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April 1, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:03
A BRIDGE TOO PHARMA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1053
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Coming up, I'll spell out the far-reaching implications—all good, by the way—of Robert F. Kennedy potentially outlawing big pharma ads on television.
I'm going to commend Pete Hegseth for announcing a new merit policy, open equally to men and women, for the Pentagon.
And former Trump aide George Papadopoulos joins me.
We're going to talk about Trump's executive order declassifying the records pertaining to the Russia collusion hoax.
If you're watching on XRumble or YouTube, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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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.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
This episode is called A Bridge to Pharma.
And Debbie and I sometimes excel at these kinds of puns.
But I wanted to talk about a report that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to outlaw pharmaceutical companies from buying ads on television.
Now, before someone says, well, isn't that a problem for the First Amendment?
No. The answer is no, because when we're talking about television, this is different from, let's say, a private newspaper.
We're talking about the public airwaves.
And the public airwaves are, in fact, regulated.
So it's not a case where you have anything goes.
Now, I really hope that this happens.
I'm not positive it's going to happen, but it certainly would be very consistent with what RFK Jr. and others have been saying, the Make America Healthy Again movement has been pushing for.
And this is important on several fronts.
Let's start by looking at it from the pharmaceutical industry angle, and then we'll look at it separately from the TV or media angle.
These pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on TV advertising.
In fact, they spend so much money on advertising that you have to wonder, is it really worth Doing these ads they'll advertise for very obscure ailments, you know And and and comedians have even made fun of this Debbie and I went to Dana Carvey show and he was like, you know Are you having a problem with your tongue twitching?
You know, we've got a new drug for it and and And these ads run all the time.
Sometimes we're watching these crime shows and the only ads we see are for pharmaceuticals.
And so the point here is that Big Pharma is up to something far more nefarious than, hey man, we're just companies trying to sell a product.
They're not doing that actually.
It's not their main motive.
Their main motive is to buy off the television networks.
The main motive is not to control the kind of entertainment side of these networks, but the news side.
It is to paralyze criticism.
So, if Big Pharma were not spending all these billions of dollars on TV ads, they could be using it to develop better products.
To lower prices.
They could put that money into better products and better services.
But let's look at it from the media side because I think that if Big Pharma is prevented from advertising on TV, we're going to see a big change in the structure of TV.
A number of these big, fat, overpaid corporate executives will be let go.
Many of these pompous TV hosts will see pay cuts, will see realism introduced into the TV business, you're going to see a lot of panic, you're going to see some of these channels shut down.
And why?
Because a lot of what we call mainstream media, I use the word mainstream a little hesitantly, but it's the conventional term, so I kind of succumb to it.
We talk about fake news, but there's something bigger than that.
This is a whole fake business.
And by fake business, what I mean is it's a business sustained by the artificial revenue coming in from Big Pharma, which views that commitment as a political contribution, or as a way of buying off the media.
And so...
I think you'll see a better media if you don't have a media that is being controlled from the back room by Big Pharma.
Why? Because the media will then start reporting on Big Pharma.
They'll start seeing articles about, hey, this vaccine has some side effects and this drug killed that guy.
And this guy is filing a class action lawsuit against Pfizer and so on.
This kind of stuff will suddenly become respectable.
And you'll see more of it, and you'll wonder, wow, wow, there seems to be a real upsurge in public concerns about Big Pharma.
No, there's no upsurge at all.
The difference is that the media was suppressing coverage before, and it won't be doing it.
It won't be doing it now.
Let me turn to Pete Hegsath and his I'm going to go through it because it's very important.
I will say before I even go into it that a federal judge, this is another district judge, has already put a hold on this.
And put a hold on this on a preposterous justification, which I'll mention in a moment.
Let's begin by looking at what Pete Hexhead says.
Different physical standards for men and women in the US military have existed for a long time.
But, he says in all caps, there were also combat roles that were male only.
Then, he says under Obama, all combat roles were open to men and women, but, again in all caps, different physical fitness standards for men and women remained.
Today, he says, we fixed this.
All combat roles are open to men and women, but Common sense.
It is common sense, isn't it?
Because if you have A rule that says only men in the military.
There's going to be someone who says, well, here's a woman and she's a rock climber and she's a star athlete and she's a crack shot and she can meet all the standards and why are you excluding her?
