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May 8, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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HOME IMPROVEMENT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1079
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Coming up, I want to cover Trump's trade deal with Great Britain.
I also want to talk about the reports about the mortgage shenanigans on the part of New York Attorney General Letitia James, raising the question of whether it's time to bring out the handcuffs.
And I want to also examine a new essay by a Harvard legal scholar on what due process is actually due, and what the distinction is between rule of law on the one hand and rule by the judges.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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I'm going to talk in this opening segment about Letitia James, but before I get to her, I want to emphasize a couple of other items in the news.
I'm chuckling because Jen Psaki made this comment.
Last night, Mr. Art of the Deal, as he calls himself, has not yet struck a single trade deal, not a single one with any country.
And almost as if on cue, Trump announces a big trade deal with, you guessed it, Great Britain.
And in his post today, Trump puts out the details of the deal, or the overview of it, And it's pretty interesting because we have a way now of looking to see what the situation was and what it is now.
And this is Great Britain.
So it turns out that this new trade deal is going to bring in $6 billion a year in tariff revenue.
It's going to be $5 billion of increased exports to Great Britain.
And when you look at the tariffs, It turned out the United States had zero tariffs or no tariffs, and the UK had 5.1% tariffs on us.
Now, it's flipped around.
The UK is going to drop its tariffs from 5.1% to 1.8%, and the United States, 10%.
So Trump is sticking with his...
Kind of 10% across the board tariffs, much higher tariffs, as it turns out, on China.
And a little bit later, I'm going to have an expert coming on to talk about China and trade with China and a lot of the pitfalls of that trade.
But my point is, hard to deny that we're now going to have bigger access to the UK market, ethanol, beef, cereals, fruits, vegetables, animal feed, tobacco, soft drinks, etc.
Trump is getting it done.
This is the first one, and I'm sure that there is more to come.
Some interesting job numbers are out, and the significance of these is not merely that unemployment is low.
The recession that people are predicting is probably most likely not going to happen, and the reason for it is pretty simple.
You can't have a recession without job losses.
You can't have a recession without unemployment.
That is the, I wouldn't just say the number one, that is the primary indicator that the economy is going into recession.
Because if somebody gets like a pay cut, that doesn't fundamentally change their spending.
They still are going to buy stuff.
They're going to make payments on their car.
They're going to do this.
They're going to do that.
They're going to keep the economy humming, if you will.
But you lose your job.
That creates a whole different picture because you now have to draw on your savings.
So you just don't have that income available to you each month.
Well, as you look inside of the data, you see two interesting things that are happening with unemployment that are worth noting.
One, we're seeing a rise of native-born American workers getting jobs.
You can't deny that this is part of Trump's goal.
These are the people who have been left behind in the past.
30 years in the past generation or even two generations, and we're starting to see that being reversed.
Very good thing.
The second thing we're seeing inside of the job numbers is a decline in the government workforce and an increase in the private sector workforce.
Also a very good thing and utterly consistent with conservative principles, reduce the size of the government, increase the scope of the private sector.
And that, it seems, is also happening.
So even this early on in the administration, we're seeing some real results.
And the other thing I want to mention, albeit briefly, is that Trump has signed an executive order banning risky gain-of-function research.
Now, I want to emphasize, some people are reporting this, I think, erroneously, that Trump has banned gain-of-function.
He actually hasn't done that.
What he's done is he's banned...
Gain-of-function research that is conducted without proper oversight, without being done in places that are safe to do it.
So, by the way, there's gain-of-function research that is being done sometimes in collaboration with countries like China, also, by the way, with Iran, but also some other countries.
And these places are notoriously lax in having proper security guidelines, I guess.
How the virus quite likely leaked out of the Wuhan lab, there obviously wasn't proper oversight.
And now there are several different things in place.
Again, not to make sure that this research doesn't occur, but to make sure that the noose around it, the oversight of it, is tightened.
Macrorubia is apparently the point man.
To make sure that these things are being done.
And now let me turn to Letitia James.
