All Episodes
Previous Next
May 22, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:57
THE GOOD IMMIGRANTS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1089
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, I'm going to argue that the left's reaction to a few dozen white South African refugees coming to America tells you everything you need to know about their conception of a, quote, good immigrant.
I'm actually going to dive a bit into the history of South Africa, show how that country has descended into violence and chaos.
I'm also going to offer some insights into the humor and mind You've heard me talking a lot about the Juvent micro-impact platform these last few months and how Debbie and
I have made it a part of our daily lives.
But let me tell you why we're sticking with it.
It's more than just a pain solution.
It's an investment in your future.
Juvent is FDA registered.
It's designed to safely support your bones, joints, and overall mobility, all in just 10 to 20 minutes a day from the comfort of your home.
If you've been around, you've heard me list all kinds of incredible benefits.
You'll notice once you start using the Juvent platform, but better balance, improved posture, reduced inflammation.
These are a few more that I haven't...
All things that are critical as we age.
Forget the shake plates.
This is a smarter, safer technology.
There's a six-week risk-free trial, financing options, and a $300 discount with code Dinesh at checkout.
Go to juvent.com.
Give yourself the gift of real, lasting health.
Juvent will help you keep up with the people and activities that you love the most.
Go to juvent.com slash Dinesh.
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.
Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
A few days ago, we saw the remarkable sight of some 60 or so South Africans, white South Africans, come as refugees to this country, and they were granted asylum.
Now, they didn't come in the normal way, which is to say they didn't come by crashing over the border.
They didn't come in some sneaky way where they show up and demand asylum.
They came on a chartered plane from Johannesburg.
And so right away you knew there was something different about these refugees.
And the left immediately went into a kind of hysteria.
First of all, the hysteria was remarkable for a couple of reasons.
One is that part of the hysteria was over the fact that they're white.
So the idea was that white immigrants or white refugees are not acceptable.
Even though there are only 60 of them.
And apparently the black and brown refugees or purported refugees are acceptable even though there are hundreds of thousands and actually more accurately millions of them.
You get the idea of who the left wants in this country, who the left considers to be a quote good immigrant.
You're a good immigrant if you're black or brown, if you come from Pakistan or Iraq or Honduras or Mexico, if you have sneaked your way in and then played the system by claiming persecution, even though there is no documented persecution at all.
And nevertheless, you get to stay in this country for often quite a long period of time until your so-called hearing.
And by then you have essentially disappeared into the population.
This is the system the left created.
It has protected.
It has carried out under Biden and Harris.
It would be going on full scale if it weren't for Trump.
And the left, in a way, revealed that it's not for migrants.
It's not for outsiders.
In some ways, what the 60 South Africans have taught us is that the rules have to be changed.
The attitude is completely different if you are white and you are fleeing South Africa as opposed to, say, fleeing Mexico or Iraq or some other country.
Now, the South Africans get here.
They're farmers.
And Trump says that they were victims of a kind of genocide occurring in South Africa.
This is a theme, by the way, that's also been echoed by Elon Musk.
And this has generated a spate of articles, including one I'm looking at here from the BBC.
This is sort of predictably left-wing.
Is there a genocide of white South Africans?
And adopting the sort of rather literal definition of genocide, mass killing, the BBC, I think, is able to effectively argue no.
They say that, look, there hasn't been any kind of mass killing of this sort.
They say, yeah, we admit.
That there have been attacks on these white farmers, but these attacks have been isolated cases.
And therefore, we conclude that the charge of genocide is false.
This has been, of course, echoed by the South African black leadership, which, by the way, traces its roots to the African National Congress.
Cyril Ramphosa, who's the prime minister, so it was basically like, this myth of genocide, no one says in South Africa there's a genocide.
And even though the situation in reality is somewhat more complex, You've got a prominent politician, Malema, who leads chants of kill the boar.
You have had a series of attacks, not just one or two, not just even a half dozen.
Apparently, there have been murders.
Of several hundred, and some would argue several thousand, of white farmers and also other whites in South Africa.
Now, the white population is something like 60,000.
But hey, if you're talking about even, let's say, 1,000 murders out of 60,000, that is not, in fact, a small number.
That is a very high murder rate.
And we're talking here about black-on-white crimes.
We also have a country, South Africa, that has discriminatory laws that allow for the confiscation of land.
They allow for the deprivation of rights.
