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Feb. 19, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:31
HANDSHAKE IN RIYADH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1024
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, I'll talk about the Riyadh meeting between the Trump negotiators and the Putin negotiators to end the Ukraine war.
I noticed the media is downplaying the havoc being caused by a trans-terrorist group called the Zizians.
I'll tell you about that.
And Gavin Wax, president of the New York Young Republican Club, joins me.
We're going to talk about how Trump is really rocking the foreign policy boat to the consternation of the usual suspects in Europe and in the media.
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I want to focus on two important things that are happening in the news.
The first one involves domestic issues, Doge and Elon Musk.
The second one, which I'll get to, involves the meeting in Riyadh between the Trump and Putin negotiators to resolve the issue of the Ukraine.
Let me start with the first one, which is a ruling by Judge Tanya Chutkin.
Now, we all know Judge Tanya Chutkin.
She is the judge of, what, Caribbean origin, very anti-Trump.
In fact, she was the judge in charge of the Trump January 6th case.
That case is now happily gone.
Jack Smith...
I was forced to dismiss the case after Trump's election, but Judge Chutkin is still up to her unsavory ways.
And so what happened is that 14 state attorneys from around the country filed lawsuits with Judge Chutkin, basically saying that Elon Musk and his associates, the whole Doge operation, needs to be stopped.
Now, the Doge operation is currently...
It began, of course, with USAID, but it's now in the Labor Department, it's in Education, it's in HHS, the Energy Department, the Transportation Department, the Commerce Department, the Office of Personnel Management, OPM. So Doge is now a full-fledged audit.
And this is what's freaking out the left.
They are pretending like they are concerned about things like our privacy.
Recently, Amy Klobuchar said, oh, I can't believe that an unelected guy like Elon Musk has access to our data.
And I responded to her and go, wait a minute, are you telling me that all the bureaucrats who have had access to our data all this time in all these departments and agencies, they're elected?
Who elected them?
They're not elected either.
So they're in the same unelected status as Elon Musk, and the only reason that you're inflamed about it now is nothing to do with privacy.
You weren't concerned with our privacy before.
What you're really concerned is protecting the racket that has been set up inside the government, a racket that benefits people like you.
And then, of course, Elon Musk weighs in, commenting on my post, and says basically that the logic of it can't be disputed.
But Doge is...
Challenged by these state attorneys, and they wanted a TRO, a temporary restraining order.
Judge Tanya Chutkin said...
No.
Now, she said a bunch of other things that suggest that she too is troubled by Doge and she's wondering where Elon Musk really gets his authority.
And so this is a lot of huffing and puffing, which really shows you that this is a left-wing ideologue sitting on the bench.
But at the same time, I think she realized that...
You know, a temporary restraining order is a very extreme measure.
It requires there to be irreparable harm.
It must be quite obvious that the government is not going to succeed if this goes to trial.
And I think she realized that there's no way that this kind of complaint meets that standard.
So she denied the temporary restraining order.
And that's a big win for Trump and a big win for Doge because, quite honestly, if she had granted it, All the Doge operations would come to a halt.
This is, I think, a flaw that we have in our system, which is that a single judge in a single jurisdiction, a federal judge, can stop things from happening.
Not only all across the government, but all over the country.
Now, it's not a permanent decision because you then can appeal it and can appeal it further, but all of that takes time.
So the very idea that you can stop the government in its tracks, that I think is something the Supreme Court at some point does need to address and clarify.
But for now, Doge marches on and that has to be a very good thing.
Now let me turn to...
The meeting in Riyadh.
The meeting is causing quite a bit of dismay on the part of, well, Zelensky, who's not invited.
Zelensky actually had plans to show up in Riyadh.
I don't know if he thought he was invited or if he just thought, I'll show up and make a scene.
He decided at the last moment, I'm not going to do that.
So he canceled his planned trip.
Who's in the meeting?
Well, in the meeting is the Russians.
Led by this guy named Lavrov.
The Rubio is representing the United States.
