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Feb. 25, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:29
WOKE POKE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1028
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, Elizabeth Warren, a.k.a.
Poe.
Pocahontas, fancies herself the leader of the opposition.
I'm going to comment on the woman I call Woke Poke.
And Lincoln fired some generals.
Obama fired some generals.
Trump has now fired some generals.
But in Trump's case, oh no, you can't do that.
Yes, he can.
I'll tell you why.
And former championship swimmer Paula Scanlon joins me.
She's going to talk about the Maine governor, Janet Mills, and why she's willing to jeopardize federal funding going to her state all over the so-called trans issue, the issue of biological men in women's sports.
If you're watching on Rumble or YouTube or X, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please hit the follow or subscribe button.
Please subscribe to my channel.
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.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk today about some of the leading opposition figures who are trying to mobilize against what President Trump is doing today.
And perhaps the foremost of them is Elizabeth Warren.
Now, she's not the only one.
I see Chuck Schumer doing his thing, but it seems to be very bland, ineffective, unattractive.
You have younger figures like AOC. Jasmine Crockett.
But there's a goofball aspect to them, a kind of lack of gravitas.
So here is Elizabeth Warren, and she's trying to be the mature figure.
Now, she's not all that mature because she does work herself up into a frenzy.
I think she wants to perform for the cameras.
And she's been trying to hit Trump in a lot of different directions.
And I want to highlight two.
One is she is...
Preparing to oppose the Trump tax bill and tax cuts, the extension of the Trump tax cuts going back to 2016 to 2020, Trump wants to see these tax cuts extended.
And here's Elizabeth Warren.
Is there any millionaire or billionaire rich enough who doesn't need another tax giveaway?
10 million a year?
100 million a year?
500 million a year?
No.
With Republicans in control, billionaires win.
Families lose.
So, I want to highlight a single word in this, and that is Elizabeth Warren's use of the word giveaway.
What, in her view, is a tax giveaway?
Is the government actually giving you any money?
No.
She doesn't mean that.
A tax giveaway simply means letting you keep your own money.
So, when Elizabeth Warren says, We're making a giveaway to people who make X or Y or Z. She's not giving anything away at all.
In fact, how can she give anything away?
She has nothing to give.
The government itself doesn't produce anything.
It doesn't produce any revenue.
It extracts revenue from the private sector.
So what she's trying to do without saying it is attack the idea that people have a right to keep what they've earned.
I'm not against the idea of taxes, but I'm saying taxes are an expropriation.
An extraction of what people have earned.
But the presumption has to be, I earned it, it's mine, I get to keep it.
But no, for Elizabeth Warren, the presumption is, you've earned it, but you haven't really earned it.
Remember going back to Obama, all the talk about, you didn't really build that.
It's all based on this idea that whatever you have really belongs to us.
Anything that we allow you to keep is a giveaway.
We're allowing you.
We're giving it back to you.
We're giving you a chance to hang on to things that you yourself have produced or made.
So I want to highlight the psychopathic.
People who extort other people's money for their own political benefit and then pose as if they are philanthropists themselves.
Ironically, it is Elon Musk.
It is the billionaires that she deplores.
They're the true philanthropists because they make money.
They give away some of it.
Elizabeth Warren doesn't make any money.
I mean, the only money she makes is leeching off the government and various...
Complicated schemes that allow people like her to come into politics, really from the academic sector, and then somehow suddenly see their net worth go up and up and up and up.
The other thing that Elizabeth Warren did was she talked about the fact that Doge and Elon Musk are making ruinous cuts.
And she singled out the FDIC. They're making some cuts.
They're doing investigations.
At the FDIC, and you might remember the FDIC is the agency that basically insures your bank deposits.
Up to, it used to be $100,000, now it's $250,000.
And the FDIC is the agency that basically says, hey, if something happens to the bank, if the bank goes under, if banks go under, here we are.
We are going to cover those deposits.
We are going to insure them.
We're going to guarantee them.
Accept.
And this is the part that Elizabeth Warren doesn't mention at all.
What are the resources available to the FDIC to cover your deposits?
And the answer is very little.
If you add up the number of bank deposits in the country, it's a giant number.
And then you ask yourself, does the FDIC have, like, forget about having 100% of that money to cover it.
Does it have 50?
No.