They allow for essentially blacks to be first-class citizens and whites to be second-class citizens.
And so when people study genocide, they talk about the stages of genocide, including the preparatory stages.
Genocide doesn't just occur where people go, oh, let's go kill off a bunch of people.
No.
Usually what happens is you start by kind of demonizing these people.
And then you decide, you know, let's just follow the pattern that we've seen in places like Germany.
You have the Nuremberg Laws.
Jews have got to wear the Star of David.
And then you have the Kristallnacht, where you raid the Jewish shops.
And the incident appears isolated.
It's just Kristallnacht, the night, one night.
But then this becomes a more regular occurrence.
And eventually these things are systematized.
So the point is not, are we at full-blown genocide?
I would say we are not.
But the question is, are we on the stage toward that?
And when you have people chanting, kill the boar.
Now, boar, the word is...
Dutch.
It means farmer.
And we need to talk a little bit here about the history of South Africa because...
What the African National Congress and Cyril Ramposa, the Prime Minister, say is, hey, we're trying to rectify the crimes of the past.
So let's look at what these crimes are.
What you have in South Africa is populations that have moved into the region.
It's commonly believed that the whites kind of came as outside settlers, the English, the Dutch, and that the blacks are all native to South Africa.
I want to start by pointing out that this is not true.
The Bantu, who are the leaders of South Africa now, the Bantu tribesmen, are not native to South Africa.
They, in fact, came to South Africa from the Congo.
And so, let's look at it.
The whites came to South Africa really in two waves.
There were the British or English whites.
Many of those people have already left South Africa.
But the people who have stayed are the people who came much earlier, and these are the Afrikaans.
Now, the Afrikaans, some of them are Dutch, some of them are French, some of them are German.
The predominantly Dutch, and they speak Afrikaans, which is a kind of slang or spin-off of the Dutch.
The word boar means farmer.
And so the boars were the Dutch settlers.
Now the Dutch settlers came about 400 years ago to Africa.
And this raises really a very profound question.
Who sort of belongs where in the world?
Because if you've moved to a country 400 years ago, aren't you in some sense as native to that country as anyone else?
I mean, would anybody go to Australia and say that the whites who moved to Australia...
Several hundred years ago don't really belong in Australia.
They should somehow get out.
Well, if the Boer should get out of South Africa and go back to Holland, then the Bantu should get out of South Africa and go back to the Congo.
So yet nobody seems to demand that.
So there's a certain type of peculiar historical amnesia going on here.
Apartheid, of course, was grossly unjust.
But grossly unjust in the sense that segregation was grossly unjust.
Because what the ruling Afrikaners did, this is going back to the 1940s, 50s.
Now, some people think, by the way, that apartheid lasted in South Africa for like hundreds of years.
No.
Apartheid started in about 1948 and ended in 1994.
So it lasted about five decades.
And during this time, what the Afrikaners did is they basically said that there should be separate development of each of the ethnic groups or racial groups.
Not all that different, by the way, from segregation in the American South.
There were certain regions, they were called Bantustans, given to each of the tribes.
And the idea was let everybody cultivate their own.
You grow your own crops, we'll grow our own crops.
Now, there was an implied inferiority of the black population, and that really can't be denied.
But it is also true that the white settlers in South Africa, or the longtime settlers, the English and the Dutch, We're able to create very prosperous regions of the country, and ultimately even a prosperous country.
And that's the country that was taken over by Mandela and the blacks when apartheid collapsed and you had the first black majority government in South Africa.
Now, here is the problem at the heart of the matter, and that is this.
We keep hearing, for example, that whites...
Although 4% or 5% of the population own 70% of the land in South Africa.
This, by the way, is completely false.
Whites who are 4% to 5% of the population own 70% of the farmland.
And how do you get, quote, farmland?
And the answer is, there's no designation that comes out of the sky and makes something into farmland.
The reason that the whites own so much farmland is they have cultivated that land.
They have sown crops.
They have enclosed it.
They are taking the fruit of it.
They have cultivated it.
So they are farmers, and this is their land.
It's not because there isn't other land in South Africa.
There's plenty of other land, but it hasn't been cultivated.
And so here's the point, and I'm here quoting a...
A property rights expert, Wanjiro Najoya, of African descent, she knows this region very well.
