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Feb. 13, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:23
BETRAYED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1021
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up to illuminate our current situation, I'm going to expound on the meaning of the story of the man who wanted to be left alone.
A giant shift is underway regarding our relationship to the government.
I'll tell you what it is.
And former Democratic strategist Lindy Lee joins me.
We're going to talk about why she switched sides and is now firmly in the conservative camp.
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There is a new sensibility, a new venom, a new force driving the right in American politics today.
You see it with the Trump administration.
There is a ferocity to these guys that we haven't seen in politics probably in our lifetimes, even though I sometimes hearken back to early Reagan.
Reagan came in with a certain type of serene confidence, and there was a sense that new possibilities were introduced because of the failures of the Carter years, but you didn't have this kind of gritty drive, almost a...
A sense of a new group of people.
And to some degree, we are talking about new people.
When you think about people like RFK Jr., Elon Musk, these are not people traditionally on the right.
So there is a rearrangement of forces going on.
But I want to highlight the aggressive, no-holds-barred temperament.
of the Trumpsters.
And it's not just the Trumpsters in the government.
It's the Trumpsters who support the Trumpsters in the government, not to mention Trump himself.
I think all of this can be illuminated by a short passage, Author Unknown, that talks about the man who wanted to be left alone.
And I want to read and comment on the passage because I think it tells us something about where we are today.
The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of men who wanted to be left alone.
They try so very hard to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love.
They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it.
They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them are over.
The moment the men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide.
They are literally killing off who they used to be, which is why when forced to take up violence, these men who wanted to be left alone fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives.
They fight with raw hate and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely...
Play acting at politics and terror.
True terror will arrive at these people's door and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy, but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the men who wanted to be left alone.
Now this is almost a nihilistic battle cry.
You've destroyed my life.
I have nowhere to go.
And so I'm now going to go the only place I know where to go, namely after you.
And frankly, I don't care about you anymore.
And all your usual appeals to civility, compassion, consideration, I just don't care.
You see a little bit of this attitude, by the way, in a very small way with the kid.
This is the 25-year-old who made some racist remarks.
Oh, I don't like Indians.
And the reaction of me and many others, we don't care.
It's not even really about consistency because if it was someone on the other side, we would care.
We would expose them.
We would demand that they resign and be fired.
So if we're accused of double standards, who cares?
This is not about logical consistency.
We have a kid who is part of a team that's fixing the government.
That's what's important.
If he doesn't like Indians, who cares?
So this is the sensibility of mobilized people whose way of life is at stake and who are fighting as if their lives depend upon it because it does.
Here is a guy, and it's no exaggeration to say that the left tried to end his life, end his life as he knows it, lock him up for life, put him out of business, not just out of politics, put him out of life itself.
So why is Trump fighting with this kind of a vengeance?
Because to some degree, He fits in with this prototype of the men who wanted to be left alone.
And the MAGA sensibility comes out of that.
Why is it the case that we want everybody connected with January 6th pardoned?
We don't care if some of them had violent altercations with the cops.
So what?
All their civil rights were violated.
Let them all go.
And frankly, our desire to root out corruption on the part of the left is a little bit of a no-holds-barred operation.
Debbie and I were talking recently, and Debbie's like, well, you know, sometimes there probably are some good ideas in these programs.
Yeah, who cares?
We're taking the whole edifice down, and sure, a lot of good stuff is going to go with it, but the blame for getting rid of the good stuff lies with the people who mixed up so many bad things with the good stuff, put in so many bad apples into the bucket, so to speak.
That we're throwing all the apples out.
There's no other way to clean this up except to empty the barrel and then one by one starting to put good apples back in an empty bucket.
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I want to continue my discussion by focusing on an article by Jeffrey Tucker.
Very smart guy.
An old buddy of mine and someone I've had on the podcast before.
This is an article published by the Brownstone Institute.
It's called The Most Dramatic Narrative Shift in Modern History.
And I think it beautifully describes the way in which underneath all the retail things that are going on, something's going on here, something's going on there, what is the big picture of all this?