And so basically, Hexad goes, we're not going to define our standards with reference to gender or sex at all.
We're just going to define the standards.
This is what you need to do to be able to do the job.
If you can do it, you're going to be let in.
If 99% of the people who are let in are male, so be it.
If it's 80%, so be it.
So nothing could be, in a way, more sort of sane than to deploy a gender-neutral standard in the same way that we have, for example, a race-neutral standard.
We don't have separate standards for blacks or whites, and we don't need to have separate military standards for genders either.
The judge steps in and says this standard discriminates against the people who can't meet the standard.
Wow. Think about that.
All standards do that, right?
A standard that says you have to jump over five feet to be qualified for the Olympics discriminates against people who can't jump over five feet.
So this is the kind of utter irrationality that these liberal judges are bringing to I think essentially muck up these orders and just delay them.
There's no way this is going to stand up and it's like beyond time for the courts to step in and intervene and shut down this now coordinated operation of it's like death by, I won't say a thousand cuts, but it's like death by 50 cuts with 50 different liberal judges, all of them, by the way, carefully shopped for by various plaintiffs.
And then the judge doesn't just give relief to that plaintiff, but issues a nationwide injunction.
One thing worth noting about these nationwide injunctions, by the way, is that they have no authorization in statutory law.
There's no law that says a judge can make these kinds of nationwide injunctions.
The statutory or legal authority just does not exist.
And then you might think, well, you know, maybe there's a landmark Supreme Court case that somehow interpreted the Constitution, even though the Constitution doesn't say anything about this either, that there's some landmark Supreme Court case that says the judges have this kind of authority and this is the way our judicial system works.
But go look for that Supreme Court case.
It doesn't exist either.
And so the point I'm trying to make is we have this customary practice of these judges issuing these injunctions.
In the past, it's been exercised with much more discretion, but now, promiscuously against Trump, this is something that has to be stopped.
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The deportation battle goes on.
A couple of days ago, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted a video.
Interesting video.
17 dangerous criminals, mostly MS-13, Trendy Aragua, arriving in El Salvador.
There are all these military guys there to greet them.
Trump, somewhat amusingly, although with his own somewhat black humor, here's Trump.
Thank you President Bukele of El Salvador for taking the criminals that were so stupidly allowed by the crooked Joe Biden administration to enter our country and giving them such a wonderful place to live.
This is Trump sort of rubbing it in.
And the administration was pretty clever here because they know that Judge Boasberg is trying his best to stop this.
The left is in the very peculiar position of becoming the defenders of MS-13 and Trendy Aragua.
They are acting as if these vicious gang members By the way, some of the most notorious criminal gangs in the world, with all kinds of brutality, rapes and murders to their credit, have somehow become the new George Floyds of the left.
They have become the new victims in the left's elaborate victimology.
But Judge Boasberg has decided that the That the ancient law, the enemies, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I believe it is.
He's like, I need to look at this more carefully to see if this really applies.
And so Trump basically said, you know, with regard to these 17 criminals, I'm deporting them, not invoking the Act of 1798.
I'm deporting them just based on my general executive authority.
So taking this Now, there's a very interesting exchange or exchanges going on right now all over social media about this one guy who they say is The Trump administration had deemed him MS-13.
The Atlantic Monthly has a big article saying he's not MS-13.
You know, he's innocent and he's just been grabbed off the street.
Well, as it turns out, the reality of the situation is more complicated.
This guy was identified by an informant as an MS-13 gang member.
And this wasn't just a case where somebody said he was.
An immigration judge decided that that information was accurate, and based on that, denied this guy bond.
So, there is good reason to believe he's an MS-13 member.
Maybe the informant is mistaken, but let's give it a 50-50 that he is.
My point is, are these the kind of guys that we want to fight for?
The left is basically saying, oh, if you send him to El Salvador, go get him, bring him back, go bring him back to the United States.
No, Trump's not going to do that.
I don't think anyone can make him do that.
And this is all a part of the effort, in this case on the part of a magazine, The Atlantic, but of course abetted by people like George Boasberg, to try to undo this deportation operation.
And then here's a figure from my Reagan past, namely David Stockman.
I don't know if you remember David Stockman.
He was the director of the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, under Reagan for, it seems like, about a year.
Maybe it wasn't even quite a year.