There's plenty of land in South Africa just waiting for the Bantus to cultivate it and have as many farms as they want, but that's too much hard work.
They prefer to steal the farms already cultivated by the boars, and they just passed a new law empowering them to seize the farms.
Not only that, but I see this interesting tidbit from the Daily Mail.
I'm reading the headline.
Black farmers in South Africa cash in by selling the land given to them by the government back to the whites who originally owned the farms.
So this is, I would call it, the lazy man's approach.
And that is that they take the farm forcibly from some white guy.
They then give it to a black guy.
And they say to the black guy, hey, listen, it's not your farm.
You can cultivate it.
The black guy goes, why do I need to cultivate it?
Why do I need to work at all?
Let me go back to the original white guy from whom the farm was confiscated, and I'll sell it to him.
So what is this?
This is nothing more than a forcible monetary transfer from the white farmer to the black guy, who is, by the way, not learning the art of farming, is not getting into farming, is not producing any kind of...
So what we're dealing with here, ultimately, I think, is that you have a...
You have a class of blacks that now feels, and by the way, this is not entirely unfamiliar.
This will strike a familiar chord, feels that South Africa owes us a living.
I think, unfortunately, there are many people in this country who similarly think, hey, listen, I'm a victim.
My ancestors were victims of slavery and segregation.
America owes me a living.
So this is not a matter of extending opportunity.
This is not a matter of creating new pathways to work or entrepreneurship.
This is nothing more than just give it to me.
You owe me.
I'm an historical victim.
So there's actually a rather eerie parallel between what's going on in South Africa and the United States.
And this is probably why the left, which takes one side of that debate over here, takes exactly the same side of that debate in South Africa.
There's a certain rhetorical consistency because just as the left supports...
Lawlessness, laziness, law-breaking in this country without consequences.
The only people the left wants to arrest are people who went to the Capitol for January 6th.
The only immigrants that the left is against are white South Africans coming in on a chartered plane from Johannesburg.
But the left has their own favorite migrants, their own favorite law-breakers.
Now, the question here, I think, is simply this.
And it is a question, sometimes when this topic is raised, people think, well, what are you saying, Dinesh?
I mean, doesn't this echo the old suspicion that blacks are inferior?
This is not what I'm saying in any respect.
I've written, by the way, about this topic of race in my book, The End of Racism, in some detail.
My argument is just this, and that is that sometimes as a result of oppression, But also as a result of resistance to oppression, groups develop a certain type of a culture.
And what is a culture?
Nothing more than a kind of aggregate or ensemble of habits, tendencies, collective behaviors.
And it is that culture that is often critical in whether a group achieves success or endures failure.
So if you look at groups that are successful all over the world...
They have certain shared cultural attributes.
They tend to value education.
They tend to value a study, knowledge of technology.
They tend to value entrepreneurship.
They are frugal.
They value savings.
They engage in self-help.
What we sometimes call pulling yourself up from your bootstraps.
So they do all these things.
And whether it's the Parsis in India and the overseas Chinese in Malaysia, whether it's the Jews, whether it's the Mormons, these are groups that have...
Per capita income is much higher than the average, and this is how they get it.
They have common traits.
They obviously don't have a common history.
And similarly, when you look at groups that fail all over the world, they have the opposite traits, which is to say they don't value education.
They depreciate it.
They mock it.
They value a certain type of swagger over actual studying.
They don't like geeks in their culture at all.
They torment them.
They try to force them not to become geeks.
They become more like gangsters.
And they go on and you just go down the list.
They don't value entrepreneurship.
They never create any businesses.
Even if you give one to them, they either destroy it or they are looking for the quickest way to sell it, cash out, and then spend the money.
They're not frugal.
They don't value technology per se.
Sometimes they'll live with technology, but they want the technology to be sort of deposited in their lap and use it as a form of passive entertainment, not as a mechanism to advance yourself in life.
So the reasons why the Bantu in South Africa are not doing well...
Is because this is their culture.
These are their habits.
They're looking to their salvation solely to the white man.
And that is, alas, a familiar pattern in other parts of the world, including ours.
In the Soviet Union, totalitarianism came with gulags, secret police, and brute force.
But in the West, it looks different.
It's soft.
It's subtle.
It comes cloaked in compassion and compliance.
Live Not By Lies by Angel Studios is a new docu-series.
It exposes how this soft totalitarianism is already taking root in America and beyond.
