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March 13, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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RUNAWAY SPENDING? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1040
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, what's with this big spending budget bill?
I'll make the case that Congress has shown no ability to cut spending, but the executive branch, the Trump administration, has.
Chase Hughes, he's an expert on human persuasion and deception, joins me.
We're going to have a fascinating conversation about how to tell if somebody is lying to you, and then also apply those principles to the political arena.
And I'm going to begin my narrative about Reagan and the Reagan era based on America
needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
These days, so much is happening all around the place that it's my old formula, which was I would talk about a single topic in my opening monologue.
I now like to do three or four items in the news and comment on them before kind of delving into a single topic.
And so let me hit a few things that I've spotted just from the last 24 hours.
Michelle Obama has a new podcast.
Well, it's not just her podcast.
It's Michelle Obama and, well, you might expect Barack Obama.
But no, it's Michelle Obama and her brother.
Craig Robinson.
Now, you know, all over social media, people are making jokes about the fact that this is a two-guys podcast and, you know, it's Craig and Mike and all this kind of stuff.
But I think the interesting thing here is the missing figure, namely Barack Obama.
And I know that Trish Regan and a few others have been, even Megyn Kelly, speculating about, are the Obamas, like, are they together anymore?
And this is hardly my area of specialty.
I focus really a little bit more on questions like, is Obama really gay?
Which I think has now been fairly well established, at least if you watch my interviews and also Tucker's with Larry Sinclair.
Odd, because, you know, Debbie made the point this morning, she's like, well, this Craig Robinson fellow is not really a public figure.
It's odd for Michelle to do a podcast with him.
Apparently, no one's really watching this podcast.
And 12,000 views, which is pretty horrible.
And so I don't know what its future is.
Well, let's turn to the cost of eggs.
Democrats are in a little bit of a quandary because they've been focusing now for several weeks.
The cost of eggs has gone up under Trump.
Didn't he say, didn't he campaign that he was going to bring the cost of eggs down?
Well, the cost of eggs has dropped.
It has dropped to about $5.50, and it was about $7.50.
And in fact, apparently the all-time high was $8.17, so it's almost one-third.
A drop in the price of eggs.
And I'm only chuckling about it because the Democrats have to find another talking point.
They can't use the price of eggs.
Major cuts on climate programs at the EPA. Very good news.
This is a massive boondoggle.
If you think USAID was a boondoggle, this is much, much bigger.
And so the savings for the U.S. government and the taxpayer are huge.
31 historic actions, says Lee Zeldin, to save money and put bureaucrats and programs out on the street.
And all of this is causing a certain kind of panic in the federal bureaucracy, which I think is a very good thing.
Here's a sign of that panic.
Article in Politico.
USAID official.
Tells remaining staffers, shred and burn all your documents.
Wow.
Well, if that's going on, and it seems to be going on, then I think Pam Bondi and the DOJ need to step in and find out who is shredding what and why.
So the DOJ here has a mission.
And that is to root out this kind of corruption.
And this is not just bureaucratic infighting.
Shredding documents, by and large, is for the purpose of hiding guilty or culpable behavior.
The NIH, the National Institutes for Health, has canceled the following grants.
I'm just going to mention two or three of them.
Inclusive teen pregnancy program for transgender boys.
Wow.
Almost $700,000 for studying cannabis use among sexual minority gender diverse individuals, end quote.
$740,000 for exploring social networks among Black and Latino sexual minority men in New Jersey.
Now, again, this is all sort of DEI related.
But this is the kind of stuff that DOGE is digging up one example after another.
And by the way, they have a website.
I think it's doge.gov.
That's it.
It's a governmental website.
And it's got a very systematic presentation of all these DOGE findings.
Maybe the best news from my point of view, Department of Education cutting its workforce in half.
Now, this is a prelude to eliminating the whole department, but cutting the workforce in half is an excellent first step.
There are about 4,000 employees who work in that building, educating, I should add, nobody.
And Linda McMahon, the education secretary, who is, by the way, tasked with shutting the whole department down, is sending about half these people home.
In fact, I think she essentially...
Called a day off because she didn't want confusion over who stays home and who doesn't stay home.
She's like, you know, digest the information.
Half of you have been kind of essentially let go.
And we don't want people who have been let go showing up for work because they are no longer part of this workforce.
Now, all these cuts in Doge and in the federal government raise a broader issue.
