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March 24, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:52
DEI UP CLOSE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1047
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Coming up, I'll draw on some newly released data from New York University to show the shameful extent of racial preferences.
I'm going to celebrate what looks to be the demise of the environmental activist group called Greenpeace.
And Professor Stanley Ridgely, he's the author of DEI Exposed, joins me.
He's going to talk about charting a path forward.
Toward the overthrow of DEI and the realization of Martin Luther King's dream of a colorblind society.
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I'm going to focus in my monologue on some very interesting data that's come out from NYU, New York University, regarding racial preferences.
And then I have a scholar, a professor at Drexel University with a book on DEI coming on.
I'll start with some items in the news which are worth commenting on.
New York's highest court just ruled non-citizens cannot vote.
This is a good thing because in New York, The Democrats, and they also have been trying this in other places, California and elsewhere, sneaking in getting non-citizens to vote in local elections.
They know that they are not going to get a chance to have non-citizens voting, at least not legally, not without fraud, in federal elections.
So their argument is, well, these people, you know, they pay taxes and they are...
They should benefit from local services.
So why should we deny them participation?
This is the argument.
But the decision, interestingly, from the New York Court of Appeals was 6-1.
So in a liberal state, the judges just looked basically at the New York Constitution, at the law, and they were like, no, this is not allowed.
So that's a good thing.
Although I would expect that they won't give up on it.
They'll be back trying again.
There's going to be more from Judge Boesberg.
Debbie told me this morning that the Court of Appeals is likely having a hearing on the Trump administration's appeal on Boesberg's atrocious rulings, basically saying, I can turn back flights, basically saying you cannot send anybody abroad, basically saying you've got to put the whole deportation program under the 1798 Act on hold.
This guy is out of his league.
This guy is usurping executive authority.
So hopefully the appellate court will act expeditiously, and I will, of course, cover what they decide.
Let's note that there are now 30 injunctions that various judges in Really, all of them liberals.
And I say liberals because it's not the luck of the draw that's getting us these judges.
The left is shopping in jurisdictions that give them liberal judges.
And then the liberal judges make liberal decisions in line with the expectations of the Democrats.
Under Obama, there were just 12 injunctions.
Trump in the first term, 64. Biden, 14. Trump in the second term, 30 already.
In other words, 30 in just, what, two and a half months?
So, this shows you that we are now in attempted rule by judiciary.
And it's very important that we stop this.
And stop it promptly.
This is not a matter of letting things play out or drag out.
Let the judicial process take its course.
Because half a year could go by.
And that means that in a very short four-year presidency, you've essentially given up.
You've relinquished six months.
That's one-eighth of your entire presidency.
So Trump should be moving on all fronts, and I think he is.
Here's something interesting regarding tariffs.
The Korean automaker Hyundai has announced a $20 billion investment in the U.S. Including a $5 billion steel plant in Louisiana.
And they admit that they're doing it to avoid tariffs.
Now, Trump put out a post this morning where he says he just makes a list of all the different people investing in America.
Just going to give you that list.
SoftBank, $100 billion.
NVIDIA, about the same.
Hyundai, Apple, the government of Saudi Arabia.
UAE, United Arab Emirates, Merck, Eli Lilly, Johnson& Johnson, Taiwan Semiconductors.
Now, this is something, very interestingly, that you don't learn in economics class, right?
In economics class, you learn that free trade is the best way to go, tariffs are bad, tariffs result in higher prices, tariffs are a form of taxation.
And without denying that those things are true, that tariffs are, in fact, a form of taxation, Trump is changing the rules of the game by showing that tariffs work in ways that your textbooks never told you.
Your textbooks never said that when you have the threat of tariffs, all kinds of foreign companies will jump to attention and go, guess what?
Why don't we make plants in the United States?
Why don't we make our stuff over there instead of over here?
We'll also save the transportation costs of having to make them in some other country and then bring them over by ship or some other way.
This way we make them right in America.
And from Trump's point of view, you create American jobs.
You create American prosperity.
We're not sending our wealth over to other countries.
In fact, by putting tariffs on them, we are getting wealth from them for the privilege of being able to send goods over here.
So, to my way of thinking, this is a way of changing the nature of the tariff debate.
Which brings me now to my topic of NYU.