And of course, the Saudis are there too.
So if you look at the table, you got a couple of Saudis and you got the American negotiators and you got the Putin or the Russian negotiators.
Now, this is a complex business because America could have a deal.
But even if you have a deal, what's going to happen next?
Is the war going to stop?
Zelensky, is he going to agree to what is agreed?
He has said no.
He said, if I'm not involved and if Ukraine is not involved and the Europeans are not involved, you can decide whatever you want.
It's your deal.
It's not my deal.
But of course, Zelensky is also, to some degree, a puppet.
And by that I mean he can't conduct a war with Russia on his own.
This would be like a rabbit taking on an elephant.
He knows that.
So he has been the front man for a U.S.-European proxy war against Putin.
And I think if the U.S. gets out of it, there's going to be no war.
The Europeans are not going to want to do this by themselves.
First of all, they're not used to spending money on defenses.
They're certainly not used to spending money on their own defense, let alone giving it to Zelensky to fight in Ukraine.
So I think that a deal between Trump and Putin will pretty much seal the deal for the Ukraine war.
But there's a bunch of people on X and also in other formats.
And this is the kind of old foreign policy establishment.
Here's a quote by Michael McFaul.
I think he's the former U.S. ambassador to Russia.
I'm sure Putin can't believe his good fortune these days.
And then Ian Bremmer, a prominent commentator, it's the best day Putin has had since the invasion.
And here I want to highlight...
A kind of fallacious mode of reasoning that we see underway, which is, if Putin is smiling, that means that we are surrendering to him.
Or to put it differently, if it's a good day for Putin, it's a bad day for the United States.
Now, just to expose how dubious this reasoning is, let's go back to World War II. Imagine if we adopted the same doctrine.
What is the doctrine?
Well, the doctrine that the left is articulating here is if it's good for Putin, it must be bad for America.
Now, in World War II, as you remember, the United States was allied with Stalin, who is a far worse guy than Putin.
And yet, let's say you adopted the same doctrine.
If it's bad for Stalin, it must be good for America.
If it's good for Stalin, it must be bad for America.
Well, if you actually follow that logic, it means that we should back the Nazis.
Because that's the only way to prevent Stalin from having a really good day.
If you want Stalin to have bad days, the Nazis need to have good days.
And so, this is the reasoning I'm objecting to here.
I'm not saying that Putin is a good guy.
I think Putin is a thug.
Putin is looking out for the interests of Russia, not our interests.
But in foreign policy, you can often find common ground.
Nixon found common ground with China.
As I mentioned, the United States found common ground with Stalin in World War II, not because we thought Stalin was a good guy.
But because we thought Hitler was the worst guy, and we were evaluating our best interest as, at the time, the primary imperative was to stop Hitler.
And so the means deployed to do that were seen as adequate or worthwhile, even though they opened the door to a subsequent Cold War with the Soviet Union in the late 40s and 50s, and all the way until the Soviet Union collapsed.
I think that it's just fine if Putin is having a good day.
He's probably going to be relieved to see this war come to an end.
But my point is, the Russian people are also going to be relieved.
And the Ukrainians are going to be relieved.
I'm sure this war is something that has rained a great deal of death and destruction.
On Ukrainian lives, I think the United States will be relieved to get out of that war and not be fighting this proxy war, which is hurting us in so many ways.
It's pushing Putin toward the direction of China.
It's weakening the status of the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
We have a lot to lose, and we have, in fact, lost a lot in the process of this war.
I think Trump realizes this, and for this reason, he's eager and rightly so.
To want to get out.
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Have you heard about the Zizians?
I guess you could call them the Zizians.
This is the transgender murderous cult.
I believe it was first reported on by our friend Andy Ngo.
But I'm looking at an article in the New York Post talking about the arrest of the leader of this transgender cult.
Apparently it's a vegan transgender cult.
And these guys have been operating around the country causing...
A good deal of mayhem.
In fact, six killings have been linked to the Zizians, including the murder of a Border Patrol agent.