You've probably read, I have in front of me an article in the New York Post, FBI opens formal criminal probe.
This is great.
Because generally when you have a formal criminal probe, I would say that an indictment and charges now become quite likely.
When people are talking about she needs to be indicted, I would give the chance of that happening 10%, maybe 20%.
Once you have a formal criminal probe, the chances now move up, I would say, to something like 70% to 90%.
Obviously, they have to make sure that the facts as reported, that this is a woman who did mortgage fraud, that she...
That she made false representations in order to get better terms on a loan for a home that she purchased in 2023.
Also, by the way, a Brooklyn brownstone that she's owned since 2001.
She apparently made false statements.
This is going to be about principal residence, even though it's not even in New York.
She obviously isn't living there.
So this is the kind of stuff where, you know, if it's true, boom, it's like a slam dunk.
And so I'm delighted.
This would be the most prominent Democrat getting indicted and getting indicted for something that I don't think she's going to be able to get out of.
Now, it is worth noting, I saw this this morning, that the New York legislature and Governor Kathy Hochul have apparently allocated taxpayer money for Letitia James to defend in this case.
And on the one hand, you've got a couple of the MAGA influences.
This is outrageous.
This is an abuse of taxpayer money.
And maybe it is.
But here's something I want to point out.
Democrats protect their own.
Republicans almost never do.
If Letitia James had been a Republican, the Republicans would never dream of allocating taxpayer money to her defense.
They would be like, okay, listen, if you did that, you're on your own.
You have to defend yourself.
It doesn't matter if you're an ally.
It doesn't matter if you're a really effective attorney general.
You have to solve your own problems at this point.
This, by the way, was the attitude of a lot of Republicans toward Ken Paxton when he was facing not so much a criminal trial but impeachment in a kind of vendetta from the Texas House.
But Democrats are like, listen, this woman is a warrior for our cause.
It doesn't matter if she's a crook.
In fact, most of us are crooks.
So the crooks need to pony up, and ideally pony up not their own money, but the taxpayer money to defend Letitia James.
So she will be competently represented.
But hey, if she did what is being reported, I don't think a good defense is going to matter very much because she did the crime and hopefully she'll be due in the time.
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My topic for this segment is the rule of law.
But before I plunge into it, Debbie just tells me, based on scrolling social media, that a New Pope has been selected, and it's an American.
No, I know what you're thinking.
It's not J.D. Vance, it's not Marco Rubio, and it's not Donald Trump.
It is a guy named Robert Prevost.
I think that's Prevost.
I think it's Prevost, honey, from what you showed me.
Robert Prevost.
And the fact is, I've never heard of this guy.
And he's from Chicago.
Probably generally not a good sign.
I was trying to figure out if he was like a Pope Francis guy, because that would not be a good sign.
Danielle, who's texting us, apparently says he's more right-wing than Francis.
Now, this is a very hard statement for me to make sense of, because saying...
That somebody is more right-wing than Francis would be similar to telling me that he's taller than a midget or more intelligent than a rock.
Francis is so far to the left, it's really hard not to be more right-wing than Francis and doesn't really mean that you're even necessarily a moderate.
it so I will try to keep an open mind but but But before making any kind of assessment about this, about the new guy.
Well, it is kind of interesting that they've picked an American for the first time.
And we'll see what that means.
Let me talk about the rule of law.
I want to focus on a very good article in, well, it's on the Substack, by the Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule.
And it is about the rule of law and the rule of courts.
Now, this is really important because so many people, including people on our side, I've got a pretty good friend who often texts me about this.
He's a libertarian, and he's blasting Trump because he keeps saying Trump can't ignore the rule of law.
But, of course, the underlying assumption...
That my friend makes and many other people make is not unique.
In fact, recently there was an opinion by the Virginia judge, conservative judge, I think Reagan appointee Harvey Wilkinson, and Harvey Wilkinson basically says this.
He says, listen, we can't let the executive do what it wants because if that is the case, then, quote, the executive's obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed would lose its meaning.