And this is really what I want to focus on.
There is a CR, a continuing resolution bill, that passed the House 217 to 213 with a prominent dissent, and that is Representative Thomas Massey.
Now, Thomas Massey is a budget cutter.
He sees that this bill doesn't really cut Biden levels of spending.
It is a big spending bill.
And he's like, there's no way I'm going to vote for it.
Now Trump lashes out at Massey, says, oh, you're, you know, this is horrible.
And Trump even says, I'll even back a primary opponent against you.
Very awkward position, by the way, to put conservatives in because a lot of conservatives and a lot of MAGA people, by the way, like Thomas Massey because he is a guy who will stand by his principles and will not relent.
So what is Trump's...
Well, part of it is that Massey has been something of a never-Trumper.
That should be said.
And Massey did endorse DeSantis in the race between Trump and DeSantis.
And Trump, as you know, doesn't...
Like that kind of thing, and he remembers that kind of disloyalty as he sees it.
But I think that's not really the fundamental issue here.
The fundamental issue here is that if you don't have a budget bill, you don't have a continuing resolution, the government shuts down.
In the past, when the government shuts down, you have a certain type of paralysis, and the Democrats and the media go out and say the Republicans are to blame.
So I think the Trump strategy here is really simple.
The Congress should pass the spending bill, and if the Democrats want to shut down the government, let them.
Because then...
It's on them.
If they shut down the government, then people can't say, I'm not getting my Social Security check.
Now, by the way, people do get your Social Security checks.
The basic functions of the government continue.
If you remember government shutdowns in the past, nothing really happens.
Nothing really of note happens.
It's true, certain things get suspended.
But the point is, if the Democrats are causing that to happen, if they are the ones responsible, guess what?
The Trump people can actually use this to accelerate the cutting of the government.
You know, federal bureaucrats aren't showing up for work.
Guess what?
Maybe some of them can be let go.
We don't need them.
We'll put them on permanent vacation.
And so the Democrats are, in a way, in an awkward situation because they're...
Willingness to shut down the government, and in fact, their decision to do it.
Now, why is it their decision to do it?
Democrats have been tweeting out saying, well, the Republicans control both houses.
Why do they even need us?
Well, they need you only for this reason.
They don't need you in the House because the Republicans, and there's some credit that goes here to Mike Johnson, although more to Trump.
They've been able to convince virtually every Republican, not counting Massey, to go along and to approve the CR. But to approve it, I think, on this basis.
I'm looking at some posts by a Republican congressman.
Here's Andy Biggs.
I've never voted for a continuing resolution, but I'm voting for the CR on the floor today.
And he says, by and large, that the executive branch is the only branch of government serious about cutting spending.
Despite my best efforts.
This captures right here, I think, the heart of the matter.
And that is that we do not have a congressional majority to cut spending.
There are enough Republicans who will not vote for it.
These are Republicans who benefit from big spending.
They like the big spending, particularly in their own districts and their own states, which facilitates their re-election.
And so, quite honestly, if you want a budget-cutting majority in the House and Senate, The American people need to vote for that.
We don't have that currently.
And so the point that Andy Biggs is making, and I see others, Greg Stubbe and others making the same point, it's that, look, guess who is shown the ability to cut spending?
Not us and Congress.
We don't have those kinds of votes.
But the executive branch is doing it.
So guess what?
If Congress allocates the money, it's still up to the administration to spend or not to spend it.
They can choose not to spend it, and to cut programs and to cut personnel, they are ultimately charged with the complete enforcement of all the allocations that Congress makes.
Now, this bill is now in the hands of the Senate, and even though Republicans have a majority, 53 to 47, the simple truth of it is because of the filibuster and because of efforts to delay procedures, You need 60 votes in the Senate.
And the Democrats are basically saying that they are going to create a unified wall so that the Republicans can't get to 60 votes.
And so there is a kind of impasse.
There is a standoff.
Now, one way to overcome the standoff is to override the filibuster.
And the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, does have the ability to do that.
But the other possibility is that John Thune goes, OK, guess what?
You want to shut down the government?
Because you're refusing to get to 60 votes, go ahead and do it.
You'll be the ones who did it.
And then anybody who's angry about the fact that they can't, they aren't getting paid.
Because remember, when there is a shutdown, bureaucrats do not get paid.
Some of them may get back pay later, but they're not going to get paid on time.
And that's going to create some restlessness and some anger.