And then he resigned.
And interestingly, this was in connection with the Atlantic.
David Stockman did a long interview with the Atlantic.
It was called The Education of David Stockman.
David Stockman to me is a bit of a Paul Ryan type of guy, a smart guy, someone with a detailed knowledge of the budget, libertarian in his economic views, and because of that libertarianism, he doesn't like Trump's deportation policy, and he posts, hey Dinesh, what's your point?
I mentioned the word alien, so he goes, are you suggesting they were sent here by some alien power, perhaps from Mars, aiming to overthrow American democracy?
And he goes on to say that most of the people coming here aren't criminals, they are just basically people seeking a better life.
And because of our past association with Reagan, I thought, look, I'm not going to slam this guy.
I just want to try to get him to think differently about it.
So here's my reply.
I go, let's grant, for purposes of argument, I mean, that most illegals are just hungry, you know, job-seeking guys.
And I say this, if you or I were in that position, let's say we're hungry, let's say we are Pressed on by necessity.
Let's say we're looking for a better life.
Here's the question.
Do you have the right to let's say sneak into your neighbor's house and just live there without that person's consent or permission?
Yes or no?
No. Why not?
Well, because it's his house.
It's his property.
He makes the rules.
He has the right to see you as An alien.
And an alien means an outsider.
Somebody with no right to be there.
In fact, he wouldn't be going too far to consider you a trespasser, a home invader, because you have in fact invaded, without permission, without consent, his home.
So why is a country different?
Doesn't a country belong to its people?
Don't the people of that country have the right to make laws?
And in fact, we have all kinds of laws that say who can and can't come in.
Is just because somebody is needy or hungry or looking for opportunity, you get a right to crawl under the fence, swim the Rio Grande, sneak your way in?
No. It's bad enough.
It's worse if you go on to commit other crimes while you're here.
You start looting people.
You steal a car.
You kill somebody.
That's on top of it.
But you've already broken the law by coming here in the first place.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast my friend George Papadopoulos.
He is an author.
He is a former Trump advisor.
He's a graduate of the University College of London.
He was a young staffer with President Trump.
He's also a former analyst at the Hudson Institute.
He's been a career consultant in oil and gas.
He is also the co-host of The Global View.
You can follow him on X at GeorgePapa19.
And the YouTube channel, by the way, is at Global View Talk Show, at Global View Talk Show.
George, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
I had the pleasure of being on with you and Simona on your podcast.
I really enjoyed that.
And I said, I better have George back because here we have Trump in a big announcement, declassifying the Russia collusion documents.
Did this come as a surprise to you?
And what do you think the consequence of this declassification will be?
Well, Dinesh, it's great to be with you.
Thanks, of course, for having me.
It was wonderful to have you on our show.
Look, I don't think that this was a shock.
We can't forget that President Trump attempted to get these files out during his first term, especially during the waning or latter stages of his administration shortly before the 2020 election.
However, I would say people that were attempting to subvert his administration and his agenda from within prevented him Those documents from being exposed or released in a very accountable way to the American public.
So this has been a long time coming.
now that President Trump has actually staffed his administration with patriotic Americans, constitutionalists, real believers in the America First cause and the principles that made this movement what it is today, I think we won't have those type of roadblocks
He knows that what's in this information is extremely damaging to probably the elite-level Democrat Party, the Obama administration especially, and he's certain that most of the cohorts and the activists in the mainstream media won't want to look at it.
But what I'm expecting to know, just to go into...
What you mentioned about what I'm expecting, I'm expecting to see a criminal conspiracy be exposed here.
I've always said from day one, and I've said it on your show and to you in private before, this wasn't simply an off-the-cuff run-of-the-muck FBI operation that two people like Lisa Page and Peter Strzok concocted out of thin air.
If you look at recent reporting going back into last summer, By people like Matt Taibbi and Shellenberger in the New York Post.
They overtly characterize a conspiracy that involved the CIA, the FBI, and other foreign intelligence apparatuses or groups that put together a scam or an operation, whatever you want to call it, to both spy on and sabotage the Trump administration.
And that's exactly why this has become the biggest political scandal in modern American history.
Let's go through this a little bit slowly because I want to start with your comment from that in the first term.
I mean, think about it.