This is the core of the matter, because it seems, on the one hand, kind of obvious that, hey, we've got to hold the Congress and the executive to account.
It's the job of the courts.
Who else to do that?
And so the courts need to perform a supervisory function, both on Congress and on the executive.
And this article, written by Adrian Vermeule, basically says no.
That is actually not what the court's job is, because if the court's job was that, the court would be running the country.
The court would be like, listen, anybody else can make a decision.
Congress can make a decision, make a law, but then turn it over to us.
We'll decide if it really is a law or if we need to rewrite it for you and give it back to you or what the law should be, according to us, which overrides what you think it should be.
And what kind of a...
What kind of a democracy would we be if the courts had that kind of power to essentially tell Congress what to do?
And similarly with the executive, if the president or the instrumentalities of the president, the agencies of the president, all did things and the courts basically said, hey, listen, whenever you do anything inside the executive branch, turn it over to us and we will then tell you if you can keep doing it or not.
And if not, we will tell you how you should be doing it.
The point here is that that approach is not only on the face of it absurd, impractical, but that is not what the role of the courts is at all.
Professor Vermeule begins by talking about something that doesn't seem related at first, but it italicizes the point.
When people talk about the president having immunity, It sounds like the president is kind of being given some kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card.
The president is being given some kind of a pass.
Like, listen, the laws don't really apply to you.
You have immunity.
But that is not what presidential immunity means, according to Professor Vermeule.
What presidential immunity means is that certain actions of the president are unreviewable by the court.
It's kind of like saying...
That if I'm speeding on the highway, it's unreviewable by the IRS, right?
The IRS has no jurisdiction.
They're not giving me, quote, immunity to speed.
It's not their job to figure out if I'm speeding or not at all.
That's not why we have an IRS.
Yes, they have their own proper function, but this is not what it is.
Now, Professor Rebuehl gives several examples to show why...
His theory is right and why it cannot be the case that courts can play this kind of second-guessing role.
I want to highlight two of these examples to make the point.
Example number one.
Professor Vermeule says that the army, the military in general, has been created according to law.
In other words, there are laws passed, there are congressional allocations of money for the military, so the military is a lawful institution.
And now, says Professor Vermeule, does the court have the right to second-guess the military on any matter at all?
So, for example, let's say the military decides we're going to do a strike against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Or we're going to, let's just say, pick up our weaponry and leave Afghanistan.
Why can't a judge issue an injunction and say, no, you can't do that.
You can't leave our equipment over there.
It's too expensive.
The judge does not get to second-guess the military.
Why?
Because that is not in the judge's authority at all.
The military has a function to perform, and that aspect of the function is not reviewable by the court.
Again, the military is not being given some kind of, quote, immunity.
The military is not subject to that kind of judicial looking over the shoulder at all.
Here's a second example.
The president's foreign policy dealings with foreign countries.
Again, Again, why can't a court step in and go, listen, I'm going to put a temporary injunction on Donald Trump's recent agreement with Keir Starmer and Great Britain.
I'm going to stop it.
It has to be null and void until we litigate it in my court and we figure this out over the next several months.
No.
Courts cannot do that.
This is outside their purview.
So you can see just from those two examples that Professor Vermeule is obviously correct and that this glib assumption that we all make, or so many of us make, that courts have a kind of unlimited kind of review power over the actions both of Congress as well as of the executive branch cannot be correct.
And so yes, there is rule of law.
But rule of law applies to all three branches.
And one of the, basically the takeaway of this article from Professor Vermeule is that courts need to recognize areas that are not in their jurisdiction and rule of law in those cases requires that the court butt out.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Jeff Parker.
He is the founder of Parker Vision.
In fact, he's chairman of the board, chief executive officer of Parker Vision.
The company's been around since 1989.
And Jeff is a guy who has been an inventor with more than 31 patents.
He's an entrepreneur.
He was also a joint venture partner with Carrier Corporation, working on research development, manufacturing, sales for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.