Does it have 20?
No.
Does it have 10?
No.
Does it have 5?
No.
Does it have 1%?
No.
So let's back up for a moment here.
You can't cover deposits if you don't even have the money.
You're playing ultimately a game of trying to con people into thinking that you do.
This is not to say that if a single bank goes under, sure, the FDIC can jump in and go, we'll guarantee those depositors.
But that is based on the whole idea that If a bank or two fails, we'll move in so quickly.
We will make those depositors whole.
Nobody else will figure out that we don't have the money to make the rest of you whole.
And so people will be lulled into once again having trust.
So the FDIC is really ultimately, you could say, a trust-building system.
But the trust isn't really justified.
It isn't really earned for the simple reason it's not backed up by anything.
Imagine if you basically said, I'm going out to play sports, and somebody said to you, don't worry, if you fall, if you injure yourself, I'll be right there.
And you say, well, are you capable of helping me?
Are you like a doctor?
Oh, no, I'm not a doctor.
I don't know what I'm doing.
But that's okay.
Go run out there and play, because if you fall down, I'll be right there.
So this is a hollow promise.
And the point I want to make is that...
Elizabeth Warren knows this.
You don't know it.
A lot of people don't know it.
They have no idea that their bank deposits are not...
Adequately covered by the FDIC or anybody else.
The only way the government can cover it, basically, is print a whole bunch of new money, and that's going to dilute the value of your bank deposit and mine, in fact, the bank deposits of everybody else in the country.
So when Elizabeth Warren puts on her granny-scolding outfits and the granny-scolding finger-wagging, what she's really doing is hiding as much as she is showing.
She talks about, oh, the FDIC is here to protect you.
The Doge people are looking at it and that's going to be very dangerous for you.
No, what's really dangerous for us is that we have these federal agencies that purport to do things that they can't possibly do.
It's like a big smoke and mirrors con operation that they're running on us.
And Elizabeth Warren is right in the middle of it.
She is actually part of the con.
Now, I want to pivot from that to a broader discussion of Doge, which I'll...
I'll continue for a minute or two and then pick it up in the next segment.
And that is the real significance of Doge is this.
What Elon Musk is doing with Trump's support is he is challenging the whole federal bureaucracy.
The federal bureaucracy is divided into two.
And until now, until very recently, until Elon Musk, people assume that the federal bureaucracy is divided into a career service.
And political appointees.
And the career service was regarded as untouchable.
They have tenure, just like you have tenure when you work in a university.
You get tenure, you can't be fired, you're there for life.
And so this notion that the career service is untouchable, governments come, governments go, presidents come, presidents go, but we, the career service, stay.
This is an illusion that has been promoted by the left and the Democrats and the media.
Why?
Because this career service is basically their team.
This career service is overwhelmingly 90-95% made up of left-wing Democrats who are doing the bidding of the Democrats.
So again, no matter who's in office, it's almost like you've got the ocean.
The Republicans get to sort of skate on the top of it or skate on the top of the ice, but underneath the ice or underneath the ocean.
Everything that's going on is supporting the Democrats.
And so when you have a Republican president, you have a career service that can work to undermine that president in a sense from below.
And this is why the media is so protective of this career service.
This is the distinction that Trump has challenged and challenged with very, I think, enduring consequences.
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Stephen Miller just gave a speech at CPAC in which he said, look, the people who work for the government work for the government.
Whether they are a career, whether they are political appointees, their job is to carry out the mission of the President of the United States.
In other words, We have three branches of government.
We have the Congress, which makes the laws.
We have the judiciary that interprets and to some degree implements the constitutionality of these laws.
And then you have the executive branch, which carries out, enforces the law.
And the executive branch encompasses all these cabinet departments and agencies who are accountable to whom?
Well, to the president.
And why to this one man?
People say, well, obviously this is, you know, the worship of Trump and this is like a cult.
No.
There is a constitutional logic behind it which goes like this.
Every other elected official represents some partial constituency.
Obviously, we have branches that aren't elected at all.
Judges are appointed, not elected.
But congressmen and senators are elected.
But a congressman represents a district.
100,000 people, 150,000 people.
A senator represents a state, whether it be a small state like Rhode Island or a large state like Texas.
Nevertheless, it is one part of the country.
Who is the one person who is elected nationwide by an electoral majority?