Trump has such a pressing interest in exposing the Russia collusion hoax that had I would have to say to some degree paralyzed his administration for four years.
Certainly he got some things done but he could have gotten a lot more done if it hadn't been for all this stuff that tied him down.
There was endless media coverage and yet what you're saying is that there were people powerful enough in his own administration and not devoted to Trump's interests who Prevented the release of these documents the first time around, and quite honestly, I have to say, if Trump didn't make it in 2024, presumably we would never see these documents, perhaps not even ever.
So that alone, to me, is really telling, and a really sharp contrast of how Trump, you know, the second time around, is so different than the first time around.
Now, that being said, You also pointed out that this is not a case of a couple of police state bureaucrats engineering a scheme to try to get Trump.
It had to have been coordinated at a much higher level.
Walk me through your hypothesis or How do you think this kind of went down from A to B to C to D?
Who do you think started it?
And did Hillary start it and recruit Obama into it?
How do you think it happened?
I think this is what happened, Dinesh.
I think that every four years, the most highly anticipated and highly watched events around the world isn't the World Cup, it's not the Super Bowl, it's not the World Series, it's the U.S. presidential election.
Season I think every single country around the world has a interest One way or another and who that man or woman is that ascends to the Oval Office and we go back in time We have to remember what the political climate looked like in 2015 in 2016.
We had the Obama administration essentially forcing These unfair trade practices and agreements on the American people, from the Trans-Pacific Partnership to this new agreement that they wanted with the United Kingdom, should they remain in the European Union.
Then, of course, going to the United Kingdom, you had Brexit.
And, of course, Donald Trump, candidate Trump, was the only candidate who was an advocate or a major proponent of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.
Then, of course, you had a candidate who didn't want war with Russia and actually wanted NATO to pay their own fair share.
So just on the economic sides and the foreign policy, military-industrial complex, and the globalist issues when it came to Brexit, European Union, supranational entities controlling sovereignty vis-à-vis nationalistic policies, You can understand why there were many countries involved with the Hillary Clinton campaign and of course the Obama administration.
Now when it comes to vested interests, those countries certainly had a vested interest in Hillary Clinton winning, but so did Barack Obama.
Hillary Clinton would have been Barack Obama's third term before, of course, Joe Biden became his ultimate third term in the disaster that we unfortunately lived these past four years.
So I think when you look at the climate, And you look at how high the stakes were for that third term for Obama.
That is why I think the CIA and the FBI with these foreign governments involved themselves in spying, not only on Trump's campaign, and there have been reports that other campaigns were targeted too, from Ted Cruz to Ben Carson, who I was an advisor for before Trump's campaign.
So I think that is the motivation of why these countries and these agencies got involved.
And it simply has to do with both money Do you think, George, just as I survey events around the world,
it looks to me that what I thought was a kind of disease or pathology within American politics appears to be part of a wider phenomenon.
I mean, look at the efforts to put Bolsonaro in prison in Brazil.
Look at what we just learned about France, where Marine Le Pen is the leading candidate for the presidential election.
They go after her on some relative technicality.
She's supposedly diverting EU funds, not to herself, but to her political party inside of France, which, by the way, the rival party did also.
But in her case, she is getting a potential prison term and she can't run again.
She's banned from running.
We've seen this in other countries as well.
Is this part of now a playbook of the global left?
read my mind, Dinesh, with what you just articulated.
And this is what was happening in 2016.
The 2016 campaign and a populist nationalist candidate like Donald Trump, who was targeted, was the guinea pig for these type of efforts to subvert Western-style democracy, to use big tech, The media and the intelligence community in a collusion effort to take down candidates or ideas or parties that these groups simply did not like.
Of course, we survived that onslaught by the grace of God, I think, or by a miracle.
Donald Trump actually won in 2016 with all of those odds against him.
He survived what he survived, of course, with the assassination attempts, the witch hunts against him this past election, and he won again.
And he's a very strong person, he's a very strong leader, and I think he was able to combat the deep state's effort to take him out.
On the other hand, you look at these other candidates who kind of espouse somewhat similar ideas, or at least a similar ideology of populism, pro-sovereignty, values, traditions, putting their countries first vis-a-vis globalist agendas, and they've been targeted.
You have people like Bolsonaro that you just explained in Brazil who's been indicted, might be facing jail time.
Marine Le Pen in France, facing jail time.
