bridge?
We end up with the jobs, and so I'm going to put that into the bill.
You can say it's waste, but it's not waste to him, because to that congressman or congresswoman, it is in fact a way of buying votes, buying votes with somebody else's money.
And now Doge intends to be different, and I think perhaps will be different, because they're putting little Doge squads into every department, into every agency.
And these teams...
Are tasked with the idea of identifying the waste, identifying the fraud, exposing it, shaming the congressmen and the elected officials who are promoting it, and then proposing, working both with the Congress and with the administration to get these programs scaled back or removed.
One of the early moves of Doge...
was to recognize that most of these government bureaucrats in Washington don't even show up for work.
And I'm not even kidding.
I mean they don't show up for work at all.
They supposedly are working from home.
But it turns out that upon examination, many of these bureaucrats have taken other jobs.
One or two of them, when they faced Trump's executive order that said you have to show up for work, said things like, I can't show up for work.
I'm looking after an elderly parent.
Wait, what?
You're being paid full-time, but no, you found something else to do with your time and you want to continue to be paid for doing that.
So here's Elon Musk.
He goes, not even one government building was found to be even half-occupied.
That's crazy.
No wonder the left is freaked out by Elon Musk.
This is a guy who sort of has this kind of peculiar focus on I'm going to get it done.
And so they're trying to go after him.
Oh, he did the Nazi salute.
And all because Elon Musk just sort of throws his arm up.
Now look, Elon Musk is a little bit awkward.
He got really fired up.
This was for him a natural reaction.
But, you know, look, I'm sure you can take photos of people who are doing ballet.
Nazi salute.
You can focus on somebody who's doing karate.
Nazi salute.
You can focus on someone who's hailing a cab.
Nazi salute.
These are not Nazi salutes.
Why?
Because there's no Nazi intention behind them.
You listen to what Elon Musk was basically saying, and he even puts his hand on his heart.
Nazis don't typically do that.
Just watch a video of Nazi salutes.
There's no hand on the heart part of it.
And Elon Musk even says, in effect, my heart goes out to you, or I'm giving you my heart.
Something actually quite touching and sweet.
And couldn't be far removed from the idea of giving any kind of Nazi salute.
I simply want to point out that had Elon Musk been anti-Israel, had he called for Hamas to kill more Jews, The left would never be calling him a Nazi.
This is the way to get out of being called a Nazi, is to be anti-Israel.
So if you're against the Jewish people, and you think it's a really good idea to drive them out of Israel, from the river to the sea, if you think it's a really good idea when they get hit back by terrorists, then somehow you get immunity from the left.
So this, I think, in a nutshell, exposes the full hypocrisy of the left.
By and large, the only anti-Semites that they can find are people who are, as in this case, pro-Israel.
I mean, Elon Musk goes to, he's a friend of the Jewish people.
And he has shown it in multiple ways.
And yet he, of all people, is being called an anti-Semite.
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I want to talk about Trump's executive order on male and female.
And first of all, it is quite remarkable that we have an executive order on this topic.
The idea of male and female has been taken for granted for hundreds if not thousands of years.
And yet somehow in the last few years, maybe the last just four years, somehow we've had this idea of there being multiple...
Genders.
Notice the interesting transposition because the left doesn't talk about sex.
They talk about gender.
And gender is more fluid, more subjective than sex.
And it allows you to say that gender is pretty much what you want to be.
Your gender is how you feel about yourself.
It has no objective, scientific, biological, physical reality.
It is, so to speak, in the mind.
And all of this has generated an industry.
Now, this isn't just about ideology.
It's also big business.
All these trans surgeries, all the subsequent, really lifelong medical treatments that attend these surgeries.
Constant checkups, all kinds of implants, all kinds of hormones, the things you have to take.
The medical industry, this is a bonanza.
This is the biggest thing since plastic surgery.
And so people are getting rich off of this.