Based on Rod Dreher's best-selling book, the series shares the testimonies of men and women who lived through communist regimes and now see disturbing parallels in today's world.
They warn of the dangers of conformity, Live Not By Lies is required viewing and only available on Angel Guild.
Join today by visiting angel.com slash Dinesh and stream Live Not By Lies along with hundreds of other films and shows.
That's angel.com slash Dinesh.
Dinesh.
As you know, our friend Mike Lindell has a passion to help everyone get the best sleep of your life.
He didn't just stop by simply creating the best pillow.
Mike created the best bedsheets ever.
They look and feel great, which means an even better night's sleep for me, which is crucial for my busy schedule.
And Mike is offering the best deal on his Giza Dream bedsheets, any size, any color, just $49.98.
Wow, that's right.
You can even get Queens, Kings, Split Kings, and Cal Kings, any size.
Any color, just $49.98.
Order now because when they're gone, they're gone.
Also, for a limited time, when your order is over $100, you get $100 in free digital gifts.
Call 800-876-0227.
The number again, 800-876-0227.
Or you can go to MyPillow.com.
You need to use the promo code Dinesh.
You get the amazing offer of $49.98 on the Giza Dream Sheets.
Any size, any color.
Guys, our topic for this next segment is one that I haven't really addressed on the podcast, but I've got a special guest, Marty O'Donnell.
He's host of The Marty O'Donnell Show.
He's an American composer, audio director, sound designer, best known for his work with the video game developer Bungie.
He's a composer for various video games, including the Halo series and Destiny.
He has a background in film and TV music.
He founded Total Audio, a Chicago-based music and sound company.
He's also running for Congress in Nevada.
And as I mentioned, he's host of the Marty O'Donnell Show.
You can follow him on x at Marty, M-A-R-T-Y, The Elder.
Marty, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
This is a very varied and interesting background you have.
You also have specialized knowledge in a topic that I confess I know little or nothing about.
So you're here to educate us.
Let me start by just asking you about the video game industry.
I understand it is downright huge.
Every now and then we'll meet someone, I think.
I think we met someone a few months ago and she's like, all that my husband does is play video games.
And so one way to look at that is, oh, your husband's a bum.
But another way to look at it is, hey, there must be something really appealing about these video games.
So tell us what is appealing about these video games and how big is the industry?
Well, first of all, Dinesh, thanks so much for having me on your show.
I love the fact that you have an apostrophe in your last name, which means you're Irish, right?
Is that how that works?
Well, sort of.
The last name is actually Portuguese, and it reflects the fact that the Portuguese had colonies in India, and they converted my ancestors, who then took a Christian, i.e.
a Portuguese last name.
So that's the little peculiar history of my last name.
Well, what I like about it, though, is that you and I probably have the same problem with computers when we put our name in and computers reject our apostrophe constantly.
And we're listed in three different places every time you go someplace officially.
I always felt like it was some sort of discrimination against Irish people.
But apparently...
Portuguese slash Indian also have the problem.
Well, you know, in practice, Marty, I've dealt with that problem by eliminating the apostrophe.
Because you're right, I would check into a hotel and they're like, we don't have anyone like that checked in.
I was like, what?
So rather than go roaming down the street looking for a new place to stay, I figured I may as well dump the apostrophe.
Yeah.
All right, back to video games.
Should I be taking this up or not?
You should take it up, actually.
You know, I'm interested.
Speaking about, we'll talk about the Congress thing eventually, but I just was right in front of your son-in-law's, Brandon Gill's office the other day.
I was in Washington, D.C., and he's got a really cool welcome mat out in front there, and I was thinking about you.
So I'm thinking he's probably in the right demographic to have played my video games.
I'll have to find out from him if I ever meet him.
Yeah, video games have been, Absolutely huge.
It's a huge business.
I've seen people say that it's bigger than television and film.
I don't know how they measure those things, but it is certainly one of the major entertainment industries.
It's come of age.
And it, you know, it only comes of age because it's compelling.
There's something about it that's more compelling than simply, you know, shooting pixels on a screen or, you know, playing ballgame.
Bejeweled or whatever.
Angry Birds.
Actually, there are parts of video games, whole genres of video games that tell very deep, complex, interesting stories.
And those are the ones I'm most interested in.
The ones that feel like you're playing a game like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars and something like that.
So they're very compelling.