Here's a panicky post by NYU itself.
Shortly after 10 a.m. Eastern Time, malicious hackers took control of the systems that display NYU's web presence and redirected traffic to NYU site to a web page the hackers created.
Now, the hackers, as it turned out, weren't just taking you away from the NYU site.
They were showing you data that NYU had Remember, these universities always say, oh, diversity is really about choosing among equally qualified applicants.
No, we're not engaging in systematic racial preferences.
No, we're not violating anti-discrimination.
No, we're not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Well, here we have four little bars showing the SAT scores of the four groups.
And this is the admissions.
These are for people admitted to NYU in 2024.
Basically, to get into NYU, if you're Asian American, your SAT score, 1485.
If you're white, 1428.
If you are Hispanic, 1355.
If you are black, 1289.
So, again, we're not talking about differences that are, you know, 10 points, 15 points.
In other words, we're not talking about modest differences.
We're talking about differences of hundreds of points on the SAT, which often translates to one year or two years of cognitive development.
And so this is blatant stuff, and I think blatantly illegal.
Fortunately, our friend Harmeet Dhillon is now at the Civil Rights Division in the department that has every authority to look into this.
And I hope that she is on high alert and diving right into it because it is time to call these universities to account.
In fact, it's time to treat them as the discriminators that they are.
There is no reason to...
Treat different classes of racial discrimination as if one type of racial discrimination is benign, another type is invidious.
No, it's all invidious racial discrimination and should all be treated that way.
And these universities need to be held to account.
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We might be seeing the end of the environmental group called Greenpeace.
You've probably heard of Greenpeace.
It is a left-wing climate change environmentalist activist group.
And it's not just a group, by the way, in the United States.
It's a worldwide, or at least an international group.
It's got its headquarters in the Netherlands.
And there is an American division, which is Greenpeace USA, but there is also Greenpeace International, and there is a funding arm of Greenpeace called Greenpeace Fund.
Greenpeace was hauled into court.
All these different wings of Greenpeace, all the factions of Greenpeace were hauled into court for engaging in disruption of a pipeline, the construction of a pipeline in North Dakota.
It's called the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline.
And it is being built by a Dallas group, a Dallas-based group called Energy Transfer.
And its subsidiary, which is called Dakota Access.
So these guys are building this pipeline, and it's an important pipeline to move energy, to move oil.
In fact, it moves about 5% of all the oil in the United States, 5% of the daily oil production.
The oil began to be transported in 2017, so this operation has been going now for about seven or eight years.
And these Greenpeace guys were blocking, disrupting, preventing the normal functioning of the pipeline.
And this was not only a blow to the company, Energy Transfer and Dakota Access, but it was also very traumatic for the people who worked at the pipeline.
And these are people, very often blue-collar guys who make a good living working on oil pipelines, and the Greenpeace people focused on making their lives miserable, if not impossible.
And so, lawsuit.
And while Greenpeace has portrayed the lawsuit as being about free speech, we have every right to exercise our free speech, the issue is disruption, not free speech.
So, free speech is one thing.
Carry a sign, stand on the side of the road.
But if you lie down on the road, or if you block the pipeline, or you prevent people from getting in and out, or you engage in other types of disruptive protests, you're going beyond free speech.
And the jury agreed.
So there is a rather severe verdict, $660 million in damages against Greenpeace.
And these damages are parceled out.
So Greenpeace USA...
It was found liable for all counts and got the majority of the penalty.
But the other Greenpeace's also have to cough up the money.
So the damages are almost $670 million.
Greenpeace USA has to pay $400 million.
And the other two, Greenpeace Fund and Greenpeace International, $131 million.
So the Greenpeace lawyers are like, oh, this is horrible.
This is going to cause Greenpeace to go bankrupt.
But at the same time, In a very arrogant way, they are saying, and this may be more for media consumption, we are not going to be deterred.
We're not going to stop.
We believe in our cause.
The cause lives on.
So here we go.
The fight against big oil is not over, says Greenpeace International General Counsel Kristen Casper.
We know the law and the truth are on our side.
So Greenpeace is going to appeal.
This inevitably happens in these situations.
And so there is more legal battling to come.
But the fact is that Greenpeace is facing this liability, and it's not clear that they will win an appeal.