Well, it's spelled out, I think, beautifully in this article.
The big shift, according to Jeffrey Tucker, is that the whole perception of the government is radically changing, and in fact has radically changed, and our politics is now a reflection of this.
He says, look, for decades, really going back to FDR, but certainly intensifying in the post-Reagan period, government, Government was invoked as a friend.
Government was portrayed as the ally of the ordinary fellow.
Government was seen as someone that protected, that supported, and that empowered.
This was in fact the mantra of the Democratic Party.
This was what drove the Obama movement, and of course, this is also the rhetoric of Biden and Harris.
Government defends the poor, empowers the marginalized, achieves social justice, levels a playing field, guarantees rights.
By the way, this doctrine was laid out by FDR himself in his famous, or some degree infamous, speech on the Second Bill of Rights.
This is not mentioned in the article.
This is just me talking.
But FDR said that the Bill of Rights is inadequate because the Bill of Rights is essentially nothing more than a series of limitations on the government.
In fact, it treats the government as the enemy of rights, which it was in the minds of the founders.
But, says FDR, the government can be the friend of rights.
It can guarantee rights.
What's the point of having rights if you don't have someone to make sure you have the means?
To exercise those rights.
This was the foundation for FDRs, you know, the right not to be hungry, the right to have a provision for your retirement.
Essentially, this is the intellectual foundation for the expanding welfare state.
And the government was seen here as the corrector of the market, the regulator of the market, guaranteeing things like safety.
Redistribution of wealth away from pockets of wealth accumulation, protecting minorities.
And all of this changed, says Jeffrey Tucker, but what was the main thing that made it change?
According to Tucker, and I think he's right here, it was COVID. Now this is to me highly ironic because my mind flashes back to something Jane Fonda said when she said COVID is God's gift to the left.
And it turns out that that was true, but only in the short term.
It was true in the short term because they could do the lockdowns, they could do the censorship, they could rig the 2020 election, and they benefited from that.
But, this is where Jeffrey Tucker is going, in the long run, COVID is God's gift to the right.
Why?
Well, let's look at it.
Basically, the left decided under COVID, we are not just going to establish command over, as with Obama, Let's say the insurance sector or the financial sector or the healthcare sector.
No!
We are going to command the entire society.
In fact, we're going to command the entire planet.
We're going to control even the microbes of the planet, the viruses, everything that moves is under our control.
And we're going to regulate it.
We're going to show you how it's done.
And we're going to control you in the process.
Now, this formula...
Would have been pretty powerful had it worked.
Had they produced something that prevented people from getting COVID? Had they produced a vaccine that was efficacious?
People would have said, wow, the government saved my life.
The government prevented me from getting COVID and dying from COVID. But instead, they didn't protect you.
And they created this dystopian world in which they mobilized all the sectors of society.
To control you, to destroy your livelihood, to block you, to even shut down your opinions, your dissenting opinions.
This is the meaning, says Jeffrey Tucker, of the term public health.
Because public health is not just about health.
It's public health because the whole society, and in fact you even heard it from the government, we're using a whole of society approach.
And that means...
Control your livelihood.
Control your movements.
Control your money.
Control your physical appearance, because you've got to put on a mask.
Control what goes into your body.
Surveillance.
Control your movements.
Absolutely a kind of totalitarian form of control.
And all the sectors of society that were supposed to protect us.
What about the courts?
The courts went completely silent.
In fact, the courts themselves were shut down.
And schools were shut down.
Small businesses were shut down.
But who was left open?
Only the agencies that serviced the administrators who ran the show.
If they wanted to go to a massage parlor, the massage parlor was open.
They wanted to go to a bar, the bar was open.
So you have a collusion between...
Powerful people in the government and their partners in high tech, in the pharmaceutical industry, in the food industry, in the banking industry, in the corporate sector.
This became one class of society, the ruling class.
They didn't care about the Constitution.
They didn't care about basic rights.
They essentially divided the world into essential things and non-essential things.
And the real definition is that essential things are things that they wanted.
And non-essential things are things everybody else wanted.
