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March 31, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:48
LAWYERS ON THE RUN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1052
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Coming up, I'll talk about the Harvard professors who warn about Trump's supposed war against the legal profession, and a distinguished legal theorist who rebuts this Harvard gang.
Disney's Snow White has flopped, and I want to show Aviation expert Dr. Sherry Walker joins me.
We're going to talk about the relationship between DEI policies and this proliferation of airline crashes and near misses.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Thank you.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
There's so much stuff going on in the news, I want to try to hit on a bunch of items in the opening segment and then zoom into one of them in the second one.
I'll begin on the international front, where a French court has found Marine Le Pen guilty We're good to go!
punished and locked up, but that she cannot run for the presidency of France.
There's a big election coming up in 2026.
So next year you take office in 2027, and she is, at least as of now, barred, prevented from running in that election.
Now, You might say, well, what is this really all about?
And that's a very good question because the charges against this woman are very dubious.
The embezzlement in question is not similar to, let's say, Senator Menendez in New Jersey.
There were no gold bars found in her house.
Unlike the Biden family, she hasn't been taking money from foreign entities or foreign governments.
None of that.
All they're saying that she did is that she confused or merged some of the finances of her official position as a member of Parliament and her political party.
So it's kind of like saying, I'm a congressman or a senator, and I've got a senatorial or a congressional budget, but I've also got a political party, and I'm running for office, and the finances of those two became somehow jumbled, and this is the deemed embezzlement.
Let's just say that this all seems to be very much part of a worldwide prosecution of right-wing figures.
Marine Le Pen, by the way, is the leader of the French, as the media says, far-right, but she was, in fact, In fact, the favorite to win the presidency in 2027.
So you've got to remember when you see these labels like far-right, when the left says far-right, how can you be far-right if you are the most popular candidate?
You can't exactly be to one extreme if the mainstream of your society is endorsing you.
So these are highly tendentious labels that are essentially put on you, pinned on you by your political opposition.
So notice what they try to do to Trump in America.
The EU has been doing this to other countries inside of the European Union, and now we see it happening in France.
We've also seen it, of course, happening in Brazil where they're trying to prosecute Bolsonaro, claiming that he, you know, he was trying to subvert the Brazilian election.
You begin to see here that this is the left's playbook, and the left's playbook is definitely recognizable here in France.
Let's come to America and talk about an important election in Wisconsin, in which Brad Scheimel is running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
And the reason that the Supreme Court is critical is because the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been We're good to
go! And the chances are that if they win this court seat, they will go even further and call for the mass mailing of ballots.
And this, of course, creates massive opportunities for fraud.
This is actually why they do it, because they want the fraud to occur.
And all of this could have a tremendous impact on congressional seats in Wisconsin, not to mention the rules governing the way that Wisconsin votes in a presidential election.
So Elon Musk is in Wisconsin.
He had a big rally in Wisconsin last night.
And the rally was interesting in its own right, because he said a number of fascinating things.
At one point, he brought on one of the leading guys at Doge.
And this is what I want to highlight.
The Doge team has found that since 2021, Let's pause to digest this.
5.5 million illegal aliens got social security numbers.
Whoa! Because the Democrats have been assuring us illegal aliens can't vote.
But yeah, even if we give them driver's licenses, that's just gonna allow them to function in our society.
They pay taxes, but they don't affect the electoral outcomes.
Well, as it turns out, they do.
5.5 million illegals have gotten social security cards, some of these aliens are registered to vote, and some have already voted in US elections.
So what's happening is Doge is pulling the names of all these illegals who have voted and referring it to Homeland Security, which is, this is the way it needs to happen.
Now, I am quite Confident that the illegals aren't just doing this all by themselves.
Nobody goes to another country and says, I want to vote in those elections.
I'm willing to take the chance that I may be deported or incarcerated, but I'm going to do it anyway.
No. These are aliens who go to the other country and then somebody puts them up to it.
Somebody shows them how to get it done.
Probably the people who brought them there in the first place.
And so, I noticed that David Sachs makes the observation, it's not just that 2.1 million social security numbers were issued to non-citizens in 2024.
Think of this, 2.1 million social security numbers issued to illegals.
But what you see is a trend line of more and more and more and more.
So for example, You have, in fiscal year 2021, they gave 270,000 social security numbers to illegals.