After all, a jury has kind of looked at the facts in this particular case, and unless Greenpeace can now convince a court of appeals that this is not about disruption, or at least that it's really a free speech case.
And Greenpeace has every right to be doing the things that it has been doing, that the disruption is constitutionally protected.
Unless an appellate court goes that way, Greenpeace is in real trouble.
Now, it has become increasingly clear that this whole climate industry is big business for the left.
It's not really about the environment because the left profits immensely by forcing the government to do things.
Initially, it may seem, looking at these guys, all they're about is they want to stop bad things from happening.
They don't want the oil pipeline to flow.
But once you meet with them, you realize they actually have a lot of things that they do want.
And those, by and large, are...
Climate-friendly industries that these guys control.
And look at a guy like Al Gore or John Kerry.
These are people who are actively involved with the climate industry.
And what I mean is that they make a fortune, Al Gore does for sure, by offering their own climate projects, serving on the board of various climate organizations.
So it's all...
Presented in the language of saving the planet, protecting the penguins and the panda bears.
But there is a great deal of money involved.
And the more you can browbeat countries, particularly Western countries.
It's not easy to do this with non-Western countries because they look at you like you're out of your mind.
Not to mention the fact that they have increasing needs.
For oil and fossil fuels, and they are not going to be deterred in their own national economic development by a bunch of ponytail activists.
So they might sometimes give lip service to these causes.
Oh yeah, net zero.
Yeah, we're going to be having a meeting about that.
We're going to be thinking about that.
But in reality, they don't care about it.
But the Western countries can be browbeaten.
You can appeal to their guilt.
Well, listen, the only reason your country became rich and powerful and made all this economic development is by trampling on the environment.
You need to give back and give back, as I'm trying to suggest here, very often means you need to put money in our pocket.
The point I'm getting at here is I don't feel sorry for these organizations like Greenpeace.
Not only are their facts wrong, not only is their cause in a way an unjust one, but at some level it's a profit-making business of its own, with the only difference that it's a profit-making business in this case that doesn't serve the consumer, that doesn't serve the citizen.
It merely puts money into the pockets of the climate Entrepreneurs.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Dr. Stanley Ridgely.
He is a clinical full professor of strategic management at Drexel University.
He's also a Russian language linguist, former military intelligence officer.
And he's the author of DEI Exposed, How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.
You can follow him on X at Stanley Ridgely, R-I-D-G-L-E-Y.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
We cross paths, as it turns out.
Gosh, it seems a full 30 years ago.
I think you were telling me a moment ago.
Around 1995, in connection with a conservative think tank called the ISI, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
So I hope you've been doing well in the meantime.
Well, we have to meet more often.
I can't do these things every 30, 40 years.
Thank you for coming on, for letting me on the show.
I do appreciate it.
It's an important topic.
Our paths crossing very fondly, and I'm hoping that we can really, and I appreciate your audience, as a very erudite audience, and that we can really illuminate some minds on this very important issue of DEI.
Well, you also mentioned to me that your wife hosted me years ago, this was probably around 2008 or 2009, to debate Michael Shermer somewhere.
Was it a university in Tampa?
Was that where it was?
Yes. Okay, awesome.
All right.
Let's talk about DEI.
You know, I've written about this subject, or at least really about affirmative action and proportional representation, those kinds of issues, going all the way back to the early 1990s.
But DEI has a kind of, it seems to be a more recent innovation.
And by recent, I mean the last couple of decades.
What was the...
What Stan was the origin of DEI?
When did this really get started?
Well, I tell you, I go back to 1991 in your book, Illiberal Education, and I like that.
That's a very prescient volume.
I encourage people to review that book.
And I see that, you know, because you predicted much of what's happening on the college campuses, DEI kind of morphed or became into its own in the last 25 years in this century and kind of lurked on the outskirts of the university, knocking at the door, scratching at the door, trying to achieve an entrance there.
But it was so illegitimate academically.
And scholarly, there was really no reason, no way for it to make it into the university until summer of 2020 on into 2021 and the BLM riots, which made universities very malleable and welcoming to anything that could give them absolution for this perceived guilt of what DEI folks like to say is a white racist society, white racist America, a society that is permeated with white supremacy culture, which of course is all...