So many of these other candidates.
You've had candidates or people that won elections in Romania have seen their own victories nullified because they weren't the right type of person that the European Union wanted in power in Eastern Europe.
So this is a very disturbing pattern.
I think you could actually draw a linear line between what happened in 2016 to the current environment and these type of issues will continue unless prosecutions where people are held accountable in the United States for what they did in 2016 and likely this past election.
So George, I think you're making the very important point.
We should not let these things go and this is not simply a matter also of Wow, we need to find out what really happened.
It's a matter of if people broke the law, if they engaged in treason, mass scale criminal conspiracy.
And we know that in this case, it is not out of the question that there are powerful outside entities, including media entities that were in on it, were being fed articles that were part of the hoax, if you will.
And so all of this coming out, I think, is very much the first step.
George, let's turn.
You had a remarkable role in all this.
You've become, in a way, not really by choice, a figure of history.
Because there you are in Europe, you're a young Trump staffer, and suddenly you discover that Very shady, but also very influential people are popping into your life.
People associated with Australian intelligence, with British intelligence, with US intelligence services, and they are all trying to lure you into an admission of Trump campaign collusion with Russia that they will then use to bust Trump.
You have, it must have been a very terrifying feeling to recognize that you are in the crosshairs of all these entities, many of which operate without direct political supervision.
So I just want you to reflect a little bit back on your life in the past several years, and your kind of position now, looking back at all of this and seeing how you came out of it.
Yeah, no, thank you for that, Dinesh.
Look, I guess I could take a page out of Donald Trump's own playbook, and that is that I want transparency.
I have nothing to hide.
So when President Trump wanted to declassify, or when he did declassify these documents, I was out there, you know, yelling at the top of my lungs at how happy I was.
I'm giving interviews of how important this was and what a historic moment this was, because the truth will finally come out.
And you're absolutely right.
And it goes back to what we were just talking about.
The foreign agencies, the foreign governments, and why they would be targeting an American abroad.
Every single operation that went against me into Crossfire Hurricane and probably other investigations that are probably going to be released shortly once these files start rolling out, was in Europe or in the Middle East.
I really had people like Stefan Halper.
There's this infamous professor, Stefan Halper, who targeted the campaign.
He was targeting some people on the Trump campaign in Washington and New York, but he lured me to London for some reason.
And then there was this entire operation there.
There were other issues that were going on in the United Kingdom, in Israel, in Greece, in, you know, other foreign capitals around the world that we still don't have the exact answers to, Dinesh.
But it goes to what I've been trying to explain as my ultimate thesis.
These countries had interests, they could not take a chance with a populist economic candidate like President Trump and his team, and they decided to go all in on the devil they knew versus somebody they did not know.
And Hillary Clinton, whether she was in the interest of these countries or not, was somebody that had been in politics for years, decades, obviously had been involved in some level of corruption that In a way,
it helps explain a little bit some of the ferocity that you see now from Trump and Vance toward these European countries because it seems on the face of it to be such Almost reckless behavior on their part to want to so Openly take sides in an election and yet I think what you're saying is and I had previously assumed that It was the US intelligence services that called up their counterparts and go,
you know, hey mate I'd like you to do me a favor but you're saying it's beyond that because those guys had their own interest in not having a populist and a nationalist of the brand of Trump coming to power in the first place and they were willing to take the risk that if this ever kind of Well look Dinesh, let's look at a prime example.
David Cameron, who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 2015 and 2016, because we have to remember the context.
of these events that were going on.
He was the only leader in the entire world, not Iranian leadership, not leadership in other adversarial nations, that actually castigated candidate Trump and his ideas and vision in the House of Commons in the United Kingdom.
Now most people were actually saying, what is this what's happening here?
Why is our so-called ally attacking a candidate in the heart of a presidential campaign season?
People kind of brushed it off But things became much more clear to me when I was on the campaign and I gave an interview reaction to those comments to the Times of London and I said that Cameron should apologize because this isn't how you behave at this level and that this is a stain potentially on the US-UK relationship.
Now shortly after that interview, that's when both the US Embassy That's when the Australian government, that's when officials of the Israeli government started to meet and want to meet and start to, I guess, you know, try to set me up, Dinesh.
So it clearly wasn't just the CIA saying, hi mate, in London or Australia or whatever, I need a favor.