So it was almost an old form of renewal under new conditions of an old type of feudalism.
We were the serfs and they were the overlords.
And nothing could have been more clear, even though they kept saying this is for our health, this is for our welfare, we pretty much realized that no, if you can't bury a loved one, You can't go see someone in the hospital.
If your wedding is canceled, if your gym is closed, substance abuse is skyrocketing and nobody cares.
So while all of this is going on, it makes you wonder, who are these people who are running the show?
Who are these overlords?
What gives them the right?
Who picked them?
Who chose them?
They don't seem to be serving the public.
Are these the people that we actually...
It turns out that we realize that it isn't.
We didn't choose these people.
You know, people now say, and some on the left, who elected Elon Musk?
And that's a good question to ask, because it has an answer.
Elon Musk actually gets his power delegated from an elected person, which is Trump.
He's directly, not only is he directly appointed by Trump, but Trump and him campaign together on doing the things that he's doing.
So this was put before the American people.
Now ask a different question.
Who elected Fauci?
Who elected the administrators of these agencies like the FDA, the FCC, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?
Who elects all these people?
Who gives them the power?
Who delegates to them specifically the power to make the rules that they do?
And the answer is nobody.
They might have been set up by Congress with general directives, but no one told them that they can do all the things that they're doing.
That is not laid out in any law.
it's quite accurate to say that these are truly lawless organizations.
For the first time, I think in our lifetime, we're beginning to see that government itself is a kind of criminal enterprise.
It is engaged in systematic looting of the taxpayer.
It is utterly indifferent to the fact that people spend thousands of hours of their waking lives to work.
It steals the product of that labor and squanders it or redirects it to projects that directly benefit, directly or indirectly, benefit the decision makers themselves.
And so, in some ways, all of the ideological mumbo-jumbo that we've been hearing, from me included, over the past couple of decades has to be somewhat revised, right?
This is not simply Republican versus Democrat.
This is not liberty versus equality.
This is not a case of Keynesianism versus monetarism.
At some level, what we're dealing with here is the government has become a massive thievery operation and a massive operation of social control, not for your benefit, but for its own benefit.
So, this is not the...
The normal ideological boundaries, let's say that divide Republican and Democrat, become a little more blurred.
Not that there aren't important differences between the parties.
The Republicans do try to restrain these things, but on the other hand, many of them also benefit from this thievery enterprise.
And so we're seeing, I think now, in a new way...
Starting with COVID, but now continuing with the expose of government that is underway, that the world works, and I'm now quoting Jeffrey Tucker, everyone was forced to realize the world worked in a very different way from what we had been told.
And not only that, but the people who have screwed up massively under COVID, think about it.
How many of them have come forward and said, you know, We really made a lot of bad decisions.
They can't say that.
They won't admit it, and they won't apologize.
Why?
Because if they apologized, the next step would be in accounting.
What went wrong?
Who made those bad decisions?
How do we prevent them from occurring again?
How do we revamp these agencies?
They don't want any of this.
They don't want you to be going inside of these agencies.
Like the NIH and asking, well, why are we actually manufacturing these deadly viruses?
And even worse, why are we giving money to countries like Ukraine and China to create these deadly viruses, even though in places like China, the...
The scientific industry is wedded to the military industry.
These are our adversaries and we are subsidizing their creation of potential biological weapons.
So the reason that there's just no accountability is because the people in charge don't want that kind of accountability.
They want accountability for us.
That's why they want, you know, let's hire Tens of thousands of new IRS agents.
Let's audit citizens' transactions, even as low as $600.
We need to see what's going on.
We need to make sure that you're not cheating the government.
But we're doing nothing to make sure that the government isn't cheating you.
We don't want an audit of the government, these people say.
They want the unaccountability of aristocracy.
We're better than you.
We're the ruling class.
We operate by a different set of rules.
So all their talk about no one is above the law is pure distraction.
We shouldn't even try to, in a way, refute it because there are some things that are so absurd that trying to refute them draws you into the game, makes you, in a sense, a sucker.
Because you're now fighting over something that is manifestly absurd.
