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Feb. 24, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:31
ACCOUNTABILITY 101 Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1027
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, I'll review the comical side of federal bureaucrats and their media defenders howling about being asked to explain what it is they actually do.
I want to talk about the results of the recent German election.
And former Illinois Governor Rod Lagojevich joins me.
We're going to talk about his recent presidential pardon and also he's going to comment about the depth of corruption in the Democratic Party.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or YouTube or X... Or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
Hit the follow or subscribe button.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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I'd like to try to cover today a bunch of different things that are happening all over the place, most of them interesting and exciting, I'm going to start with the election in Germany because I think that that points to a larger issue developing between the United States and Europe more generally.
I want to say something about the FBI and the new appointment of Dan Bongino.
I then want to talk about the notorious email that has been sent out from Doge and from Elon Musk to all two million federal employees.
And I also want to talk about Trump's firing of some of the woke generals.
So in this segment and the next one, I hope to cover all that.
Let me see how I can do in traversing that territory.
Let me start with Germany, where the AFD, the party that Elon Musk supported, in some ways this is the MAGA party.
Now the left has demonized the AFD as being somehow fascist.
But they're not fascist.
The reason that they're accused of being fascist is because they don't support these porous and open borders.
They want to deport the illegals and the migrants who have come over over the years.
And so there's a chorus of Germans that say fascist.
Now, interestingly, this characterization of the AFD is not limited to the left or the Social Democrats.
It is also shared by the center-right.
And the center-right has gotten the most votes in the election, 29%.
Interestingly, the AFD is second with 19.5%.
So the Social Democrats have been routed.
They have been humiliated.
In fact, I saw their leader basically saying, this was terrible news.
We got booted.
And indeed, they did.
So it would normally make sense for the center-right, the CDU, to ally with the AFD. But I don't think they're going to do that.
Precisely because they are terrified of the, quote, far-right, they are going to most likely make an alliance, believe it or not, with the Social Democrats.
Talk about, you know, a German uniparty where the center-right party, and I won't call it center-left because the SPD is left-wing.
In fact, it's to the left of what we would, the Democratic Party in this country.
And it is a measure of the type of, you know, Romney, McCain-type conservatives that make up the CDU in Germany.
Those are the type of guys who go, yeah, I don't want anything to do with MAGA, with Trump, and in this case with the AFD. Let me sort of find common cause with the Democrats.
And there's a very striking statement by the guy who's likely to be the new prime minister, the new head of Germany.
And this guy said, you know, we've got to detach ourselves from the United States.
This is the statement I want to focus on for a moment because why would he say something like that?
A very striking statement, not something you would have heard from a German politician of whatever political stripe in past years.
Well, one sore spot is, of course, Ukraine.
A second sore spot is the fact that Trump wants these Europeans and these Germans to pay more for their own defense.
But the third, I think the one that rankles the most, Is that the Germans, like the Brits, like the French, they're into censorship.
They're into shutting down disinformation, what they deem to be disinformation.
They're into arresting people for posting memes.
They're into sending the cops to your house if you said something that they don't like.
And all of this in Germany is justified under the slogan, never again.
So we don't want to...
We don't want to do the Holocaust, and so as a result, we now have this promiscuous and almost unlimited power to go around terrorizing people for their views, even though their views are completely different from those that Hitler espoused or the Nazis espoused.
And here I think we, Debbie and I were talking about it this morning, and I was making the point that here we begin to see the deep divide.
Between Europe and the United States.
Because in Europe, you had kings and monarchs and aristocrats and a kind of royal structure of society.
And when that royalty was overthrown, or in some cases executed, certainly in all cases sidelined, the monarchy was seen to represent the one, the few, the tyranny, the oligarchy.
And parliament...
Basically said, we represent the people.
We are the party of the people as reflected by the majority.
And so once you got parliamentary supremacy replacing, if you will, royal supremacy, the Europeans said, okay, we've done it.
We're now democratic societies and that's the end of it.
But the missing component here is the component of individual rights.
You'll notice that you don't really have free speech rights.
There's no First Amendment in any European country.
There's no Second Amendment, for that matter, or Fourth Amendment, for that matter.
And certainly other amendments, like the Fourteenth Amendment, don't really exist.
Parliament, by and large, has the ability to pass laws that curb, restrict, trample on, if you will, individual rights.
And all of that is considered permissible because it is, quote, the voice of the people.
