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March 17, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:41
NO PLACE LIKE HOME Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1042
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Trump wants to cancel the Biden pardonsk.
Kaboom!
I'll talk about that.
I also want to talk about what can be done about these rogue judges who are blocking Trump from exercising his legitimate authority.
And Newsweek editor Josh Hammer joins me.
We're going to talk about the ceasefire and also about his new book, Israel and Civilization.
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In one of the more hilarious as well as bold moves of his presidency, Donald Trump has just announced that the pardons Donald Trump has just announced that the pardons that sleepy Joe Biden gave to the unselect committee of political thugs and many others are hereby declared void and
vacant, and of no further force or effect.
Trump is canceling the Biden pardons.
And if you look at the immediate response on the left, it is consternation.
The autocracy is here.
See, we told you, this man has no respect for the Constitution.
He's a dictator.
And so on and so forth.
Here's Jake Tapper this morning.
He says, the president decreed he was nullifying President Biden's preemptive pardons, an assertion of power the Constitution does not bestow.
So here's Jake Tapper, journalist, opining.
On what the Constitution does and doesn't say.
First of all, and this is actually quite separate from what Trump said, there is an interesting question about whether preemptive pardons are even allowed.
How do you pardon someone in advance for something that they haven't been charged with, they haven't been convicted, they're not facing any sentence?
Isn't a pardon a kind of forgiveness of some kind of offense that has been, at the very least, established in some court of law?
So that's one question.
But leaving that aside, Tappers seems to say that the power of the president to make a pardon is specifically given in the Constitution, true, and cannot be revoked by a subsequent president.
This is, by the way, strictly speaking, also true.
In fact, Debbie said to me this morning as I was sipping my coffee, she goes, you know, if what Trump says is right, do you think the Democrats could, if they get into power, next time revoke your pardon?
And I go, no.
In fact, Trump is not.
And this was my reply to Jake Tapper.
I'm just going to quote it.
Trump isn't unpardoning people that Biden pardoned.
If you actually read Trump's statement, it's really clear.
Here's what Trump is saying.
Biden is not mentally cognizant.
Biden is not, in fact, aware of what's going on.
If you asked him to give a list of the people he pardoned, he wouldn't be able to do it.
Moreover, Trump points to Biden's use, or should I say, somebody else's use of the auto pen.
As proof of this, somebody else is doing all the signing.
If you compare the auto pen to Biden's own signature, they don't even resemble each other.
The point is, other staffers are deploying Biden's auto pen without his knowledge.
So that's the question.
Do these other staffers, who are not the president, who have not been elected by anybody, do they have the right to issue pardons?
And then just use the auto pen and claim, well, Biden pardoned these people.
So that's what Trump is saying.
What he's saying is that Biden's pardons are not Biden's pardons.
They're somebody else's pardons.
So these are not presidential pardons in the first place.
They are counterfeit.
They are, you know how when you sign a check and you didn't sign it, somebody else signed it, or they...
Or it was signed by some kind of automated device that was made to look like your signature.
That would be called a counterfeit check.
And I think this is where Trump is going.
He's saying these are counterfeit pardons.
The proof, by the way, of Biden not being all there is not merely that Biden is a stutterer, Biden is a babbling fool, Biden couldn't even string a sentence together during the debate.
It's really the fact that the special counsel, Robert Herr, himself concluded, based upon a careful judicial examination, that Biden is not competent to stand trial.
And if he's not competent to stand trial, I mean, think of the kind of people who stand trial.
A lot of them are semi-retarded.
A lot of them have very low IQs.
It's well known that criminals, for example, have IQs in the range of like 77, 82. This is borderline retardation.
So actually, being a borderline retard doesn't mean you're not competent.
You have to be way below that.
To be held not competent to stand trial.
And here I have right in front of me, in entry, February 14, 2024, in the congressional record, quoting Robert Hur's declaration that Biden is so forgetful, so not all there.
That it's not even reasonable to put this guy into a witness stand because he's not going to know what he's saying.
So in other words, Trump is on to something here.
I don't know if this is just a high-level trolling by Trump or if this is something that Trump is going to seriously contend in court.
In other words, to get a judge and perhaps even the Supreme Court to invalidate those Biden pardons on the ground that they are spurious pardons or not real pardons at all.