If someone says up is down and down is up, you stand on your head, you try to show them that no, it isn't that way.
This is the distraction that government is doing to us.
And, says Jeffrey Tucker, When you sum it up, it's a crime against humanity, what these people have done.
Now the good news is we're trying to track them.
We're trying to figure out who got the money.
And we're finding racket upon racket upon racket.
And it involves people not just in the government, but outside the government.
The newspapers, who we thought were like keeping a check on the government and chronicling the government.
Yeah, they might be biased.
They might even be doing some fake news.
The point is, they're on the take.
They're being bankrolled.
They are getting money under the table from the government.
The censors aren't protecting us.
They're protecting themselves.
The inspectors are in on the game.
The courts that are supposed to be a check on power and a protector of our rights are enabling this government ripoff.
Look at USAID, graphed on a scale that's almost unimaginable.
And now we have the receipts.
This is the point.
Tucker's conclusion, I think, is not exaggerated here, and that is the entire system of government is kind of unraveling before our eyes.
And he goes on to point out that what we're seeing emerging because of the presence of prominent Democrats, former Democrats, in our camp, and I'm going to be...
Actually talking to a Democrat, a Democratic strategist and fundraiser who raised money for the Democratic Party has now come over to the Trump side.
This is going to be fascinating.
But Tucker says that we're seeing the emergence of a de facto third party.
Now, this may be slightly overstated.
I think this is a party of the right, but it is a party of the right engrafted with certain people on the left.
Or formerly on the left who are strengthening our ranks.
So we're celebrating and we have a right to celebrate because something is breaking open.
That's a very good thing.
But the people who are fighting back are the people who are protecting this entrenched privilege.
The establishment media, the NGOs, the bureaucrats in the government.
But the people on the other side, and we now have a force, we've become a force to contend with, independent media, the genuine grassroots, the deplorables, the non-essentials, the pillaged and the oppressed, the so-called peasants of the old feudal system are finally picking up their pitchforks and rising up in revolt.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Lindy Lee.
She is a prominent political strategist.
In fact, for a long time, she was a strategist and fundraiser for the Democratic Party, raised millions of dollars for Biden and Harris.
but now she has become a prominent critic of the DNC and its wasteful and misguided policies.
We've seen her on MSNBC and CNN and Fox News and News Nation.
By the way, you can follow her on x at Lindy, L-I-N-D-Y, Lee L-I.
Lindy, welcome.
Thank you for joining me today.
Yours is a really fascinating story, and I want to...
Come to the question of your disillusionment with the Democratic Party, but let's start with the opposite, which is the illusionment part, if you will, or how you became a Democrat in the first place.
I heard somewhere that your parents fled from communism.
I did.
And you did.
We all did together, yes.
Okay, so now we have...
To me, a little bit of a mystery, which is you have a refugee from communism.
By and large, those kinds of people tend to be conservative.
They tend to be Republican.
You, on the other hand, were an enthusiastic part of the Democratic Party.
So talk about what it is about your background, your interests.
What appealed to you about the Democrats in the first place?
Dinesh, first of all, thank you so much for having me.
I watched your journey over the last couple of years and you are just a bastion.
You are unstoppable and no one can take you down.
You are like the ultimate survivor.
So, thank you for having me.
Well, I grew up in Philadelphia.
This is a hugely democratic city.
There's not really an option to be a Republican.
I don't know how much time you and your viewers have spent in this city, but being a Republican here is pretty much anathema.
And I went to an extremely liberal university where I think you could count the number of Republicans on your hands.
So it didn't occur to me that being a Republican was an option.
I just always labeled myself as a conservative Democrat.
And up until maybe five years ago, it was an okay thing to be.
But especially in the past decade, the Democratic Party has lurched so far to the left with this trans and woke and bathroom nonsense and men and women's sports.
This wasn't the case 10 years ago when I first started getting heavily involved, right?
Dinesh, this is a recent development.
And the woke coalition has completely hijacked.
The Democratic Party, they are insane about identity politics.
They label me as AANHPI. No, I am American.
I'm not a hyphenated American.