But this is what DEI is all about.
It's not about creating a level playing field, giving everyone a fair shot, about teaching about slavery, teaching about race.
It's nothing as benign as any of that.
The purview of the Enlightenment University, the idea that we should welcome all ideas, let them contend in the marketplace of ideas, and the loser must exit the stage, not be inflicted or imposed on everyone else in a kind of, you're the winner, and now we're going to do things your way.
So DEI has been around for quite some time, but only in the last five years has it really metastasized on the campus under the umbrella of one of the many social justices.
I mean that's very interesting that George Floyd and all of that was really the battering ram.
That kicked in the door, so to speak.
I mean, I remember, if you take a guy like Ibram Kendi, this guy's been around a little while, and I remember seeing his name creeping up, but he seemed to be like one of these semi-literate, you know, guys who's just making these extravagant claims without any empirical support.
Every now and then he'd get swatted down on social media.
And then suddenly I noticed he was writing...
Cover stories in the Atlantic Monthly, which has been kind of the totemic magazine of intellectual liberalism.
And I'm like, wow, these guys have sort of surrendered to this kind of inane Kendiism.
And that's almost like a little metaphor.
I think what you're saying is that that's happened to the university system as a whole.
It got taken over and taken over in pretty short order.
Well, yeah, Kendi's an example.
I call them Kendenistas, the followers of Kendi.
He came out with a book, and it was The Man Meets the Moment.
His book, How to Be an Anti-Racist, came out in 2019, just in time to ride the wave on into the universities, because I think DEI folks used a version of the Jesse Jackson, you know, Kahn from the 1980s where he said, you know, hey, that's a nice business you have there.
Be ashamed if something happened to it.
The kind of protection racket that Jesse Jackson used to coerce funds from.
Well, DEI folks did the same thing.
That's a nice university you've got there.
Be ashamed if demonstrations came to your university and you were shown to be a racist organization.
And DEI people said, we can offer you absolution in a con game.
They didn't say con game, but in a con game that's called virtuous victimhood.
We'll offer you absolution.
You can appear that you're doing something about this, and in return, you let us onto the campuses, set up a massive, luxuriously compensated bureaucracy, and we will train your faculty, staff, and students how to be anti-racist.
It involved training students into this alternative worldview where all white folks are racist and all people of color, as the situation demands, are victims.
Villains and victims, oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, evil and good.
And this binary, this alternative universe, this alternative Manichaean binary is the salt and pepper, the meat and potatoes of DEI.
It's false.
It is demonstrably false.
It's a fraud.
And yet universities have been paying big bucks, and I can get into that in a moment, to maintain these bureaucracies.
But thank goodness, Dinesh, these things are coming to an end under the new administration in the Department of Education.
Now, how are they coming to an end?
Are they coming to an end because of a constellation of court decisions?
Are they coming to an end?
In some ways, it's a reverse browbeating, I would call it.
It's a battering ram on the other side.
But it looks like the Trump administration went to Colombia and basically said, you know what?
Nice university you've got over there, but it'd be a real shame if we took away all your federal funding, wouldn't it?
And so suddenly Colombia becomes malleable.
Yo, yo, we're going to ban these protesters from having masks.
You know, we're now going to discipline the people who took over the University Hall forcibly, and we're going to now re-examine our kind of ethnic studies and Palestinian studies department.
Is it ultimately just a case of the fact that we've got to apply the same kind of, you know, power tools that the left used in order to bring these universities to heel?
Well, I like that image of power tools being applied.
I really do, because I think the comeuppance of universities is long overdue.
And if Columbia University had done what it should have done on its own, disciplining students and making students and the faculty adhere to their own regulations, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
Columbia would not be on the front page of losing their $400 million, but they abdicated their responsibility to protect their own students, to display oversight of its own actions.
It's clear.
And that is what the letter states.
And I would say that the letter from March 14th by the federal government to Colombia saying, we want you to do this, this, this, and this, these are things that Colombia should have been doing all along.
And we expect you, we, the Department of Education, expect you, Colombia, to adhere to U.S. civil rights law.
We expect you to protect students.
We expect you to prohibit people from wearing masks while they intimidate other people.
And so I think that what we're seeing is simply a bringing back into balance.