Now, I also want to talk about Tren de Aragua and that great video put up by the Salvadoran President Naguib Bukele of the Tren de Aragua criminals and aliens, criminal aliens, landing in El Salvador and there to greet them.
I'm happy to say we're just up.
Platoon of Salvadoran soldiers, all bearing heavily armed.
And these guys were all shackled.
They were made to crouch over.
It was beautiful to behold.
Debbie's chuckling at my enthusiasm.
She loved it too, I have to admit.
And these guys are all heading now to a notorious prison.
And here is an article.
It's called the CECOT, C-E-C-O-T Prison.
Here's an article in PBS. It will hardly surprise you.
What to know about the El Salvador mega prison where Trump sent hundreds of immigrants?
That's my favorite word here.
Immigrants.
The criminal aliens from Venezuela, Tren de Aragua, have now become immigrants.
An immigrant is somebody who moves permanently to a country legally.
That's why, for example, I would be an immigrant.
That's because I got a green card.
I became a naturalized citizen.
I would qualify as an immigrant.
Debbie is not really an immigrant because her mom is from Texas.
Her mom, although of Mexican-American origin, is from Texas.
Her family is from Texas.
She goes back generations.
So Debbie's dad is Venezuelan.
And sometimes Debbie...
Sounds like an immigrant.
I think she's thinking about the Venezuelan part of her background, but she's not, strictly speaking, an immigrant.
Well, she wasn't born here as well.
Now, the Seacott Prison apparently does not allow any visitors.
And moreover, I'm now quoting from the PBS article, the prison does not offer workshops or other educational programs to prepare them to return to society.
After their sentences.
Well, this is supposed to be kind of an outrage, but I think the good news is that Bukele's idea is that there are some people who do not need to be returned to society at all.
They are such bad people that they need to stay locked up and therefore the prison doesn't really prepare them for release because there are no plans to release them, at least in the foreseeable future.
Now, all of this is...
A matter of great disturbance to one Judge Boasberg.
This is a Democrat nominee, a left-wing judge, and left-wing organizations shop around for these judges, and they get these judges to say, Trump does not have the authority to do this.
Wait, what?
Well, says the left, these people have not had due process of law.
They have not been charged.
They have not been convicted of any crime.
Where are their constitutional rights?
Well, first of all, they're not U.S. citizens.
They don't have constitutional rights in the same way that citizens do.
The rights of a country pertain to the citizens of that country.
The Bill of Rights does not apply to aliens, let alone criminal aliens.
Now, Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, basically authorizing the president to do this, to remove, deport aliens who pose, in his view, a danger to the United States.
And the law itself says That he can do this if the country is at war.
Clearly, we're not at war.
But it says he can also do it if he concludes, the president concludes, that the country is facing an invasion.
And this is what Trump is relying on.
So the judge has not said that Trump can't do this.
What the judge has said is...
I've got to now have a trial to determine whether or not there is a real invasion and whether or not Trump has this constitutional authority.
Now, interestingly, with regard to this deportation, the judge said that even if these criminal aliens are in the air, they need to be brought home.
The planes have to turn around.
And what Trump has done is...
Now, by the way, when you file this kind of a lawsuit, you file in the names of certain defendants.
And there were apparently five people that were the plaintiffs in this suit against the Trump administration.
Those five people are still in the United States.
It's not as if Trump is saying, OK, I've already sent those people.
They're gone.
But what it is is that Trump is saying, I have sent a number of criminal aliens...
I've sent them out of the United States.
This is within my executive authority.
I have declared an invasion just as the Constitution specifies.
I am within the parameters of the Alien Enemies Act.
And apparently what happened is that the judge made his decision.
These planes were already in the air.
They landed in El Salvador, I believe, three flights.
And even Naguib Bukele put out a message basically saying on social media, too late.
Meaning, I've already got them.
They're already locked up.
Sorry.
This has already been done.
What's done is done.
Now, the Trump administration has filed an appeal immediately to have Judge Bozberg's decision overturned.
So, the reason that the left is saying that Trump is a dictator, Trump doesn't follow the rule of law, is that Trump didn't...
Then turn around and bring these trendy Aragua criminal aliens back to the United States.
Trump is not going to do that.