And that's what makes something powerful is when it has an ideological motor and then it also has a commercial motor and the two are running side by side.
For a while there, it seemed like this is an almost invincible trend, very disturbing, but almost impossible to defeat in our society.
But now the countercurrent has grown very strong.
And it is amazing to see this Trump really nuclear strike on this whole thing.
And I just want to read a few sentences from this executive order because it has...
That's something executive orders don't have.
It has a certain kind of scholarly elegance and eloquence to it.
It begins by noting that there has been, quote, an ongoing and purposeful attack, ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and long-standing use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable.
Immutable meaning, of course, unchangeable.
Biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self, unmoored, unattached to biological facts.
Then goes on to say, this executive order is aimed at doing two things, defending women's rights and protecting freedom of conscience.
Think of these twin ideas and how beautifully they're conjoined together here, which is we're defending women's rights, and not just women's rights, we're defending women from being embarrassed, from being harassed, from being assaulted.
And second, protect freedom of conscience.
A lot of people are bullied.
You've got to use my pronouns.
You're misgendering me.
So this kind of systematic aggression against other people.
Look, it's one thing if you want to say, you know, I think I'm really a woman.
I think I'm really for Mars.
I think I'm really a horse.
There's apparently one person who has surgically altered her face to make it look like a horse, and she does actually now resemble a horse.
You can do that stuff to yourself if you want, but you can't demand that other people then pat you on the neck and treat you like a horse.
Because that's going too far.
That's not only trying to alter your subjective reality, but you're trying to now impose that on other people by a certain type of social, if not political, coercion.
And so the executive order goes on to basically say there's sex, not gender, enough of gender.
In fact, the term gender is basically kind of, from the government's point of view, abolished.
You have women and girls and this refers to females and you have men and boys and this refers to males.
It also throws in a little zinger that female means a person belonging at conception to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
Male means a person belonging at conception to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
So this is basically a very simple...
Biological definition of sex and with a little bit of a nudge that, hey, guess what?
Not only does your humanity, life, begin at conception, but also we come into the world male and female.
We don't come into the world, no one comes into the world as a generic human being.
And it goes on to then say, That the erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.
It then goes on to say, enough of all this and all the programs that are trying to push this gender ideology are abolished from the federal government.
Not only that, but federal funds can't be used to promote gender ideology.
Every agency of the government has got to make sure that that's happening.
And it goes even further to say that institutions that receive funding, we're not just talking about government prisons because we have some private prisons in this country.
If they get any kind of federal funding, they're not going to be able to do any of this.
It also basically says that institutions that get Funding.
Universities from the government are not going to be able to use those funds to promote any kind of gender ideology.
And by and large, the executive order ends by identifying a whole bunch of things that the Biden people had put out.
And all of these are now recalled, repudiated, abolished.
So here are some of the documents that have been killed.
One, the White House Toolkit on Transgender Equality.
Gone.
The Department of Education's guidance on documents including 2024 Title IX regulations, pointers for implementation, which obviously had a transgender component, gone.
U.S. Department of Education Toolkit, creating inclusive and non-discriminatory school environments for LGBTQI plus students, gone.
Debbie and I were talking this morning about the fact that even Trump is going way beyond where he did in 2016.
And Debbie was making the point, which I agree with, She said, you know, they've created this monster.
And she doesn't mean that Trump is a monster.
He's actually a monster that we like.
He's our monster.
He's a good monster.
But the point is that he wasn't like this.
He tried to play ball with these people.
He tried to accommodate them.
He tried to...
Be easygoing with them.
And initially his agenda in 2016 was very conventional.
I'm going to focus on some tax reform.
I'm going to focus on some negotiated deals abroad.
And then they started with him.
Impeachment number one.
Legitimate phone call.
And that was somehow turned into...
You know, the problem isn't Biden corruption.
It isn't the fact that Hunter Biden's been getting $80,000 a month from an energy company in Ukraine that he has no expertise in and yet is somehow a consultant on and is actively involved with.