And what you're saying is, are you saying that the appeal of it is not merely that...
I mean, in a good movie, for example, imaginatively, you get to experience a different world, right?
If I was watching Lord of the Rings, I'm in Middle-earth, and there are all these kind of creatures and characters, and it's...
It's imaginatively irresistible, but I'm not participating in that world.
I'm merely observing it.
It's on a big screen.
Is it the case that in the video game you get to sort of jump into that world and you're a gladiator and you're a fighter alongside everybody else?
Absolutely.
That is the attraction, I think, for most people, especially in the story-driven, world-building kinds of video games where you're actually...
I would say you get to become the protagonist or at least a character within the world where you can really get close to the protagonist and the characters.
And you feel like you have an actual investment in the outcome of the story.
Even though we're behind the scenes sort of manipulating all the things that drive you forward in the story.
And we are the ones as developers who are controlling what happens in the story.
What we want...
For the player to feel like they're actually in it, they actually have agency in that world, and the decisions they make have an impact.
And how do you do that?
In other words, that's an interesting...
Because in some ways, what you're telling me is that you're...
I don't mean this analogy strictly, but you'll get what I'm saying.
You're God.
You're creating the universe, so to speak, right?
But you're giving the players free will so that they're able to go down this street instead of that and make this choice instead of that and take on this bad guy instead of that.
How do you nevertheless control the outcome?
I mean, I think this is a problem probably God has scratched his head over.
Well, you know, I don't want to ever sound sacrilegious, but we have, especially with some of the games that I've made, we've had this exact discussion.
We are essentially trying to create the illusion of free will, but still, you know...
Which is the denomination now?
I can't remember all of a sudden.
Oh, you know, it's the Calvinists.
They basically believe in predestination, even though you think you have agency, but alas, little did you realize that your mind is ultimately being caused by something external to it.
Yeah, I've always thought of it as, you know, the twin pillars of predestination and free will.
As humans, we see these pillars side by side in the earth.
But if we had vision to see them go to the top, They would eventually somehow cross.
I don't know exactly what that means.
I'm not a theologian, but I understand the idea that, especially as a game developer, that is a conundrum because we want the player to really believe that they have free will, but they really don't.
We are aware of where they are every second of every game.
So we know we can allow them to trigger certain events, and those are the only events we're going to allow.
So that's how we do it.
We make you feel like, hey, if you take a left turn down this road, you're going to have all this wonderful adventure.
If you take a right turn, you're going to a completely different place.
But eventually, we are going to bring you back to another nexus point.
And no matter which way you have gone originally, you're going to end up back at a place that we are going to be in control of.
And I think the best games are the ones who...
You know, are able to write the story and develop the gameplay, so the player is never really aware of those points.
Now, you mentioned earlier something that greatly intrigued me, the notion of a truly deep or complex plot, because, you know, we're all familiar with, I mean, I am, with extremely simple type of primitive games where...
That kind of layering is just utterly impossible.
I mean, I find complex plots only in literature, of course, to some degree in history.
But give me an example of a successful video game that has this kind of complex plot.
And let me know, what's complex about it?
Yeah.
Well, I'm not sure it would be...
Take a lot of hubris on my part to start to compare any video game I've worked on with the great books of literature or even great movies.
The difference is it's compelling because of the player agency in the story.
But for example, even all the way back in 2001, one of the first games that we released, the first game we released in the Halo series, as you were given who you were as a character, which is interesting because Every game, you can't just pop in and understand the world and the character immediately.
We have to introduce it to you.
So that's always an interesting thing.
We have to make you believe like you're there and you've been there, but there's always a little bit of like you have a memory problem.
So you can like, as you go forward, you're like, you know, you're refreshing your memory.
So that's actually one of the problems that just about all these story-driven games have to overcome.
So especially if we're making you believe that you're in the game, that it's you either jumping into an avatar that you're controlling, or if it's just you, it's you, Dinesh, in the game.
So there are games like Myst and Riven, which is a game genre that I worked on.
I worked on Riven, where actually you are you.
You were just you, and now we're bringing you into a new world.
So you're pretending to be in this world, and you're discovering and exploring.
And what ends up happening, for example, in Riven, it was an amazingly complex story about how these worlds were created, who the creators were, what the material and the sort of magic behind the creation of worlds were, and you end up meeting, you know, this...