I think what Trump is saying is that this is just a judicial tactic to delay the legitimate exercise of executive power.
So I think Trump has now realized that if these judges are just allowed to make Temporary restraining orders.
They can temporary restrain every single thing he does.
They can take every single executive order and just put a TRO, put a temporary restraining order, and say, listen, you have to now litigate this before my court.
That could take days, if not weeks, if not months.
And in the meantime, your action is suspended.
Trump's point is, litigate all you wish, but...
Because these are executive actions.
The actions should be performed.
And then you can decide, and I can then later appeal, whether or not these actions are legitimate according to you.
So we have an interesting clash here between a system that allows these district judges to issue not just...
Not just proclamations that pertain to five people or apply to a particular act within a jurisdiction, but are able to issue proclamations for the whole country.
Suspend Trump's action nationwide.
And this is what the Democrats on the left are calling rule of law.
There's something clearly wrong with this.
And I think what needs to happen and happen soon is for the Supreme Court to step in and weigh in on this issue.
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I don't know if you have been to Stratford-on-Avon.
This is the venue of the Shakespeare Festival.
Shakespeare was from Stratford.
There is a Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford.
It's about, I think, an hour, maybe 90 minutes outside of London.
And while there are Shakespeare plays always playing in London, the real place to get Shakespeare and to feel the presence of Shakespeare, and there's a Shakespeare museum, is to go to Stratford and to spend a day there.
It's a fun thing to do, especially if you like Shakespeare.
And so I'm particularly troubled to report that someone has infiltrated The Shakespeare operation at Stratford.
And I say this because I see an article from the British press saying that Stratford, the actual organizational authorities of Stratford have gone woke.
Or to put it in Elon Musk terms, the woke mind virus has infiltrated Stratford.
Why?
Because evidently they are now going to downplay Shakespeare.
I mean, think about the insanity of that.
This would be like going to Abraham Lincoln's birthplace and saying, we're going to downplay Lincoln.
Why would you do that?
What possible rationale could there be?
What was bad about Shakespeare?
Well, it turns out there was nothing bad about Shakespeare per se, but according to the Stratford people, the woke Stratfordians, if I can call them that, They think that an overemphasis on Shakespeare might give added weight to Western civilization.
And Shakespeare is kind of the outstanding creative artist of the West, probably the greatest literary mind to have been produced by the West.
And therefore...
Shakespeare supposedly gives a certain reinforcement to Western superiority.
What you have going on here is an anti-colonial critique of Shakespeare, that somehow Western civilization is represented by oppression and conquest.
Shakespeare is the kind of totemic figure of the West.
Therefore, Shakespeare represents colonialism and conquest.
Therefore, we have to downplay Shakespeare and elevate who?
Well, as it turns out, Muslim writers.
And so, Stratford-on-Avon is going to be highlighting and presumably doing some exhibits.
Here's an exhibit of the poet Rumi, for example, and there's a number of other important Muslim writers.
And no one denies that these Muslim writers are worth reading, at least in certain contexts, but why are they in Shakespeare's birthplace?
What do they have to do with Shakespeare?
The answer is nothing.
Now, what makes all of this...
So troubling is that, first of all, Shakespeare's writing around the year 1600. This was the heyday of the Elizabethan era, and there was no colonialism going on at that time.
In fact, England was a relative backwater compared to the great power of the time, which was, of course, Spain.
Remember that when you think about the discovery of the world, it begins with Portugal.
In the 15th century, and then in the 16th century, which is the 1500s, Spain takes over and dominates the 16th century and a good part of the 17th before the Spanish are eclipsed by the French.
But England is nowhere in the picture until considerably later.
So the order of colonialism is the Portuguese first, the Spanish second, the French third, the English fourth.
So Shakespeare is...
Pre-colonial, by any calculation that you want to make.
So why is he being even involved in all this?
And moreover, even if you want to involve him in some way and look at the impact of colonialism around the world, British colonialism exported a lot of things that the rest of the world hangs on to.
And I'm not just talking about things like English tea, which is still the commonly Is essentially a common meal in India, even, you know, 75 years after the British have left.
I'm not even talking about English clothing or suits.
Or the English language, all of which, again, English is now one of the accepted national languages of India.
In fact, it's spoken throughout the country, which is even different than Hindustani.