And now the leader of the group has been apprehended.
This guy is evidently a...
He's Jack Lasota.
His nickname is Ziz or Ziz, and that's where you get the Zizians because apparently they're followers of Jack Lasota, age 34. It's a trans cult, so this guy identifies as a woman.
He uses she, her pronouns.
And so this is a very bizarre operation.
He was arrested with two other Zazians, Michel Zacco, 33, and Daniel Bank, 26. And who are these guys?
What are they like?
Well, number one, they are young.
They are trans.
Many of them are computer nerds or computer science types.
They describe their politics as anarchist.
As I mentioned, they are vegans.
And so these are smart people, but they are also twisted, and they are vicious, and they carry weapons, and they kill people.
Very sad, really.
One of the Zizians is an award-winning young math genius.
Another one is a computer scientist.
This guy named Zachko is a bioinformatics researcher.
And Lasota, the Ziz himself, is a computer programmer.
So all these guys could have gone on to live productive lives, but they have chosen not to.
They have settled, by and large, This is very Unabomber-ish.
Debbie actually invokes kind of like the Manson family.
Now, the Manson family were all in one place.
They were in a single commune, and they were kind of cohabiting together in that single dwelling.
The Zizians aren't like that.
In fact, they are kind of decentralized.
The six murders that they have allegedly carried out, well, four of them...
Are in Vermont and in Pennsylvania and in California.
Evidently, two of the Zizians have already been killed.
In one case, there was a guy, they were renting a room from this guy named Lind in Vallejo, California.
He told them, I must have realized what kooks they were and probably how dangerous they were, so he told them to get out.
But when you tell dangerous kooks to get out, they start trying to kill you.
So they tried to kill him, but he was armed as well.
And so he actually shot a couple of these Zizians.
He was wounded in the gunfight, but unfortunately they came back and killed him.
And yeah, when you read the details of this, it's really very gruesome.
Lind was previously attacked by cult members when he tried to boot them from his property, and Lind was found dead two days later before the eviction was set to go through.
In a prior run-in, Lind shot Emma Borhanian, 31, in self-defense.
He was stabbed with a sword and partially blinded, only to be murdered months later by this guy named Snyder.
These are people you really don't want moving into your neighborhood.
And I think the reason we've been hearing so little about these guys, I mean, think about the kind of coverage that we got from the Manson murders, for example.
Admittedly, there was a Hollywood connection there, but nevertheless, this was all over the news.
There was a great deal of intrigue in who these people were, what motivated them to do what they did.
Helter Skelter came out of that.
And yet here, we have a kind of media silence about it.
In fact, when I saw the early reporting from Andy, no, I'm like, I haven't seen anything about this anywhere.
And now we see, yes, the New York Post.
And the New York Post is doing excellent work these days in reporting stuff.
But notice the New York Post is an outlier.
They were an outlier with the Hunter Biden story.
They're kind of an outlier here.
There's not a whole lot of reporting on this.
And the reason has to do with simply one word, trans.
We're supposed to be wonderful people.
Even the things that trans people do to themselves, they have very high suicide rates.
But no, that's not violence because they're victims.
They're driven to it.
Society is making them do it.
And so the idea of trans terrorists, trans killers, trans perpetrators is something that the media wants to downplay.
And that's probably why, until now, you haven't really heard about the Zizians.
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Hey guys, I'm really happy to have back on the podcast our friend Gavin Wax.
He is an author.
He is the president of the New York Young Republican Club.
He's also executive director of the National Constitutional Law Union.
The book, The Emerging Populist Majority.
You can follow him on x at Gavin Wax.
Hey Gavin, thank you for joining me.
I'd like to talk to you about the emerging contours, the emerging outlines of Trump's foreign policy.
Let's begin with Russia, with this meeting that's going on in Saudi Arabia, the Trump negotiators, the Putin negotiators.
What's your take on what's going on there?
Well, look, I think it's a fantastic development, Dinesh.