And that is the president.
And so the executive branch answers to this one person, this one man, in this case Trump.
And so...
The idea is that if you're not on board, if you're not following the edicts, the policy, the mission of the president, and you're in the executive branch, you need to get out.
And if you don't voluntarily get out, you need to be put out.
You need to be ejected.
They need to hit the eject button on you and boom, you need to be propelled out of the airplane.
And this is a big change.
Now, I can see in some ways why these federal bureaucrats are so unnerved by this because no one has done this.
Coolidge didn't do it.
Harding didn't do it.
Hoover didn't do it.
Nixon didn't do it.
Reagan didn't do it.
Really, no one has challenged the authority, the supremacy, the durability, the permanence of this sort of career class.
I don't think that people knew how to do it.
And Trump has shown that it's actually something that other presidents didn't have any idea how to do.
I remember in the Reagan years, we'd think about cutting spending.
It never occurred to us that we could root out the career bureaucracy.
It was taken for granted that those guys have tenure.
You can't do anything about it.
And so if you raise the issue with your superiors, they would shrug and say, well, sorry, there's not much we can do about that.
The political appointees have got to do their best to cajole the career bureaucracy to snap into line.
And if they can't do it, then that's just maybe a lack of leadership on their part.
But Trump's...
The point is no.
Why should we put up with a team?
It's kind of like I'm a coach.
I've got a team.
And a whole bunch of people on the team say, you know what?
We're permanent players.
You can't tell us what to do.
We don't care what plays you want to run.
Not only do we not agree with those plays, but we're going to be running plays against you.
You want to move the ball over here?
We're going to try to move it over there.
You want to go forward?
We want to go back.
You want to run, we want to throw.
So you have obstructionism built into not only the government, but your own branch of government.
And what Trump is saying, I think for the first time and proving himself, putting himself behind it is, you know what?
This whole cozy arrangement is now over.
I'm not going to allow it.
There is no...
It's constitutional, not even really a legal basis for this sort of sharp line of demarcation or separation between the career service on the one hand and the political appointees on the other.
And so either you're on the team or you're off the team.
And this I cannot tell you how important, how interesting, how exhilarating this is.
Now let me turn to the generals that Trump has fired because it is really funny to see the...
Well, here is Susan Rice I saw on CNN. She's like, oh, Trump is undermining the apolitical character of the military.
And I'm like, pause.
The apolitical character of the military, yeah, we like to think of the military as apolitical.
I think for many years it was reasonably apolitical.
And by the way, the kind of natural political balance of the military comes from the fact that the military is made up, by and large, of southern white guys and black guys.
And the black guys traditionally have been leaning Democrat, at least as a group.
And the Southern white guys have been traditionally leaning Republican or leaning right.
And so there was a kind of organic balance to the military.
But in the Obama years, and now continuing in the Biden years, there was the politicization of the military, the woke military.
Let's put the cadets in high heels and make them all march down the street.
The purging of Trump supporters from the military.
So the people who were doing this...
And thought it was okay.
And now lecturing us about the fact that, oh, the military has to be apolitical.
You can't fire this general because of DEI. Yes, you can.
We're talking about this general.
First of all...
I don't want to fall into this idea that all these generals need to be hero-worshipped.
I recognize that they have 45 medals on their chest.
But I look back at the World War II generals, and they had like four medals on their chests, and they actually won a war.
Whereas when you're dealing with these generals, they couldn't beat a bunch of Afghan tribesmen.
They didn't do all that well in Iraq.
I guess you could say that they won Desert Storm, although even that proved to be short-lived.
Before that, they didn't do so well in Vietnam.
I agree.
This is not all about the generals.
There were political failures all across the way.
They got bad leadership from the political class and so on.
But I mean, basically, the last time the United States won a war decisively is World War II, and none of these generals were any part of it.
So if someone tells me that the security of the United States depends upon the generals...
We can't change out the generals.
Never mind that Obama fired McChrystal.
Never mind that Truman fired MacArthur.
Never mind that it is customary.
Lincoln, when he said, my generals aren't doing what I want, they're doing, in fact, a horrible job.
Out they go.
Lincoln fired a bunch of generals.
So this is something entirely within the province of the executive branch.
After all, let's remember, the president is, in fact, the commander-in-chief.