It's only in America where we never had a king, we never had titles, we never had a kind of formal aristocracy where the founders decided, you know what?
The threat doesn't just come from a king.
It comes from a centralized and tyrannical government.
And that government can be, in fact, popularly elected.
But nevertheless, we need to have individual rights that are secure, even from elected leaders, even from democracy itself.
And that's how we got, for example, a Bill of Rights.
And so I think that this key difference...
Between America and Europe is playing out now because the Europeans do not believe in individual rights per se and show a great deal of willingness to trample on them.
And America's like, you know, we're not okay with that.
That was the point of J.D. Vance's speech in Munich.
He was telling the Europeans, we are not on board with what you're doing and you're doing it not because...
You're doing it because you're afraid of your own citizens.
And so in any event, I foresee a further fracturing of the ties between the United States and Europe on this key issue, and the implications of it remain to be fully seen.
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We're in a perfect storm.
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I was very happy to see yesterday that Trump has named our friend Dan Bongino to be the deputy director of the FBI. And the reaction among the Democrats and from the left was, well, what you might expect.
The freakout over Kash Patel is now only matched.
By the freakout over Dan Bongino.
And of course, the left, going into its usual derisive mode, Trump appoints radio host to be deputy director of the FBI, leaving out the fact that Dan was a New York City policeman.
He was a Secret Service agent.
He's got a close familiarity with defense and law enforcement and security issues.
He's fully qualified for this job.
What the left really fears is that Bongino and Cash They understand the thorough abuse of justice that has gone on throughout the FBI. And so let's just say that the cleanup crew isn't just going to show up.
They're already here.
And the way I think about it is this.
For the last four years, the FBI has been raiding and terrorizing ordinary American citizens.
Now, that's been stopped.
But what we're getting now?
Is the raid on the FBI on behalf of ordinary American citizens?
In other words, Bongino and Cash are leading our raid on them.
And they're going nuts because they have arrogated themselves.
We are simply carrying out the law.
Some of these FBI guys, when you see them talking either anonymously or in some cases they go on...
Former FBI agents go on CNN and MSNBC. They say, well, of course we got court orders to do what we did.
Never bothering to mention that they...
Lied to get those court orders.
Judges, by and large, do no independent investigation.
The FBI comes and says, we think this guy is a terrorist threat.
We think that this old lady of 72 years old could be a white supremacist and head of some sort of a white supremacist ring.
Oh, okay, well, you can go raid her house.
Okay, you can go search her property.
And so the FBI operated in this lawless manner, but under the...
Guise of law, under the cover of law.
So accountability is not only coming, but accountability is here, and I think we ought to be thrilled about it.
Now, let me also talk at least briefly about this magnificent email that has been sent out to the entire federal workforce, very simply saying, What did you do last week?
Just tell us a few things, five things that you did last week.
And my favorite part of it, failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.
Great.
Now, the level of anxiety, the level of outrage...
That is being expressed over this, some of it coming from the federal officials themselves, some of it coming from the Democrats and the media speaking on behalf of these federal officials, is something that needs to be analyzed a little bit.
Because first of all, these kinds of requests are routine in the private sector.
Managers will say to their staff, their IT staff, or the guys who are carrying out some kind of function, hey, what did you get done last week?
Can you make a list of what you did?
What your goals are, what you expect to do next week.
All of this is very helpful from a managerial point of view.
And as I mentioned, it's normal.
It's routine.
It's no big deal.
In some cases, it's even welcome in the private sector because it's helpful to make a kind of inventory of what I've done.
And it's also a way of being able to show the boss that you are productive.
Hey, look at all I accomplished.
So it motivates people to want to do more.
But of course, in this case, You have government officials that don't do anything.
Some of them don't even show up for work.
Some of them have second jobs.
Elon Musk says some of them don't exist.
They're dead.
Or they are fictional people who are getting checks.
You have other people who don't even check their email.
In other words, they have gotten so used to collecting paychecks and not working that even a routine email sent to them is not going to be read by them because...
They don't read email, or at least if they're on social media, they're on their own private social media.
And so you've got a kind of freak out over this simple request for minimal accountability.
And I think that a lot of these government workers don't want to answer because they don't want to give the true answer.
You know, what did they really accomplish last week?
I think here are some of the actual answers.
Number one, I walked my dog.
Number two, I played video games.
Number three, I did online shopping.
