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March 4, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:55
WAR AND PEACE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1033
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, I'll cover the two big issues in the news, Trump's tariffs and Ukraine.
I also want to use the example of the shutdown of a clinic in India to show why USAID policies are so destructive.
Ryan Helfenbein, who runs the Standing for Freedom Center at Liberty University, joins me.
We're going to talk about threats to freedom at home and abroad.
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Hey, this is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
Guys, big address coming up tonight.
Trump is going to be speaking to Congress.
It is the annual congressional address.
And Trump is promising that he will, quote, tell it like it is.
So this will be fascinating, Debbie, and I'll be watching.
I'll give you my take on what Trump says tomorrow.
Linda McMahon has been confirmed as Secretary of Education, normally something that would be uneventful and go unmentioned by me.
However, what's interesting here is that she has been tasked by Trump with shutting down the education department.
So when Trump called her to offer the job, he said, your job is to, well, put yourself out of a job.
And this is not by dismantling, quote, education.
This is what the left is going to make it look like.
It's really about...
Decentralizing it, sending it back to the states.
Education is in such a bad way that any kind of shake-up, I think, is bound to be good because what comes out of it is likely to be better than what we have now.
Pete Hegseth is on a mission to rename military bases.
And what I mean by that is give the basses back their old name.
Now, what I want to point out here, which is quite amusing, honey, I don't think you know about this, but Pete Hegseth has renamed Fort Moore, Fort Benning.
And he earlier renamed...
Fort Bragg, which had been changed to Fort Liberty.
He changed it back to Fort Bragg.
Now, what's funny about this is that there is apparently a congressional law that prohibits naming military bases after Confederate generals.
And so what Pete Hegseth is doing is finding soldiers who have the same name and naming the forts after that guy.
So, for example, there's apparently a guy named Roland Bragg.
He's private first class.
His accomplishments so far are unknown.
However, Fort Bragg is named after this guy.
So not the Confederate general.
It's named after private first class Roland L. Bragg.
And the same thing, there's apparently a guy named Corporal Fred G. Benning.
Again, accomplishments unknown.
And Fort Benning is now named after...
after that guy.
So Hexeth is really being a little bit naughty here, but I think in an awesome way.
Hey, look, as you know from my work on Lincoln, it's not like I'm a fan of the Confederate generals.
I'm just against the left's campaign of pulling down statues, renaming military bases.
And in some cases, we have to say, particularly, this is especially true about military men, very often they fight for a cause because they are in the army.
I mean, Lee's primary motivation for fighting in the Civil War, a war that, by the way, he tried to prevent.
He was against secession.
He was against slavery.
But nevertheless, he saw himself as a Virginian first and foremost.
And so military men, their loyalty is often that way.
And so then to just transpose it and go, well, Lee was fighting for slavery is at best a crude simplification of the matter.
So I'm actually happy to see what Hexeth is doing.
Now, I'm going to I do want to talk briefly about these tariffs.
And this is a topic I'll be talking about a lot more.
So take this as a very much of a preamble or introductory set of comments.
And tariffs, in general, my view, I'll state right up front, are bad.
They're not a good thing.
And they're not a good thing for the simple reason they are attacks.
Tariffs are attacks.
So the question about tariffs is not whether they're good or bad.
They're not good.
But can they be used effectively in certain contexts?
This is really the question to ask with regard to the Trump tariffs.
At first, I thought that the Trump tariffs were mainly diplomatic.
Their purpose was really not economic at all.
It was not to create a trade war.
It was not ultimately to create a different structure of trade.
It was a way of sending a message to Mexico and Canada in particular that, hey, listen, stop sending the fentanyl over our borders.
Police the border on your side.
Or we will hit you with some tariffs that will be very unpleasant for you.
And I was quite supportive of the tariffs in that sense.
But now we have a much wider regime of tariffs.
Tariffs on the EU, tariffs on China, tariffs on Mexico, tariffs on Canada.
With not only the possibility, but the reality of retaliatory tariffs.
And so now what you have is governments competing with each other by, quote, raising taxes on commodities.
Now, this is not the end of the story.
It's the beginning of the story, which demands further analysis.
I'll leave this topic today by just giving you my response to a couple of comments.
This is by a leftist who's posting on X. His name is Tristan Snell.
He's probably very much...
Well, he looks a bit like his name.