You can follow him on X at against underscore giants or the website is just parkervision.com.
Jeff, thank you for joining me.
I thought we would talk a little bit about this whole issue of trade with China.
Trump just today announced a big trade deal with Great Britain.
And I was kind of poring over the fine print, and it looks like, you know, it was an unlevel playing field.
They had much heavier tariffs than we had on them.
So it looks like what's happening is that their tariffs are coming down.
Trump is still keeping a modest tariff on Great Britain, but no, you know, severe or onerous or kind of confiscatory tariffs.
And so it looks like this is the first...
Big deal that Mr. Art of the Deal has worked out with our longtime ally, Great Britain.
But I think you would say, and I would agree, that China is a whole different story.
Now, for many decades, there were many people who said, oh no, China's not different.
We need to open up deals with China.
In fact, this is not only mutually beneficial economically, but it's going to have a liberalizing effect on China, maybe even promote democracy in China.
I remember all of this talk going back to the Clinton era.
So I'd like you to educate us on kind of the real China and how we should, in fact, and how Trump should, in fact, be dealing with them.
Well, great topic.
Thank you for having me on today, Dinesh.
Happy to be here.
You know, I think what the president is focused on and I'm totally in agreement is we've got to level the playing field for the American worker.
For the American manufacturing opportunities, we cannot continue to carry the whole world on our shoulders.
I mean, I understand after World War II why we were very generous to try to help the world rebuild and build an economy.
But at this point, it's gone on far too long with the United States taking it in the shorts.
With very uneven tariffs against us and territorial boundaries, it just doesn't make any sense.
You can't continue to operate this way.
But, you know, just a quick little bit about my background to kind of put some context as to where I'm coming from.
So I've been a technology person my whole life.
I loved to tinker when I was a kid, and I had the good fortune of starting a company that did some of the very first semiconductor chips.
For heating air conditioning controls.
So back in the day when your thermostat was a little round device that had mercury bulbs in the springs, I wanted to bring electronics to that.
And so we did the very first digital thermostats that we all take for granted today, but back in the 80s was a big deal.
Ultimately, we built that company up, and it was a partnership with Carrier Air Conditioning Corporation, and we ultimately sold the company to United Technologies.
That was a whole different era.
We designed our chips in the United States.
We built our chips in the United States.
We put the products together from those chips in the United States, and you know what?
We sold products all over North America, all over Europe, and we were starting to sell products into Asia.
When United Technologies decided they wanted to buy our company and we agreed to sell it to them.
So that was kind of our starting point.
But my perspective has changed significantly since then.
We went on to develop other companies which we've built and sold.
But the latest company I've been involved in, we developed the wireless connectivity technology that, candidly, is why your smartphone can work anywhere in the world.
It's why you can put a little Bluetooth thing in your ear and it's tiny.
It's why you can get Wi-Fi all over the place now.
Our technology is everywhere, but guess what?
It's now been heisted and taken to China.
And so we had a skirmish with a big tech company who saw our technology fully patented.
We thought we could work out some kind of a relationship because we had relationships with large companies before.
Carrier Corporation was the biggest in heating and air conditioning controls, and it was where 1 plus 1 equaled like 10. But in this situation, they liked what they saw, but they decided they weren't going to do a deal with us.
Instead, a number of years after we had special nondisclosures and everything in place, we found our technology inside their chips.
Okay, that's bad enough.
But let me tell you then what happens.
This company, in order to get business in China, they don't just have to manufacture in China.
They don't have to just support Chinese companies.
They're told...
You must put engineering facilities in China.
You must develop your products in China.
And this is where I think it's a step too far.
Because now, all of a sudden, you are training your future competitor.
And this company had a very large market share 10 years ago, 7 years ago.
Well, you can see now their market share has been dropping, dropping, dropping.
You know why?
Who they trained to develop their products in China have left their employee.
And now there are companies like Huawei, ZTE, HiSilicon, MediaTek.
These are all Asian companies.
Three of the four I just mentioned are Chinese companies.