Number four, Facebook, Insta.
Number five, my daily consumption of porn.
Not me, honey.
Debbie gives me an alarmed look.
My daily consumption of porn, Debbie's like, what?
I'm like, no, not me.
I'm quoting the federal officials, honey.
Okay.
Number six, attended diversity seminar.
Number seven, three-hour lunches.
Number four, office naps.
So the government officials don't want to say these things.
And of course...
You know, someone, when I post this sort of stuff on social media, someone goes, well, Dinesh, what did you do last week?
Like, tell us the things you did.
So, okay, I'm going to tell you some of the things I did just in the last seven days.
First of all, I did a daily podcast, five shows, close to an hour apiece.
Debbie and I did a bunch of movie planning for our upcoming Israel trip.
I did some negotiations, now completed with publishers on my next book project.
I've read probably between six and seven books last week.
Debbie and I flew to Australia for two days.
We had meetings based on a new venture, and I've written up a proposal based upon those meetings.
So that is a partial list of what I accomplished last week.
Debbie's chuckling here.
Debbie actually believes I accomplished too much!
Debbie's like, no, don't give me a list of five things you did last week.
Try to bring that list down to like three because we need to enjoy our life.
We're not as young as we used to be.
So the pressure in my family is toward doing less, not doing more.
But this is not the case with the federal government.
I think, and I'm going to actually quote a post I did here.
The reason this is disturbing to federal bureaucrats is not because they don't like to be asked.
They're all pretending like, I don't know why you're asking me.
I'm accountable to my own supervisor.
No, you're not accountable to your own supervisor.
Your own supervisor has pretty much the same list of activities that you do.
So you're habituated, most of these guys, to doing nothing.
Nothing is your record of accomplishment.
Nothing is what you're giving in exchange for your salary.
In short, you are a null set.
And it isn't just that Elon Musk is calling you out on it.
It is that it is very shameful for you to write down the things that you have, in fact, not accomplished.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast our friend Rod Blagojevich.
He is the former governor of Illinois, actually now does his own podcast.
He was the 40th governor of Illinois when the Democrats sprung a trap on him.
He got set up.
He got 14 years in prison.
And Donald Trump commuted his sentence, but has now granted him a full...
I thought it'd be great to have Rod back on the podcast to talk about that and also talk about how Trump is doing so far.
Rod, welcome.
Great to have you.
Thanks for joining me.
A lot of people may not really know the key differences between having a sentence commuted and getting a pardon.
Can you start by talking about what those differences are and what the pardon itself means to you?
Well, you know, Dinesh, I went to bed on Super Bowl Sunday as a convicted felon.
The last time I talked to you on your podcast, I was a convicted felon, technically.
And then the next day, President Trump pardoned me, and I went to bed that night.
No longer a convicted felon.
It basically takes away those felony convictions, and to quote President Trump, it cleans you up.
And he was right to do it on many levels, not the least of which is, I didn't break a single law, cross the line, or take a penny.
It was all politics.
I spent eight years in prison.
It would have been 14 had President Trump not commuted my sentence.
But I spent eight years there on conversations.
Barack Obama started.
Wanted to make a political deal.
And I talked about potential deals with him.
He went to the White House for eight years.
I went to the Big House for eight years.
Those were legal, routine, political conversations.
And it's been a long, hard journey.
And let me just say this, Dinesh.
God bless President Trump.
He's been nothing but kind to me and to my family.
When I think about my relationship with Donald Trump, it's really him doing good things for me.
And even though I helped him in the campaign and did some things here and there and raised some money and did some media appearances and whatever I could do to be helpful, it doesn't compare with what he's done.
And the best thing he did to Nash was commuting my sentence five years ago when he gave my little girls, who've grown, their father back.
And I think your listeners, I think many of your listeners and your viewers already know, but Donald Trump is a very strong and tough man, but he's also a very kind-hearted man.
And I think that's part of the story about him that people don't really understand or realize.
Do you think it is, Rod, that That Trump recognized that you had been the victim of a political witch hunt, thought, look, let me get this guy out of prison so he can kind of go back to a normal life.
But of course, when you're commuted, but you still have this felony millstone around your neck, you don't get your life back entirely.
Isn't that right?
You still have a probation officer.
When you travel, they block you at the airport.
In other words, you're not...
You can't just go out and live your life and you don't have your rights back, so to speak.