It goes up to 590,000 by 2022, 964,000 by 2023, and then 2,095,000 by 2024.
So this is a frightening a phenomenon, but it begins to make sense.
You think about why did the Biden administration bring in all these illegals?
Why did they take so much political risk to do it?
They knew that there are people who are outraged by it.
They knew that there was a resistance building.
So there's got to be some Pressing reason why they would keep doing it.
They took the risk of terrorist attacks on US soil.
They knew there was going to be an explosion of crime that was going to come back and haunt them politically.
So what was the great Who are you?
Here's my driver's license.
Here's my social security card.
Oh okay!
We can use these mechanisms of identification to take people who shouldn't be here, are not legal, but nevertheless integrate them into the system to such a point that if and when they do vote, it's not even going to be detectable.
It's not going to be seen as a big deal.
They've got the ID.
They can show, yeah, this is who I am.
Here we go.
This is a state issued or a government issued ID.
ID. So the degree of corruption that Doge is identifying goes beyond the financial.
There's been a lot of focus on waste and fraud and money being misused here and money being abused there and all of that is true.
But here we see how the end goal is not just to take over the monetary mechanisms But to take over the election mechanisms, which ultimately deliver control of the country to one party or the other, and then you automatically control those monetary mechanisms completely.
So the Democrats have always kept their eye not only on the fiscal ball, which is the spending, not only on the resources of the government, but also on the Way in which elections are decided and Think of it.
They they've had us essentially a secret force here It's almost like we've got a we've got our own army that we can deploy.
It's the army of illegals We've got to think of all kinds of ways to give them the tools so that the distinction between legal and illegal becomes blurred and many of us as conservatives we know the illegals are here, but we we kind of have Confidence or at least we have hope that this isn't going to be a problem right away.
Maybe it'll be a problem with their children or in future generations or maybe it's a problem indirectly because it affects the census count and that affects apportionment.
But no, we're talking about the straightforward phenomenon of enabling mechanisms that give illegals access to social security cards, driver's licenses, other forms of ID.
And that means that when they show up at the ballot box, they don't even necessarily need an absentee ballot.
They can even show up in person and produce an ID.
Why? Because A, they're on the voter rolls.
Somebody got them there.
And B, they've got the driver's license and the social security card to say, this is who I am.
All right.
Carry right on.
Pick up your ballot.
And thank you for voting.
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I don't know if you've heard, but the movie Snow White, a bomb, a disaster, a box office catastrophe.
Some people are posting images of theaters and they are Completely empty.
There's no one in the theater at all.
So this is not a case where the right is boycotting Disney, but the left loves the film.
Nobody's going.
And this means Disney's gonna lose a lot of money.
Probably not tens, hundreds of millions of dollars.
And that's good news for America, because Disney's loss is America's gain.
At one time, that wasn't true.
Disney was the embodiment of Americana.
But it is true now.
Interestingly, a lot of people are blaming Rachel Zegler, who plays the role of Snow White.
And Rachel Zegler is extremely annoying and has said things like she doesn't like the plot and she's not into the handsome prince.
And then she goes on with other political rants about the Palestinians.
And so Disney has sort of decided to blame her.
I saw an interesting exchange where the son of the producer of this film was talking about, Rachel Zegler, you ruined the movie!
You, you know, you cost all these people, thousands of people who worked on this film.
You've jeopardized their jobs and all because you're so selfish and all you care about is making political statements.
All of this, I think, is true to a point.
But it also misses the point.
Because the problem with Snow White isn't just that Rachel Zegler is out there, this twenty-something, making idiotic statements and interviews.
The problem is that the plot of Disney, the plot of Snow White, is not Snow White.
First of all, they decided no dwarves.
No dwarves in the movie.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves has no dwarves.
Number two, the Resolution of the plot does not involve a handsome prince.
It's not happily ever after.
The whole architecture of the story is destroyed.
It is woke-ified.
So it isn't that Rachel Zegler is woke.
It's that Disney is.
Disney wrote the plot.
Rachel Zegler didn't write the plot.
She was brought in.
In fact, they probably brought her in because her woke personality suited the woke plot.
And now that the woke plot has essentially burst into flames, it's like, let's blame Rachel Zegler.
And so, don't be fooled by that.
Is she, you know, an income poop and a twit?
Yes. But the big twits are all sitting in boardrooms at Disney, and their producers and directors, they're the powers that be at this at this horrible Now let me turn to these 90 Harvard Law professors.