But I'm talking about the exports of colonialism in terms of democracy, separation of powers, a modern judicial system, checks and balances.
The university system that is now widely established in countries, not just India, but countries like Ghana and other places that were ruled by the British.
So the point is, all of this, it's not that colonialism doesn't have its downside, but my point is it also has its upside.
And the whole idea of blaming Shakespeare and somehow trying to take him down a notch is, I think, a misguided project.
In its conception.
And it's especially perverse to do it by the very people who are charged with upholding, celebrating, and cherishing Shakespeare's legacy.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, I'm very pleased to welcome back to the podcast our friend Josh Hammer.
Senior editor of Newsweek.
He also hosts the Josh Hammer Show podcast and syndicated radio show.
He writes a weekly newsletter, The Josh Hammer Report.
But his new book, Out Tomorrow, Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West, we've mentioned and sort of looked forward to the book, and here it is.
So jump onto Amazon, jump onto Barnes& Noble, get your copy of the book.
You can follow Josh on X, by the way, at Josh underscore Hammer.
Josh, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I thought I might start by asking you what the state is of the ceasefire because it appears to be one of those situations where it goes back and forth.
Hamas doesn't live up to its commitments, but then just when it seems like the wrath of Israel and maybe the wrath of Trump is about to be unleashed, they kind of modify and do one or two things, but not enough.
Is this kind of a game that they're playing with Israel and with America?
Where do things stand as you see it right now?
Well, Dinesh, great to be back with you, and thank you for generously flagging the book.
I look forward to talking about that as well.
But currently between Israel and Hamas, you know, it's phase 1.5 of the hostage ceasefire deal.
That's the way that I've heard many Israelis refer to it.
So phase 1 is over.
So-called phase 2 of the January deal has not commenced yet.
And the problem, as you aptly identify, is that we're dealing with a genocidal Islamist death cult called Hamas.
We're not dealing here with rational actors.
We're dealing with people who literally chop up and murder babies.
I mean, it doesn't get much more satanic.
It doesn't get much more just evil than that there.
So this is obviously not an honest broker.
This is not the kind of actor that you can deal with in kind of a rational fashion.
So they're constantly trying to extract more concessions, to change the terms.
On basically any which day here.
To me, Dinesh, personally, I think that the ball is in Prime Minister Netanyahu's court right now.
Donald Trump has made very clear, by both word and deed, That he is standing with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the State of Israel.
Frankly, if you are Prime Minister Netanyahu, Dinesh, you're not going to get a more enthusiastic, supportive presidential administration, maybe ever.
I mean, at least for the rest of Netanyahu's adult lifetime.
I mean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsat, the incoming ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, my goodness gracious.
I mean, these guys are all in for the U.S.-Israel alliance here.
year.
Donald Trump is talking about how there's going to be hell to pay.
He will provide Israel with whatever weapons they need.
So to me, I look at that and I say, okay, I mean, the president of the United States is making very clear what he wants to happen.
The President of the United States also respects strength, and he abhors weakness there.
So, Israel, are you going to be strong?
Are you going to be weak?
It looks like Hamas is going to sabotage this deal.
They're going to blow it up there.
So that means that the next obvious question is, is Israel going to actually finally, with this administration backing it to the hilt, are they going to actually go into Gaza and finish the job?
That, to me, is the million-dollar question.
I certainly hope that the answer is yes.
I pray that the answer is yes.
I suspect that the answer is yes, but I guess that we shall see sooner rather than later.
The obstacle for Netanyahu to do that is presumably not any credulity that Netanyahu is attaching to Hamas or its guarantees.
Is there a political fragmentation within Israel?
Is the opposition no longer unified behind the war?
Why would Netanyahu hold back?
Israel, like any other country, is definitely war-weary.
I mean, they've been at war now for a year and a half, and there are still hostages, and there are obviously some people who I think would prioritize politically reaching a deal at essentially all military costs to retrieve the hostages ASAP. So that's definitely a thorn in Netanyahu's side.
Having said that, Dinesh, the polling that I've seen does show that a large majority of the Israeli public wants Israel to remove Hamas from power and to make sure that they will never...
So it seems to me like he has a pretty clear mandate.
I suspect that what Netanyahu is worried about is not necessarily the United States.