He has a right to fire and change out the generals if he wants.
So Trump is doing...
He is doing great.
He is forging ahead on all fronts.
And he is leaving, as I think it was Tom Cotton who said, he is leaving a confused, befuddled, and demoralized democratic faction in his wake.
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Text my name, Dinesh, to the number 989898. Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Paula Scanlon.
She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor in Science and Engineering.
She is also a competitive swimmer, and she was on the same team as the controversial trans athlete named Leah Thomas.
You might remember...
Leah Thomas.
Paula is now an Early Vote Action New Jersey Registration Coordinator.
The website is earlyvoteaction.com.
She's also affiliated with the Independent Women's Forum, where she speaks out on women's issues.
That website is iwf.org, and you should follow Paula on X. Paula, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I've followed you on social media and seen some of your posts that talk about the issue of biological males in women's sports.
I'd like to, since it's your first time on the podcast, Talk a little bit about what kind of opened your mind to this issue initially.
How is it that you decided to get involved and speak out?
Definitely.
Well, we found out that Leah Thomas is going to be joining our team back in the fall of 2019. So that was many years before it even happened.
It was two years before that we even knew.
But before any of this, I was already pretty conservative.
I was already right-leaning.
I was already in the...
College Republicans Club in college.
And so I took me zero seconds to say, hey, guys, this is a terrible idea.
How dare they do this to us?
And I look up the policy and I find out that the NCAA believes that if you simply suppress your testosterone for a year, whatever that even means, that you can compete on any women's sports team in any sport across any division, D1, D2, or D3. That to me felt so wrong.
I was only 19 years old at this time seeing this.
And I was very quick to say to my teammates, to my coaches, I don't think this is a good idea.
We shouldn't allow this to happen.
But of course, no adults in the room stepped up.
The NCAA did not step up.
My university did not step up.
And they allowed a fully grown man to compete on a women's swim team and change in our locker room every single week, 18 times per week.
And then go on and win an NCAA championship title in women's swimming.
So the situation ended up happening, even if I said things about not liking it and other athletes saying the same, they didn't care.
They were going to allow this to happen regardless.
I mean, I think, Paula, you know, just backing up for a minute, just what you described is so outlandish, so preposterous.
I mean, the whole rationale for having men and women's sports, as I understand it, is that there are huge, you know, physical differences of strength and stamina between men and women.
And if these did not exist, you wouldn't need to have men and women's divisions at Wimbledon.
Men and women boxing in separate divisions, you wouldn't need to have really the kind of separation or even segregation that we have in sports.
It's based on the recognition of genuine and ineradicable biological differences between the sexes.
How do you think this whacked out idea came about that someone could essentially proclaim themselves a woman, then as you say, take some puberty blockers or take some inhibitors for a year and then voila, take some puberty blockers or take some inhibitors for a year and then voila, they're I mean, have you thought about how did this derangement inflict itself on us?
It's coming from, honestly, these colleges and these leftist academia hotbeds, right?
So they ran out of things to study.
Departments in college, I went to the University of Pennsylvania, right?
I saw this firsthand.
I studied engineering, but I still saw the liberal arts education.
And they have these departments that have hundreds of employees that don't do anything at all and have nothing to research and have no interest in studying real things and teaching students real things.
They do research on things like gender study and Weird other things like that.
Or they're making films about lesbians.
I mean, that was actually a course at the University of Pennsylvania.
There was like a lesbian filmmaking class.
What is that?
And they ran out of ideas and they started to push this concept of transgenderism and that there's no differences between the two sexes and that men can be women and women can be men.
And there's 52 genders now.
It's really from their research and pushing these things.
And in classes, before this even happened, my freshman year, they would ask us to go around and introduce ourselves with pronouns.
They would say, please tell us your preferred pronouns.
What do my pronouns have to do with teaching me a course in something completely unrelated?
Like engineering, for example.
They would ask us in our engineering courses, what pronouns you are are not going to have a determination if you can solve the algorithm or if you can write code.
But they act like for some reason that's the most important thing.
And so the signs were starting very early that this was a problem.
But again, I said, okay, well, you know what?
They're just a little bit left-leaning.
It's all right.
Once they put a man on my team, I said, okay, wait, this has gone way too far.
And this is much, much worse than just telling us we have to share our pronouns in front of the class.