Who have issued a statement claiming that Trump is endangering the legal profession.
He's going after these law firms.
He is prosecuting students and deporting them.
Just because they have pro-Hamas views.
And the 90 law professors take a very kind of above-the-fray, whatever your politics, regardless, many of us may agree or disagree about some of these individual actions, but they essentially say, we're united in our concern for the rule of law.
And this screed by the 90 professors is taken on by a single Harvard Law professor, Adrian Vermeule, in an open letter to my students.
And I just want to focus in on one part of this letter because it so effectively capsizes or refutes what these 90 Harvard legal eagles are saying.
Professor Vermeule basically goes, listen, he goes, It was unprecedented what we've seen in the last four years.
Federal prosecutors launched a battery of charges against a former president who also happened to be the leading opponent of the incumbent president.
He goes, what did we hear from these 90 Harvard Law professors at that point?
Not a word.
He goes, where were they when Jeff Clark, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, other lawyers who had represented Trump and Trump interests were threatened with disbarment, In some cases, prosecuted for their representation of Trump.
He goes, was this not a threat to the rule of law?
And then Professor Vermeule pulls back and he goes, well, of course, I know what these guys are going to say.
They're my colleagues after all.
I know them.
I see them at lunch every day.
I know what they're going to say.
They're going to say, well, those prosecutions were actually warranted.
Of course we went after Trump on many different grounds because this guy commits crimes on many different grounds.
So we went after him justly and appropriately.
We were holding up the rule of law in what we did.
And then Professor Vermeule says, okay, so what you're really saying is that the law As you call it, is what you take to be the law.
It's your interpretation of the law, and you're conflating your interpretation of the law with the law itself.
If anybody doesn't agree with your interpretation of the law, then they're against the rule of law.
And he goes, look, two people can play at that game because we can take exactly the same view, which is that the law is what we say it is.
So if we're going after these students and they resist, they're against the rule of law.
If we go after these law firms and bring them to their knees and they make agreements and so on with us, that's because what we say is the law and they are opposing the rule of law.
So, Professor Vermeule's point here is, and he puts it beautifully, the central vice of the collective letter is that it is tendentious, meaning one-sided.
It appropriates a shared ideal and turns it to sectarian ends.
So the shared ideal is the rule of law.
And it turns it to sectarian ends, meaning the rule of law is what we say it is.
The rule of law is what benefits our side.
If it benefits your side, it's not the rule of law.
You're against the rule of law.
Implicitly dubs anyone who disagrees as an opponent of the rule of law altogether.
In other words, it essentially creates the idea that all talk about the rule of law becomes a political sham.
Which is sometimes, I have to confess my feeling about these matters.
It's like, listen, whenever someone says, you know, it's like what Samuel Johnson said, is that when he hears the word patriotism, patriotism, he said, is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Now, he didn't mean that patriotism itself is bad.
What he meant is that whenever someone says, You're unpatriotic and they define as unpatriotic the fact that my interests, my view of what benefits the country is not shared by you, therefore you're unpatriotic.
You can see it's exactly the same thing going on here.
I interpret the rule of law this way, you don't agree, you're against the rule of law.
This is in fact the hallmark of a scoundrel.
And by this criterion, I think what Professor Vermeule is saying, he's too polite to say it, so I'll say it, is that these 90 Harvard Law professors are indeed the real scoundrels.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Dr. Sherry Walker.
She is...
Wow. Well, she began her career as the director of contract security at the Tulsa International Airport.
She then went into contract administration, managing about a billion dollars of U.S. Navy and foreign government contracts and subcontracts.
And then she returned to her first love, which is flying.
Since 1998, she...
well, she flew for many years for Continental Airlines.
And of late, she focuses on the issue of Airline security, aviation issues, also health freedom.
The organization is called Airline Employees for Health Freedom and the website is AE4HF.org.
Sherry, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
Debbie saw you on your appearance with Tucker Carlson, and she said, you know, Dinesh, we talk about these airline issues, and we gotta have, this woman knows what she's talking about, and I gotta tell you, Sherry, so we watch these airline, you know, catastrophe shows, which are really about the detective work and figuring out what I don't know.
you know, you notice that a lot of these crashes are from the 70s and the 80s, maybe the early 90s.
So at the end of each show, they always assure you, well, we've learned a great deal from this crash.