I like to think that federal funding is really the only...
I don't use the word weapon, but the only leverage that the federal government can utilize against the university, which doesn't pay taxes on its endowment, which has a kind of a carte blanche kind of thing, come on, come on, give us this money, this research money, and no strings attached.
Well, I think those days are over.
And Columbia has no one to thank but itself for the results of what's happened in the last couple of weeks.
Is it the case, Stan, that somehow the demographic complexion of these colleges has radically changed?
And I say that because when I was at Dartmouth, this is going back to the very late 70s and early 80s.
I mean, there were probably, I would say, eight or nine Asian Indian students on the entire campus.
And I could recognize them because I'd see them from time to time.
I read recently that at Columbia, the foreign-born students, We outnumber the American-born students, and I guess the idea here is that these maybe wealthy families abroad are able to pay the tuition, and so the colleges are drawing in these Pakistani students, Chinese students, Middle Eastern students, and so you get a Columbia that probably looks radically different from what it looked like a couple of decades ago.
Is this part of the problem, that these are, in a sense, no longer American universities anymore?
Well, I think that the problem arises from foreign students coming in and trying to change the character of an American university.
That would be the core of the problem.
There's nothing inherently wrong with having an internationally-based student body.
We have one right here at my own university, Drexel University, but lots of students from India, students from Russia, Albania, China.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
In fact, I think it really leavens the intellectual atmosphere of Drexel University.
At Columbia, the problem was the fact that a lot of these folks who are coming over to study are doing a lot more than simply studying.
They are basically trying to change the character of the American university into something that is much more to their liking.
And I think that the lever for this, the fulcrum for this lever, was the attacks on God.
From Gaza on Israel back on October 7, 2023, which they then leveraged into gaining support, a lot of support from foreign students and a lot of people.
Not even knowing what they were in favor of.
And this was kind of like the linchpin for a whole host of causes.
These leftists are always the same.
You find all kinds of people coming in.
Oh, there's a demonstration.
I'm going to go demonstrate for LGBT rights.
I'm going to demonstrate for this or that, union labor, that kind of thing.
And so you find it becomes a big fest, a big festival of protest.
I think that the idea that international students have a propensity to do this This is not really all that true.
I think we have to really examine what these folks are doing, make sure that they're not violating the terms of their visa, the terms of their study, and if they are, they ought to be ushered a swift exit.
I mean, the psychology of it, I think, is what I find most striking because, you know, when I was a student, I thought of myself like, I'm away from my own country.
Here I am in another country.
I'm on this beautiful Ivy League campus.
There's really no equivalent of this in India.
So the idea that I would somehow import my views of Indian politics or, you know, I'm militating against the caste system.
I mean, this didn't even cross my mind.
It was more like, you know what?
There's an awful lot to learn here.
There's a whole civilization with intellectual underpinnings going back to the ancient Greeks.
This is what I'm here to imbibe, to take in.
And so that's why I look with a certain amount of wonder at these Palestinian kids and they somehow think that they're...
They're bringing the old neighborhood, so to speak, right into Columbia University, and they are all animated with rage in this completely unfamiliar environment.
Isn't there something downright strange about it?
Well, yes, the idea that you're going to go to a foreign country that welcomes you in to study and you're immediately going to agitate for politics back in your home country and against the policies of the country where you're a guest.
I should say that I enjoyed your exploits when you were at Dartmouth as an undergraduate by reading the book Poisoned Ivy with Jeffrey Hart.
You had quite the undergraduate career, and I highly recommend the book to anyone who wants to find out about the early Dinesh and what he was all about.
It hasn't changed much, I should say.
Well, you know, Stan, that book was written by Jeffrey Hart's son, Ben Hart.
Oh, that's right.
And I don't know if you know these days, but Ben Hart is now, he lives in Florida, and he is, I think in his early 60s, he is the most accomplished breakdancer.
One of the most accomplished breakdancers in the United States.
So kind of an interesting path right there for Ben.
Yeah, I saw a video of him doing it.
I said, this guy can't be in his 60s.
But yeah, I'm sorry I made that mistake.
It is Ben Hart.
And you guys were just phenomenal at Dartmouth in the early days.
I tried to do the same at Duke with the Duke Review.