He's kind of a freaky-looking guy, but he does have a big following, and so I think it's worth answering him.
And he says two things that are both false.
First, he says, The last time America increased tariffs like this, it was 1930, and it triggered the Great Depression.
Well, this is actually not possible because the Great Depression, the crash, was in 1929. So you could argue that tariffs made the Great Depression worse.
In fact, that is a correct argument.
But you can't say the tariffs triggered.
Triggered means started.
Triggers means set off.
So the tariffs of 1930 could not have set off the crash of 1929, right?
That's impossible, and that should be pretty obvious.
But the other thing this guy says, and I'm quoting him now, is he goes, the tariff is a tax.
The company that pays it then passes along the cost as a price increase to you.
So Donald Trump is raising your taxes.
25%.
This is a really good example of like an economically illiterate statement on multiple levels.
And let me tell you why.
First of all, a tariff is a tax.
The company that pays it then passes along the cost as a price increase to you.
This is a non sequitur.
And this is not necessarily true.
Let's say, for example, I'm a restaurant.
And let's say that the cost of eggs, the cost of the things that I'm buying that go into the...
Go into the restaurant that I need.
Go up.
Does it follow automatically that I'm going to raise the price of the food by that much?
No.
Why?
Because there are many other restaurants.
They might be charging less.
I've got to pay attention to what other restaurants are charging because otherwise people may go, well, you know what?
It's too expensive to eat over here.
I'm just going to go eat across the street.
I'm going to eat someplace else.
So it doesn't follow.
Sometimes when people have increased costs, you know, we have increased costs in making a movie, but the movie ticket is the same because we can't afford to raise our movie prices because other movies charge less.
And so this is the point.
The idea that these tax increases are automatically passed on, not necessarily true.
But the second point is even more egregious.
So Donald Trump is raising your taxes by 25%.
This is a basic error.
And here's why.
If Trump imposes 25% tariffs on certain goods, it doesn't follow that your taxes or mine go up 25%.
It simply means that the foreign imports of those goods are taxed at that rate.
So, you know what?
We should have a debate about tariffs, and I'm going to try to have a conversation about it here that's not economically illiterate in this way.
We've got to look at the way that markets actually work.
And we've got to look at the impact of tariffs, not just, by the way, on the cost of goods, because everybody agrees, by and large, the effect of tariffs is going to be to increase prices on those commodities.
But tariffs have other effects.
For example, they make it easier to create jobs in this country, because when things are more expensive from abroad...
There's a greater incentive for domestic producers to supply those things.
And so if we have tariffs, let's say, on lumber, that's actually good for the lumber industry in America.
So trying to balance these things that are the effects of tariffs is something I'll be talking about as the week goes on, and possibly in response to what Trump says about the subject tonight.
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I have some sad news to report.
A trans clinic, apparently the only trans clinic in the country, has shut down in India.
Most of my relatives are just aggrieved about this.
Indians are having almost like a national day of sorrow.
Well, not exactly.
Indians don't care about a trans clinic.
This is a trans clinic, by the way, that was not funded by India.
And think about it.
If Indians wanted a trans clinic, they could pay for a trans clinic.
The reason you have a trans clinic in India is because of USAID. And the reason that the trans clinic, India's only trans clinic, has closed...
It's because the USAID funding has been closed down by Doge.
So Tilsey Gabbard tweeted out, we don't need to be funding trans clinics in India.
The Indians can pay for their own trans clinics.
And the point I want to make is Indians don't want trans clinics.
This is a case where the U.S. government under Biden and Harris was essentially the prime evangelist for immorality and perversion around the world.
They were pushing the LGBTQ agenda.
They were pushing the trans clinics very often against the opposition of traditional people and traditional cultures all over the world.
Now, let me turn to Zelensky.
Zelensky was on an interview recently, and he made the odd statement that ending the war is, quote, And this annoyed Trump a great deal because Trump sees this as Zelensky basically saying, we're going to keep fighting.
We are not really pushing for peace.
We don't see this ending anytime soon, perhaps not for several years.
And Trump said he better not be right about that.
Trump basically saying, listen, the way to end this war is to end the war.
To come at it with the mindset of what do we need to do to get this war to end.
Now, simultaneously, and this is why Zelensky probably should, in general, shut his mouth, is Zelensky goes, I'm ready to sign the Minerals Treaty.