So do you think that Trump then thought about it some more and then went, you know what, I've seen the degree of politicization.
I've seen how bad the weaponization of justice is.
I'm just going to give this guy a full pardon.
Because Trump did it in two stages.
How do you track his thinking on it?
Well, his thinking was absolutely correct to begin with.
What he did for me five years ago when he commuted my sentence, after being there for 2,896 days, one month short of eight years, was an act of political courage.
I was a Democratic governor.
Now, this I'm guilty of, Dinesh.
I was the first Democrat governor to endorse Obama for president.
If that's a crime, and I'm beginning to think it might have been, send me...
Yeah, I'm sure you're doing a lot of repentance these days on that one.
I would say.
No, but he had a lot of political opposition within his own party, the Republican Party.
And the Democrats here in Illinois were very angry at me because I wouldn't do what they wanted me to do, and that is raise taxes on people.
And I was fighting the Democrat House Speaker Madigan, who's now, incidentally, just been convicted of corruption.
That guy's been the guardian of the status quo, an empire he built, where the government of Illinois basically makes the people work for it rather than the government working for the people.
So when he did that back in...
He did it with all kinds of opposition.
His own party, my party, big-time Democrats here in Illinois who didn't want me home.
J.B. Pritzker, our governor, didn't want me back because he's on the FBI tapes with me asking me to make him a United States senator and actually saying some racist things about my expressed desire to him to pick someone who was black.
So Pritzker didn't want those tapes out.
He didn't want me out.
And so Trump did it in spite of it because he saw something wrong.
Now, to answer your question at the very beginning, Do I think he felt that he saw me a victim of the weaponization that he had to experience himself?
I think the answer is absolutely yes.
And when he signed the pardon in the Oval Office, he expressly said I was set up.
Some of the same people that did to him what they did to me.
And I do believe that my relationship with Donald Trump is, first of all, as I said, he's been so good to me.
But I believe it's divinely inspired in the sense that the unlikely convergence of events and the relationship that he and I have together, the same sort of people doing the same sort of things to both of us, I don't really know him that well.
That I would be on his television show, Celebrity Apprentice, when I was in a real dark moment after they'd thrown me out and I'd been maligned all over the world by the big lie that they were telling.
And that then he would watch all of this and then they would do it to him when he was the president.
Then he would take me out of prison and then pardon me as he did just...
A little over a week ago.
It's the hand of God.
And President Trump is, you know, God's instrument.
It was a miracle.
I mean, I was buried in prison, Dinesh, for eight years.
That's a long time.
And you're heartbroken.
You're heart sick.
You miss your family.
You fear for them because they're alone.
And it was only God that pulled me out.
And Donald Trump was his instrument.
And, you know, putting us together with these strange similarities, I think, creates a certain recognition on his part, I have to believe, certainly on mine.
That when they do it to you, you recognize it when they do it to somebody else.
And so I think that's exactly why he did it.
And all I can tell you is he's just a, quote, you know, a great effing guy.
He's just a good guy who sees wrong things and ends them.
And again, he gets nothing.
Politically, no benefit doing what he has done for me, but he's done it as he has twice with regard to these criminal charges.
And one more thing, Dinesh, it's very interesting.
Donald Trump fired me back in 2009 on Celebrity Apprentice.
He freed me from prison back in February 2020, and then a little over a week ago, he pardoned me, and he was right every single time.
The right thing to do, and I'm grateful for him because it was a political hit job.
I broke no laws, crossed no lines.
I would never give in to the extortion, the shakedowns, the threats, or even the offers of a light sentence if I would simply say I did something wrong because they were hijacking a governor who was elected by the people, and it's the people's right to elect or unelect me, not weaponized.
Bureaucrats with fancy law degrees who turned themselves into political hitmen.
Well, Rod, Debbie and I have gotten to know you over the years a little bit, and we were just elated when we saw that.
When he did the commutation, we thought, ah, well, he decided to do a commutation, not a pardon.
So I was worried that the pardon wouldn't come on its heels.
And as you say, there was a four-year gap between the two, but we're thrilled for you, and it's wonderful, wonderful news.
Let's talk a little bit about what...
And how Trump is doing so far, because I think for a lot of us looking at Trump, he seems to be...
Well, he's not a different man.
He's still the same man, but he seems to be...
Tackling the government with a level of ferocity.
Some would say fury.
Some would say, you know, just determination.