I mean, I suspect what's going on here is that you have these...
You know, these researchers, if you will, and then they suddenly discover...
That people are sometimes born with sexual abnormalities or anomalies, right?
I mean, to me, it's not all that different by saying, okay, we have a guy, and he's born without an arm, or he's born with a third stump that looks like a third arm.
But that doesn't really mean that human beings don't have two arms.
This is just an abnormality that sometimes occurs in nature.
So, because I keep reading about these so-called intersex people, and it's evidently a tiny, tiny fraction of people who are born with like abnormal genitalia, but it apparently has sent a bolt of sort of epiphany or revelation through these academic communities.
Wow, the fact that we've got intersex means you can't simply distinguish human beings into male and female.
I mean, as someone with a science background, isn't this the kind of idiocy you're dealing with here?
And I think it's gone way too far with just doing these research.
But also, it's not even related because a lot of these people that are...
Identify as transgender, whatever that even means.
Leah Thomas, great example that I know personally, right?
He was just a normal man.
It wasn't even like he fell into that situation where there was anything going on there that was abnormal or a development issue.
None of that.
I mean, it's starting to take those people who have conditions that they've researched, which they should research.
But that doesn't mean that there's now magically 52 ways to identify or whatever the number that they're trying to sell these days.
And that it's a fluid thing.
That's what I'm always told.
Oh, it's fluid.
It's not fluid.
Every single cell in your body has a sex.
They'll know that you're male or female, no matter what hormones you take, no matter what you try to cut off, or no matter how you identify and how you tell people to call you.
It's not going to change your cells in your body.
And these researchers are not willing to admit that.
And that's why actually we've had this.
A lot of researchers, and there's a good researcher on X. His name's Colin Wright.
If you guys don't follow him, you should check him out.
And he talks about the fact that there is male and female, and there are two sexes, and he was canceled in academia for having that belief, which is wild because that's so scientific, but we've lost track of that.
And as you know, Paula, not just cancel, but there was a time, and maybe still continues on some platforms, where you get restricted, you get deplatformed, you get banned, you get strikes against you for...
Essentially articulating what is biologically accurate.
Hey, let me ask you about this.
I don't know if you followed this latest with Trump and the governor of Maine.
This was at the governor's meeting where Trump says, hey, listen, none of this allowing biological males and women's sports, and if you do it, you're going to lose federal funding.
And I thought it was really interesting that Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, Like, dug in.
And she's like, no, I'm going to sue you.
I'm going to go to court.
So evidently you have a governor for whom this issue is so important, so fundamental, that she's willing to jeopardize federal funding for the whole state in order to continue allowing biological males and women's sports.
How do you even process something like that?
It's funny.
I was actually talking to some friends about this, and why is she dying on this hill?
It's not even popular among Democrats anymore.
We've looked at polling, and it's at least 80% of Americans agree that men do not belong in women's sports.
How many issues do 80% of Americans agree on, especially in this day and age?
There's so much division.
There's people on the left who believe wild things.
80% of Americans agree on this issue.
Why are you digging your heels in and saying no and you want to die on that hill?
I have no idea why she would be doing that.
I think part of it maybe is she has a personal connection to the situation or there's transgender constituents that are, you know, giving her a hard time.
That's what I've seen with a lot of these Democrats and any politicians really, state level, federal level, they're just being held hostage by that really small 20% group of people.
And it's probably less than 20, to be honest.
I really, truly believe it's 10% or under.
From my understanding, I'm talking to people from all different backgrounds.
I think 10% or less of people agree with this issue, but they are holding them hostage.
And the Democrats don't know how to wake up and say, enough is enough.
We have to drop this or we're not going to win elections.
And I thought that after the result of the 2024 election, they would have realized that, but apparently not.
And so my answer, and a lot of people were saying this.
I think we should just give Maine to Canada.
I'm sure they'll fit in much better in that country.
That's funny.
Yeah, you know, it doesn't make sense to me that the trans movement, which is, I don't think, small.
I mean, infinitesimal would be probably a better description.
To me, it only makes sense If the trans issue has been co-opted by the broader LGBTQ movement, because then you have all these groups, and some of these groups are pretty powerful, particularly powerful in blue states and particularly powerful in certain sectors of American life, like academia or the media or Hollywood and entertainment.