I'm good with it.
Basically, what he's saying is, I'm good with...
He then goes on to say that he regrets what happened in the meeting with Trump.
He goes on to say that he appreciates the efforts of the United States.
So basically, all the things that Trump and J.D. Vance complained about, Zelensky has now backtracked on.
In fact, he has backtracked so much that his position now, at least as stated in his post this morning, is pretty much the Trump position.
And so, what's funny about it, of course, to me, is that the left keeps calling Trump, you know, the Europeans too, some of the European pundits and activists will say, you know, Trump has clearly shown himself to be an asset of Putin.
Well, I mean, if that's the case, then Zelensky has shown himself to be an asset of Putin.
Why?
Because Zelensky's position, as stated, is now virtually, if not in fact, identical to the Trump position.
Harry Enten, who's the pollster for CNN, says that the survey data shows that Americans agree on the subject with Trump.
More Americans want a quick end to the Russia-Ukraine war.
That number, by the way, was 31%, now 50%.
Fewer Americans see Russia as the enemy, dropping from 64% to 34%.
And then this is Harry Enten.
I'm quoting him.
Americans want to see a compromise at this particular hour.
Americans, in other words, like Trump, want to see this curtain come down on the Ukraine war.
And this is CNN. So CNN is now admitting that the Trump position is, in fact, the mainstream American position.
And then Tulsi Gabbard was on Fox, and she made, I think, a very interesting point worth considering.
She said, you know, everyone keeps talking about how Putin has fake elections.
She goes on to say, well, Ukraine has no elections.
They've stopped having elections since this war started.
Putin throws opponents, Khodorovsky, Navalny.
Well, guess what happens to dissidents in Ukraine?
They get thrown into prison.
People talk about the fact that there isn't full religious freedom in Russia.
The Russian Orthodox Church gets preferences.
Other denominations are tormented or restricted.
Well, apparently churches are being shut down in Ukraine.
Putin controls the media.
Zelensky controls the media.
So this is really where Tulsi Gabbard is going.
She goes, it really begs the question, it's clear that they're standing against Putin, but what are they actually fighting for?
In other words, if you claim to be fighting for freedom, you cannot be doing all these tyrannical and totalitarian things.
And by the way, many of these things are also being done by the Europeans.
The Europeans have censorship.
The Europeans send the police after you over a social media post.
So Europe is moving, perhaps incrementally, but nevertheless unmistakably, in the tyrannical direction.
Here is a guy named Omid Dajjali, a very self-important character, who puts out the following statement.
He's bashing Trump.
So my neighbor's house was on fire.
He came running out saying, please call the fire brigade.
I said, of course, but only if he gifted me half of his possessions.
So this guy is being, is sarcastically drawing an analogy to Trump demanding that the Ukraine share its mineral wealth with the United States.
And his point is, he gives the analogy of a fire and he says, all we're asking the United States to do is call the fire brigade.
And here's my reply.
We have actually called the fire brigade.
The fire brigade is Europe, which is Ukraine's actual neighbor.
So shouldn't Europe bear the responsibility here?
I mean, we are more like a faraway town.
We are long ways from the fire.
And if you have a fire next door...
You don't call some guy, you know, in Saskatchewan and say, get over here, take a flight, come on, bring some buckets of water.
You ask the guy next door to help you, to put out the fire in the neighborhood.
Let alone, this is not simply a case of calling the fire brigade.
We're being asked to pay for everybody's fire insurance in the area.
And we don't live there.
This is not part of our neighborhood at all.
The point here, I think, is just this, and that is that all kinds of bogus reasoning is being deployed here to sucker the United States into continuing to write blank checks to Ukraine.
In fact, what I'm getting from some of the Ukraine pundits is so annoying and disturbing.
They're acting like, well, in a way, I suppose it shows the worst of human nature, doesn't it?
When you're helping somebody on a consistent basis, if you stop doing it, they turn on you with a vengeance.
Suddenly, they act like their condition, their starvation, their difficulties are due to you.
You caused them.
Even though you didn't cause them.
They were in those difficulties in the beginning.
You've been helping them.
The fact that you stop helping them doesn't mean that you're responsible for their condition.
Very often they put themselves in that condition or they found themselves in that condition, but their condition is not owing to you.
You are the one actually relieving their condition, but you have no responsibility to keep doing that.