I think what we're seeing is a new school of foreign policy thought take over in the wake of President Trump's election, taking over at the State Department, taking over in our various different national security arms and understands that we need to approach international geopolitics in a pragmatic way, in a way that advocates for our best interests, that advocates for pragmatic solutions to conflicts rather than The sort of ideologically...
It's been a disaster for the Ukrainians.
It's been a disaster for Europeans.
It's been a disaster for the American taxpayers who've had to foot the bill.
And it needs to come to an end.
And I think we're seeing that unfold before our very eyes.
I think Secretary Rubio has been doing a fantastic job trying to make the case for peace, talking about lifting sanctions, talking about restricting NATO enlargement, talking about territorial concessions, talking about things that were on the table, frankly, years ago and that were rejected by Brussels, talking about things that were on the table, frankly, years ago and that were rejected by Brussels, rejected by London, rejected by the then-Biden State Department and prolonged the conflict in Ukraine, prolonged the suffering, prolonged the killing for no real strategic end,
And I think this overall shows that we're reshifting our focus from this unnecessary...
An unwinnable conflict in eastern Ukraine and shifting more towards the Asia-Pacific to focus on our real nemesis, our real enemy, our real challenger for global supremacy, and that is the communist Chinese one-party state, the CCP.
That is our real enemy that we need to be focusing on, both in terms of economics, both in terms of geopolitics, culturally, you name it.
And this conflict in Ukraine needs to be resolved.
It's a distraction.
And I think we need to bring all parties to the table and return to a situation where we have peace in Europe.
And I think President Trump is doing just that.
I wonder, Gavin, if we can actually push this logic even further in the following way.
You know, of course, that going back to the 1970s, Richard Nixon made his famous trip to China.
In the middle of the Cold War, and Nixon's idea was to separate Russia from China.
Nixon's idea was, let's, in a sense, team up with China a little bit in order to thwart the terrifying power of the Soviet Empire.
And I'm wondering if, in some ways, an idea in the back of Trump's mind is sort of the opposite here.
In other words, that the great threat today...
is not the Soviet Union, which doesn't exist anymore.
It's really the growing power of China.
And one way to thwart the growing power of China is to separate Russia from China.
Now, in a weird way, the effect of the Ukraine war has been to push Putin into the arms of China, right?
Because of the United States and Europe coming together to fight this proxy war in Ukraine, Putin's going to look for allies wherever he can get them.
So I wonder if there is this larger thing going on, which is to say an attempt on the part of Trump, perhaps implicitly, to fracture this kind of evil empire alliance between Putin and Xi.
No, I think this is a brilliant point.
I think it's very reminiscent of what President Nixon did in the 70s.
I think we need to create a wedge between China and Russia.
Back then, it was to separate China from the Soviet communist influence and bloc and hopefully sort of win them over through trade and the beginnings of some sort of free market capitalist reform.
Of course, that failed for a variety of reasons, which we'll probably get into later in this segment.
But I think now what we're seeing is we need to reevaluate the global landscape.
It's a multi-polar world order.
And we need to bring Russia out of the fold of China.
We need to bring them at least to a position where they're neutral, where they're transactional, and they're willing to not fully be in this Chinese sort of lead block, this third world global south lead block.
And I think the past few years has been very detrimental.
To that goal, it's pushed Russia and China, which have historically had great animosities, historically have had a lot of competition and have a lot of views and positions geopolitically that put them at odds.
This has put them into the same camp to our own detriment.
And I think we've been subsidizing, you know, foolishly the defense of Europe for far too long.
They don't play ball with us on things like trade, but they expect us to flip the bill for their defense budget.
And they're not carrying their full weight and they're not acting like allies should.
That's why I think Vice President J.D. Vance's remarks in Munich were so historic, calling out, you know, the lackluster approach to defense.
That our NATO allies have been doing for years, talking about their slide towards very undemocratic non-Western norms as it comes to free speech.
I think those were all very valid criticisms that we could level at.
I think we should also be willing to horse trade with Russia, you know, talk about sanctions.