And we were rambunctious as well, took a page out of the Dinesh D'Souza playbook.
But the idea that these folks are guests in this country, and it would never occur to me to go to South Korea and study at a South Korean university and immediately skip classes, hold up signs and protest something in that country that I didn't like.
Why am I protesting your university and that you're not running your university the way that I wanted to?
They'd kick me out in a heartbeat and they'd be right to do so.
Stan, are you hopeful?
You know, we have all had as our guiding star the idea of the colorblind society, the idea of...
Just looking at people based on merit.
And merit doesn't just mean SAT scores.
It also means your extracurricular talents, the ensemble of abilities that you bring when you apply to college.
Do you think we're going to get there, or is this goal more elusive than ever a whole generation before, after Martin Luther King dreamed it?
Well, I think there's a lot of people out there that don't want us to reach that goal.
These are racialized people, and they're DEI people down the line.
They come onto the campus, and they're teaching young people to be racialized beings.
The most important aspect of their character is their race.
And they inculcate paranoia and hyper-suspicion and narcissism and delusions of grandeur and externalization of blame.
And I'll give you the example I'm talking about.
You and I walk down the street, and you see someone coming toward us, and the only thing we see is, well, they might be dressed a certain way, and they're in a certain neighborhood.
We make no judgments about these people, except perhaps, hey, I wonder what this person's all about, and we want to learn about them.
These DEI folks, however, see someone coming down the street, and it's a binary.
If it's a white person coming down the street, that's a villain.
We already know all we need to know about them.
If it's a person of color, depending on the situation, depending on the needs of the moment, then that person is a victim.
A person that is a victim of a white racist society, inherently racist America.
And so they've already made their conclusions.
And that's how they conduct their seminars on class.
I've seen these.
They judge people by virtue of their skin color.
You are a victim or you are a villain.
They don't need to know anything at all about the individual student, and I think that's not just a shame.
I think it ought to be expunged from the university because that's not an American university.
It's based on the German model.
That's not an Enlightenment university.
That's a regression, if you will.
So I think that we're on the right path of moving to this idea that we're going to accept an entree of all ideas, and we'll discuss them until they have been disdained.
destroyed in the fire of the crucible and ushered out only to welcome in more ideas, new ideas.
And that diversity of ideas, ideas that are not judged based on the skin color or the source of the ethnic source, but based.
The thing I'm enjoying right now is just the intellectual...
Indigestion of these DEI types as they see increasing numbers of Blacks and Hispanics migrating toward the Republican Party.
I mean, this is such a difficult concept for them to die.
And so they're forced to say things like, well, it's the brown face of white supremacy.
It's the black face of white supremacy.
So in other words, they're preserving their doctrine, aren't they?
And they'd rather hold on to the doctrine and sound stupid.
Than have to modify the doctrine in a fundamental way and go, guess what?
Blacks and Hispanics, just like white people, have a very wide range of viewpoints on these issues and not all of them agree with us.
Yeah, they're always trying to rescue their hypothesis or rescue their theory with these subsidiary hypotheses that rescue hypotheses.
The idea that, well, Asian Americans do very, very well.
So, well, they're white adjacent.
They're white adjacent.
That explains that anomaly.
So we're out of trouble here, you know?
And so Indian Americans do quite well as well.
Well, they're white adjacent.
And so they begin to define reality in terms of this alternative theory that they have.
And they will not let their theory fail.
It's very much like Marxism.
They will not let their theory fail, no matter how many times it's disproved.
And it really has to...
I think that that is the empirical proof of the pudding, so to speak, that America is indeed a great country, it's a land of exceptionalism, and that it's worth holding on to and teaching subsequent generations of why it's a great country so that we can pass that on.
Guys, check out the book.
It is DEI Exposed.
It's written by Professor Stanley Ridgely of Drexel University.
Follow him on X at Stanley Ridgely.
Stan, it's a real pleasure.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I certainly thank you, and I thank you for having me on.
It's been a pleasure.
Let's connect again sometime before next 40 years, okay?
I look forward to it.
I'm picking up.
On my discussion of Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader, we're really just in the opening section of the book, which is called Why Reagan Gets No Respect.
Now, it's not that Reagan gets no respect at all, but it's that Reagan remains, even now, decades later, somewhat of a mysterious figure.