Ad infinitum, or permanently, or forever.
So this is actually kind of a good warning to keep in mind.
It's always good to help people, but it is a nasty aspect of human nature that sometimes the people who are being helped by you, far from being grateful, Turn indignant and angry and blame you for their troubles and then sometimes act as if they have been the ones helping you all along rather than the other way around.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Ryan Helfenbein, Executive Director of the Standing for Freedom Center.
That's the center at Liberty University, where he's also the Vice President for Communications and Public Engagement.
He hosts a weekly podcast there, the Give Me Liberty podcast.
And you can follow him on x at rheelfenbein or the website standingforfreedom.com.
Thank you for joining me.
A very interesting day today.
Trump is going to be doing an annual address to Congress.
Now, I read this morning that some people on the left are saying, we're going to boycott We're not going to be there.
Others are saying we're going to disrupt the speech by waving signs or yelling out during the speech.
The Democrats are planning to try to torpedo what is coming.
But my question to you is, what do you think is coming?
Trump hasn't really signaled in advance what he's going to say.
Where do you expect him to go?
You know, I'm not a great prognosticator when it comes to these things, but here's what I would like to hear, what I hope to see.
Now, going back to 2016, let's recall in the first Trump administration, from the start, the political left was always trying to undermine his leadership, and that even includes the internal conflict within the White House.
There were certain plants that were undermining his leadership all along the way.
Trump, too.
The second administration is much different than the first.
President Trump now has a primer.
He is an expert politician, but he's had a primer in seeing how things operate in D.C. I don't think he's taking anything for granted.
What I hope to see tonight is some articulation of what's been happening over the past 40 days.
It's very clear the moves he's been making, very aggressive with executive orders.
Peeling back DEI policies, strong leadership when it comes to security, both at home and abroad, southern border, Greenland, Panama Canal.
He's exerting dominance over the Western Hemisphere.
This harkens back to classic Monroe doctrine.
The United States needs to get back to that policy, which I think is common sense.
Also, what's happening with Zelensky in Ukraine?
It is obvious that he is applying what 77 million Americans voted for.
He clearly signaled a new direction when it comes to foreign policy.
This is a time of negotiation and concession.
We recognize no progress has really been made in this Ukrainian war.
I think he's got to articulate an outline of vision.
For the American people to fully understand the direction he's going, I think many of us understand it, but he's got to articulate that from the main stage.
And I think also, Dinesh, at this time, call upon Congress to act.
So there's a lot of things that Congress needs to do.
The president is acting.
But I think we need to see more leadership from Congress.
We need to get these bills passed.
We have Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
There's no excuses.
I know there'll be it.
There's slim majorities, but we need to see some action, not just executive fiat.
So I'm encouraged by the president.
I'm encouraged what I'm seeing right now and all the action, promises made, promises kept.
He's going to articulate, I think, that vision tonight.
I think part of what you're saying, and tell me if I'm right, is that we have seen this flurry or blizzard of individual actions, and yet it is not entirely clear.
I mean, quite honestly, even to me, part of what I do in the podcast is try to thread these things together and make sense of them, but there is...
An underlying thought process, a philosophy of both of foreign policy but also of domestic policy, right?
So let's take a couple of examples of what I'm getting at here.
Is it the case, for example, that our policy toward Ukraine and the way Trump thinks about Ukraine is driven in part by this kind of understanding that what has happened over the past several years is that Russia has pulled a lot closer to China.
The more that we've pushed Russia away from us, the more Russia has moved in the Chinese direction.
That can't be good for us long term.
And so separating Russia from China could very well be part of what is in the back of Trump's mind.
And maybe what you're saying is that what he should do tonight is bring it to the front of his mind and tell the American people, this is what I'm thinking, this is kind of my big picture.
And the same with domestic policy.
You have something like Trump's tariffs.
And initially I thought, you know, the tariffs are kind of a diplomatic tool, which is, hey Canada, hey Mexico, you better close the border on your side, otherwise we're going to whip you with some tariffs.
Not that the tariffs were going to be a sort of central tool of fiscal policy, let alone perhaps a provocation to a trade war, which could have economically negative consequences.
So again, what is Trump's underlying thinking about economics?
And how do these different pieces doge the tariffs?
Trump has a tax bill.
He wants to make permanent the tax cuts.
It's like, how do these pieces fit together and deliver the agenda for the American people?