And we know this because you can just look at LinkedIn and you can follow where people have been and where they've gone to.
And so now they're competing against the very people that they trained.
The Chinese know exactly what they're doing.
This is no accident.
They're on this big 50-year plan to dominate the world.
And they are, you know, step, step, step going down that path.
And, you know, it's bad enough that they may come here and steal intellectual property.
But to allow...
Our own big tech companies to go over there and set up shop.
And as I say, not just manufacturing, but actual development facilities.
This company has 5,000 R&D people in China.
So, you know, I applaud the president.
For recognizing, look, we can't continue down this path.
This is a path of insanity if you want to be a leading democracy that is the world's superpower.
We have to develop these products here.
We have to develop these technologies here.
I hear people argue all the time, oh, but we can't be competitive, our labor rates are too high, etc.
Let me tell you something.
A lot of manufacturing is now going with automation.
You still need people to learn the automated products, run the automated products.
That's not true.
We absolutely can do lots of manufacturing here, be highly profitable.
And if you want to be a trade-balanced world, we as a country have to own and make technologies that other people around the world want to buy.
So, you know, we can tariff things to death, but...
Ultimately, I think the goal that the president is after is to level the playing field so that people will buy things from the United States that, frankly, we will be the best providers in the world of.
And that's how we'll maintain our defense posture.
We'll enhance our national security.
I think, Jeff, this is a really important point you're making, which is that tariffs are not merely intended here as a...
You know, kind of a clever way to get tax revenue from abroad rather than get it at home.
It's really aimed at creating a shift in which not just manufacturing jobs, not just blue collar jobs, but high tech jobs are brought here.
And products are made here.
I think it was, I was watching, I think, Kevin O 'Leary in an interview with maybe CNBC, and he was making the broad point that, listen, a lot of this, a lot of the technological breakthroughs and the true innovations are made in the United States.
We invent stuff.
But then what happens is that the Chinese kind of move in.
And they take it over without having incurred any of the R&D costs, the development costs, the getting the product from, you know, an idea to having an actual something that is of use in the market.
The Chinese kind of skip over all that and they get the benefits of all of that for free, either by outright stealing or by the process you just unnervingly described, A hundred percent.
And I think that people need to understand, it's not just the enemy abroad.
There's an enemy right here.
And let me tell you what I think kind of stimulated a lot of this.
It wasn't just the Chinese saying, if you want to do business here, you have to put...
R&D facilities, we have also allowed one of our best assets to be taken apart a brick at a time.
It's an esoteric area, but I'm going to bring it up because I think it's a really important area, and it's our patent system.
You know, everybody when I was a kid growing up used to think about inventors and innovators as kind of this really...
Amazing, cool area of the United States.
You know, this guy invented this, this guy invented that.
Well, that was all made possible because in our Constitution, not even an amendment, in the original Constitution is the notion that we will allow innovators to own the rights to their inventions.
And you're given a limited-time monopoly to exclude others from practicing those inventions.
This was the concept that the founders decided, how do we prevent a country of becoming kings and queens where there's just a few at the top and everybody works for them, right?
These people had fled from Europe where that was the norm.
And so it was the patent system that was written right into the original Constitution.
Well, let me give you a clue.
That system has been taken apart now mostly through big tech lobbying.
And legislation out of control, frankly, courts that don't really embrace or defend patents.
I mean, it's a bigger topic than we have today, but let me tell you what the end result is.
There's no sheriff in town anymore.
So if you're a big tech company, here or overseas, you can take other people's patented inventions and what used to maybe be a couple, three years to get Through the justice system and get resolution?
Dinesh, I'm working on a situation today.
I'm going on my, you're sitting down, right?
15th year.
15 years with the original company who stole our inventions, minted billions of dollars in profits out of it, and they've been able to take advantage of this weakened system.
Where it's almost impossible to get through the process.
Most people who I've seen have gone through that process, have gone out of business, have gone bankrupt, have given up.
We've had the very good fortune of having great support from investors.