A man who's in charge of things, and is he corrupt?
Is he not corrupt?
There's a woman who's in prison, and you feel like it's your job to find out if you can go release her from this prison, but you're not really sure if she's good or bad.
So, I mean, these are the kinds of things you can do.
And as long as you're aware that the player...
It doesn't have any extra insight.
They're just learning as they go, as they turn the next page.
That's what makes it interesting.
And in the first game we did Halo, we had a reversal that was really one of the best reversals I think I've ever worked on in a video game, where you had the first half of the game where you thought you knew who your enemies were, you knew what was going on, you knew what your mission was, and all of a sudden you're dropped into a new environment.
And you cannot figure out why it's suddenly horrific and horrifying, and it's not just this military sci-fi action thing.
You're in this creepy place, and you realize that there is a parasite that will destroy all of sentient life called the Flood, and suddenly everything changes.
You realize that the true enemy is not the enemy you think it's been, but it's this parasite called the Flood.
And that changes everything.
So, you know, it's amazing the kind of lore that can go into some of these games.
And the lore builds on itself.
We can drop little breadcrumbs of interesting stuff.
And sometimes the fans will take those things and develop them even more.
And then we as developers will say, well, that's a really interesting thought.
Maybe we should...
Spend more time on the next game developing that piece of lore.
So it's actually there.
And there are tons of, you know, World of Warcraft, just huge amounts of lore in there and complex stories.
So, you know, when you look at your teenager spending all this time playing video games and you think, wow, they're just doing, you know, mind-numbingly dumb things.
Give your teenagers a little bit more credit than that.
If I was a teenager and I was obsessed with reading Lord of the Rings, which I was, it was because the Lord of the Rings is worth reading.
Now, I'm not going to compare video games directly to Lord of the Rings, but there's got to be something there for these young people and even middle-aged people to be so obsessed with video games.
Yeah, I mean, what I'm getting from you is you're suggesting that this is not just a kind of fantasy escapism, nor is it just a way to pass time for people who have nothing better to do with their time.
But there may even be an educational or a brain sharpening and certainly an imagination widening component of these games that's drawing you into creative environments that you might I mean, that's not something that you would ordinarily come up with yourself, right?
We don't all spend time dreaming of new worlds created by magicians which have certain types of magical powers, let alone, you know, what exactly are the different forces within that world and what are the...
I mean, one thing that amazed me about Lord of the Rings was the fact that Tolkien just developed...
Now, he was a linguist and he could do this, but he develops an actual language for Middle-earth, which is just downright incredible.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's funny.
We attempted to do that in our universe of Halo.
We actually spent the time and had a linguist help us, but we ended up the main...
Forces that we, as the United Nations Space Command, this is a sci-fi future, so the humans were against the Covenant, and the Covenant was a group of alien races that had banded together to wipe out the humans.
We actually developed a language that the Covenant spoke, and that was a lot of fun, because as audio director, I had to direct actors.
Pronouncing words in this language we had developed.
So that is not an easy thing to do.
In the very first game, the way we made the aliens sound alien is I had them speak English forward and then we reversed it and pitched it down.
Fascinating.
Oh, yes.
But eventually the fans realized what we were doing.
So by the time we did Halo Reach, I believe, which is the...
The last game in the series that we worked on, we had actually written our own language, so that was pretty cool.
Marty, talk about the issue of wokeness in video games.
I just read an article, actually, Debbie gave me, it's called The Woke War in Forbes, and it is an attempt to sort of debunk the idea that wokeness is responsible for the...
Failure and anti-wokeness for the success of various video games.
It goes through these video games.
Basically, what it's trying to say is, no, the video game market is not particularly attentive to the issue of wokeness.
But hey, we have wokeness in academia.
We have it in Hollywood.
It would hardly surprise me that we have it in video games.
Is it a problem in the world of video games?
And what is the relationship of the kind of woke ideology to something that, you know, should be, I would...
Yes.
Well, unfortunately, the video game industry is not immune to the disease of wokeness.
And the first people who kind of realized it goes back into like 2013, 2014.
And that was when they were being called social justice warriors.
And there were some people who out in the fan community and YouTube and Twitterverse, which...
We're pointing out some things.
It seemed like, why are the journalists, quote-unquote, you know, independent journalists in the game field, why are they supporting these SJWs?
And why is this dialogue this way?