So I can sort of understand if the gays, who are very well connected politically, are pushing this issue.
And I say that because, you know, for 30 years in American life, the whole premise of sort of gay tolerance has been this.
Hey, listen, you know, I'm gay.
I'm not choosing to be gay.
That's the way that I am.
I don't know if it's nature.
I don't know if it's nurture, but it's me.
And so since this is not a choice, it is only reasonable for you to accommodate it, to be tolerant toward it.
Now, of course, the logic of trans identification is...
What do you make of the seeming adoption by the larger LGBT movement of the T part of that conjunction?
Yeah, that's something I've talked about a lot as well.
Interests are not aligned at all.
It's weird because we're actually starting to see a lot of these gay people and the LGB part of the group want to drop the T. I mean, that's something I've seen all the time in my ex timeline.
There's a lot of people that have spoken out.
There's a lot of people who have been saying, hey, I'm gay or lesbian, and they love Trump and they openly support Trump.
And so it has been really interesting to see that.
And I think part of the problem is this is just going back to the leftist.
Ideas and what the Democrat Party is pushing is this concept that everyone needs to be put in a category.
And it's the same thing that they've done with POCs, right?
Person of color.
They're saying that Black people, Hispanic people, and occasionally Asians when they want us, sometimes they don't want me.
They try to group us into categories when our interests are very different.
I mean, there's very different cultural differences between African-American people and myself as an Asian.
And when it's convenient to them, somehow we're the same.
And so I think that this LGBT situation is just another one of those groups where they're trying to pin everyone against that other group, right?
So it's the LGBT everyone versus straight people, or it's all people of color versus white people.
They always need to have a victim and an oppressor.
And in this case, all straight people are the oppressors and the LGBT group is the group that's oppressed or the victims.
And that's how they're trying to paint it.
People start to wake up and realize it doesn't actually work like that.
Everyone has their own different interests.
And also, it shouldn't matter to how you live your day-to-day life and also what policies affect you because you're an individual at the end of the day and everyone has different experiences.
You can't be categorized like that.
Yeah, you know, Paula, let's close out by me asking you this question, which is, there's so much...
Indoctrination on this identity politics and this grouping based upon race and gender and sexual orientation.
And it goes on from elementary school through middle school.
I'm curious about how you liberated yourself from thinking in those boxes.
Because was it your family?
Was it that you thought to yourself, this is so confining?
Did you find that you're thinking thoughts that broke out of these molds?
How is it that you were able to beat the indoctrination?
Honestly, I think the biggest thing for me is I'm obviously mixed race.
So I have a white father and my mom immigrated here from Taiwan.
So my mom's Asian.
And so I think very quickly, I didn't fit into a perfect box one way or another.
And so by being outside of the box in a lot of ways, I wasn't able to really fit in.
So I had to make decisions for myself.
But also in Asian culture, we love merit-based decisions.
And Asians were discriminated against in the college admissions process.
So I saw that happen firsthand.
And I think I saw a lot of this hypocrisy going on where people were also trying to push feminism.
And as a woman, you have to believe these certain things.
And I said, OK, as a woman, I don't think that we're any less than men, but also I can't become a man.
I'm not a man because I declare I am one.
That's not going to happen.
And so just seeing past a lot of these things that they were trying to push on us.
Again, it was I think it really was my background of being a mixed race individual where, again, I don't fit into a category.
So I'm less likely to get sweeped up into one.
But I saw it in college, and I would say the majority of people who go through the college system, especially at these Ivy League institutions, come out brainwashed, thinking that you have to believe a certain way.
And I have a lot of people that I used to be friends with in college that will not even speak to me because I might even semi-support Trump to them is just, how dare you?
You're an awful person.
And they categorize you as a disgusting human being when...
Who you are as a person often doesn't have anything to do with how you vote.
I mean, you're an individual.
You conduct yourself in day-to-day life.
And that has nothing to do with how you voted.
But Democrats want to believe that.
And it's their only tactic to really get people on their side.
Because if you just convince them that the other side is awful and all the people are terrible bigots, they'll convince them not to vote that way.
And that's really the strategy that they've been using for the last eight or so years.
And I hope to see the end of that.
I got out of it.
I mean, I never really got into it, but I hope to see more people, especially in my age range, also burst out of that as well.