I am American.
Over the last couple of years, I've been starting to voice my frustrations, but they just don't care because you've got to toe the party line.
Nothing else is acceptable.
Lindy, let me throw out an idea to you, which I want you to reflect upon, which is, I've thought over my career about Asian Americans, loosely speaking, as a group.
And of course, we all understand that in Asia, there's no such thing as, you know, an Asian category.
It's a very big continent.
But nevertheless, I think to myself that, by and large, in Asia...
People are socially quite conservative.
They believe in merit.
They believe in family.
They believe in tight-knit communities.
Tribalism, in some ways, is not a bad word to the degree that it involves self-help.
So they believe all these things.
And yet I think that because Asian Americans as a group value education so highly, and precisely because we care about merit, we dispatch our kids to the very best and most elite universities in the country, right?
Which happen to be liberal.
Which happen to be liberal.
And in fact, not only happen to be liberal, but...
Assimilation takes on a new meaning in a liberal college or in a city like Philadelphia.
Because why?
You assimilate to the ruling class of those universities and to the political powers that be in those cities.
And so as a result, assimilation means assimilating to the left and to the Democratic Party.
And it seems like what you're saying is that for much of your adult life...
You were trying to negotiate that.
You were trying to maintain moderate and conservative values inside of a coalition that was pulling you further and further to the left.
Is that an accurate summary of what was happening to you?
First of all, you're brilliant.
I don't know why no one has articulated the theory that you just laid out.
Asian Americans, especially Indian and Chinese Americans, were obsessed with the Ivy League.
Let's be honest.
Are we not?
It's true.
And the Ivy League is famously liberal, and that is where we spent our most formative years.
And so I actually first came into the public consciousness because I went to war with the left.
That's how I became known.
I went to war with the far left five years ago.
So I've been warring the left for most of my adult life.
And since then, the party has been just subsumed into the LGBTQI, I mean, I'm like just saying it's ridiculous, the LGBTQI plus worshipping coalition.
There's nothing else.
It's like they're overweening mission in life.
And I just, it's not me.
In some ways, Lindy, isn't it true that, you know, by and large, the Asian American temperament is supposed to be somewhat accommodating?
If not submissive, right?
And they probably thought that they could count on you to raise money for the Democratic Party and not raise, you know, not make a noise about it and not take on the favorite.
So the moment you did that, I think they were probably a little stunned and they probably thought, what do we do?
We've got to figure out a way to beat this woman into submission, right?
Isn't that what you experienced?
This is so therapeutic.
This is probably one of the most therapeutic interviews I've had.
Because I think as a fellow Asian American, you totally get it.
We are the rule followers.
We kowtow.
We follow authority.
That's the way that we've been told to act all our lives.
But this harkens back to Newton's, their law of motion.
Right?
For every action, there's an opposite and equal reaction.
I've been so sick and tired of staying quiet.
About Biden, about Harris, about the Democratic Party.
I've been actually secretly leaking to the press for years.
But this is the first year, the first, you know, the first time that I'm putting my face and my reputation on the line and saying these things.
But I was sufficiently alarmed about Biden and Harris for years that I, you know, I was leaking into Politico.
I have friends there.
And I wanted to give voice to my concerns that we shouldn't have a president in such significant cognitive decline.
We shouldn't have a president who struggled to complete sentences.
Actually, I hosted Biden on May 1st at the Mayflower in D.C. Are we allowed to curse on here?
I always ask because I have such a potty up.
We may have to zap it, but go for it.
We'll fix it.
Don't worry about it.
Let me make it more applaudable.
He was trashing India.
In Japan, our allies, US allies, as xenophobic.
This was supposed to be a very peaceful event, but he made news, perhaps inadvertently, because he didn't realize or didn't remember that you should not be trashing your allies in public, or ever.
These are just the rookie mistakes that Biden is prone to make, you know?
What do you think?
I mean, let's back up, Lindy, and think about Biden for a moment, because obviously the Democrats, if they could...
Would much rather have a guy like Obama, because Obama, for all his flaws, is obviously a suave character.