That's not the problem.
The problem is that Trump is asking about it.
Wow.
So from the first impeachment to the second to the attempts to jail this guy, destroy his finances, look, a normal person is going to take all that in.
And say, alright, I get the picture.
I know what I'm dealing with.
I mean, I went through in miniature a very similar experience myself, where I'm like, alright, well, American politics is no longer some kind of schoolyard debate or academic exercise.
It's been gangsterized on the other side, and Trump has experienced this gangsterization to an unbelievable degree.
In fact, to a degree that you can't compare really to anyone, I don't think, across the whole sweep.
Of American history.
So he's gotten the message and he's decided that he needs to be a different kind of man in response to it.
And I think that is the correct and understandable and appropriate response.
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He is Senior Counsel at the Lawfare Project.
He's a native of New York City.
He has degrees from NYU, the University of London, University of Michigan Law School.
He was also a scholar at the Middle East and Central Asia and a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
He's a litigator.
I mentioned the Lawfare Project.
The website is thelawfare...
Gerard, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I wanted to start by asking you about this rather interesting controversy involving Elon Musk.
Elon is up there before the crowd.
He gets really fired up.
And he flashes his arm up in the air.
He turns around, kind of does the same thing.
But then he touches his heart and he says something like, you know, my heart goes out to you or I'm saying this from the heart.
And then almost predictably a rash of insistences all across social media from AOC to many others.
Warning us very sternly that Elon has been caught doing the fascist salute, the Hitler, you know, Heil Hitler or the Sieg Heil.
What do you make of this rather remarkable turn of events?
Well, are we surprised that the far left has engaged in character assassination based on a hand gesture that's taken out of context?
We've seen this for years now.
And you pointed out, as you pointed out, you know, he was touching his heart.
It came from the heart.
That was not a fascist salute.
Now, if the mainstream media wanted to be accurate about this, they'd look at pictures of, oh, I don't know, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, pretty much anyone on the left doing the exact same gesture.
But they weren't called out as fascists.
It's Elon Musk.
There's this obsession.
And that's the narrative that the media is still playing.
I mean, this reached a kind of absurd height when AOC began to lecture the ADL. Now, I mean, the ADL is not exactly a right-wing organization, but the ADL was like, listen, we've taken a look at this.
Elon Musk is not doing a Hitler salute.
Kind of, let's cool it.
This is a new era.
Let's try to understand the other side a little bit.
So a very innocuous comment by the ADL. And then AOC jumps in and is essentially telling the ADL that they don't know what antisemitism is, but Xi apparently does.
Well, Xi and the squad know exactly what antisemitism is because they encourage it, they practice it.
So they're experts.
If anything, they should be called out for what they're doing, but they're not.
The media attention is on Elon Musk.
The media attention is on Donald Trump.
All of this is just to distract from the issues that we're facing, from actually governing the country.
It's distracting from policy and implementing policy.
They're focusing on something that even the Jewish people don't think is anti-Semitic.
All right, let's talk about the ceasefire deal.
It seems to be one of these things that, I mean, it's a relief that there is a deal and there's obviously an elation about the return of hostages.
But at the same time, it seems like Israel gave up a lot in that deal.
I mean, I always marvel at the fact that you've got Hamas, they're on the ropes, they're getting pummeled, they have no hope of winning.
Normally, at that point, you kind of give in, and you basically tell the winning side, you know, you have your way, or you can set the terms of the agreement.
But I'm kind of amazed that Hamas is able to pull off these deals in which, you know, it's like, I'll give up one, you give up 30.
You know, Israel gives up a lot more than it gets, it seems.
And how do you how do you read this?
Would you have signed that deal?
I would not have signed that deal.
But then again, I don't have a family member or a national of my country that's being held hostage.
Well, we do have Americans being held hostage.
That's a separate topic, why Joe Biden hasn't done more to get Americans home.