And so we...
have the assumption that it's all been fixed and things are working really well, but of late, as you know better than anyone else, we seem to have, I won't say almost daily, but close to daily accounts of near misses, windows breaking up,
you know, the airline, you know, touches the ground, it has to turn back, and in some cases of course, well recently I guess in Milwaukee, a private plane crashed into a home, So, there's got to be some change that has occurred in the airline system that is making things more unsafe.
Am I right in this suspicion?
And if so, what is it?
Well, first of all, let me say, you don't realize that we've met before.
I actually was a captain on a flight from L.A. into Houston, and you were my passenger, and before departure, I snuck back and just said, Quietly.
Thank you for your work.
I really love the movie 2,000 Mules.
And you did not miss a beat.
You turned to your wife and said, it's all her.
She's the brains behind it.
So you proved to me that chivalry is not dead.
So I thank you for that.
Oh, well, I'm very glad we crossed paths.
How cool.
This was a mere statement of the truth.
There was no chivalry involved.
Most husbands know that.
No, with regards to what's been happening as of late, you know, it's a systemic failure.
It's a system problem.
I don't think it's on the individuals.
I mean, we have good pilots.
They might be younger, a little more green.
But I think the system, especially in the DCA crash, failed the pilots.
And the NTSB administrator debriefed the initial findings.
And over a 10-year look back, with 948,000 operations into that airport, there were 15,000 near-miss incursions on the transponders, which is the device on our plane that gives us a unique code so the radar can see us.
And they're called TAs and RAs.
And a traffic alert, a TA, tells you traffic, traffic, and you look and you have a certain amount of time to react.
A resolution advisory, on the other hand, is climb now, descend now.
And so these are serious incursions, but the data, I guess, was going into a black hole.
The FAA had the data.
They knew they had a problem at that airport, yet no one was taking action.
And that's the concern out there.
You know, when you have an agency who's charged with aviation safety and oversight, and they spend more time looking at or ensuring that their employee's signatory line reflects the proper pronoun, then we've got a problem.
So where did the data go?
And in fact, if the data was that bad at Reagan, What is it at Houston or Dallas?
And so we're hopeful with the incoming administrator that we can get back to the business of safety.
And so this DEI problem, it's real, but I think they're starting to unwind it.
It sounds like, Sherry, you're identifying an issue with DEI, which is not one that people normally focus on.
What people normally focus on is, look, an airline or a university or some employer is Choosing between let's say two candidates for a position and one of them is less qualified but they happen to be Hispanic or they happen to be a woman or they happen to be trans and so they're given a preference and that of course creates a vulnerability because you don't have the best person doing the job.
You're identifying a problem with DEI that's quite different from that and that is that when an institution It's very important to us, for example, to emphasize the diversity of our workforce.
This is where we need to put our eyes.
This is what we need to count.
This is what we need to put into our charts and tables.
That what happens is you're sort of distracted from the main mission of what the institution is supposed to do, in this case, fly planes safely and land them safely, and so you're using up resources not just of money but of time.
And of course, in an industry like the airlines, time is very critical, right?
Time is critical if you're an air traffic controller.
Time is critical if a military helicopter is ascending and coming into the path of a descending plane.
So it looks like the cost of DEI in some ways seems perhaps to be bigger than people otherwise measure.
I agree.
And you know, in the case of the air traffic controllers, we are super shorthanded.
There's a lawsuit out there.
There were a thousand controllers turned away, merit-based hires, but because their scores were adjusted because they were white men, other people were hired.
Now, that doesn't mean that the other people were hired, weren't properly trained, and eventually cut the jobs, but here we are complaining about not having enough, and you gave away a We've just lost focus on what's important.
You mentioned that you think that there is a greater awareness of all this, but I also know bureaucratically that these cultures, first of all, take a while to change.
Second of all, one of the problems with the DEI culture is it's somewhat self-perpetuating, isn't it?
It's sort of like the, you know, the Marxists in the economics department.
I mean, they hire other people who are like-minded, and then the people who don't think that way get sort of frozen or pushed out.
And so, trying to fix it, Well, I think so, and I hope so.
And it started actually on November, I think, around the 5th, when the General Counsel, who's the number two person at the FAA, a man by the name of Mark Nichols, A DEI hire himself, resigned.
And if you look back in his speeches and his writings over the previous two or three years, he was a Biden administration appointee.