This is hundreds of billions of dollars worth of international trade that could be restored to the benefit of both of our countries.
And in the meantime, it could also help us, again, geopolitically isolate China.
And let's talk about China.
China is really the aggressor here.
Vis-a-vis the United States.
They're stealing our technology.
They're infiltrating our country with a massive intelligence and espionage operation designed to both steal technology and infiltrate institutions.
We've seen them buy up farmland in the United States.
We've seen them manipulate their currency and enact unfair trade policies to our own manufacturing bases.
We've seen the spy balloon saga.
We've seen them try to set up underground illegal police stations in lower Manhattan where they were being used to spy on Americans, maybe Chinese Americans, maybe any other Americans.
We've seen them try to bribe undercover federal agents to remove non-profit tax status from Shen Yun, which is a Chinese-American-founded cultural, musical, artistic group.
And we're doing all of this while, you know, the Kennedy Center, which has recently been, we recently elected a new chairman in President Donald J. Trump, but in the past...
Our own Kennedy Center was helping fund and put on CCP-sponsored propaganda shows in our own government-funded institutions.
So we have a very backwards policy as it comes to China taking advantage of us, infiltrating us.
I didn't even get into the student visa program where many spies have come over.
They get subsidized U.S. education.
They go back to China and bring that education with them or they infiltrate corporate America.
So we have some serious issues here on the home front that needs to be addressed.
And I think it's a far bigger national security concern than anything we have to worry about vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine.
I mean, in some ways, I think what you're saying is that the conventional wisdom on China of the past 30 years has turned out to be completely wrong, because the conventional wisdom on China was that the more we trade with China and the closer that we deal with the more that China is going to become like us.
And in fact, not only has that not happened, but as you say, the Chinese have taken a pretty hostile posture vis-a-vis America.
And I find it kind of amusing on the other side of the equation that the left, which was very soft on Russia when it was the Soviet Union, has now become suddenly unbelievably tough on Russia when it's no longer communist.
In other words, when the threat is obviously much less.
I mean, between 1974 and 1980, the Russians basically took over 10 countries.
Under Putin, well, you've got the Ukraine war, but that's pretty much it.
So there's no comparison between...
No real change from the old Soviet days to Putin.
Yeah, it's a completely dated perspective.
It dominates the State Department, or rather has dominated the State Department.
They're still living in the Cold War.
They're still living in another era.
They don't understand that the dynamics of the world have changed, both within Russia and outside of Russia.
They don't understand that China has been the rising threat.
And what you just described, that we had this sort of naive view that if we trade with China, that if they opened up their markets and there was some kind of cross...
You know, Pacific cultural and economic exchange that they would slowly drift towards our way of thinking.
But in reality, it's been the exact opposite.
They've only strengthened themselves internally.
They've only built their economy up at a rapid pace.
They've only militarized an incredibly...
I saw something recently on X. Their shipbuilding capacity is 300X what we're able to do in terms of the production of ships, and they produce military-grade ships.
So we're falling behind in many different quantitative metrics in terms of defense, in terms of economics, and they are actively antagonizing us.
They are actively violating our sovereignty.
They are actively trying to work against us within our own country through their espionage, through all these subversive tactics to infiltrate institutions, to buy up U.S. land.
And again, they are bringing mainland Chinese policies to the U.S.
They have set up spy rings, illegal police stations that have – this is federal prosecutions we're talking about – have been dealing with these matters.
They have set up illegal police stations in American cities.
They've tried to bribe officials to go after American organizations.
Like I mentioned with Shen Yun, they are actively persecuting religious minorities not only in China, but also in the United States.
They've found ways behind the scene, cloak and dagger, to go after various anti-CCP Chinese American institutions and organizations.
So this is a very detrimental force on our body politic.
They are acting incredibly insidious.
They need to be brought to heel.
We need to push back on them in all facets, trade, intelligence, militarily, culturally, everything.
We cannot let them continue to grow at the rate that they're growing and continue to infiltrate the United States at the rate that they're infiltrating us.