The deal sucks.
I hate using that word, but that's the simple word.
The deal sucks for Israel.
Hamas is empowered and emboldened.
For every hostage that they took illegally, they're getting between 30 and 50 terrorists who are convicted of crimes released from Israel's jails.
And we know what's going to happen with those terrorists.
They're going back to terror.
Yahya Sinwar, who led Hamas, was one of those people who was released from an Israeli jail in a prisoner exchange.
A prisoner exchange for a hostage years ago, a decade ago.
And now we're seeing that again.
And on Sunday, we saw scenes of...
Thousands of people at that exchange, when the young women were taken drugged from the Hamas vehicle and into the Red Cross vehicle, they had machine guns, they were waving them in the air, they were celebrating, they were praising Hamas.
Hamas isn't defeated, they're just rebuilding.
And that's what they will continue to do for the next six weeks of this deal.
So this is really a bad deal for Israel, but it also shows the high price that that state is willing to pay for its people.
Did you see the report?
I spotted something this morning, and you might know more about this than me, but it was a rather striking account that some of the hostages, I believe three, were being sheltered, not in some hideaway tunnel in Gaza, but in a UN compound.
And evidently the UN did not...
See fit to tell the world, hey, we got three hostages.
They were, it seems, either complicit or doing Hamas' work for them, or maybe they made some kind of arrangement.
Listen, these people will be safe in your care, but you've got to agree not to say a word.
Have you heard about this, and what do you make of it?
We saw this earlier with a previous hostage exchange that they were actually being held by an UNRWA, United Nations Relief Works Agency employee.
They're meant to provide aid to Gaza.
These are the same UN employees who are the teachers in Gaza.
They provided textbooks, the same textbooks that count math by how many dead Jews are on a page.
That has fostered Jew hatred, a hatred of Israel that's led to generations of hate and terrorism.
So these are the people who were involved.
We've seen very credible allegations that UN employees...
Crossed over into Israel on October 7th itself, not to mention people masquerading as reporters for certain outlets.
So this just shows you the problem really is the United Nations.
They have fostered hatred of Israel.
They encourage it to this day through their agencies, not just in Gaza, but also in Lebanon.
Let's not forget that the UN peacekeeping force allowed Hezbollah to militarize on the border, which was prohibited by a peace treaty, and they did nothing about it.
So really, we have a problem with the United Nations, which is why we're so happy to have Elise Stefanik there.
We're happy to have Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel.
We're happy to have Marco Rubio at state.
People who understand that the problem isn't just terrorists in Gaza, it's the UN which encourages it.
I was watching a little bit of the Stefanik confirmation hearing this morning.
And one of the senators was trying to do a gotcha on her by saying, in effect, do you believe that based upon some reading of the Bible, that the West Bank is part of Israel?
And I found this to be really quite remarkable because the implication here was that it is some weird theological point that the West Bank is part of Israel.
And Eli Stefanik was like...
Yes, I do believe that.
And you could see the senator register a little surprise on his face because I think he thought he had her kind of up against the wall.
But I don't think that he realized that the idea that this is in fact Jewish land, I mean, Israel may have decided for prudential reasons, all right, we're going to let the Palestinian Authority, you know, run it over here and, you know, Hamas run it over there.
But this guy was implying that somehow the idea that all of this is part of Israel is merely lifted straight out of the Old Testament and has no other grounding other than that.
The Old Testament, as we have seen through archaeology for decades now, is a record of history.
And if you look at history, let's put this in terms the woke left understands.
Jews are indigenous to Judea.
Judea is...
Part of Judea is what is today the West Bank.
So this is the homeland of the Jewish people for centuries.
This is also part of what was promised to them through the Balfour Declaration, through what we saw at the end of World War I, promises that were not kept by the international community.
That was a recognition that the West Bank had been part of the Jewish homeland.
So what Elise Stefanik is saying is completely accurate.