He has very little to worry about here, frankly, when it comes to the Trump administration and U.S.-Israel relations.
The president has admirably made very clear that Israel has very little to worry about.
I suspect that he's probably worried, that is Netanyahu, about all the usual actors here when it comes to sanctions from the ICC or the United Nations.
Maybe he's worried about Europe, which is not nearly as much in his court as is the United States at this moment here.
But he has to ultimately do what he said he had to do.
I mean, Israel announced two very clear war aims after October 7. The two war aims were very straightforward.
One is retrieval of all the hostages.
Two is the removal and eradication of Hamas as a military and political institution in Gaza.
Thus far, neither of those war aims has been completely, completely achieved.
The hostages is obviously extraordinarily difficult, and I'm willing to forgive that.
But the eradication of Hamas has to happen.
And I think we should be very clear about this.
Unless and until that happens, Israel is not winning this war.
Unless and until that happens, Israel tragically will have lost the war because they announced a very clear aim, eradicate Hamas.
At some point, you've got to actually do it.
You have to actually finish the job here.
The Trump administration is basically saying, make them pay for it.
Go in there.
They will have hell to pay there.
So hopefully, Bibi Netanyahu gets the message.
Again, I suspect he probably will.
Josh, let's talk about your book, and I'd like to introduce it this way.
A lot of Americans, when they think about Israel, they think about it in terms of the strategic, military, or maybe broader diplomatic interests of the United States.
And I don't think that's a wrong way to think about it, and a case can be made for Israel.
But I take it from your book that you are making a broader and maybe even more profound case in which you are saying that there is a line of moral, philosophical, maybe even constitutional linkage from Israel, from Jerusalem, from the days of the prophets.
To the origins of Western civilization, to the founders who brought Athens and Jerusalem with them when they came from England to the United States, is that the argument that you're going for in this book?
How would you describe its objective?
So all of what you just said is in the book, Dinesh, including kind of the more hard-headed geopolitical stuff.
There's actually a whole chapter in this book on MAGA, America First Style, foreign policy realism, because I actually am a national interest foreign policy realist there.
And there's a whole chapter making the case for U.S.-Israelians on explicitly realist foreign policy grounds.
So that's all in there.
But the book fundamentally is more broad.
It is fundamentally operating at a slightly higher altitude level, I guess you would say there.
What I'm basically arguing in this book, Dinesh, When we speak about so-called Western civilization, you know, we hear a lot these days, Western civilization is at a crossroads.
We're at an inflection point there, and I happen to agree with that.
I think that we are at an inflection point.
I'm also a lawyer, and I like to make sure that we're on the same page when we define terms.
What is the West?
Well, you know, Leo Strauss famously defined the West as this double helix of Athens and Jerusalem, of reason and revelation there.
And I'm not saying that Leo Strauss is wrong.
Rather, I actually am arguing in this book, I argue this in a very early chapter, Chapter 2, that I actually do think that one of those two things is actually more important for the West than the other.
I think that Revelation is actually the more important piece of the puzzle here.
I think that above all...
When we talk about the West, I think we're really talking about the Bible.
We're really talking about the two biblical religions, Judaism and Christianity.
And I fundamentally argue that Western civilization actually began with God's revelation to Moses and the Israelites.
At Mount Sinai, so much of what we take for granted today, tracing the steps through the English common law to the American founding there, really does go all the way back to that.
I mean, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia has this famous quote from the book of Leviticus, You shall proclaim liberty unto the land and all the inhabitants thereof.
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin famously wanted the national seal of the United States to be Moses parting the Red Sea.
Heck, you know, a century and a half before the American founding, you had the pilgrims cross the Atlantic Ocean on the Mayflower.
They viewed themselves very much as modern Israelites crossing their version of the Red Sea.
They actually even talked briefly on the Mayflower, believe it or not, about making Hebrew, not English, the official national language of the United States.
That didn't catch on, obviously, but it actually was discussed there.
So this notion that the Jewish people, the people of the book, and just the Bible more generally, it has always been front and center of all that constitutes Western civilization.
It has always been the backbone of the United States.
Frankly, it has been what makes the United States such a great country.
So this country really was founded upon.
Dinesh, you know, I look out there at the current political discourse, especially post-October 7th.