And on the one hand, he seems to be dealing with politicization.
You have Kash Patel.
You now have the latest appointment of Dan Bongino as the deputy FBI director.
On the other side, there's a relentless drilling into corruption.
This I take to be the project of Doge and the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk.
Do you see this as the two-pronged project of Trump to fight the politicization of the government, or at least of the judiciary, and then simultaneously to excavate examples of waste, fraud, corruption, and root those out?
And are you on board with what Trump is up to?
Oh, very much so.
Let me just say again real quick on my part.
I didn't even ask him for that.
I felt he did so much for me when he pulled me out of prison that, you know, God bless him.
I wasn't going to ask him for anything.
He just did it.
And he just did that.
And that's a small thing relative to all the other big things that he's doing now since he's been president on the 20th of January this year.
And it's been a frenetic pace, as you talked about.
I believe, too, this is something.
That I think I recognize, having been basically dead for eight years, Dinesh, and then I've been given a new life, a new beginning.
And I don't recommend prisons for any person who didn't break a law.
But one thing about it that's positive is you come out of there, it's like you've been dead and now you get a new beginning and it's a new life and you're alive again.
And then you realize, at least I do, and I think President Trump does, that there's something larger than us that has put us in this place.
And in his case, I think the attempted assassination where he just turned his head slightly and avoided being killed, I really think that has had a big impact on his determination to really take advantage of this opportunity the American people have given him to make America, to first of all, fix a broken country and then to make America great again.
And I know this about him.
He loves the American people and he loves this country.
And that's not the case for some presidents I've known.
And it's not the case for a lot of people, too many people who are in politics.
They're into their political careers and their upward mobility in life, and less so about serving their country and doing right for the country.
So I think what you're seeing with President Trump is a man who believes God gave him this unique opportunity by saving him from an assassin's bullet.
Not unlike what it was like with Ronald Reagan back in early 1981 when an assassin almost took his life.
And I think that's why you're seeing this activity in part.
And then I would say again, Trump's a doer.
He's an unusual politician.
He's a problem solver.
He wants to get things done.
And every day he gets up doing a whole bunch of stuff, which is things that most politicians don't want to do, because I hate to say it, I hate to sound cynical, but I know the business.
Congress for six years, governor for six years.
Too many politicians, they just don't want to solve problems because they don't want to lose the political issues.
They want to be able to keep campaigning on issues.
And today's Democrats have become, basically, that's all they're about.
All about opposition, not about finding common ground or pursuing the general welfare for the country and occasionally finding a particular place where they might be able to compromise and achieve something good for people.
It's all about opposition and obstruction.
And among the reasons why Trump won as big as he did, Dinesh, I believe.
And here again, I... I've given myself high marks as an expert in politics because I never lost an election.
They see through the baloney.
Trump has exposed it now.
And more and more Americans are now starting to see him for the real person that he is and seeing the opposition, particularly the Democrat Party, being the phonies, the fakes, and the inauthentic people that they are.
And now what we're facing as we move forward with this new president and this new agenda, the same people opposing what he's been doing.
But this time...
The American people are onto it, and I think President Trump has a lot more support by the American people to make these changes, because fundamentally, the American people almost always get it right, and they can see through the baloney, and they're sick and tired of having a government in Washington that serves itself on the backs of them.
Rod, let me ask you about whether you see some kind of a reconfiguration or maybe a realignment of some sort.
I say this because you were for...
Virtually all of your career is a conservative Democrat.
You remember going back to the Reagan days.
Reagan was sometimes able to find common ground with conservative Democrats.
And then our politics seem to have become so fractured that the Republicans and Democrats were really at opposite ends for a while.
And now you have this strange phenomenon in which you've got some prominent Republicans.
I think here of like Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney.
These are people who have sort of pivoted.
You've got Tulsi Gabbard, you've got Robert F. Kennedy Jr., even Elon Musk, whose political affiliations were at best ambiguous, is now some kind of a, you know, pretty much a rabid Trumpster.
When you look at these tea leaves from your unique perspective, what do you think is going on here?
It's the political realignment that President Trump has been leading since 2015 when he announced for president, 2016 when he was elected, and now.
It is the fruits of this political realignment that's been happening, and I think the American people, without really having a place to follow, the shepherd wasn't there, have found one.
They've sensed that it's really less about Democrats versus Republicans in Washington, as opposed to the ruling elite against we the people.
And you just described...