This is part of the Jewish experience.
You don't need to make it sound evangelical or religious.
It's history.
It's fact.
Denial of this fact is what's led to so much animosity against Jewish people everywhere, including as we've seen on college campuses here in the U.S. Very interesting.
Let's pivot, Gerard, if we may, to this issue of pardons.
You have side by side the Biden pardons, the pardon of the January 6th committee members, of Liz Cheney, of Mark Milley.
Very interesting pardons, it seems, because the implication here is seemingly that these people, I mean, Biden said that they could be targeted, but the point is, obviously he was worried they could be prosecuted and convicted.
And if you're worried that somebody could be prosecuted and convicted...
Presumably, you think that they did something that would withstand judicial scrutiny and would get juries to go along with those convictions.
On the other hand, we have the Trump pardons.
Let's have a comment, if I may, about the Biden pardons, and I want to ask you about the Trump pardons of January 6th defendants.
Well, the Biden pardons really are unprecedented.
You're pardoning people who have not been accused or charged or convicted of a crime.
You're giving them blanket pardons, including Biden's family, which is even more bizarre.
You're making these blanket pardons on the fear that they might be investigated for something that they did wrong.
Where does this come from?
This comes from the realization that Democrats are having that lawfare works both ways.
They went after Trump and his supporters.
They went after so many people in the legal system, abusing the legal system for the last four years, that now they realize, oh, no, we lost.
They might use the same tactics against us.
So let's pardon everyone who may have been involved in wrongdoing.
It sends the message that where there's smoke, there's fire.
You don't need a pardon if you have, you know, if you've done something, if you've actually done nothing wrong.
Wrongfully convicted people, it happens all the time.
They need pardons.
They deserve pardons.
People who are disproportionately charged or punished, like the J6 defendants.
Some of whom were the full weight of the government went down on them to go after them using charges that the Supreme Court said were inappropriate just to punish them, to get them in prison in a politically motivated prosecution.
So that's where we see the difference.
We see Biden pardoning people who are not charged with anything, not convicted of anything, and Donald Trump issuing pardons to people who suffered the justice system and were abused through it.
I mean, there were well over 1,500 people arrested on January 6th and prosecuted.
Now, there were some cases of violence.
Even the cases of violence, when you look a little more closely, turn out to be a little ambiguous.
In other words, in some cases, the policemen start firing pellets into the crowd or they use a shield against somebody and somebody raises their hand to block.
And this is supposedly fighting against the cops.
But leaving all that aside, the vast majority of the people there were peaceful.
They not only didn't fight with cops, they didn't harm anybody, they didn't break anything, they in fact stayed rather cautiously between the ropes.
And so these days when I see reporters yelling out at Trump, saying in effect, you know, how is it that you're pardoning people who are fighting with the cops?
There is an implicit concession.
That in all the other cases, these pardons are more than justified for the simple reason that these people have been prosecuted as felons.
In some cases, they've been incarcerated for long periods of time prior to trial, then facing long sentences after the trial.
And Trump, I think, just decided enough is enough.
Do you think that was the right call?
I think it was.
And it also points to the double standard that we've seen.
We saw in the summer when Trump was president, we saw in the summer of BLM, we saw the protests, the righteous anger that turned into illegal violence.
We saw occupation of federal buildings.
We saw attacks on police stations.
And the government didn't go after those people with the same resources, with the same vengeance that we saw with J6. And the conduct is remarkably similar.
Yet when it's people who are indignant at a vote and they're going into the Capitol, yes, the conduct was illegal.
But did a lot of these people deserve to have their lives completely upended under major felony charges?
Probably not.
So I think you see Donald Trump righting a wrong.
Yeah, and I think there were commutations in a handful of cases, but I think in most cases the pardons are...
I mean, I know something about this because I got into an issue with the Obama administration over campaign finance issues.
A pardon is really great because it wipes the record clean and restores your rights in full.