I think these countries might have actually felt more threatened themselves by Donald Trump than even our own CIA and our own FBI and they themselves I think so.
the situation to then pass off later to the FBI.
And that's why this all started in London and not in Washington, D.C.
or in New York.
And that's all now been substantially reported.
But because of how sensitive this is to the national, what we're really talking about here and how fake the media and the narrative has been for so many years about this being some sort of justified FBI investigation that two FBI agents like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page spontaneously.
Spontaneously launched it's going to take some time to both deprogram Those on the left who have bought that lie and also it's going to be it's going to take a long time also for I think people on the right to really accept That we don't really have allies permanent allies in this world anymore And that we should be focusing on America first both from a foreign policy lens and of course socially and economically as well Fascinating stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to George Papadopoulos.
Follow him on X at GeorgePapa19, the YouTube channel at Global View Talk Show.
George, what a pleasure.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Real pleasure.
Thanks so much for having me tonight.
I'm discussing the spectacular record of Reagan over two terms, all drawn from my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And I've talked about Reagan's economic record.
I've started to talk about foreign policy and the way in which things improved around the world.
But then we have the penetration of Reaganism into the Soviet orbit itself.
This begins in 1987, somewhat innocuously.
Well, not innocuously.
There was a lot of hoopla about it, but the full significance of it was not clear.
Reagan and Gorbachev sign an Intermediate Nuclear Forces, a so-called INF Treaty, which dismantles the Soviet SS-20 missiles.
This is the generation of giant medium-range anti-ballistic missiles, bigger, by the way, than any missiles in the United States.
But then a year later, 1988, the Soviet Union begins to pull out of Afghanistan.
This is a surprise, because the Soviets had occupied, forcibly, Afghanistan in 1979.
They had been there for eight years.
There was an Afghan war going on.
But, you know, to some degree, I suppose it's similar to the war in Ukraine.
You've got Afghanistan, a kind of a Plucky little country, but then you've got the Soviet Union.
There's no way Afghanistan can hold off the Soviet Union, and yet the Soviets pull out.
And this is the first time in, really, in Soviet history that the Soviets voluntarily relinquished or jettisoned, gave up a puppet regime.
The revolution then moves into the Soviet Empire itself.
Poland holds free elections.
Like Valencia, who was a prominent critic, becomes the president.
Suddenly all of Eastern and Central Europe is free.
This is the breaking loose of Hungary and Romania and Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.
All these pieces of the Soviet Empire are Are now outside of it, or at least not being governed by it.
The Berlin Wall comes down in 1989.
So, the very wall at which Reagan had said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, you know, and I remember I was there in the old executive office building watching Reagan give the speech at the Brandenburg Gate, which is a sort of name for the part of the Berlin Wall.
And many of us thought, wow, this is a very bold and kind of brazen speech for Reagan to give.
It had been drafted by one of my Dartmouth classmates, a guy named Peter Robinson, who's been for most of his life a fellow at the Hoover Institution.
So we were excited to hear, you know, Reagan essentially saying Peter's words.
Well, they were Reagan's own words.
Reagan wanted to say them, but Peter wrote them down.
But none of us thought, I think it's fair to say, that calling for the Berlin Wall to come down was the same thing as the Berlin Wall coming down.
This is like calling for the government to stop printing money, or calling on Iran to stop supporting terrorism.
Noble aspirations to be sure, but it's not going to really happen, right?
And that's the way that most people thought about it.
Most conservatives thought about Reagan's speech.
And yet, here was the Berlin Wall coming down, people jumping all over it, breaking pieces off.
And if that wasn't stunning enough, there was more to come.
In 1991, there was a remarkable meeting in the Politburo.
With the leaders of the Communist Party, and what they did was they abolished themselves.
In fact, they abolished the Soviet Union.
They didn't abolish the country, the country remains, but of course the system, the Soviet socialist system, or the system, the union of so-called Soviets.
Soviet here refers to a kind of association or village or gathering So this whole structure that went all the way back, back through Andropov and Chernenko and Brezhnev and earlier Khrushchev and before him Stalin and before that Lenin, I mean this structure that essentially had held for 70 years now went kaput.
And power passes into the hands of a new man, post Gorbachev, and that is Boris Yeltsin.
He becomes the first freely elected president of Russia.