You know, he said his number one goal in his position, the number two man at the FAA, was to ensure that they spread diversity throughout the institution.
Well, that's a problem.
Now he's gone.
He's off with Piper SLA, I believe is their, you know, head lawyer.
That's good.
But the problem with the Trump administration is filling all these positions and then ensuring they fill them with like-minded people, not just those bureaucrats that have been there forever.
So, I think they're on the right track with the incoming administrator.
Secretary Duffy is awesome.
He is looking with the doge at everything that we've talked about.
So, I think there's hope that they'll get back on track.
But, you know, it was insidious there for a while.
So, They're making the right moves.
But at the same point, at the same token, if you look at someone like, for example, the Delta CFO, Chief Financial Officer, in their latest earnings call, I believe it was January, President Trump had already put out the executive order to remove DEI from all contractors.
Well, keep in mind, the airlines receive almost $4.9 billion a year in hauling the U.S. mail.
Right? They are federal contractors.
That executive order applies to them.
And yet the CFO, when questioned on an earnings call, says, oh, no, no.
We like our DEI programs.
We will continue down the path we've been on.
So somebody like American, they just changed the name of the department at their airline.
So it's going to take a little push by the Trump administration.
They're going to have to get serious if they want to enforce this.
But I think they will.
I was going to switch and ask you about the airlines and you already went there first, but that is critical, isn't it?
Because usually after these near misses and accidents, at least on social media, I typically will see You know, these ads that these airlines are putting out, and they're quite embarrassing, at least when they're watched against that kind of context or backdrop.
You've got these, you know, women kind of dancing down the aisles and so on, and you get the idea that, wow, you know, you guys just crashed a plane, or, you know, your windows just blew out, and here you are talking about the fact that, you know, that this is an all-female aircraft.
There's not a single male, you know, who's operating this airline.
And so, Again, far from it making you feel great, it actually makes you slightly nervous because, again, you get the sense that the priorities may be out of whack.
Is it the case with DEI that the airlines sort of reluctantly slipped into this because everybody else was, or maybe they felt there was pressure from the Biden administration to do it?
Or do you think that there's enthusiastic adoption and you have top airline people who genuinely believe that diversity is critical to making an airline successful?
Well, I think it's all of those.
But in the end, it comes down to the airlines run on three things, right?
They run on people, fuel, and airplanes.
Airplanes take financing.
Financing rates are driven by your ESG scores.
Larry Fink is involved from the top down.
So in pushing to get higher ESG scores, They brought this DEI mantra in, and airlines who follow along with that get higher scores, therefore their interest rates go down, they can buy more airplanes.
So, you know, it is from the top down.
But yes, there are some that I believe, firmly believe this is a good thing.
Look, none of us care, in my profession, pilots, none of us care what color you are, who you love, you know, your religion, or anything.
We just want the best.
And when we have a system that is designed to at least showcase the differences, because we're all just airmen at the end of the day, but when they design a system, now when passengers get on board, they look sideways at me.
And if I'm sitting next to a young Hispanic pilot or an African-American pilot, it's assumed they got there based on an outward attribute, not on their skill.
And that's harmful.
To us as aviators in our profession, but I think it's also harmful to the airline and they don't see it because they're not on the front lines every day.
You alluded to something a moment ago that I think needs a little more explanation, and that is the issue of ESG.
And I think it is important because it illustrates the way in which outside people, in this case Wall Street financiers, create a metric, a calculus.
And they say if you don't score high on this metric, We're going to make it more difficult for you to get access to our money.
And so what we're identifying here is the way in which DEI gets kind of pressured in from the money men on Wall Street.
So explain how this ESG scam works.
And it of course applies to far more than the airlines, but it does apply to the airlines as well.
Sure. After the traditional pensions went away, all of us were forced into 401ks, right?
So we're investing in the market.
Money is free-flowing like crazy, and the big funds have to find a way to invest it.
The problem is they have to justify which companies they invest in, so they need a metric.
And so the metric comes down from, I believe it started right around 2000 with International.
And they started with a list of, I think there were 15 or 17 items on there.
Are you green?
Do you hire diversely?
And all these other things.
And as they brought those metrics to pass, the heads of certain companies, and especially ones that need financing, realized if they could appease these global points, then they could get higher scores, then People would be more willing to take that money that we've infused in our nation's 401k programs and invest it back in those companies.