We, frankly, are tenacious and we think it's such a bad place for the United States to be that just on principle, I'm going to do whatever I can to get through this and prove a point.
But I'm hopeful this administration will also look at this area of our economy, because if you look at where do the really big innovations come from, I'm not going to say they don't occasionally come from large incumbents, but most of the time it's startups and small businesses.
And the reason is there's something innate in the human nature.
When you're trying to break into something and you have nothing to lose because you're not an incumbent, you know?
And you get clever and creative.
And we have no longer got a system in place to reward that.
It's a totally rigged system.
Again, it's a topic for probably another day.
But in our situation, I mean, just to tell you how crazy it is, we actually in two years, like 15 years ago, in the first phase of our campaign, won a jury verdict.
That was a multi-hundred million dollar jury verdict that then got reversed by a judge.
We had to go through a second case.
And our second case, because of the degradation of the system, we're now going on our 12th year.
12 years.
You know, Jeff, there's a speech that was given by Lincoln, of all people.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but he talks about how in the Constitution...
The protection of patents, he specifically is talking about patents, and he says it adds the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.
His point being that you invent something, but now you've got to motivate somebody to carry that to market, to make a useful product.
Otherwise, you've got, you know, E equals MC squared, but you don't know what to do with it until you have an adapter or you have a microchip or a semiconductor.
And when I read that speech by Lincoln, I was like, wow, I was not aware that in the Bill of Rights there's some kind of a patent protection.
But as you mentioned, this patent protection is not in the Bill of Rights.
It is in the original Constitution itself.
So this is kind of my exposure to it, and it's actually very fascinating that the founders were farsighted enough.
To think of something like patents, which, I mean, they were in an agricultural society, very far removed from our highly industrial, and not to mention the communications revolution of the last couple of decades.
So this is clearly something very important.
So are you hopeful as we close out here that...
That Trump will be able to take on this Chinese challenge?
Does he seem to have a grasp of the issues that are involved?
And does he have a team around him that is, as they say, on it?
I think that he is absolutely well positioned to take this on.
He has a team around him that is probably the best cabinet and team we've had.
In my recent memory, to be able to handle the challenges here.
Because it's a multi-dimensional challenge, right?
I mean, I say that we've degraded our patent system.
Do you know what else the Chinese copied, Dinesh?
This will blow your mind.
They copied our patent system when it was working.
Okay?
Pretty smart.
Guess what?
We used to be the number one most patents filed We're not even in the top five or six.
Do you know that the Chinese now lead in like 44 of the top 50 sciences in the world as measured by an independent Australian think tank that tracks all this?
20 years ago, we were number one in all of those areas.
We're now only number one in like four.
So President Trump, I think he is right on it, but it's going to take a multidimensional solution.
When he talks about corruption, there's an element of this that needs to be exposed and come out and corrected.
It deals with our justice system, our Department of Justice.
It deals with.
How the courts handle these things.
It deals with enforcement that has to be rapid and swift and make it a penalty if you do this, not just a hand slap and there's no real sheriff in town.
And the tariffs he's talking about to try to get that negotiation to level the playing field.
All of these things together, in my opinion.
We'll put America right back on track.
It's degraded over a long time frame, but I believe with President Trump's leadership, this is going to come springing back.
It's like a spring.
The United States is the society to lead the world in innovation, democracy, what makes us a superpower.
And I think there's a lot of pent-up opportunity here that President Trump is going to unleash, and I don't think it's going to be decades.
To see the results from this, I think you're going to see this like a spring just fly open.
And look, my hope and belief is that with President Trump and the direction he's going, you're going to see thousands of new companies springing up that are going to be inspired to innovate and lead the charge.
And it's also a national security concern.
I mean, the technology that was stolen from my company, you know where it is now, Dinesh?
It's in Chinese drones.
It's in military gear and not just U.S. military gear.
So this is a very important topic that we have to address.
I believe President Trump will address it.