Because, you know, if you get a commutation, all right, you're out of jail.
But guess what?
You're still a felon.
You can't travel comfortably abroad.
You're generally stopped at the airport.
Your passport gets a big X sign.
You have a parole officer who drops by and asks you things like, do you have a weapon in the house, sir?
And so you still have a little bit of a legal millstone around your neck, but a pardon clears all that out.
And so I'm glad to see that some of these people have a real chance to put their life back together.
And as you pointed out, the ones who are engaged in actual violence, the ones whose convictions I think were very much appropriate, they're not pardoned.
Their sentences are commuted.
So they still have that stigma.
They still have those consequences.
And that's more than we can say for a lot of other people who've broken the law that have never been prosecuted under any administration.
Guys, I've been talking to Gerard Filitti, the Senior Counsel at The Lawfare Project, thelawfareproject.org.
That's the website.
You can follow him on x at Gerard, G-E-R-A-R-D-F-I-L-I-T-T-I. Gerard, great having you, and thank you very much for joining me.
A pleasure, Dinesh.
Thank you so much for having me.
We are now in the middle of the book, The Big Lie, a chapter called...
Disposable people.
And in the next chapter or two, we're going to be talking about some fairly gruesome things, but these are gruesome things that connect the Democrats in America and the left with the fascists and the Nazis.
And we focus so far on issues like slavery, on racism, and it's worth noting that the Contours of these issues shifts over the years.
We don't have slavery in the old sense, but we do have certain types of slavery in the world today, including some sex trafficking, which in a sense involves human possession, human use of someone as an object, so there's a clear connection to the idea of slavery.
Now, racism is different in that The Democrats have new types of plantations.
They don't have the old slave plantations.
What do they have?
They have the ghettos.
They have the barrios.
They have the Indian reservations.
And they're making an effort, an effort admittedly interrupted in this election by Donald Trump, to create democratic plantations of a new kind, plantations throughout the country.
I think ultimately the Democrats wouldn't even mind having poor whites on a plantation.
The characteristic issue here is dependency.
And this is a similarity and a difference from the old days because, of course, the slaves were also dependent.
But the slaves were not dependent in this sense, that masters did very little and slaves did all the work.
So the slaves cultivated skills, and work was, of course, mandatory, was a requirement for the slaves.
Notice that today Democrats like to have the people on their plantation not work.
They would rather have you dependent on them for a livelihood, because this way they are guaranteed of your subservience and your vote.
See, right now, you can't legally leave the plantation.
You can get up and go.
In a way that the old slaves couldn't get up and leave the plantation because there would be slave patrols that would chase them down, capture them, and return them to the plantation, probably with some whippings for doing what they did, for being a runaway.
But now that the slaves, or at least now that the would-be dependents can leave, the Democrats have got to create incentives for you not to leave.
Hence the please don't work.
Hence the let us take care of you.
Hence the continuing In some cases, intergenerational dependency.
But let's move on now to this issue of disposable people.
And the kind of key thing that we think about when we talk about disposable people, certainly in the case of the Nazis, we think about the death camps.
I mean, think about people...
Not just Jews, but others being fed into these death camps where you are initially, in some cases, murdered by being shot.
And then later, of course, the introduction of various forms of chemical gas.
Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide gas, and the horrors of the so-called death camps.
And where were the death camps?
I mentioned earlier, these were not in Germany.
There was Treblinka, Chelno, Belzec, Sobibor.
These are some of the death camps.
Carbon monoxide was used, so was Zyklon B gas.
But before the Nazi death camps, there was something else.
There was a kind of program that has been called a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.
And that is something that has been largely lost to history, but it's important we recover it because we will see a parallel happening in America with the Democratic Party and with the progressive left.
I'm talking about the attempt to euthanize or kill large numbers of people who were considered unfit, either physically unfit, mentally unfit, people who were seen as defective in some ways later.
In America, Margaret Sanger would call those same people human weeds.