And so we've kind of created our own problem, but yet we've allowed certain players to drive the definitions of those metric points.
And to me, that seems somewhat criminal because it really should, in an airline, only be about safety.
Very important point.
Guys, I've been talking to Dr. Sherry Walker, airline captain.
Also, the organization Airline Employees for Health Freedom.
It is AE4, the number 4, hf.org.
Sherry, great stuff.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
I'm in the early stages of my book on Reagan, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And I've been talking about the standards for measuring greatness.
It's very nice when you can use a measurement of greatness, of achievement, that is somewhat objective.
And that is not simply that Reagan was great because people thought he was great, or historians adjudicated him to be great, or even he won re-election and therefore must be great.
These are non sequiturs because It's possible to get elected, maybe elected even multiple times.
FDR was elected multiple times.
And yet, the reason why you get elected is not that you're great.
There could be all kinds of circumstances, or it could even be that you offer people something that is highly irresponsible, puts the country in bad shape, but nevertheless, it's a kind of candy that they gratefully accept, they vote you into office, And so even though you're making a mess of things and there's going to be long-term impact of what you're doing, nevertheless, you did manage to get re-elected.
So, what is the Reagan record after two terms?
That's worth putting down and spelling out.
And it's also something that's going to apply to Trump, because Trump is now in his second term.
He's undertaking some new and ambitious ventures.
He is certainly rocking the proverbial ship.
And so, the Trump record is going to matter greatly at the end of this four-year term and beyond, as the consequences of the Trump second term become clear.
Now, Trump had a pretty smooth run in the first term, although it was rudely interrupted at the end by COVID.
But Trump is in a unique position.
Well, not entirely unique, but largely unique.
Certainly in recent times, unique of having two terms, but separated by somebody else coming in between.
In this case, Biden.
Now, back to Reagan.
Let's look at the Reagan record.
When Reagan comes to office in 1981, America is quite obviously on a downward spiral, economically as well as in foreign policy.
And let's go into that a little bit, because you have inflation that really had started much earlier.
It had been accelerating since the 1960s, but it reaches double digits in the 1970s.
And by 1979-80, when Reagan's running for office, inflation is at 12%.
Very high rate, by the way.
Under Biden, it got to 9%.
That was its peak, and 9% was an outrageous rate.
Inflation has subsequently dropped some.
So we still have inflation now, but it's at a much lower level.
And in addition to this, and related to it, we have Rising energy prices.
Part of this, of course, was the after effect of OPEC, the oil cartel established by oil-producing countries.
But it went beyond OPEC.
And so you see prices rising throughout the 70s in gasoline.
And some people, like Senator Ted Kennedy, proposing gasoline rationing.
Interest rates.
21% in 1979-1980.
Now, we're We haven't seen those kinds of interest rates really in decades.
But it gives you an idea of the kind of problems that the country was confronting when Reagan came in.
Unemployment was high.
Poverty rates were high.
Productivity was down.
Economic growth had ground to a halt.
And Jimmy Carter had talked about the fact that maybe the country has a malaise.
This was Carter's famous phrase.
And it almost implied, like, the country is sick.
Not that democratic policies are sick.
Not that the left had brought us into this terrible past.
But rather, this was an American ailment.
But Reagan proved it wasn't an American ailment.
It was an ailment produced by the Democrats.
Why? Because when Reagan leaves office, inflation was gone.
The inflation rate plummeted during Reagan's first term.
It averaged 3% in the second term.
It remained low under Reagan's successors.
Interest rates dropped dramatically.
Housing starts went up.
Gas prices dropped dramatically.
The oil crisis was over.
And there was a recession in 1982.
So, right about a year into Reagan's first term in office, the country plummeted into a recession.
And it was a pretty bad one, but then it went into a seven-year period of economic growth.
This was the largest expansion, at least until that time in peacetime history.
20 million new jobs, growth rate of 3.5%, the GNP, the Gross National Product, increased by a third.
The stock market doubled in value.
Poverty and unemployment rates went down.
And then something else.
There was a technological boom that happened in the 1980s.
Remember, Microsoft was started in 1982.
Michael Dell started his Dell computers in his dorm room right about that same time.
So the United States once again dominated the world economy and also became the vanguard of technology.
In his 1976 campaign against Ford, Jimmy Carter developed a concept that he called the Misery Index.