And I think the Republicans can say, well, we...
We deployed our entire majorities in both houses to get this through, and the Democrats refused to go along.
They shut the government down.
We didn't.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Chase Hughes.
And he has the most unusual title.
Well, he's an author, but he's also an interrogator.
He runs an organization called NCI University, and you can follow him on X at NCI University.
His website is chasehughes.com.
He served in the military for 20 years, and now he teaches interrogation, sales, influence, persuasion.
He's also the author of a best-selling book which talks about behavior profiling, persuasion, and influence.
It's called The Ops Manual.
Chase, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
Debbie and I like to watch these criminal shows and we came across a segment in which you and three other guys were commenting about, I don't remember if it was the Scott Peterson case or the Menendez brothers.
We watched two or three of those segments and they're really fun to watch because you've got really smart people observing human behavior and Analyzing it from the point of view of do we see and detect Deception.
And that's what intrigued me a lot.
And I thought, wow, I'd like to have Chase on the podcast.
I noticed you followed me on X, so I messaged you.
Anyway, that's how this came about.
Maybe I'll begin by just asking you to tell just briefly about your background, because this is such an unusual field.
The field of interrogation and the study of human behavior.
Well, I think that, and thanks for having me on, Dinesh.
I think when I was like 19, I got rejected by a girl and I kind of searched the internet for how to tell when girls like you.
And that was kind of the origin of all that.
And it became almost an obsession because...
I think I had this social anxiety, and the more I could see behind the masks that people are wearing, their insecurities, these little fears that we hide from the public, I never judged anyone for it, but it just made me realize that everybody's screwed up.
Everybody's screwed up in their own way.
And it became addictive in that we're kind of getting this glimpse into a part of reality that no one else in the room...
We're seeing a layer or several layers deeper than most people really see.
And it just became an obsession for me.
And I did 20 years in the military and then wound up training the psychological operations personnel and then now titled in a bunch of podcasts as a brainwashing expert and a mind control guy and stuff like that.
But it evolved into that thing to where I wanted to see Where the loopholes are in the human brain, not just from a profiling perspective, but from an influence perspective.
If we go all the way back to like the Milgram experiment where people were made to do crazy stuff, I wanted to identify all these loopholes to make interrogation better, to make hostage negotiation better, and all of that.
I mean, Chase, you're touching something that is so fundamental, I think, to human experience, which is that unlike any other animal, we have this sort of Rather profound inner life.
And yet the inner life is not automatically disclosed to the world.
I like the phrase that you use that we all kind of wear a mask.
And so often, even in normal interaction, someone does something really stupid, but it's in social companies, so you're not going to register an astonishment in your face because you realize you don't want them to know that you've realized how dumb that was.
And so you put on a sort of screen.
And what you're saying is that your career is devoted to peeking behind the screen.
Now my question is, do you do that by...
Using the tools of biology and neuroscience or more the tools of philosophy and psychology?
In other words, are you studying the mind or are you studying the brain?
I think that's a very important distinction to make, but I think it's a mixture of both.
I think if we look at, we have one side of like...
The philosophy of it and the sociological aspects of everything, the cultural things that impact.
So someone's tiny little head movement might mean something different in another country.
So it's cultural and there's a lot of biology there.
For instance, somebody starts getting scared, their body, their shoulders go up, their arms kind of squeeze into their sides, they reach down and cover their abdomen.
It makes our body just automatically start protecting our arteries.
So there's some biology there, but we're also looking at a lot of sociological indicators.
Let's talk about, just to set things up, I'm going to pivot a little bit into politics in a moment, but I thought I would ask you about two cases.
Actually, one of them, I agreed with you completely.
The other one, I disagreed not just with you, but with your entire panel.
So, the first one was the Scott Peterson case.
This is the fellow who was accused and convicted of killing his wife, Lacey Peterson.
He was being interviewed by Diane Sawyer.
And I thought it was very interesting how, I mean, yes, I was like, this guy is obviously lying, but you go way beyond that to look at things like his eye movements, the fluttering of his eyelids, whether he is looking directly at Diane Sawyer or kind of looking to the side, if he is speaking in a kind of normal, I didn't do it, or if he speaks in a sort of abstract way like...
Like, I don't think the general public would believe that I did it, has a whole different meaning than, no, I didn't do it.
And so talk a little bit about some of those kind of human signals that you look for to see if somebody is not telling the truth.