So a speech perhaps that connects the dots.
Yeah, I think that's right.
It needs to be clear from the beginning that in this new administration...
Trump wants to reassert America not as a world power, but as a superpower.
Not just as some kind of, like China's a world power, but not a superpower.
And we need to reassert that dominance in diplomacy, in economics, militarily, all of it.
I think that when it comes to, exactly as you pointed out, Russia and China growing closer together.
Russia is a client state of China, make no mistake.
It's smaller than the economy of Brazil, smaller than the economy of Canada, smaller than Texas and California, and I think even Florida at this exact moment.
Their resources are depleted.
They do have energy reserves.
They can sell that and trade that right, but they're depleted in terms of population, manpower.
They do not have the ability to continue this fight.
On the other side, Ukraine is very small and weak.
At this point, it looks like we're funneling billions.
Hundreds of billions of dollars into a war that they cannot win.
We shouldn't even be involved in it.
He's making his case clear there that Zelensky doesn't have the cards.
America is the biggest ally they've got, and he needs to make concessions.
But yes, we've got to rip away China from Russia, or Russia from China, going all the way back to the open-door policy.
Under Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, they were smart at that time to see the future power of China and they knew enough to peel away China from the Soviet Union at the time.
Now we have the inverse of that.
We have a strong and powerful China with military ambitions.
We need to peel Russia away from them.
And then when it comes to domestic policy, I do think that these tariffs have been used as leverage.
Now, some are saying...
This could be a new economic policy for the United States.
If we do away with the federal income tax, I would love to see that.
Tariffs could go back and replace that income that was lost from income tax.
We go back to kind of a pre-1915 Woodrow Wilson policy before the Federal Reserve.
Tariffs were how the federal government made income.
So I think that it would be interesting to see that, but it's not going to happen without acts of Congress.
We need to see leadership in the House and the Senate.
He needs to articulate that vision and they need to get on board.
Let me make one point about Russia that picks up from something that you just said a moment ago, which is Russia is depleted.
You know, Russia's economy is, by worldwide standards, pretty modest.
Interesting because I keep hearing all these European leaders say that if there isn't a mobilization on behalf of Ukraine to defeat Russia, that Russia will basically start taking all of Europe.
And it occurred to me...
That's pretty dumb.
Because what do the Russians have?
170 million.
The United States has 330 million people.
But Europe has 500 million people.
So if you put the resources of Europe together, the military power of Europe together, Russia does not pose a serious threat to Europe as a whole.
Russia may have claims on Crimea.
We have claims on Ukraine.
This was all, as you know, part of the...
The debris of the old Soviet Union breaking up into pieces.
But all I'm trying to say is it is incoherent to say simultaneously, which is what we're getting from the left right now.
Number one, we can easily beat Russia.
Russia's on the ropes.
They're almost defeated.
And in the same breath, if we don't do this, Russia will start invading Poland.
It'll start invading Germany.
It'll take all of Europe.
So, you know, Ukraine is just the start.
Well, both things can't be true simultaneously.
I wholeheartedly agree.
There's apparent contradictions.
I do think that there is still, so I might part ways from other folks who are saying we need to peel out of NATO. I still think that there's value to that as long as we are in the driver's seat and we are leading it.
We're at the table and then we can steer the direction of NATO and its leadership.
But I do not want to be pulled into Brussels.
I do not want to be any more than I want to be pulled into Davos.
America needs to exert its leadership as the world's superpower.
And so we hold a lot of clout in Europe.
We can guide the direction of this.
But Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, I mean, those nations alone could mount a significant defensive wall against any ambition of Russia.
And just going back, you know, Dinesh, I mean, this is an important point to make.
You know, going back to 2008, the second...
Russia invaded the former Republic of Georgia.
Georgia was part of the USSR. I'm not talking about the state of Georgia and the southern states in the United States, but Georgia.
You go to 2014, it invaded Crimea.
By the way, that was under Barack Hussein Obama.
Then in 2022, under Biden's watch, of course, invading into Ukraine.
All of these were second terms of an administration, lame duck in terms of Congress.
Putin has absolutely been strategic about when he strikes, understanding that he's trying to wedge himself in there, and the gains that he's taking, he's locking in.
We need to flex our power, but not in the way that Biden and Obama have tried to do so.
I think one of the things we have to make sure of is that the American dollar is the reserve currency and the envy of the world.