I'll talk to people who were in the Reagan administration, around Reagan, and I noticed that they seem slightly Bewildered by Reagan.
I don't know if something of the same can be said about Trump because I think that they are both mysterious but not quite in the same way.
So let's zoom into Reagan to see what I'm talking about and you keep in the back of your mind whether you think the same about Trump.
One of the things that the critics of Reagan never understood is what is the source of Reagan's appeal?
Like, what made him tick?
And they would always come back to, well, he's an actor.
Or they would come back to the fact that, you know, he has this rapport with the American people.
So their theory was that Reagan was a good politician, but he wasn't a good leader.
He, in fact, was, he knew nothing about the major issues of public policy.
But nevertheless, he had sort of mesmerized or charmed, like a snake charmer, the American people.
And that was the key to his appeal.
For me, it's not that interesting that Reagan had critics who derided him.
That actually is quite similar to Trump's critics on the left, who not only deride him, but they have a loathing toward Trump that you didn't see, at least not in the same degree, with regard to Reagan.
But what was interesting about Reagan, and I don't know if you could say the same about Trump, I think you could, certainly with regard to the first term, maybe less so in the second term, is this.
That when you have all these critics of Reagan, you might expect that the Reaganites, the people around Reagan, would rush to his defense and go, oh no, you're wrong.
Reagan was a great man.
This is what he did.
Here's where he was right.
And you notice that that never happened.
There are in fact relatively few books defending Reagan.
Mine in a way stands out because when I wrote it, and remember I was a young guy in the Reagan years, so I was not in the cabinet.
There were plenty of people who had the credentials and the daily exposure to Reagan, and yet they didn't speak up.
They were kind of on the sidelines.
It's because they too were somewhat ambivalent about the man and a little bit mystified themselves about what made him tick.
Some of the Reaganites wrote memoirs.
Ed Meese wrote one.
Don Regan, who was the chief of staff and earlier, I believe, the treasury secretary wrote one.
Michael Deaver, who was a top Reagan aide, wrote one.
David Stockman, who was chief of the budget, wrote one.
Now, here's the interesting thing.
Ed Meese's biography was very positive, very pro-Reagan.
Meese was an old buddy of Reagan's going back to the California days.
But most of the other memoirs, oddly enough, are somewhat negative.
David Stockman resigned from the administration and wrote a pretty negative...
A book about Reagan, essentially, I believe it was called The Education of David Stockman.
Michael Diva portrayed Reagan as a sort of detached figurehead type of guy who didn't make major decisions, even though that was manifestly not the case.
Don Regan, pretty much the same thing.
He described the machinations of the First Lady as if somehow Nancy Reagan was really running the White House, something inherently preposterous, even though Nancy Reagan was, in fact, a kind of meddler.
But she would get into issues where she thought Reagan was being backstabbed in some way, and then she would jump in, very different than Melania Trump, who sort of stays out of that kind of thing.
But Nancy Reagan did get involved.
Now, you might remember that in 1988, when George Bush, George H.W. Bush, Ran for president.
He promised the American people a kinder, gentler America.
Now, we use that phrase almost as a cliche.
I'll sometimes talk about the fact that we're not living in the kinder, gentler America of that era.
But it's very important to notice that that kinder, gentler America was intended as a critique of Reagan.
In a sense, what George H.W. Bush was saying is that things have been somewhat on the unkind side and on the ungentle side.
And I, George Bush, am going to introduce a better, a sweeter, a more benign tone to the country.
So I offer these as examples just to show that the people who you might have counted on to be Reagan's most vociferous defenders...
Didn't really do that.
Now, what about all the young conservatives?
What about all the staffers?
What about all the Reaganites in the Reagan White House and all the cabinet agencies, which were full of them, or I should really say us, because I was part of that group?
I noticed that even in that group, there was a certain amount of, I won't say condescension, but it was the idea that somehow Reagan could not be counted on.
To know and do the right thing by himself.
And I'll give an example of a very common type of debate in the Reagan years that I heard many, many times that illustrates the point.
And that is these were the conservatives who, you know, in the restaurants and conferences and bars of D.C. would sit around and talk about the two groups of people around Reagan, the true believers and the moderates.