Well, the first thing we look for anytime we're using behavior profiling is change.
How does the person normally act in a comfortable or lower stress scenario?
And am I seeing a change in behavior at this critical moment?
And a lot of times what we're looking for are, are they deviating from that baseline?
Is there hesitancy?
Does their statement lack pronouns?
This is proven that deceptive statements are more likely to lack pronouns.
Are they lacking contractions instead of, I... Didn't kill her.
It's, I did not kill her, or I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
And there's other things called psychological distancing that's really, really common.
There's 50 or so indicators that we're really looking for, but these are some strong ones.
In psychological distancing, you're going to see people that are, instead of saying murder, they might say hurt.
Instead of saying steal, they might say take.
Instead of saying...
Touch inappropriately, they might say interfere with.
And so you'll see this little softening.
And instead of sex, you might hear sexual relations, to use that statement again.
So you'll hear a little softening, and guilty people are a lot more likely to do that.
So we're looking at several dozens and dozens of factors here.
But those are some of the most common.
And one of the other things we're looking for is blink rate.
And our average blink rate is like, this is how often we blink, is around 15 times per minute in conversation.
And if I see a blink rate suddenly start increasing, that is a almost guaranteed indicator of high stress.
Stress is going up.
If I see blink rate go way down, that's actually an indicator of focus.
So it doesn't obviously mean the...
So it's focus in the low end and stress on the high end.
So it could be different.
You could be focusing on something that's a potential threat or something that's valuable.
But we really look, is during this critical question, am I seeing all of these things come to a little crescendo?
And that's where we're paying attention to.
The case where I... And I thought it'd be fun to mention it to you, was in the Menendez brothers case, where my take on that, having actually watched a lot of the trial, going back, of course, now to the 1990s, I guess it was, was that you had an authoritarian, you know...
Kind of classic bullying Cuban father who ruled the household somewhat tyrannically.
You had a submissive mom, and then you have two unbelievably uncontrolled, bratty, entitled kids with at least one and maybe both being pure psychopaths.
But...
Distinguished by the fact that at least one of them, I'm thinking here of Eric, not Lyle Menendez, is a kind of a genius performer and actor.
And so I saw them as putting on the performance of a lifetime, at least in the first trial.
But then I noticed that you and your buddies, who are all extremely well-credentialed, very smart, analytically looking at this at a depth that I wouldn't be able to match.
But all of you thought, you know what?
I think these guys were in fact abused.
Not to say that they are telling the full truth about what happened, but I think that they are believable on the fundamental abuse.
Do you still hold to that position?
And do you think that they were abused?
I don't remember because so many of these cases that we look at, I'm never looking into the case.
And the more I look into the case, the more I find that it skews my bias.
So I'm definitely no expert on the case.
The behaviors I remember distinctly indicating signs of abuse and when they recalled it.
And so just as an example, and this is proven.
We look down and to our left most of the time in our baseline when we're accessing an internal dialogue.
We're thinking about what to say.
We're kind of rehearsing something mentally.
And if something hits us emotionally, we'll look down right when we're thinking about it.
And you can test this with anybody you know.
And there were so many times when we saw this cluster of behaviors.
I can't remember all of them, but I know for sure there was just speaking about the parents.
There's this downright accessing.
The chin would tuck down, and this is artery protection, kind of protecting that carotid artery.
The shoulders would kind of come forward.
And I remember, in two separate occasions, their hands kind of drawing in and going into what's called a fig leaf, or another name for that is genital protection.
And remembering something with parents and then kind of covering the genitals and all the other indicators definitely seemed to us that...
That there was some abuse going on.
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I post lots of exclusive content on Locals, including content that you won't find elsewhere that's censored in some cases on other social media platforms.
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Chase, let me steer you a little bit more toward an area, and I'm not even sure if this is an area that you examine at all, but of course we've got...
All these political figures out there, and this is a field where deception, prevarication, diversion is commonplace.
Are you a connoisseur of the political arena as well?
And how would you apply your techniques in general to helping us understand these politicians a little bit better?
Yeah, I published something called 25 Steps to Control and Destabilize a Nation pretty recently.
And they have, and this is far left and some far right movements, but they have followed this plan like to the letter.
And this was, I think this was published two years ago, but they've kind of completed the last steps.
If you have time, we'll kind of walk through some of those steps.
Yeah, let's do it.