We don't need to be...
Doing things that all of a sudden creates a two-system, you know, BRICS versus the United States where people say, you know, we can't trust the dollar anymore.
We're going to go over to BRICS. We have to absolutely, again, show dominance when it comes to that and use the American dollar in such a way that it's trustworthy and it is the reserve currency and the envy of the world.
Lots of things to do, lots of fronts there that Trump has to engage with, and again, articulate a clear vision.
Ryan, let's pivot to something a little different and very much up your alley, and that is, you know, what's happening within the evangelical movement with regard to politics.
The evangelical movement as a whole was thought to be pretty strongly right of center.
And it is.
It delivered a pretty solid vote, for example, for Trump.
But there appear to be a number of fairly prominent voices in the evangelical world.
I think here of David French.
I think of Marvin Olasky.
I think of the kind of regime at Christianity Today.
I mean, the movement of that magazine, which again, if I remember the old Christianity Today, which I would write for occasionally, it was moderate, but moderate-leaning right.
And it appears that they have, to some degree, at least gone woke.
And so I'm seeing these sort of evangelical posts these days that say things like, you know, Trump's border policy is inconsistent with a parable of the Good Samaritan.
The parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us that we should be helpful not only to our own, but also to the outsider, to the stranger.
I'd like to get your take on the point.
But also about what exactly is happening here within the portals of evangelicalism.
Yeah, great question.
I just want to go back to something in history.
Christianity Today was founded...
By Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry.
Carl F.H. Henry was like the William F. Buckley of conservative evangelicalism, and he was just an intellectual juggernaut.
He would not recognize this magazine today.
Evangelicalism in the modern times is experiencing what mainline Protestantism experienced, say, 100 years ago, where there's this liberal drift, this infiltration of outside forces exerting pressure.
Within the evangelical world, there's a lot of books that have been written on this recently.
Megan Basham, who's over at the Daily Wire, wrote Shepherds for Sale.
There's also a book right now about the woke movement, the book called Sin of Empathy.
And it's about how the woke movement tries to hijack conservative Christianity through untethered compassion.
And I love the fact that you brought up the parable of the Good Samaritan because that's a great key verse that the leftist movement likes to pick up on.
And when you go to the actual story, this is in Luke's gospel, but when you go to the actual story, there is a sense of justice.
And what Christ is actually ultimately pointing to is not somebody, Who is trying to skirt the law, but is trying to restore someone's life, that in a situation when robbers came in, it was the clerics, it was the priests, it was the Pharisees who ignored a person in need, and the Samaritan was the good neighbor in that situation.
What the left likes to do is hijack that for the purposes of promoting Marxist ideology and the social justice movement.
It cures very little.
About where that shows up in scripture.
And it cares very little about whether that is congruent with the rest of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And by the way, I'm at an institution, Liberty University, founded in 1971, where the founder of this institution founded the moral majority in 1979. Many people on the political left like to blame conservatism,
like to blame the moral majority, go back and try to rewrite history, memory-holing all of the various aspects of what happened in the 1960s and what happened in the 1970s in terms of all the riots that took place, the destruction, the division in America.
The evangelical left started first.
It started in the early 1970s.
Evangelicals for George McGovern, for example.
And there were other iterations of that all the way up to Evangelicals for Biden, Evangelicals for Obama, Evangelicals for Harris.
This movement wants to, make no mistake, hijack Christianity, wants to leave the Bible behind, and wants to set...
New value sets and principles in line with Marxism and wear evangelicalism like a cheap skin suit.
We're seeing this being played out.
You mentioned Doge earlier, exposing a lot of the grift, the various NGOs and shell organizations using taxpayer dollars, but then these compassion ministries that are giving sort of the...
The evangelical Christian stamp of approval and not recognizing, wait a second, you're circumventing our sovereign laws as a nation.
We do have borders.
We do have an immigration process where people need to be vetted before coming in.
We do want assimilation into American principles, ideals, freedoms, virtues.
We don't want to just take any person into the United States to be all of a sudden subversive or to commit some sort of act of treason or espionage.
We have to be very, very careful.
Christians can sometimes play into this, but Christians are not dumb.
They're smart.
They just need to be shown the truth.