And I think his strategy for leveling the playing field, starting with the tariffs, is just the beginning of what ultimately is going to happen during his first couple of years here.
And I'm very excited about it because I...
I don't think we've been in a better place in recent memory to turn this situation around.
And I'm excited, very excited.
I mean, it certainly seems about time.
Guys, I've been talking to Jeff Parker, founder of Parker Vision.
Follow him on X at against underscore giants.
The website is parkervision.com.
Jeff, thanks for opening our eyes to a topic that we pay too little attention to, in my opinion.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
I'm still in the chapter, Mr. Reagan Goes to Washington, which is describing Reagan's prehistory of the presidency.
In other words, how did he get there?
And he got there by being governor of California for two terms.
I mentioned last time that his first term was kind of spotty, but his second term he did a lot better.
And this set him up to be a viable candidate in the late 1970s and, of course, in 1980 when he actually was successful.
Now, I alluded earlier to the fact that Reagan didn't merely run on policy, but when he was governor, he took on the counterculture of the 1960s.
And this is something I now want to focus on.
Because prior to Reagan, the Republican Party was not identified with what we would now call social issues or cultural issues.
I mean, it's a little hard to believe, right?
Because today, cultural issues are in the forefront.
I mean, what would the Trump movement be without issues that are, well, even immigration is to a large degree a cultural issue.
It's got an economic dimension, but I think the cultural dimension is even bigger.
Certainly crime is a cultural or social issue.
Certainly the family, abortion, the trans issue, the issue of the kind of revival of religion, the place of religion in the public square.
All of this is now almost inextricably bound with the MAGA and the conservative agenda, but it wasn't before Reagan.
In fact, if you spoke this way, About these kinds of topics to Eisenhower, I think he would be puzzled about what you were talking about.
And the same, oddly enough, with Nixon.
Now, Nixon had kind of an element.
One of Nixon's big themes was law and order.
But I think that's about as far as Nixon got.
Well, we need to have law and order.
But with Reagan, you're beginning to see the wider ensemble of cultural issues come into the Republican platform and come into the conservative.
And this has the effect, of course, of broadening the Reagan coalition and now, of course, the Trump coalition.
Now, the counterculture, as we call it, was kicked off by the Berkeley free speech movement of the 1960s.
But the Berkeley Free Speech Movement wasn't really about free speech.
The radicals wanted free speech for themselves, but they were in no way committed to free speech in principle.
In fact, shortly after they kind of won their cause, took over the campus, they immediately began to shut down the speech of the other side.
But the counterculture was, of course, bigger than free speech.
Its big issue was the Vietnam War.
And a war that was portrayed as a war for big corporations.
So they'd have, you know, we won't die for Texaco, that kind of slogan.
Draft dodging was part of the counterculture.
But it was also about the civil rights movement.
It tried to incorporate the civil rights movement and push it toward affirmative action, toward racial preferences, the sexual revolution.
Feminism, so-called women's movement.
So this is the fairly wide reach of the counterculture.
They really wanted not just a different culture in the sense of different songs and different art and music and literature.
They wanted ultimately to create a moral shift in the country and I would argue they were successful in doing that.
The activists of the counterculture didn't like They certainly didn't like blue-collar Americans.
They didn't really like white people.
And they specifically didn't like America's past, and they didn't like American ideals.
So think of it.
If you want to think about who are the people who burned the American flag, their roots are right here in the counterculture.
Because if America has a terrible past of looting and oppression, it is unjust in the present.
And its ideals are bad.
That means that you don't even have anything to aspire to because the closer you get to your ideal, the worse of a society you become.
Kind of what we would think today of like a communist society, right?
The closer they get to the communist ideal, the more tyrannical, the more oppressive, the more totalitarian the society becomes.
Now, Reagan was very tough on these activists.
But he was tough mainly on their leadership.
So one of the first things he did was that he was on the Board of Regents of the university system in California, and he gets the Chancellor of Berkeley, Clark Kerr.
A complete loser.
Now, Clark Kerr was not so much of a rabid leftist, but he was a coward.