Tell me a little bit about it.
Sure.
So step one, we have to foster a sense of uncertainty at the social belonging level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
And this is generating confusion around the concepts of belonging and identity.
So that's step one.
It's very critical.
Step two is to create a sense of unpredictability in the economic system and other systems.
So we want to instill doubt.
In the survival level of Maslow's Pyramid, where the resources come from.
And that's what that is.
And step three is intertwine your political agendas with your followers' identities.
And we do this by amplifying the us versus them mentality.
And once identity is interwoven with political views, the cognitive dissonance that people experience...
The cognitive dissonance associated with nonconformity is going to lead to massive, unstoppable groupthink and enforce this new definition of self.
And that's just step three.
And step four is incite recurring anger.
So if I continuously incite anger over and over and over, this leads to apathy and eventually the death of outrage.
I can't remember who wrote that book, but outrage.
Begins to die.
And then step five is to continue destabilization at the social level of Maslow's hierarchy.
So we're challenging and undermining the established structure of traditional values and morals and ethics.
And we want to undermine morals and sometimes just flip them upside down.
So the followers identity being tied to the political party or the group.
It's going to allow you to kind of redefine brand new conditions for acceptable and normal behaviors.
So step six is exploiting the bystander effect.
And another term for this is called diffusion of responsibility phenomenon, where lots of people are there, apathy grows, we can't feel concern for everybody.
There's too many people around.
This happens in big cities.
So we're carrying out immoral or unethical acts out in the open.
And if it's done in plain sight with millions witnessing it with no consequences, this adds so much power to any behavior that you want to normalize later.
So the follower's sense of identity is not going to allow them to openly disagree with the group's apathy and tolerance of the behavior.
They can't disagree with it.
And that is where step seven comes in.
You want to ensure this is done.
This is where we use an increased instability of social belonging.
So we're promoting mass shame and social punishment for violating the new norms, which instills fear in people who are not really complying.
So we're ensuring these social consequences are immediate and they're visible to lots and lots of people.
I can keep going.
Let's pause there because that's a lot to think about.
To some degree, I think you are giving an almost clinical description of...
A certain mindset on the left that wants to overturn the existing order.
And by that I mean everything from pulling down the Columbus statues and the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.
It's almost like let's refound the country on a new basis and let's enforce, you mentioned it yourself, a kind of rigorous new moral code.
And then I see public riots.
Rioting and this sort of thing and the apathy shown in the face of all that, again, gives people the idea that this is now acceptable behavior.
Now, on the other hand, trying to apply a certain critical lens, I also apply what you said to myself.
And I say, to what degree do I kind of go along with some of these tendencies?
And I would say, well, I think to a certain degree I would plead guilty in this respect that A lot of the institutions that when I was in my 20s and 30s and even 40s that I... Took for granted, and I took them at face value.
That the FBI is there to go after bad guys, for example.
That the CDC is there to warn us about, you know, foodstuffs and things that could make us sick.
And the FDA, you know, that's why we have food labeling, for example.
And so, in other words, there was a high level of trust in these institutions that I thought had been well-earned.
But I find now, and maybe some of this is just the aftermath of COVID, that...
Wow.
I think that this trust is largely misplaced.
And these institutions have now done things that have earned my mistrust.
So I'm not being paranoid.
I'm actually...
My eyes are open to things that I didn't notice before.
And it appears that there is a bureaucratic rot that has set in.
So am I part of this phenomenon of societal bonds dissolving, or is there a place for this kind of critical reexamination where we go, guess what?
Our institutions are indeed failing us.
Yeah, I think there's definitely a place for some examination for all of us, everyone.
Everybody needs to be willing to say, am I doubling down because of a tiny little agreement that I made a year ago to change a flag on my profile to say that I support this?
And this isn't the whole left.
And it's also not the whole right.
There's many people on the left who probably disagree entirely with a lot of the things that you just mentioned.
There's some great people.
And that's one of the things that I very often say is if you're on the right or left, if you can't find anything wrong with your own party and you can't find anything right with the other party, you are in a cult.
You are in a cult because the critical thinking is gone.
This is, in many, many ways, these steps that we're going through, I think we only just got to seven, is the indoctrination process of many cults just done in mass.
It's done on this massive scale.
Very interesting.
So part of what I think you're saying, and I think maybe we'll close out on this, is that, you know, I remember, you remember the old CNN show from years ago, Crossfire.