They are the far bigger threat geopolitically, geostrategically than any other nation right now.
And it's been a complete disaster that we've ignored this crisis for this long.
Do you think, Gavin, you used a phrase a little bit earlier that we are in a multipolar world.
And since the Soviet Union collapsed, there's been, of course, a lot of talk about the United States being the world's sole superpower, our alliances with Europe, some of it, of course, inherited from the aftermath of World War II, but also based upon the idea that the Europeans are the people we can count on.
If we're doing an operation in the Middle East, we get the Europeans.
If we do the Afghan operation, we kind of count on some French soldiers and some British soldiers.
Are you concerned that somehow the Euro-American alliance is going to fracture?
The Europeans are going to decide?
I mean, Trump seems a little bit hard for them to take, that they're going to just go their own way.
And if that happened, it would be an historic shift.
We would, in a sense, be separating our foreign policy from that of the people who, in general, we have counted on the most, at least for the past.
Well, listen, I think alliances and these type of international agreements, they need to be based on mutual respect.
They need to be based on mutual benefit.
And I think our alliance with These various European countries in the form of NATO has not been mutually beneficial.
We've been picking up the tab for military defense.
They've been violating their contractual obligations to NATO. This is something President Trump has consistently called out going back to his first term.
And if you look at trade, you know, they pound their chest about President Trump trying to reevaluate our trade imbalances across the world and talks about reciprocity.
In terms of tariffs, but in reality, they have been leveling tariffs on US goods for quite some time.
They are subsidizing their own industries to compete with US imports into Europe, so they're not exactly acting like...
Great trade partners, certainly not free trade partners, so I think talking about reciprocity and trade is completely welcomed.
And then if you look at the cultural front and their approach to civil rights, it's been very concerning what we've seen happen in Europe, that they've had a crackdown on free speech, they've had a crackdown on things like internet memes, that they've gone after people for dissenting views, for right-wing views, for conservative views, for views against abortion, they've jailed people for crimes that are not even crimes in the United States, are not even crimes in what I would consider.
society.
So they've been backsliding in many ways into some sort of, you know, kind of tyrannical forms of government, particularly in the United Kingdom.
I think it deserves to be called out.
I think it deserves to be reevaluated.
And they frankly have been gutting their own nations from within.
They've had massive mass migration, particularly from the Islamic world that's created instability, that's created chaos in their countries, that led to terrorism, that's led to deaths, that's led to entire demographic shifts.
So I think Europe is frankly a mess.
They're lagging behind in tech and economics and in their military.
They're becoming more unified and disjointed.
But this is not universal.
There are certainly many countries in Europe that I think we share a lot more commonality with.
You know, countries like Hungary come to mind, even Poland under the previous government there, the more right-leaning government.
Italy under Giorgio Maloney.
There are bright spots.
So we're seeing moves in the right directions.
But many of our more traditional Western allies, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, they are not acting like allies.
They were importing Russian energy for the longest time, excluding or preventing American gas from being brought in.
And then when President Trump called this out, they laughed at him.
him and they were under Putin's leverage because he controlled the pipelines, but they also want us at the same time to fight a war against Putin primarily for their own benefit for the expansion of the EU, for the expansion of NATO, and we see really no benefit in return.
So I think everything needs to be re-evaluated.
I think everything needs to be looked at under closer scrutiny, closer inspection.
We shouldn't just continue with the status quo.
We shouldn't continue with the norms just because it's what we've always done since the end of World War II. The world has drastically changed.
And yes, going back to my comment earlier, You know, we emerged out of the Cold War as a unipolar world power.
We were an industrial behemoth.
We were an economic behemoth.
We were a military behemoth, you know, going back to the early 90s.
And we frankly, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, we squandered that unipolarity, all those massive leg-ups we had vis-a-vis.
Many other countries of the world economically and militarily.
We squandered it in forever wars.
We squandered it in offshoring our jobs and our industries.
We squandered it with our open borders.
So 30 years later, yeah, we're looking at a very much a different world where the United States is not necessarily in the position we once were.