He was a weakling.
He was an invertebrate.
And so the activists would start screaming on the campus, and this guy would keep surrendering to them.
So he was a human jellyfish.
And Reagan's point is, get him out of there.
And so Reagan was able to motivate the Board of Regents, which was, by the way, fairly conservative.
But a lot of times these boards of regents are scared of the chancellor.
They're scared of the university.
They're scared of the professors.
And so they don't take action.
There probably are, for example, some conservatives on the boards of Ivy League schools.
But what do they do?
They're happy to be on the board.
It's prestigious.
They zip them out.
They don't say anything.
And so they allow themselves to become overrun.
And indeed, they are intimidated.
Reagan wasn't intimidated.
But, you know, with the students and with the student activists, Reagan was...
Not so much harsh as he was kind of witty and whimsical.
And he didn't take them very seriously, which actually annoyed them even more because these guys thought of themselves as like deep thinkers, philosophically minded.
At one campus meeting, a student comes up to Reagan and he says, listen.
You know, you're an old man.
You don't understand young people.
And Reagan goes, well, why not?
And the student says, you grew up in a different world.
Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers.
And Reagan goes, you're right.
It's true we didn't have those things when we were young.
We invented all of them.
So this is Reagan like in one cool...
Expression, just absolutely leveling this kid.
But he does it in such an easygoing way that he kind of moves on with a chuckle.
The activists would often take Reagan on, and they'd bring these big signs like, make love, not war.
Reagan's comment on that was, he'd say, well, I'm not sure you people can do much of either.
One of the demonstrators says to Reagan, he starts insulting Reagan's appearance.
And Reagan basically says of the guy that he has a haircut like Tarzan, walks like Jane, smells like cheetah.
Very Reagan, very old school kind of joke.
The militants tell Reagan, you know, if you keep this up, there's going to be a bloodbath.
Reagan says, before we have the bloodbath, why don't we all take a bath?
So this is, again, Reagan diffusing the situation, not taking these people seriously.
At one point, Reagan was heading to a meeting, and a bunch of the activists surrounded him, and they were kind of giving the silent treatment.
Like, they would just not say a word.
They just stand there in silence.
And so Reagan walks right by them, and he surveys all these silent activists.
And then he puts his finger up to his lips, and he basically goes, shh.
So, again, very Reagan.
Mocking their tactic and, in fact, diffusing it by doing that.
And then, of course, there's the famous incident of the student who comes to Reagan.
He's sitting inside the gubernatorial limousine and the student holds up the sign basically saying, we are the future.
And then Reagan scribbles on a piece of paper, holds up his reply.
It goes, I'll sell my bonds.
Meaning, I'm not going to invest in any future that you are in charge of.
So, what we learned from this is Reagan is treating these guys as spoiled children, pampered brats, people who shouldn't be given really any kind of moral authority because they haven't done anything with their life, they haven't accomplished anything, and yet they have this kind of overweening arrogance.
In May 1967, Reagan had a debate.
Most people don't know this, and I've never seen this debate on YouTube or any of social media.
Reagan debated RFK, Robert F. Kennedy.
Not RFK Jr., obviously, but RFK, the dad.
And the issue was the Vietnam War.
Now, RFK came in basically thinking, you know, I'm a prize fighter.
I'm like the Mike Tyson of debates.
And, of course, my RFK thought he had an easy job with Reagan.
But it turned out that Reagan was extremely effective in the debate.
And there were some radicals in the audience, but Reagan kind of, you know, got them to...
To back off.
And evidently, Senator Ted Kennedy later quoted his brother, RFK, basically saying, hey, this guy is the toughest debater that I have gone up against.
So this gives you an idea that Reagan, even though people said of him, oh, he's a former actor, oh, this is a guy who sort of doesn't have the same political credentials.
Certainly, as a member of the Kennedy family, let's remember that, you know, John F. Kennedy had been president.
RFK had been the attorney general.
So this was a family with a lot of political pedigree.
Didn't matter.
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