And, you know, it was a little bombastic, and they had, if I remember, Michael Kinsley on the left, and they had Robert Novak on the right, and they would cross-examine the guest from the other side, and some of it was artificial, but at the very least, if you watched it, you could sort of see where each side was coming from.
I think what's striking in our society is there's very little of that now.
By and large, people are talking to their own side.
There's very little real engagement of...
And I think what you're saying is that that is a real impoverishment of our public debate, right?
I definitely agree.
And if you look at the trends, these media companies are in the business of making money.
So they follow, like, if I cater to just this side, I'm going to get more viewers or more isolation.
I can sell more ads.
And if you just look at the algorithms of social media.
It says, oh, well, Dinesh didn't like that one video, so we're going to show him this other stuff, and more and more and more and more.
And it just puts you into this ping-pong maze of just being in this little echo chamber of your own ideas.
And that is the antithesis of what we need in the country.
We need to be able to see.
On both sides, what's going on.
And biggest of all, we need to have the courage to say, maybe I was duped a little bit.
Maybe I believed something a little too fast that I shouldn't have.
And just look at stuff with a little more criticality.
Very interesting.
Guys, I've been talking to Chase Hughes, author and interrogator.
Follow him on X at NCI University, the website chasehughes.com.
Chase, very fascinating.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks, Dinesh.
I'm beginning today a discussion of this book right here.
I'm going to hold it up.
It's my book on Reagan, and it's called Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
It's now in paperback, very easy to get.
I recommend you grab a copy.
And add it to your shelf.
It is the book that brings out the, I think, the real Ronald Reagan.
A Reagan that was, to many people, somewhat of an elusive figure.
And I say that because over the years, as I would talk to people about Reagan, Or even people who worked with Reagan or in the Reagan administration, people who were quite senior in the Reagan years, people like Gene Kirkpatrick and people who worked at the Treasury Department, people who had more interaction with Reagan than I did.
And I would ask them, what is it that made Reagan so successful?
And their answers would be just downright absurd.
I say absurd because on reflection, the answer couldn't be right.
Well, what made Reagan so effective is that he loved America.
Well, that can't be the answer because there are millions of people who love America and they couldn't exactly do what Reagan did.
Well, I think the key to Reagan is that he spent most of his life in Hollywood.
Well, how is that a particularly appropriate preparation for the presidency?
You know, Reagan was a guy who had negotiated for the Screen Actors Guild, not made him really good in dealing with the Russians.
There were lots of people who dealt with the Russians that had far more impressive negotiating experience than Reagan.
And so all of these answers only deepen the puzzle.
And that's really why this book has a subtitle that states the puzzle.
Traditional biographies of Reagan essentially are potted histories of Reagan, beginning with his birth, his youth, and the kind of New Deal era, and it follows along.
But this is really more of a biographical, I would say, essay.
And the conundrum is stated right here, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
Reagan was, in many ways, I'm going to argue not in all ways, but in many ways, An ordinary guy.
So how does an ordinary guy become an extraordinary leader when most ordinary people don't reach that kind of summit?
They don't have those kinds of achievements.
This is the question that I set out to answer in the book.
I'm kind of chuckling looking at the paperback because right on the top here, right above the headline, there is a blurb.
I'm going to read it.
D'Souza's fine new study provides a fresh opportunity to consider Reagan's achievements.
William Kristol, the Weekly Standard.
This is from the Weekly Standard review of my book by Bill Kristol.
And then on the back cover, blurbs from Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal.
Here's Rush Limbaugh.
The one and only Rush Limbaugh.
An unforgettable portrait of Reagan the man.
I mean, it's kind of...
Is that interesting?
I can almost hear Limbaugh's voice in that blurb.
P.G. O'Rourke and the author, Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities.
This marvelous book will drive the intellectual establishment, the conservative cadre, as well as the liberal legions straight up the wall.
It convincingly demonstrates Ronald Reagan's moral...
Political, and yes, I'm afraid so, intellectual superiority to the entire lot of them.
Again, I got to know Tom Wolfe in the 80s and early 90s.
In fact, at one time, my dad had come to visit from India, and the two of us were having dinner in New York, and who should walk by but Tom Wolfe?
We said hello.
He then joined us.
And gave us a tour.
I think it was the New York Athletic Club.
In any event, it is for me somewhat nostalgic to see all these names.