Paula, it takes courage for someone like you.
You're young.
You know it's going to generate controversy, and yet you speak out.
I think you're doing a great job.
Guys, I've been talking to Paula Scanlon.
She's New Jersey Coordinator for Early Vote Action.
Website is earlyvoteaction.com.
Follow her on X at Paula Y. Scanlon, S-C-A-N-L-A-N. Paula, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me today.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the big lie.
And yesterday I talked about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the affiliation of this great 20th century philosopher with the Nazis.
Today I want to talk about one of his students, a guy named Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse was part of a group of thinkers, later to be called the Frankfurt School.
These guys were the people who imported a Marxist philosophy into American education, but they did it under the guise of fighting fascism.
This is the interesting part about it and the part that I want to focus on.
I had said a few days ago that we think of the Gleichschaltung or the regimentation of the left as coming about in the 1960s.
Here I want to go to what are the roots of that regimentation.
In other words, where did the activists of the 1960s get it from?
And I want to suggest that they got it from the men of the 1930s.
And they got it from the Frankfurt School.
The Frankfurt School brought it from Germany.
To America, and a key figure in this was, in fact, Herbert Marcuse.
Now, Marcuse was a young Marxist.
He studied under Heidegger, and he recognized that one of Marx's key themes, which is alienation, being alienated from society, think about it, so much of the left's identity politics.
I'm black, I'm gay, I'm a woman, I'm trans, is based on alienation.
In other words, I'm not accepted by society.
I'm on the outside.
I am a victim.
People have been mistreating me, discriminating against me.
So this is the politics of alienation.
And Marcuse recognized that Heidegger was pushing in the direction of fascism.
It's important to realize that for Marcuse, this was not a problem.
It's not a problem because fascism and Marxism are very close to each other.
Giovanni Gentile, the intellectual founder of fascism, was in fact a full-fledged Marxist.
So Marcuse knew Heidegger doesn't like individualism.
Neither do I. Heidegger doesn't like capitalism.
Neither do I. Heidegger's favorably disposed to socialism.
So am I. Heidegger doesn't like America.
Neither do I. And so for all these reasons, what Marcuse was trying to do is a kind of intellectual fusion between Marxian socialism and Heideggerian fascism, making a sort of a synthesis between the two.
But there was, in fact, one wrinkle here, and that is that Hitler wasn't just a fascist.
He was also an anti-Semite.
Marcuse was a Jew.
And so Marcuse realized, not only does Hitler disagree with me, not only does he not like me, but he's very likely to kill me.
And so even though I, Marcuse, am a Marxist and I'm on board with fascism, I'm obviously not on board with National Socialism, with Nazism.
Why?
Because it's targeting people like me.
And so Marcuse breaks with Heidegger.
He flees the country.
And he joins the Frankfurt School.
Now, in the Frankfurt School, you've got other people, very like-minded, left-wing, socialist, Marxist, and all these people are coming at it in different ways.
There's a guy named Theodore Adorno.
Marcuse and Adorno, by and large, both came to the United States.
Adorno worked in New York City for the Institute of Social Research.
Then he moved to California for several years before going back to Europe.
Marcuse taught at Columbia.
Then he also worked with some government agencies.
And then he taught at Brandeis up in Massachusetts.
And then finished off his career at the University of California in San Diego.
Now, what was the project of this Frankfurt School?
This is something that I think I'm covering here.
In a very original way.
And it's this.
The Frankfurt School started off trying to peddle its own brand of Marxism.
But they realized nobody cares.
Americans were not in the mood to listen to some tedious Germans babble on about the evils of capitalist consumer culture.
While this kind of rhetoric was common in the socialist parties of Europe, Americans just did not take to it, did not respond well to it.
People like nice homes, they like cars, they like pools in their backyard.
So just pointing the finger and saying consumerism isn't really going to do the trick.
So Marcuse and Adorno began to scratch their heads, put on their thinking caps, and they're like, you know what?
Let's stop marketing ourselves as Marxists who don't like consumer culture.
Let us rebrand ourselves as anti-fascists.
Now, this was a very interesting move because Marcuse was in fact the disciple and the willing disciple of a leading fascist, indeed a prominent philosophical Nazi.
So how do you somehow say...