Three people, Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk, which is remarkable.
Three people who are now wedded into that Washington establishment, who to varying degrees have resisted it and have challenged it.
And then the ones you mentioned on the other side, Liz Cheney, I mean, there's the poster child, the poster woman of that Washington establishment.
The Cheneys, what are they about?
They're about starting wars on lies, breaking up a country, and then Cheney's big company, Halliburton, goes in there and rebuilds the country, and they're all making...
Hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars on the backs of dead soldiers on a big lie, on a war that they told us that were weapons of mass destruction.
I voted for that war.
Believe in them.
And they lied.
And Liz Cheney is the epitome of that.
And that system is what Trump is trying to destroy.
That's why they are so determined to destroy Trump.
And so you've got this alliance of Liz Cheney and Kinzinger, the former congressman from Illinois.
And those sort of Republicans who are establishment insiders who basically, you know, make their living off that system, joining the Democrat Party today.
That's, as I said, not interested in solving problems.
And that's a coalition that is basically protecting the ruling elite and the establishment and trying to resist the will of the people as expressed in this last election, supporting President Trump and incidentally electing a Trump Republican Congress and a Trump Republican Senate.
Because Trump has remade the Republican Party.
It's no longer.
The old corporate country club, warmongering Republican Party of Bush and Cheney and Romney, and to some extent, I hate to say it, McCain.
It's now a Republican Party that's reached into traditional Democratic voters, working people who are my political base, who Trump and this new Republican Party are speaking to.
They've been abandoned by the Democrats because they support the elites in Hollywood, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, and this Trump Republican Party is on the side of those working people.
So it's a historic political realignment.
And it's among the reasons why President Trump is going to go down in history as one of the greatest presidents, I truly believe, in American history.
Rod, let me close out by asking you about you.
You have your pardon.
You have your rights back.
You can own a firearm.
You can vote.
You can jump back into the political arena.
Every time I have you on the podcast, Debbie says, that guy is just so talented.
That guy needs to run again for something.
And no one would blame you if you just said, hey, listen, after losing so many years of my life, I just want to enjoy private life.
I just want to hang with my family.
But on the other hand, you do have the gifts, including the gift of the gab, not to mention many other gifts.
And my question is, are you giving some thought now that you are a free man?
In the full sense of the term, hey, I'd like to get back in the public arena in some capacity.
How are you thinking about that?
Yes, thanks for asking.
I smile because, look, there's a part of me, Dinesh, that very much would like to get back in it for the right reason and for the not-so-right reason.
The right reason is, and I know this from having run before and win.
All hard elections, and I won every one of them.
They were hard.
You know, a name like Blagojevich back in the 90s and the early 2000s was not a good ballot name, certainly not here in Chicago and certainly not in the state of Illinois.
But so I think I've been – well, I've had success in politics, and so I like doing it.
But what gave me the motivation to go out and do it and work so hard and then take all the criticism that comes your way, which is – Inherent in the business, and I'm not complaining.
This is part of what a democracy is, and there's a certain level of fairness.
Don't trump a criminal charge to get somebody.
But in the honest public discourse, those attacks are all part of the process.
But what gave me the motivation was I always had to convince myself, look, I really believe I can do right for the people.
And take stock of yourself and ask yourself, what is it that you want to do for the people before you put yourself out there?
This can't just be you wanting to be somebody and having an office.
Or a governor's mansion.
It's got to be about you wanting to do stuff for people.
And so when I was able to do some soul searching and felt and believed that these were the things I wanted to do, and then once I got elected, I would do them, which I did.
Then I felt, you know, I'm going, I'm going to run and do all those things.
This is what I think drives President Trump.
In my case now, that certainly would have to be the first step.
I'd have to convince myself that there are all these things I would like to do and that I believe I could do them for the public, for the people, for our country.
The other part of it is, which is not the best motivation, but it's a personal thing.
I feel like I got cheated.
I feel like I was, you know, a middleweight boxer, which is what I was in the Golden Gloves when I was 18 years old, and that they not only hit me below the belt, but stabbed me in the back and threw me out of the ring, and I was cheated.
And so, you know, having a bit of an athletic mindset, I kind of would like to get back in the ring, and I'd like to win, frankly, kick some ass because of what they did.
But it's always got to be about the people first.
And then my big problem, Dinesh, as a practical matter, it isn't so much winning a Republican primary or a Democrat primary or a Trumpocrat primary.