And yes, that's a sad thing.
That's a sad state of affairs.
But that is the reality.
And we need to approach reality with a more, you know, we need to approach the world.
Understanding what reality is, and it's multipolar.
Russia cannot necessarily be beaten on the battlefield.
We've had years to experiment with this.
We've had hundreds of billions of dollars spent to experiment on that theory, and China is certainly not going away.
So we need to reevaluate, we need to readjust, and we need to approach world affairs with an America-first point of view, with what's going to put our own people first, with our own country first, rather than supporting the interests of Brussels and London and Paris for nothing in return.
And you know, Gavin, I'll close out with a comment, which is I think that these Europeans who have been very generous with spending American money on this proxy war, it's going to be interesting to see what they do now, because the United States decides we're not going to be putting up the funds.
There are some of these American pundits like Michael McFaul and Ian Bremmer and these guys, and they're like, well, the Europeans need to step up and they need to be the ones that recognize that they're next.
If we don't stop Putin, he's going to seemingly challenge Europe.
And I predict that these Europeans, once they realize that they're the ones who have to foot the bill, they're going to take on a whole different attitude because they're okay as long as we're paying the bill.
And, of course, we've been paying the bill for their defense going all the way back to the end of World War II. So they're able to, in a sense, fund their welfare state because they don't have to spend money on defense.
Very interesting stuff, Gavin.
Guys, I've been talking to Gavin Wax, author, president of the New York Young Republican Club, author of the Emerging Populist Majority.
You can follow him on x at Gavin Wax.
Hey, Gavin, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
Thank you for having me.
It means coordination.
It means marching in lockstep.
It means threading together or chaining together all the institutions of society.
It is this notion of, well, sometimes we hear in America the phrase, the whole government approach, and the whole government approach refers to It includes not just governmental institutions, but private institutions as well.
Everybody, in a sense, looking in the same direction.
Marching in the same direction, heading toward a common goal.
This is the essence of fascism and Nazism.
Gleichschaltung was just the German evocation of it.
And a description of what the Nazis were trying to achieve, and in fact, to be honest, did achieve in the 1930s and 1940s.
And we have an equivalent of that going on in America.
In fact, the big struggle right now is to dismantle progressive Gleichschaltung in the United States.
It is to break up, to untether.
To separate out, to fracture the tight relationships that currently exist among progressive institutions inside and, as it turns out, outside the government.
Now, we know about the institutions inside the government.
It's the whole apparatus that had been constructed, starting with Obama, continuing with Biden and Harris.
This involves the deep state, the police state, the so-called police agencies of government.
But not just the agencies that are hidden from us like the CIA or to some degree the back rooms of the FBI or the NSA, but also places like the DOJ, the Biden White House, the coordination between the, if you will, the spooks in the dark rooms and then decisions openly made by Biden or maybe coordinated by people like Biden.
Obama, Schumer, and Pelosi.
And then outside the government, we have other institutions that have been working closely with the left to create this like shaltong, and that is the academia, Hollywood, the media.
These are the permanent institutions of the left, and it's worth thinking about that because by permanent institutions, what I mean is that even when the government changes hands, There are certain things that don't change hands.
One thing that doesn't change hands is the Korea bureaucracy.
This is something that Trump is trying to, again, he's trying to get a hold of.
He's trying to break the monopoly of this bureaucracy.
And again, the bureaucracy, as I describe it, doesn't just exist inside the government.
Its effects are felt outside the government.
Look, for example, at the January 6th cases.
Who's the jury?
Bureaucrats.
If those cases are held in D.C., you're almost certain to have a jury pool overwhelmingly made up of government bureaucrats plus people who sort of leech off the bureaucratic sector, lobbyists and people like that.
And those people don't go away.
They don't really change.
So we'll see how successful Doge is and Trump is in being able to disrupt.
This career of bureaucracy, but that's one of the permanent elements of the progressive state.
Look at academia.