Tom Wolfe is, I don't believe, any longer with us.
And Rush Limbaugh, of course, has passed away as well, as did Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal.
William Crystal, alas, is still with us and causing all kinds of trouble.
Turning to this book on Reagan, I published the book in the mid-1990s.
So this is not a book written sort of contemporaneously with Reagan.
It was not written while Reagan was president.
In fact, the context of it was that Reagan was hugely successful in the goals that he set out.
Some of it was obvious in his own time, the booming economy of the 1980s, the stock market tripled in value, and Reagan had the Soviet Union on the defensive.
Gorbachev had come to power about 1985. Reagan and Gorbachev had signed a major treaty.
But it's important to realize that the real triumph of Reagan came after Reagan.
After Reagan left office, 1989 is when the Berlin Wall came down.
That was a big objective of Reagan's.
Reagan went to the Berlin Wall.
He called for it to come down.
He predicted it would come down.
It did come down, but it came down after he had left office.
And then the spectacular events of the early 1990s, which is the liberation of Eastern Europe, the unwinding of Soviet communism, the Communist Party abolishing itself.
Russia becoming a whole different kind of society in the post-Soviet era.
All of this occurred under Reagan's successor, which is George H.W. Bush.
And Bush deserves some credit for the pretty adroit way, the pretty skillful way in which he managed all that.
But at the same time, he didn't do it.
Not only the groundwork, but the entire architecture of US policy that had led to Soviet collapse was the work of his predecessor, Reagan.
Now, nevertheless, even though Reagan had done all this, and even though, quite honestly, Bush was elected in 1988 purely on the strength of Reagan, Nevertheless, Bush made a mess of it.
He made a mess of it politically.
As I said, he did a good job on the foreign policy front.
But there was a recession in 1991. It dragged on kind of long, even though it wasn't very deep.
And a young Bill Clinton was able to pull off the presidency in 1992. And this generated people who were, you know, Clinton's the new JFK. It's Camelot all over again.
And there was this kind of romance around Bill Clinton, notwithstanding the fact that Bill Clinton was obviously, some of the scandals had already come to light.
But nevertheless, Clinton was seen as a younger, refreshing contrast to Bush.
And all of this had led to a series of attacks on Reagan.
The attacks would seem to be unbelievably...
Well, unbelievable, let's put it that way, because people had just experienced Reagan in the Reagan years.
But nevertheless, the idea was, no, Reagan didn't win the Cold War.
The credit for that really goes to Gorbachev.
And no, Reagan didn't revive the economy.
In fact, he put the economy in massive debt from which the country is never going to recover.
And Reaganomics was a failure.
It was trickle-down economics.
So all of this stuff.
That, to some degree, we still hear, and some of it is now applied to Trump, this was in the air in the 1980s.
I'm sorry, in the 1990s.
And I had served in the Reagan White House in 87 through 88, really the end of the Reagan years.
Then I joined the Bush campaign.
But I chose not to go with the Bush administration.
In retrospect, a very good decision.
Instead, I came to the American Enterprise Institute.
And I began my career in writing books.
I published my first book, Illiberal Education, in 1991, and a follow-up to that, a much more detailed study of racism called The End of Racism in 1995. So the Reagan book came right after that.
So it was a reappraisal of Reagan and an intellectual defense of Reagan.
And as Tom Wolfe noted in the blurb on the back, Reagan needed to be defended both against his defenders and his critics.
I say this because there were many people around Reagan who throughout the Reagan years thought of themselves as smarter than Reagan.
They were the intellectuals and Reagan was this happy-go-lucky Californian who didn't really have a full grasp on things, but they, the neoconservatives, the smart people, would be steering Reagan.
In foreign policy, in economic policy, and so on.
And so Reagan's successes were really their successes.
Reagan, in a sense, was their front man.
At least this was their delusion.
And part of what I do in the book here is to show that we know that Reagan was his own man because he didn't always listen to these people.
In fact, in the second half of his presidency, he went totally against him.
And they predicted apocalypse, disaster, Reagan's really blowing it, the Soviets have outplayed Reagan, and it turns out in retrospect that Reagan, and only Reagan, was right all along.
So when we pick this up, I won't do it tomorrow because Debbie and I are doing our Friday roundup, but I'll pick it up on Monday.
I'll dive into the first chapter, well actually the foreword of the book, which is somewhat amusingly called The Wise Men and the Dummy.
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