He's much more presentable in public.
In fact, for much of his term, I don't think he governed that much to the center, but he acted like he was at least considering centrist points of view.
He was always scratching his head as if he's wrestling with the issue and so on.
Did the Democrats go with Biden because they had no one else after Obama?
How did Biden even get to the forefront?
Well, let's remember that he had a shellacking in Iowa.
He came in third in Iowa and he came in fifth in New Hampshire and everyone thought he was done.
But then James Clyburn came to the rescue and injected some life support into his moribund campaign.
So that's how we got, you know.
Stuck with Biden.
And he was the moderate that people were looking for because we were so terrified of Sanders.
So I supported Biden because I didn't want a socialist as president.
I was terrified of the idea that Bernie Sanders could become president.
And at that time, if you remember, about five years ago, people loved him.
There was a massive movement behind Sanders.
And as someone who survived the perils of communism and socialism, I did not want that.
So I thought that Biden was my best bet.
Oh, that's very interesting.
Let's take a pause.
When we come back more with Lindy Lee, follow her on X at Lindy, L-I-N-D-Y-L-I. We'll be right back.
Guys, I'm back with Lindy Lee, a former Democratic political strategist and fundraiser, and now she is on the Trump.
She raised money for Trump's inauguration.
She's working with the RNC leadership.
This is quite a sort of switcheroo, but it's not a case of Lindy sort of converting from atheism to Christianity.
It's rather more of a recognition of what has happened to the Democratic Party and perhaps also important changes that are occurring on the Republican side, which we'll get to in a minute.
But Lindy, let's come back to something we were talking about actually off camera just a moment ago, Even though there would seem to be a natural alignment between Asian Americans in terms of merit, of education, of values, with the Republican Party, you felt, and other Democrats, other Asian Americans have felt, that somehow the Democratic Party has a lot to offer.
And talk about how the branding of the Democratic Party, at least at first glance, is extremely appealing.
Absolutely.
And I really think I've been obviously just racking my brain over the last couple of months asking, how the heck did I get here?
You know, how did I make this 10-year detour?
And I wanted to account for all, you know, all of my decisions.
And I landed upon, you know, I think really it's just a massive, it's a case of massive hoodwinking.
Because we come from these communist countries and everything is branded in red.
And, you know, with the very traditional conventional communist logos and everything that everyone recognizes.
And then we come to the United States and everything is blue.
And Democrats are shouting slogans like freedom and democracy and, you know, opportunity for all.
So it seems very contradictory, but then beneath it all, you realize that they actually employ many of the same tactics that communists do.
And what are they?
excommunication, public disowning, public shaming, and these extreme views, these extreme ideologies that you must adhere to, lest you be publicly excommunicated like I have by the party.
And I am almost, I feel like, I don't think I'm a, I'm just shocked that I didn't realize that before.
I just completely bought into it.
I bought into the idea that the mainstream media can be fair, but now I know that they're not.
I realize that now they're an arm of the...
Of the liberals.
Why did it take me my entire life to realize this?
Well, you said something interesting, which I never really quite thought of.
First of all, even if we go back to the Reagan years, this whole idea that the Democrats are blue and the Republicans are red did not exist.
This was a more recent invention.
And somehow I think you take the red, white, and blue, and the Democrats go, we'll be blue.
So the Republicans go, well, I guess we'll be red.
When what you're saying is that, well, red is actually the color of communism, you know?
Exactly.
And please do not shortchange or underestimate the power of subliminal advertising.
It is so strong, especially when you first survive in the United States and you don't really understand the parties.
Those visual images are so incredibly powerful.
And especially when you get them young.
Right?
So I went to college when I was 16. That's when I got into college.
Okay?
So this is when I was becoming an adult.
And I go to a liberal, basically a vacuum, a bubble.
They call themselves an orange bubble, actually.
That's the nickname of the school.
I go to this school, and liberalism is literally the only option.
There is no other option.
And I live in Pennsylvania, and the Colorado County is not in the middle of the state.
Not the T. Dinesh, you must have heard about the T. I live in the liberal cities.