Kind of a clever idea, but it was aimed at zinging Ford and the Republicans.
So the Misery Index is you take the inflation rate and you take the unemployment rate and you add them together.
And so Carter's point was that, look at the Misery Index under Gerald Ford.
But what Reagan did is he did the same thing to Carter.
He said, let's look at the Misery Index under Carter.
The misery index rose from 13% under Ford to more than 20% under Carter.
So, using Carter's own metric, he had been a failure.
And, in fact, Carter has been such a recognized failure.
I say all this because, of course, recently when Carter died, there were all these encomiums.
But notice, no one really even said Carter was a good president.
Yeah, well, he did wonderful things after he left office.
He was a decent man.
Carter's record was utterly indefensible by his own measure.
And then let's look at the misery index under Reagan.
It was about the lowest on record.
Very low inflation and very low unemployment rate.
Kind of the best of both worlds.
Now, let's look at the foreign policy picture.
What was happening abroad?
The turnaround here is In a way, even more spectacular.
When Reagan was elected, capitalism and democracy were kind of on the retreat around the world.
The Soviets appeared to be in the vanguard of history.
In fact, Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, earlier, from before Reagan's time, had boasted that the Soviets would bury the West.
And it looked like it was happening because much of the Third World appeared to be moving in the direction of socialism or Marxism.
There were guerrilla revolutions in South America.
And for the first time in the 1970s, the Soviet nuclear arsenal surpassed, was bigger than, that of the United States.
The Soviets deployed these massive long-range missiles called the SS-18.
Each of these missiles had multiple warheads.
And there were also a new generation of intermediate-range missiles.
These were called the SS-20s, and these were targeted at Western Europe.
So this was a very terrifying nuclear picture in some ways.
And then between 1974 and 1980, while the United States was in a kind of post-Vietnam War funk or angst, nine countries fell into the Soviet orbit.
Let's look at them.
One, South Vietnam.
This is, of course, the fall of Vietnam.
2. Cambodia.
Happened around the same time.
3. Laos.
Also part of the greater fall around Vietnam and Indochina.
But then also South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Grenada, and Nicaragua.
So this is a...
These aren't all big countries, of course, but it's quite a roster.
Nine countries essentially toppling into the Soviet camp.
Now, during the Reagan administration, all of this changed.
First of all, not a single new country fell into the Soviet orbit.
Number two, capitalism and democracy began to advance around the world.
On Reagan's watch, a number of dictatorships collapsed.
Chile, Haiti, Panama, and nine more countries moved toward democracy.
Bolivia, Honduras, Argentina, Grenada, El Salvador, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, And the Philippines.
This is a remarkable democratic trend of self-government occurring under Reagan.
And so fewer than one-third of countries in Latin America were democratic in 1981.
More than 90% of the region was democratic by 1989.
In Nicaragua, shortly after Reagan's second term ended, there were free elections.
The socialist, the Marxist Sandinista government was ejected from power.
Apartheid ended in South Africa.
And so all of this stuff happens either during Reagan or in the immediate aftermath of Reagan.
And then there is more to come, but I'm going to save this for tomorrow because this has to do with what was happening In and around the Soviet Union.
So the big picture here is that Reagan produces simultaneously a domestic and economic transformation within the United States, but then a remarkable foreign policy transformation.
Notice that I haven't yet talked about the Berlin Wall.
I haven't talked about Eastern Europe.
I haven't talked about the Soviet Union itself collapsing.
I'm just talking about the fact that all around the world, And here, by the way, and Debbie sometimes makes this point in chatting with me, she goes, you know, look, look at the difference between what happens in the world when Republicans are in charge versus Democrats.
Now, again, you cannot say that all Republicans can produce a comparable result.
Clearly, some are better than others.
Under some Republicans, you have, well, you had a fairly decent record on the part of Eisenhower, for example, moderately decent record under Nixon.
Later, after Reagan, I think George H.W. Bush managed things on the foreign policy front quite well.
The record of George W. Bush is far more mixed.
Trump had a very successful foreign policy.
But at least as of now, Reagan's is, I think, in a class of his own.
And it's partly because we've had not only the two Reagan terms, but a lot of time for the Reagan policies to kind of play out and for their full impact to be recognized.
So when I pick it up tomorrow, I'm going to continue by talking about the way in which Reaganism ultimately not only affected the Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple,
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