I mean, you know, Ryan, when I think about the Good Samaritan, I think to myself, first of all, it's not as if the Samaritan was inviting people from the far-flung reaches of the Roman Empire to, like, move into ancient Israel, right?
This is the case where he Encountered a guy injured on the road who was right in front of him.
Number two, the Samaritan was a private individual.
This was not a case where the Samaritan was tapping tax money or calling upon the government to do anything.
He just decided to help himself.
And third, even the help that he administered is very limited.
In other words, you're injured.
I'm going to restore you and you are on your way.
In other words, it's not a case of move into my house or, you know, here's the Roosevelt Hotel.
We're going to pay them $300 a month to put you up.
We're now going to give you a food allowance.
You can bring other members of your family.
So in other words, I think that the particularity of this incident, as you say, has been hijacked, has been elongated to draw conclusions that don't really follow from the story itself.
Guys, I've been talking to Ryan Helfenbein, very interesting conversation, executive director of the Freedom Center at Liberty University.
Follow him on X at rhelfenbein or the website standingforfreedom.com.
Ryan, a great pleasure.
Thank you for joining me.
As always, thank you, Dinesh.
Appreciate it.
I talk about how the big lie is promoted by originally the Nazi-affiliated philosopher Martin Heidegger in Germany, then by the German intellectual Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, a guy who, however, moved to America, taught on the East and West Coast, influenced a whole generation of students.
And now I'm talking about George Soros.
And the connection between Soros and Nazism appears fantastic, appears remote, appears implausible.
How can this guy possibly even be a Nazi sympathizer?
Leave aside the fact that Nazism basically came crashing down in 1945. But Soros is also Jewish, and so he would be someone who would be expected, and in fact he did.
Flee the Nazis.
And yet, underneath it all, there is an interesting connection.
And that's what I want to explore today.
In 1998, George Soros gave an interview with CBS News, 60 Minutes.
And he was interviewed by Steve Croft.
And I want to go through this interview in some detail and comment on it.
So, here's Steve Croft.
You're a Hungarian Jew.
Soros, mm-hmm, meaning yes, who escaped the Holocaust.
Soros, mm-hmm, Croft, by posing as a Christian.
That's interesting right there.
Why was Soros posing as a Christian?
Soros goes, right.
Croft, and you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.
Suddenly, the interview takes on a kind of chilling turn.
Here's Soros watching.
And as it turns out, Croft is not saying, Soros, you know, you were there while this happened.
You watched people get shipped off.
And Soros goes, right, I was 14 years old, and I would say that's when my character was made.
What an interesting statement.
His character was formed somehow in that time.
Of watching the Nazis ship off Jews to their death.
In what way, says Croft, obviously intrigued, Soros?
That one should think ahead.
One should understand and anticipate events when one is threatened.
It was a tremendous threat of evil.
I mean, it was a very personal experience of evil.
So Soros' lesson coming out of the fact that the Nazis are shipping Jews to their death, Man, you Jews don't think ahead.
I do.
So, in other words, there is an implication here, it's an implication, he's not saying it outright, that the Jews in some ways bear a certain measure of responsibility in the sense that they were negligent.
They didn't take care.
They didn't foresee what was coming, even though what was coming was actually rather obvious.
A very strange And perverse thing, actually, for Soros to say.
He's congratulating himself on being able to beat the system by getting out, while other Jews apparently were not as far-sighted as he is.
So he learns the lesson of looking ahead, that one should think ahead.
Croft, my understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
So now the plot...
Turns and plot thickens.
Croft goes, well, I understand that you were going around with this guy who claimed, apparently falsely, that you were his godson.
So here we get an understanding of how Soros was posing as a Christian.
This other guy was a Christian.
He was obviously a German.
And he passed off Soros.
As his own godson.
So what seems to have happened here is that Soros' father or Soros' family made a deal with this guy.
Hey, listen, you take over, George.
Let's pretend he's a Christian.
And so that's what's going on here.
Soros goes, yes, yes.
Went out, this is Croft, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
Bombshell.
Croft is saying that not only did Soros go around with this guy, but he, quote, helped, helped.
In the confiscation of property from the Jews.
So this guy was, as it turns out, not exactly a good guy.
Not someone, this is not Oscar Schindler hiding Soros.
No, this guy is part of the Nazi regime.
He is a trusted figure in the Nazis.
He is helping to take property from the Jews.
And evidently young Soros, and Soros is a young man.