And it seems to me like there are so many people, frankly, all across the political spectrum, tragically these days, that are willing to just throw away the biblical tradition, that are willing to just kind of throw away all the thousands and thousands of years of history there.
But we should not do that, because the biblical tradition still holds timeless truths going forward there.
So the book is really, at its core, a call to action.
It's a call to action for Jews and Christians alike to fall in love with the Bible, to fall in love with what made this entire Western...
civilization, great, and to ultimately then link arms and stand shoulder to shoulder because we're in this fight together.
We have the exact same enemies.
Wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism are the three that I identify.
And unless we understand exactly where we come from, I worry, Dinesh, that we will not be adequately equipped to make sure that we fight back against these enemies and then ultimately land on solid footing on the other side.
I mean, Josh, that was a very interesting thing you said when you insisted that the legacy of Jerusalem is maybe even more important than Athens.
And this, of course, is very different than Strauss' view, right?
The philosopher Leo Strauss, being a philosopher, took the view that, look, the origins of philosophy are with Socrates in ancient Greece.
And I suspect that, you know, because the United States and much of the West has become more secular over the last several decades and generations, it's a little easier to see the legacy of Athens.
You can see that, oh, well, this philosophy started over there, and gee, the theater started over there with the ancient Greek tragedies, and the Romans then gave us Roman law, but...
It is less easy to see how Jerusalem is not only important but could be potentially more important.
I think that the case for Jerusalem is kind of simple.
And that is that the ordinary American had no easy way, for example, to find out about Socrates or Thucydides or the Peloponnesian War.
But think about it.
There were thousands of pastors in churches all across the country who were...
Expounding the Bible.
And so the impact, for example, of Moses or Abraham or take, for example, the impact of the Exodus story on the Western imagination, on the civil rights movement, on people like Frederick Douglass was manifestly huge.
So there's a much easier way in which the legacy of Jerusalem was transmitted across the ocean and has had more impact on America than the legacy of Athens.
Would you agree?
Yeah, that's very, very well said.
Look, I also want to make sure that I don't come across as somehow anti-Greek or anything.
I'm actually a big fan of Aristotle.
I think that Aristotle had profound insights, specifically, above all, his concept of teleology and telos is something that I talk about in the book a little bit as well.
So I'm definitely not anti-Greek.
I'm certainly not anti-reason.
This notion of reason is considered to be the big legacy of the Athens school.
Rather, Dinesh, what I argue...
I'm very skeptical of a society, an individual, or anyone who kind of, behind a proverbial Rawlsian veil of ignorance, just sits down and closes his eyes and says, hmm, let me use unaided reason to deduce XYZ things.
Because that can lead to some very, very, very dark places.
I mean, not to use too prolific an example.
But the Nazis thought that they were acting quite reasonably and rationally.
Germany was a very, very advanced civilization, culturally, philosophically, mathematically.
They thought that they were the quintessence, actually, of rationality.
They definitely were not acting in the name of the Bible, that's for sure.
But they thought that they were deeply reasonable there.
You know, in our own Jewish tradition, our great sage Maimonides, in Hebrew we call him the Rambam, he's kind of viewed as the Jewish equivalent of Aquinas in many ways there.
You know, Maimonides talks about how reason is a deeply valuable analytical tool, but again, it has to be contextualized within the context of a pre-existing worldview there.
But your point is also deeply well taken.
You can go back and look at the speeches from the pulpit of the pastors in the 17th and 18th century in colonial America there.
Were they reading John Locke and the Second Treatise?
Sure.
You know, there were a lot of erudite educated men who were, but you know what they were reading a lot?
More than John Locke?
The Bible.
They were reading the Bible a lot, and the Bible really, really formed their worldview.
And in many ways, actually, it really was the Hebrew Scripture, the Hebrew Bible, that they were oftentimes deeply engaging with.
Abraham Lincoln, actually, in his speeches, he quotes Scripture all the time.
He actually quoted the Hebrew Bible even more so than the New Testament there.
So, you know, especially in today's day and age, Dinesh, of just skyrocketing, tragically skyrocketing anti-Semitism, not just anti-Israelism, just outright.
I mean, the resuscitation of many of these grotesque millennia-old lies here.
You know, my call is for Jews and Christians alike to kind of fall in love with their heritage again and really fall in love with the Bible above all.