It's about winning the primary in my bedroom.
I've got to convince Patty, my wife, that this is something that she'd be willing to sign on to because my daughters and my wife have suffered a great deal based upon the career I chose.
And it would be very selfish of me when I did this.
Didn't have them on board being willing to do it.
And right now, Dinesh, if you were to poll my wife, Patty, I'm losing that primary in the bedroom.
But that doesn't mean...
That can't change in six weeks or six months.
Very interesting stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois.
I hope he jumps back into the arena sometime, someday.
By the way, the website, cameo.com slash rblagojevich, and you can follow him on X at Real Blagojevich, B-L-A-G-O-J-E-V-I-C-H. Rod, always a pleasure.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
God bless you and help me, your family.
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We're going through my book, The Big Lie, now out in paperback.
Grab a copy, if you will, easily available at Amazon or any place you want to get books.
And I'm in the latter part of the book.
We're talking about the idea of Kleckschaltung, the Nazi concept of coordinating the whole society, marching in lockstep.
And this is the original form of political correctness.
This is the original combination of propaganda and social pressure and ostracism and the creation of false narratives and the whipping people into line.
And for the Nazis, Gleitschotung was essential, a doctrine of political uniformity, a doctrine of suppression of free speech.
A doctrine also of physical pressure and intimidation when needed.
But the Nazis realized, as the left does also, that the Gleitschotang works best if you don't have to force people.
If you can somehow convince them to internalize the pressure, to become, if you will, good Nazis themselves.
Kind of like, how do you convince a kind of Karen to run up to somebody in a...
In a Walmart and say, why aren't you wearing your mask?
Well, that's somebody who has internalized the ideology of Fauci and the NIH. Someone who sees herself as a kind of virtuous enforcer.
And this is what the Nazis were all about.
And of course, we see its echoes again, not on the right.
The right doesn't even attempt this kind of thing, but exclusively on the left.
I want to explore a couple of episodes that sort of show how this works.
You might, you of course, remember the George Floyd divinization before that, Trayvon Martin, before that, the lionization of people like Che Guevara, even Bill Ayers, seemed to be a kind of a hero for bombing the Pentagon.
This is a...
A rebel.
I think there was an article once, Rebels with a Cause.
So this is a form of Gleichschaltung.
And let's look at the Nazi equivalent of it.
The Nazis had a song called the Horst Wessel Song.
It was named after a local brown shirt.
In fact, a 20-year-old, a 20-something, who was kind of a weirdo.
He was an artiste.
He was a self-proclaimed poet, although his poems are basically doggerel or rubbish.
He got into fights with people all the time, and finally he got into a dispute with his landlady.
The landlady called up a bunch of her friends who were evidently communists.
They came and shot this guy, Horst Vessel.
Apparently the landlady was trying to evict his girlfriend, a one-time prostitute, from the apartment.
So this was some kind of a local fracas.
An episode soon to be forgotten.
But Goebbels, who was the propaganda minister, later the propaganda minister for Hitler, was very smart about this.
He goes, look, one of our own, Horst Wessel, has been killed.
Let's make him a martyr.
Let's elevate him.
You can see here the George Floyd operation moving into full swing here.
So a bunch of Nazis sat down.
They took Horst Vessel's poem, his rubbish poem, and they set it to music.
They picked an old German tune, and they set this song to that tune.
And this is how we got the Horst Wessel song.
The Nazis would march through the streets of Stuttgart or Munich, and they would all be singing the song.
And Wessel's funeral became a huge Nazi demonstration.
Thousands of mourners.
Goebbels himself delivered the oration.
And there were tears, there was applause.
And Goebbels goes, wherever there is a Germany, you will be there too, Horst Wessel.
And then everyone belts out the Horst Wessel song, which becomes a sort of a Nazi anthem, by the way, sung throughout the 1930s and even during the war to rally troop and public enthusiasm.
And so fast forward to our own time, and you see the elevation, the valorization, the lionization of these street thugs.
As I mentioned, Trayvon Martin, of course, most familiar George Floyd.
And this is the Horst Vessel story all over again.
I suppose the main difference is we don't really have a Trayvon Martin song, and Goebbels never claimed that Horst Vessel could have been his son, the way Obama said about Trayvon Martin.
Now, one of the things you notice about Gleichschaltung and about these Nazi tactics is that when the left uses Nazi tactics today, they never say, We are in the proud tradition of the Nazis.