Look at how left-wing our colleges have become, including colleges that at one time were considered right-wing.
At one point, the University of Virginia was considered right-wing.
Not anymore.
Texas A&M used to be considered right-wing.
Not anymore.
The Claremont colleges, not anymore.
Similarly, the media.
Do you think that there's a reasonable chance, for example, of having real balance, real objectivity at places like the New York Times or the Boston Globe?
No, it's not going to happen.
The Washington Post, these are entrenched leftist institutions.
They may be...
More or less leftist.
Sometimes tactically they move a little bit toward the center.
The New York Times, going back now a whole generation, hired a Nixon speechwriter, William Sapphire, to prove that they were not 100% left-wing.
But that only means that they become 92% or 95% left-wing.
It doesn't mean that they're going to be balanced or that it's going to be something even approximating 50-50.
So some of these institutions are just far gone.
The entertainment industry, academia, the media, we're not really going to get them back.
We can work to create alternatives, and I think we should.
But the point I'm trying to make here is just that these organizations work in sync with each other inside and outside the government to promote this leftist agenda.
Intimidate the rest of society into obedience.
And if not obedience, at least kind of sullen submission.
So the whole point of having ostracism, excommunication, censorship is a way of the coordinated forces of Gleicksholtung...
Subduing everybody.
Look, in no society are you going to have 100% agreement on anything.
And the left knows that.
The Nazis knew that.
They knew they're not going to have every German agree.
So what do you have in these societies that are trying to establish conformity?
What they do is they mobilize a combination of carrots and sticks, mostly sticks, in order to get people who don't agree to be silent.
Get out of the way.
Shut up.
Don't interfere with what we are doing.
Allow us to run roughshod over you.
This, by the way, is not unique to the left.
It's not unique to fascism.
It's not unique to progressivism.
We see it, for example, in Islamic societies.
Islamic societies like Iran know they're going to be, even now, in Iran.
People, including probably quite a few people, who don't want to go along with the mullahs.
But the mullah's point is, if you don't do what we say, we're going to catch you, we're going to flog you, we're going to cut off your arms in certain cases, we're going to make you wear the veil.
We know we can't control your private thoughts.
So if you're immodest in your mind, fine.
But when you're walking down the street, Put on the veil.
Wear the burqa.
Wear the abaya.
So this is a way of enforcing conformity.
And that is really what we've seen.
If you want to know what's been going on in our society, it is an attempt to regiment the society in one way.
And Trump is trying to change that.
And I think he has changed it to some degree.
Notice the way in which some of the institutions of the progressive Gleitschel Tongue are running for cover.
Suddenly you find Mark Zuckerberg is, well, I'm not going to rely so much on these fact-checkers anymore.
And the fact-checkers start screaming, wait a minute, we thought we were all part of the lockstep choir.
We were the band for everybody marching in lockstep.
But now you're telling the band to go home.
And Zuckerberg is, yeah, I don't really want Trump breathing down.
So, you can go home.
So, all of this is the ongoing effort right now to defeat the Gleichschaltung of the left, which had reached really a terrifying point.
This was the theme of the film Police State, is that we're moving, not that we've fully become a police state, but we're moving in that direction.
I'm happy to say that we are now moving in the opposite direction.
We're getting resistance from the police state.
We're getting resistance from progressive Gleicksholtung.
And the theme that I'll develop as I pick it up tomorrow is that the Nazis formulated this ideology.
Some people think this progressive Gleicksholtung comes from the 1960s.
They think, oh, you know what?
That's when academia went left-wing, and that's when the media went left-wing, and that's when...
That's when Hollywood took a left-wing turn.
All of this is true.
I'm not disagreeing with it.
But I'm pushing it even further to ask, well, Where did the ideology of the 60s itself come from?
What are the intellectual roots of the kind of regimentation that began in certain precincts in the 1960s and then broke out into the larger culture?
That ideological root, I'm suggesting, came not from the 1960s but from the 1930s.
In fact, as I'll show tomorrow, it came straight out of the practice, institutionalized.
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