I mean, I know that for Debbie and me, when we went to Israel for the first time in the end of 2022, and we're going again in April to do some filming, we might be going again in September for the unveiling of some archaeological work in Israel that we support.
It's so eye-opening to see a society that...
Bears some, I think, recognizable resemblance to the society described in the Hebrew Scriptures.
In other words, that Israel hasn't gone, and yet it's very different from life in the United States, which in many ways is so different than the kind of rooted society described in the Bible.
I mean, to me, it is almost a kind of moral imperative for Christians, At some point in their life to try to go to Israel if they can.
But if they can't, that's why you write books, right?
Right.
In other words, this is the second best way to be able to show someone and make the case for the the deep connection between the society of Israel and the and the United States.
Guys, I've been talking to Josh Hammer, senior editor of Newsweek, the book Israel and Civilization, the fate of the Jewish nation and the destiny of the West.
Great stuff.
Check it out.
Josh, a real pleasure.
Thank you for joining me.
The pleasure is mine, Dinesh.
Thank you so much.
I am beginning today the full on discussion of my book.
Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
The last couple of days, I've done a little bit of a prelude to the book or setting the groundwork for it.
Debbie and I talked a little bit about the ways in which we first encountered Reagan.
But here we're diving into the prologue.
And the prologue is called The Wise Men and the Dummy.
Just to refresh, this book is written in the mid to late 1990s, and that's worth keeping in mind because it has some hindsight.
Now, obviously today, more than a quarter of a century later, we have even more hindsight into the events of the late 20th century.
So this is going to be a very interesting retrospective on Reagan.
And let's also keep in mind, as we think about Reagan, the situation that we are in now, And the comparison, which we can't help avoid making, between Reagan and Trump.
Now, the opening line of the book is this.
Sometimes it really helps to be a dummy.
I'm kind of proud of this opening line because, well, opening lines are important in books and they have a certain...
If the book is a good book, there is something that you remember.
Think about, you know, books that you've read, classic works, and very often the first line is notable.
Call me Ishmael is the opening of Moby Dick.
Or it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
That's the Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
The statement, sometimes it really helps to be a dummy, is ironic.
It's ironic because, as we will see, Reagan is no dummy.
And yet, he is described as a dummy.
He's thought to be a dummy.
And as we will see in a moment, not just by the liberals and the Democrats, he's also thought that way by a lot of know-it-all conservatives, including people that I greatly respect.
So, I start the book by describing a dinner that took place in 1985. At the apartment of a prominent Republican diplomat, her name was Claire Booth Luce.
And a bunch of conservative luminaries were there.
And Reagan was there.
And Reagan was talking to them about his upcoming meeting with Gorbachev.
And as they saw it, Reagan was revealing his extreme naivete about the Soviet Union.
Now, this is what Reagan said to these conservatives.
This is in 1985, right in the middle of Reagan's tenure.
He finished his first term.
Let's remember he was re-elected in 1984. This is early 1985. Here's Reagan.
He says, I only wish I could get in a helicopter with Gorbachev and fly over the United States.
I would ask him to point to people's homes at random and we could stop at some of them.
Then he would see how Americans live in clean and lovely homes with a second car or boat in the driveway.
If I could just get through to him about the difference between our two systems, I really think we could see big changes in the Soviet Union.
End quote.
Now.
Michael Novak, the conservative luminary, passed away several years ago.
But Michael Novak was, to some degree, my mentor at the American Enterprise Institute.
Our offices were side by side.
The two of us worked together on a magazine that I edited at the time called Crisis.
And Novak is telling me this.
And he's at the dinner with Reagan and others.
And he says, at this point, he says he looked across the table and his eyes met the eyes of George Will.
Another prominent conservative and now something of a never-Trumper.
But he says both of them...
rolled their eyes.
And they rolled their eyes as if to say, this Reagan, we like him and all, but man, you know, he really doesn't know what's going on.
Does anyone really think that you can change the Soviet system by trotting around the Soviet leader and just having him stop in American homes?
Is that going to really open his eyes?
And he'll go, gee, I was wrong.
Our whole system is bad.
We need to change it.
So the conservatives...
Thought that they were smarter than Reagan.
I'm now quoting Novak, talking to me.