So suddenly an era of cooperation now becomes possible between the United States and Russia.
There's diminished nuclear rivalry.
All the worries about nuclear apocalypse have now subsided.
The United States becomes the world's sole superpower.
Suddenly it appears like democratic capitalism is the Envied formula of the whole world.
The centuries-old debate, it seems, between capitalism and Soviet Marxism appears to have been resolved.
And later, of course, we will see new forms of socialism.
I call them identity socialism.
Socialism in the West that is somehow engrafted onto identity politics.
But certainly the old type of socialism that the Soviets embodied, we really don't see that anywhere even today.
China, of course, has communism and socialism of a sort.
But again, I have to say of a sort because, again, it doesn't resemble the old Soviet socialism.
In Soviet socialism, the government owned everything.
They owned all the land.
They owned all the buildings.
If you had an apartment, it wasn't your apartment.
The government was letting you live there.
You certainly had no Soviet billionaires, except maybe unofficially the ruling Politburo, the so-called nomenklatura, or ruling class.
But in China, you have guys who run companies, Tencent, Alibaba, they make tens of millions of dollars, they travel all over the world, they set up new companies, they trade in various currencies.
So, China is different, even though it remains Very much a tyrannical society.
So, the point is that a huge chapter of human civilization, and specifically of the 20th century, is closed.
And the question is, how did this come about and who did it?
Who's responsible?
So this comes to the thesis, the key argument of the book, and that is that, I write, these developments, both domestic and international, were no accident.
Reagan was the prime mover.
He brought them about.
This is a very large claim to make for a single person.
Reagan did it.
What? How does one man do these things?
How does he bring them about?
But I say he was the architect of his own success.
This is not to say that he transformed the world single-handedly.
He had help.
I mentioned Margaret Thatcher, the Pope.
Not this Pope, by the way, John Paul II.
Václav Havel, who subsequently became the President of the Czech Republic.
Lech Wałęsa, who I just mentioned, the new leader of Poland.
Gorbachev, too, played, as we will see, a critical role, yet not quite the role that was attributed to him in the Western media.
But my argument is that none of these things would have happened when they did and in the way that they did without Reagan.
He was the decisive agent of change, and so In order to explain this, how he did it and what did he do, you have to show how this ordinary man became such an extraordinary leader.
Now, I go on here to identify some of Reagan's key traits.
And again, as I mentioned them now, it's worth thinking in the background about other leaders and leadership in general.
It's worth thinking specifically about Trump.
And the first point I make is that Reagan was a visionary, and what we mean by a visionary is that he looks at the world.
This is the world, kind of the way it is.
And in his mind, he can see a different world.
In his mind, he can see the world as he thinks it ought to be.
uh And so while other people are kind of bewildered by the problems right in front of them, Reagan is sort of looking at a different structure, a different society.
And in a certain way, it's an otherworldly characteristic of Reagan.
And I have to say, this is one way in which Trump is somewhat the same.
Debbie and I were talking this morning about And Debbie goes, I'm a little uncomfortable with all these tariffs.
And doesn't this run against the concept of free markets or free trade?
And I was ranting some of that, but I also said, you know, for Trump, the tariffs are part of a much different and broader architecture of American society.
A lot of things have happened in American society, and these things are the result of the type of capitalism that we've had until now.
So it's the capitalism that says, hey, if tons of people are out of work, that's the market.
Hey, if communities are ruined and destroyed, that's the market.
Hey, if a whole class of people can't find jobs, that's the market.
Hey, if young people can't buy homes because homes now cost $400,000 to $500,000 and there's nothing in their income that makes them remotely qualified for a home, that's the market.
We're getting all this huge transfer of wealth away from the United States to China and other countries.
They manufacture everything.
We merely are consumers.
That's the market.
This is, for Trump, unacceptable.
And I think Reagan would have found it unacceptable, too, the circumstances that Reagan found.
But the point I'm going to make here is that what a visionary does is he doesn't take the world as it is.
He's got a different idea of where things are going.
You see this visionary aspect even with business leaders.
They can see the world is not going to be in hardware.
It's going to be in software.
The world is not going to be in the camera.
It's going to be in the digital film.
And so great fortunes are made by this visionary ability to see things differently than the way most other people see them.
Reagan had that and that was one of the elements of his success.
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