It was never an option to be a Republican.
I think there's like one Republican on this entire street that I know of.
It's not even an exaggeration.
I can't think of any other people.
And another thing that I must mention is if you're a Republican in Philadelphia, you cannot vote in the primary.
You cannot vote in the contested primary.
So almost by default, you must be a Democrat.
Otherwise, you have no voice, you know?
Given all this, then, Lindy, what was the single most important factor, would you say?
Because think about it.
This is not a case where you're changing your mind about one issue or another issue.
It almost seems like you're putting a new lens in the camera, right?
In other words, it's like you're saying that the way that I have been...
I've been habituated to life in America, at least political life.
I've been fed a bunch of lies, and I now have to rethink everything.
It's almost like I've got to reassess the media, I've got to reassess...
Recalibration, yeah.
What do you think, even if you were conservative and fighting, you were fighting within the democratic system.
What is it that you think, what was the single factor that decided, you know what, I'm going to get off the train?
The thing is, it wasn't a single thing.
I've been hiding...
I think this is the first time I'm articulating this ever on air.
I've been hiding my true self for at least the past year.
Every night, I would read the New York Post.
I would talk with my loved ones.
The person that I love...
This is definitely the first time I've ever said this on you, but I'm going to say it now.
And, Dinesh...
If I were to tell someone this, if I were to tell the world this, no one would attack me anymore.
Everyone would be like, oh, I understand why Lindy had to do this.
But because I'm protecting somebody, I am basically on the end of endless attacks.
Because some people think I'm opportunistic or a grifter, even though I'm not making a single dollar from any of this.
You're not paying me.
Fox isn't paying me.
Sean Ryan didn't pay me.
The person that I love most in life is a lifelong Republican.
And I will not say anything about them because they're not a public figure and he doesn't have to be dragged into this.
But as you know about love, you want to agree with the person that you most love.
And I will never mention this again.
I hope to God he's not listening.
You know, you just want to be aligned with the people who matter to you most.
It would make sense to anybody, but I'd rather protect him than explain everything and then drag a private individual into the public sphere against this will.
So anyway, that is my personal reason, but there are many, many policy reasons.
This is just who I've been all my life.
And the left has shifted so far to the left that it seems like I'm changing my mind.
Please bear in mind that when Obama first ran, he was even against gay marriage.
So, I mean, come on.
The party is no longer...
If you thought it was communism before, now it's like ultra-communism.
Yeah.
And a guy like Trump, I mean, this is a guy who was so radioactive in 2016. I remember that there was all this stuff about, you know, you can't even normalize Trump.
You have to report on him like he's a monster and so on.
It does look like Trump is in a very different place now than he was in 2016. Do you agree?
And why do you think that is?
I absolutely do.
I absolutely do.
Because he is able, you know, on July 13th, when he was shot, the way that he handled himself was mythological.
It was like, as John Fetterman would say, it was God-tier level.
The way that he carried himself.
Frankly speaking, on that day, the election was essentially over for all intents and purposes.
At that point, it was basically Democrats picking a candidate to lose.
Because how do you beat a guy like that?
And Trump is just an authentic guy.
He's like, you can tell.
The vibe that you get from him is someone that you would want to hang out with.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, my goodness.
The endless word salads.
The circular thinking.
The android-like verbal diarrhea.
I mean...
I don't understand.
I speak with, like, I've spoken with her.
She's fine behind closed doors where things are, like, low stress, you know, not so intellectually taxing, but once she gets on camera, her brain just freezes.
And maybe that's the case for most Americans, but most Americans aren't running for president.
We can't have a president like that.
Fascinating.
Guys, I've been talking to Lindy Lee, political strategist, to follow her on X at Lindy Lee, L-I-N-D-Y-L-I. Lindy, extremely fascinating stuff, and I'd love to have you back sometime as things evolve here, but this story has been, your story has been really riveting, and thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
You're one of the smartest people I've ever done an interview with.
Thank you.
I never said that before, but you are very smart.
I knew that within the first minute of this interview.
So thank you so much for having me.
Absolutely.
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