In fact, they say the opposite.
We are in the proud tradition of the anti-Nazis.
We are fighting Nazism.
And this is really where the left kind of gets its moral respectability.
They pose as the opponents of Nazism, and they portray their targets, the targets of their abuse, their intimidation, their propaganda.
As fascists, who fully deserve to be humiliated, abused, ostracized, and so on.
So this is a horrible inversion, turning of things upside down.
And I want to now go into a little bit of depth about how this inversion comes about, because it has a bit of an historical and also a philosophical ancestry.
I'm going to talk about a few key figures.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger, one of his students, Jewish students, Herbert Marcuse, and I'm also going to talk about, perhaps most familiar to you, George Soros.
There's a kind of unbroken line that runs through these men, and it's important to identify what it is.
So let's talk about Martin Heidegger, a philosopher, truly a great philosopher.
Some people think the most important philosopher of the 20th century was, I suppose there would be five or six candidates for that position, but Heidegger is in that group, and I think even those of us who loathe what Heidegger stood for would not disagree with that description.
So a widely influential thinker, his great work.
Which is worth studying is called being and time.
But as we dig into Heidegger, certain themes emerge.
He is vehemently against capitalism and materialism.
In fact, he doesn't like modern technology either.
He attacks individualism and he likes communities of blood and soil.
In other words, communities, as he thinks, grown right out of the earth itself.
And finally, Heidegger is an atheist.
Part of his theme in Being and Time is that our being is connected to our mortality, and at the end of that bracket of time, that is the end of things.
So, these concepts Heidegger argues for in rather dry, roundabout, abstruse, which means hard to understand, philosophical terms.
The Nazis did not mistake that this is a guy who was one of theirs.
And Heidegger saw it that way, too.
In 1933, when Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, Heidegger was named the rector, which is to say the president, the head of the University of Freiburg, the free university, so-called.
And at that point, he circulated a manifesto of German academics.
Pledging their loyalty to Hitler.
And so here's Heidegger basically saying, I am an instrument of Glekschaltung.
I'm going to bring everybody into line.
In a famous address that he gave to the university called the Rector's Address, Heidegger says intellectual freedom is a kind of mirage.
It's a myth.
It's a false freedom.
All intellectual freedom has to be subordinated.
To the larger objectives of this new Germany, this new man.
And Heidegger also goes on to say that education shouldn't just be about learning, about the mind, about books, about ideas.
It should be integrated into national service.
And this is a time when Hitler was calling people to join the military.
And here's Heidegger backing that up intellectually.
As he puts it, the national socialist state is a worker's state.
Sure enough, after Heidegger finishes his address, they all sing the Horst Wessel song, Shouts of Sieg Heil.
Now, after the war, Heidegger backed off a little bit, acted like he wasn't really such a Nazi.
In fact, he argued, he goes, go back and read my lectures on Nietzsche.
They actually contain a very anti-Nazi message.
Very typical progressive left-wing rationalization and intellectual butt-covering.
And I say this because, look, you can read those lectures, but there is no anti-Nazi message in them.
You'd have to labor very hard inside the text to detect in what way is Heidegger saying things that are somehow inconsistent with Nazism.
In other words, you'd have to be some sort of a philosopher yourself to get the message.
And the point about Heidegger isn't really just that he was a philosopher who happened to be pro-Nazi, but rather when you plumb his ideas, when you look at what are the principles he stood for, anti-individualism, blood and soil.
The notion of a kind of inner greatness for a nation that is being tapped, in this case, by a charismatic leader or fuhrer.
The hatred of modernity.
The hatred of America.
Heidegger often spoke about Americanism, always in derisive and negative terms.
The atheism.
All of this ties together into a sort of foundation for...
for Nazism.
Now, Heidegger wasn't a crude Nazi in the sense that he didn't go around with a truncheon beating people in the street.
He didn't serve in the military or any of that.
But nevertheless, here you have one of the prominent philosophers of the 20th century with an unquestioned affiliation to Hitler and to the Nazis.
And interestingly, he is He has been worshipped on the left, and he's been worshipped on the left even though these Nazi connections have been pretty well known.
In some cases, the extent of them was not known, but as the extent became known, there's a debate kind of erupted.
Now, I'll talk a little bit about this tomorrow as I move from Heidegger to Marcuse and on to Soros.
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