Our view was that it was foolish bordering on suicidal to think the Soviet leaders would respond to personal initiatives.
We thought in terms of a totalitarian system.
The particular leader of the Soviet Union didn't matter because it was the system that dictated policy.
And then Novak says to me, he goes, Did not share our view at all.
And then, says Novak, and he's now, remember, he's recalling this, so he's telling me this later.
He says, it really makes you wonder, doesn't it?
What did he know that we didn't?
So Novak here is recognizing, you know what?
Reagan turned out to be right.
The Soviet Union did unwind.
Gorbachev did play a big role in that.
Reagan's impact on Gorbachev was, in fact, huge.
So here is Michael Novak.
And this was very much Novak.
He was fundamentally...
He's not like these never-Trumpers who will dig in and are so confident in their original assessment that they will never admit they're wrong.
Here is actually Michael Novak admitting...
Reagan kind of got it right, and we, the conservatives, did not.
Now, I'm continuing.
Wise men, again, I'm using this term ironically.
Remember, the chapter is called The Wise Men and the Dummy.
I'm going to be contrasting the wise men, all the smarty pants, all the smart people in the United States, with the dummy, namely Reagan.
This is the point of the prologue, is to expose the wise men.
And vindicate the dummy.
And I'm going to do it not just by asserting that Reagan is right.
I'm going to show you that the things said by the wise men, certainly with the benefit of hindsight, are not so wise after all.
Like a wise man from the fields of politics, economics, and divinity issued Solomonic pronouncements, this is a reference to King Solomon, about the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s that now make for informative reading.
Here is the Reverend Billy Graham commenting on material conditions on returning from a 1982 trip to the Soviet Union.
Quote, The meals I had are among the finest I've ever eaten.
In the United States, you have to be a millionaire to have caviar.
But I had caviar with almost every meal.
Now, this is a very foolish thing to say because we know that when people travel to totalitarian countries, They get VIP treatment that's completely different from the way that ordinary people in those countries live.
I mean, this was the point about Reagan in the anecdote with Gorbachev.
Reagan's point is, I'm not going to take Gorbachev to a sumptuous White House dinner.
I'm going to fly over the United States with him and ask him to point, ask him to point at random homes of his choice.
And then we'll go see how those people live.
So in other words, I'm not going to try to rig The outcome.
I'm going to let him choose what he wants to see, and then we will be able to make a judgment about our society.
Here is the learned Sovietologist Seren Bialor of Columbia University.
Quote, he's writing in 1982. The Soviet Union is not now.
Nor will it be, during the next decade, in the throes of a true systemic crisis.
For it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability.
In other words, what he's saying is, don't expect the Soviet Union to collapse.
It's not going to.
And here's Arthur Schlesinger, prominent democratic historian.
Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse are wishful thinkers who are, quote, Kidding themselves.
Here's John Kenneth Galbraith, the prominent economist.
When I was in college, we would read textbooks by Galbraith.
He's the author of The Affluent Society, among other books.
That the Soviet Union has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene.
Partly the Russian system succeeds because in contrast with the Western industrial economies, It makes full use of its manpower.
So here is Galbraith saying that the Soviet Union is actually doing better than the United States.
It's materially more prosperous, and therefore the idea that it's going to somehow unwind, he says, never going to happen.
Here's Paul Samuelson of MIT, author of the Standard Economics textbook, which might still be used for all I know in economics courses.
But it was used for decades.
Quote, he says, And there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth.
The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.
This stuff goes on and on and on.
I'm going to give just a couple more examples.
Here's Lester Thoreau, another prominent pundit and economist.
And here's Lester Thoreau writing in 1989. 1989 is the year the Berlin Wall collapsed.
So this guy is giving his forecast for the Soviet Union just in the year that the Soviet Empire begins to implode.
Quote, So, why am I reading these quotes?
Just to show that these pundits, who are considered to be the...
The Eminence Gris, the wise men, if you will, of their time, could not be more wrong in their own diagnosis of the malaise of the Soviet Union.
In fact, they didn't see any malaise at all.
They honestly believe the Soviet Union is thriving, and they looked with great contempt on the dummy.
This is Reagan.
Who was saying the opposite.
So when I pick it up tomorrow, I will go further into what the dummy said and why the wise men scorned him so much.
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