The moderates were sometimes called pragmatists.
They were sometimes just called, you know, squish.
But the idea here was that you've got these two camps.
You've got the true believers, who are the kind of, you know, they're the hardcore conservatives, and then you have the moderates.
Now, notice that nobody used the term rhinos, and the idea wasn't that the moderates weren't really Republicans.
They are Republicans, but they're Republicans of a kind of softer stripe.
And the view of the Reaganites that I heard was basically, we've got to make sure that the moderates don't talk to Reagan.
We've got to make sure the moderates are not...
If, like, George Shultz, who was the Secretary of State, was meeting with Reagan, there'd be all these tremors going on around D.C., like, what's he saying to Reagan?
And look at the underlying assumption of all that.
The underlying assumption is that Shultz is smarter than Reagan.
We don't want Schultz to be meeting with Reagan because he'll put all kinds of bad ideas in Reagan's mind.
He'll pollute the mind of Reagan, i.e.
Reagan is not on his own strength capable of seeing through the bad ideas or the inadequate solutions of Schultz.
And so Reagan is seen as a bit of a pawn of the true believers or the moderates, like whoever happens to be meeting with him at that time.
So, all of this is kind of a way of saying that there was around Reagan a mood that did not fully appreciate Reagan.
And I have to say that even though I was a fan of Reagan, liked Reagan, and I think I was more appreciative than most of the people around me, I don't think I was sufficiently appreciative until much, much, much, much later.
The Reaganites, and we're talking now about Republicans, people on the Reagan side.
Part of the reason that they were this way is that, strangely, and this is a big difference between Reagan and Trump, Reagan, frankly, never cared whether he was appreciated at all.
Trump does.
With Trump, it's almost the opposite.
Trump wants to be appreciated.
He goes out of his way to seek that public appreciation.
He immediately beams and reacts positively when he gets it.
He is annoyed if he doesn't get it.
But this is the one area in which Trump and Reagan are at polar opposites.
And I'm actually not even saying, I think I'm saying that Trump is egotistical and Reagan wasn't egotistical.
No, because I think that actually Reagan's indifference was just as strange as Trump's need and actually courting of public affection.
Let me give an example of this.
This is an anecdote told to me by a guy named Jeffrey Bell.
Who was close to Reagan.
He was one of the Reagan aides.
And he once had a conversation with Reagan, and this was at the very end.
1989, Reagan was out of office, just out of office.
And Jeff Bell said to him, you know, Mr. President, you are a very lonely man in the White House.
When you look at all these memoirs written about you, all these people criticizing you, you must have felt all by yourself.
And Bell said that Reagan was like, what are you talking about?
In other words, Reagan didn't feel that way at all.
Reagan didn't even know what Bell was referring to.
In 1994, Peggy Noonan wrote Reagan a letter and asked him, how do you feel about all these public attacks on your reputation?
This is, by the way, right around the time I was starting this book, which came out in 96. So in a sense, it was a book in answer to what Peggy was asking about.
But she's like, How do you feel about all these guys backstabbing you?
And Reagan's reply was essentially a line or two to the effect of, I'm not going to be losing any sleep over this.
So Reagan was like, who cares?
That was his attitude.
Biographer Edmund Morris was once asked, Now, Morse was Reagan's official biographer, and he had multiple meetings with Reagan.
They would have these appointments.
Morse would travel with Reagan.
And he was once asked, you know, here you are, Reagan's official biographer.
Like, is Reagan happy to see you when you show up for your conversations or your journeys with Reagan or your travel with Reagan?
And Morse goes, well, you know, he's happy to see me, but Morse goes, he would have been just as happy to see anyone else.
In other words, Morris realized that it didn't matter if it was just the guy who keeps Reagan's appointments or the guy coming in to clean the office or some Fulbright scholar from Indonesia.
For Reagan, it was just another guy.
So there's a certain kind of egalitarianism about Reagan, but Morris felt it.
Morris' point was, I don't really matter to this guy at all.
Not only do I not matter, I'm supposed to be his big official biographer.
He doesn't care what I write about him.
So Reagan has this strange indifference to how he's going to be viewed by history itself.
Reagan is like, I'll do my best to fix the world, and I'll leave history to the historians.
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