So in 1933, the year the Nazis took power, they issued, this is the law for the prevention of offspring with hereditary diseases.
What is it?
A forced sterilization program.
If you are an imbecile, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, blind, deaf, people diagnosed with some kind of deformity, drug and alcohol addicts, okay.
You're not going to be killed, but you are going to be sterilized.
350,000 Germans sterilized between 1933 and 1939. In 1939, when World War II began, the sterilization law had a new amendment, and that is the euthanasia law, because by this time the Nazis already had concentration camps and they had just set up their death camps.
And these gas chambers, these first gas chambers, We're not used to kill Jews.
Very interesting.
They were used to kill the physically and mentally ill.
These were the original disposable people.
I guess that's the point I'm trying to make.
I'm quoting a historian.
The gas chambers were not developed for concentration camps, but for the medical killing facilities of the euthanasia program.
Now, the early gas chambers were kind of small.
They weren't.
They weren't as expansive.
They weren't as industrial as later the subsequent ones that were constructed for really mass-scale murder.
Murder of Jews, gypsies, and also many others.
But the procedures were the same.
The small gas chambers and the large gas chambers differed only in size, not really in what they did.
Now, the procedures were kind of simple.
You come in, you're given a medical diagnosis.
Quite frankly, if you have gold in your teeth, out comes the gold.
The Nazis want to hang on to that.
And then these people were put into rooms and poison gas was generally fed out of trucks.
So the trucks contained the gas.
The gas was pumped into these rooms and that was it.
The lesson here is that the Nazi euthanasia program and the Nazi final solution are totally linked.
In fact, they are one in the same program.
One was expanded into the other.
One of the veterans later of Auschwitz, in fact a guy who would have fit very well into the scheme I've just described, is Joseph Mengele.
Many people don't know that when Mengele later fled to Argentina, this was after the war, he became an abortionist.
Is that a big surprise?
Not exactly, because what had he been doing?
Experimenting with victims at Auschwitz, conducting all kinds of macabre and disgusting experiments.
He would take twins, he would inject them with...
With all kinds of substances to see if they reacted in exactly the same way.
He would not hesitate to even perform surgeries on them, again, to test the effect.
The interesting thing here is Mengele didn't see himself as some kind of a monster, not at all.
Later, his son was interviewed, and you can find the interview even online.
And Mengele basically, the son says of his father, he goes, you know, my dad saw himself as a progressive.
He thought of himself as a scientist.
He saw himself as conducting the latest types of studies that kind of on the cutting edge to make advances in medical research.
He said he didn't see himself as responsible for Auschwitz.
He's like, whether or not I was there, the killing was still going to go on.
So since they were going to be doing this anyway.
He didn't see any problem with stepping in and kind of using the human fodder, as he saw it, in Auschwitz for medical research.
Now, I mentioned that the Nazis had appended to their original program of sterilization a new program of euthanasia, but I should point out that this term euthanasia is completely misleading.
In this context, because let's think about what euthanasia means.
I mean, I don't support it, but euthanasia means mercy killing.
The idea here is that you've got someone who's really old, they're really sick, they are in terrible pain, and for them, death comes as a relief.
At least that, in theory, is the idea of euthanasia.
It implies that this is the person who wants to die.
They're under extreme circumstances.
They're giving their consent, or if they can't give it, a trusted family member is giving it.
So this is somehow an act of relief, an act of compassion.
Notice that this has nothing to do with the Nazi program at all.
It's called the euthanasia program, but there's no attempt here to relieve suffering.
There's no attempt here to obtain consent.
It is just a systematic program of murder and butchery.
It's like, we don't want these people.
We want to get rid of them.
Let's basically, as the old mafia would say, let's whack them.
Let's get rid of them.
And euthanasia is just a kind of useful word that is being deployed for this practice.
It's a cosmetic term, as the historian Michael Burley puts it, it's a cosmetic term for murder.
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