Remember he said a moment ago he's 14 years old, but he is helping.
Here's a Jew, a young Jewish guy, helping a Nazi or a Nazi official confiscate the property of fellow Jews.
Wow.
And Soros goes, yes, that's right, yes.
So here you have Soros confirming what Steve Croft just said.
And then Croft...
Who should have gone a little bit more for the kill, in my opinion, but nevertheless, he backs off.
He goes, I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years.
Was it difficult?
This is a stupid question.
Because here you have Croft basically acting like, oh, that must have been so difficult for you.
No, the real issue is that Soros is emerging here as a Nazi collaborator.
That's the issue.
Not that this was a difficult experience.
Of course it was a difficult experience.
But how do you handle difficult experiences?
That's the window into your character.
Was it difficult?
That was Croft's question here.
Soros, no, not at all.
Maybe as a child you don't see the connection, but it created no problem at all.
Croft, no feeling of guilt.
Soros, no.
Croft, for example, that I'm Jewish.
Here I am watching these people go.
I could just as easily be there.
I should be there.
None of that.
And here is the final part I want to read from Soros.
Well, of course, I could be on the other side.
And I could be the one from whom the thing was being taken away.
But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there because that was...
He goes, well, in a funny way, it's just like in markets.
That if I weren't there, of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would, would be taking it away anyhow.
And it was the, whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator.
The property was being taken away, so I had no role in taking away that property, so I had no sense of guilt.
Well, wow.
There's a lot here, and I want to slow it down and go through it a little bit, piece by piece.
The first point Soros makes, and there's some truth to this, he goes, well...
Even though I said a little earlier that I helped in the confiscation of property, I didn't do it directly.
I wasn't confiscating the property.
The guy I was with, my so-called protector, was doing it.
And so the most you could say is I was now under the protection of this kind of Nazi bad guy, but I'm not responsible, so I don't feel a sense of guilt for what I did.
But Croft is actually asking a bigger question, and that is that You are a Jew kind of in hiding.
All these other Jews are being taken away to their deaths.
You know that.
So it's kind of like you're a survivor in an accident where it could just as easily have been you.
And Croft is getting at, did you feel a sense of regret, of anxiety?
And basically what Soros is saying is...
He's drawing an analogy, and it's a little bit of a startling analogy, which is an analogy to markets, taking advantage of market opportunities, jumping when you see a buy option, going long, going short, making a bunch of money.
In other words, capitalizing on an opportunity, and evidently, again, these other Jews were not doing that.
And then Soros also goes on to say, of course, That if I weren't there, of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would.
And that's interesting, isn't it?
Because what Soros is basically saying is, look, even if I am witness to the crime, in fact, take it further, even if I helped with the crime, using the word that came earlier in the interview, even if I helped, even if I was even a modest participant at the age of 14, nevertheless...
I don't really bear any responsibility because if I wasn't there, the crime would have occurred anyway.
So, in other words, you can't blame me as, I'm now going to the crime analogy, I was the getaway driver, but guess what?
They would have robbed the bank whether or not I was the getaway driver, or they would have gotten somebody else to be the getaway driver, or maybe they wouldn't have needed a getaway driver at all.
So, I think from this interview, and I've basically gone verbatim, Through the key section of the interview, you get a sense of this guy Soros and what a thoroughly amoral.
That's the word I want to emphasize.
Not even immoral, but the difference between immoral and amoral is that an immoral person knows what's right and wrong and does the wrong thing.
Now, there could be reasons for why they do it.
They could be a psychopath or they could have a reason.
I'm doing it because I have to do it.
I'm doing it because I want to use the money for this or whatever.
But an amoral person is someone who doesn't care.
They operate outside of morality.
Morality is a matter of relative indifference for them.
And I think that's what we're seeing with Soros here.
And when I pick this up tomorrow...
I want to develop the idea that the reasoning that Soros uses in this interview, this interview that establishes him as a Nazi collaborator, even a young collaborator.
He was only 14. And that's part of Soros' defense, or the people who defend Soros, they go, well, he was only 14. You can't hold a 14-year-old responsible.
I want to argue, and I'll make this point tomorrow, I'm not holding a 14-year-old responsible.
I'm actually looking at what a mature Soros is learning from his 14-year-old experience.
So we're judging not the 14-year-old, but we're judging a much more grown man and what he has.
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