That you are now anti-fascist and you are now anti-Nazi.
Because remember, these guys are coming to America after World War II. They know that fascism and Nazism have become discredited.
They know that Nazism is like the embodiment of evil.
And so the clever move that they're making is if we can pass ourselves off as anti-fascist, as anti-Nazi, people will think that we must be the apostles of virtue.
And see, the thing about it is they were able to point to their Jewishness and say, look, I can't be fascist.
I'm Jewish.
Everybody knows that the Nazis were against the Jews.
Now, as I mentioned before, the fascists were not against the Jews, but most Americans didn't know that.
And so, as refugees from Nazi Germany, many people, many Americans thought these two guys have seen Nazism, the evils of Nazism from the inside.
And so it was a marketing strategy and it worked really well.
In fact, Marcuse, as I mentioned, was hired by the US government on how to develop strategies to combat, ideologically, Nazism.
Think about the irony of all this.
After the war, Marcuse was instrumental in shaping re-education programs in Germany that were aimed at eradicating Nazi allegiances from the people.
And so neither the American government nor the American Jewish Committee, which promoted Marcuse, understood that Adorno and Marcuse had their own agenda.
Their agenda was not fighting fascism per se, but promoting Marxism and a leftist political agenda.
As I've argued throughout this book, Marxism and fascism are actually quite close.
They're kindred collective ideologies of the left.
Their common enemy?
Free markets.
The institutions of the private sector, the church, the traditional family.
So Marxism and fascism are united in trying to get rid of capitalism, remake the social order, and this was the agenda of Marcuse and Adorno and the Frankfurt School.
So what these guys did was they repackaged fascism as moral traditionalism and as technological capitalism.
They acted like that is the meaning of fascism.
So if you support technological capitalism, if you support moral traditions and social hierarchies, you're a fascist.
Now, this was absolutely deranged because real fascism despised the market.
Real fascism also despised the traditional moral order.
Real fascism was aimed at creating a new type of order detached from traditional patriotism, the traditional family, the church, and so on.
The technique that Adorno used, highly successful in sort of marketing this Marxism disguised as anti-fascism, was a book that he wrote called The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950. And basically what Adorno argued is that respect for authority Respect for your family.
Obedience.
These are all fascist traits.
Why?
Because they involve conformity.
They involve doing what you're told.
They involve following a rule.
And so tradition in this twisted view of thinking becomes the embodiment of fascism.
And meanwhile, all kinds of deviants.
You're a criminal.
You're a homosexual.
You're a drug addict.
You're a homeless person.
These were all seen as signs of being anti-fascist.
Why?
Because you're not conforming.
You're not playing by the rules.
You don't just grow up in a two-bedroom house with two cars in the driveway.
So what Adorno did is he redefined fascism to mean nothing more than all the traits that he saw in America in the 1950s.
The patriarchal household.
Fascist.
The church, fascist.
Following authority, fascist.
Tradition, fascist.
And being a bohemian, being a nonconformist, sexual liberation, homosexuality, all of this was seen as an index of being non-fascist or even anti-fascist.
So this is the big lie here, being manufactured right in front of our very eyes as early as 1950. And the question I want to leave you with is why did the mainstream of American academia and media go for it?
Why did they fall for it?
Well, they didn't really fall for it.
They were predisposed to want to believe it anyway.
The point is that mainstream media and academia, even as early as 1950, were left-wing.
They were progressive.
They shared this aversion to the traditional family.
They shared this skepticism about the church.
They were experimenting with bohemian lifestyles.
This was not the mainstream yet of American culture at all.
The 60s had not arrived.
It was still in the 1950s.
But in certain sectors of American life, This bohemianism was very popular.
And so from the point of view of American academics and media types, here were these German scholars, and they spoke with a clipped German accent, and they seemed to have academic credibility.
And it was like, wow, they're telling us exactly what we want to believe, exactly what we want to hear.
And so progressives delightedly climbed aboard the bandwagon, cheered them on, and the cheering continues.
So if you wonder today how we have such a distorted...
This is part of the way in which the false ideology, the big lie, the narrative, if you will, was imported and promulgated to America.
And this didn't just happen now.
It didn't just happen under Obama.
It didn't happen under Clinton.
It didn't even happen in the 1960s.
It goes back to the very aftermath of World War II. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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