And why are these characters being made this way?
And why suddenly it felt like the games were preaching at you.
Just like television shows and movies, it was all happening simultaneously.
The difference is that the game community, some of these fans got together, and there was this thing called Gamergate, which is still hard to unpack and understand, but it was the first kind of mass movement against SJWs and the influence in the game industry.
And basically what happens is the fans say, well, we don't want to buy those games anymore.
So they just stop buying certain games and they stop trusting the media that is trying to push those things.
Just like we have, you know, across the board every place else.
To a certain extent, I almost think the Gamergate was one of the first, you know...
Fan movements or people movements that was going against the influence of the woke.
And it has come back again.
And there are some very, very huge failures.
I haven't read this article.
It's in Forbes.
I wonder, is that Paul Tassi?
Let me see.
Sure enough, Paul Tassi.
That's it.
Well, I would have issue with Paul Tassi.
I've had my own personal issues with some of his reporting over the years.
I would probably, if I read the article, if I was talking to him, I would probably debate him on some of the specifics in that article, most likely.
I don't know.
Well, yeah.
His theme is to debunk the idea that wokeness is really a factor.
Now, he has to admit that there are a bunch of woke...
I mean, it's so...
In the movie world, of course, if you look at Rotten Tomatoes, as you probably know, there are two separate ratings.
There's the critics rating, and this is all the professional people.
Inevitably, if it's a movie with a conservative message, it's going to get a low rating by the critics, but quite often a very high rating from the audience.
And right there it tells you that the customer is entirely different from the weird guy whose job it is to offer a rating.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think it's no different in the game industry other than the fact it's interesting.
I was talking to somebody, Jack Posobiec, if you know him.
Sure.
He's a gamer, and he was talking about how in the way the gamers, especially the...
They're not necessarily conservative gamers.
This is what I find interesting.
It's a big tent out there, people who like to play games.
And they're just people who want to be entertained, and they want to be compelled to enjoy what's happening.
They want to have fun.
They want to get deep into the characters and the lore.
And all of a sudden, in the middle of the game, they'll be...
Preach that about, you know, non-binary characters, and they'll see characters that are, you know, race-swapped for unknown reasons, even if it's a historical drama that's supposed to be, you know, accurate to history.
And now, trust me, some of those people can go overboard and overreact, and I think, you know, if Paul is talking about some of that and attributing the failure of games to, you know, the...
It's probably true, but what people are tired of and why they will decide not to buy a certain game and buy another game is they just really want to find the games that are not preaching at them and games that don't have some sort of, you know, propagandistic agenda.
And gamers, when it comes to outside the game itself and how do we...
Fight against those people who are trying to control things.
They see it as another game.
They see it as another boss to be defeated.
So they will figure out ways on Twitter and on YouTube and on Twitch to defeat the forces of evil.
That's how they see it.
They see the wokes as someone they need to defeat.
So there's a very interesting approach that the anti-wokes take in the game business.
Oh, I mean, that's fascinating.
The idea of converting the secret, like, woke people into a villain that's added to the panoply of villains in the game.
I mean, that's genius.
Guys, I've been talking a very interesting conversation with Marty O'Donnell.
He's host of the Marty O'Donnell Show.
He's running for Congress in Nevada.
So check him out.
Follow him on X at MartyTheElder.
Marty, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me, Dinesh.
It was a pleasure being here.
I saw a few days ago a post by Trump on Bruce Springsteen, and I was just reading through it and digesting it and chuckling about it.
I think the Trump social media posting is a real window into his mind and also into his sense of humor.
So I thought it'd be interesting to look at this post as a fairly typical Trumpian eruption.
And try to see what's going on in Trump's head, what he's doing rhetorically, politically, what irks him.
And it's just a window into Trump, I think, in a fascinating way.
So let's go through it here.
He goes, I see that highly overrated Bruce Springsteen.
We've got to stop right there.
Because here is Trump's...
Total obsession with ratings.
And how is this movie rated?
What do the critics say?
What does the audience say?
And here he starts off by noting that Bruce Springsteen, who's liked, but Trump's point is he's overrated, goes to a foreign country to speak badly about the president of the United States.
Trump is making the point here that, hey, it's bad enough that Bruce Springsteen is attacking me.
That'd be bad enough.
But he's going to a foreign country to do it.
And this, for Trump, is like an added offense.
It's like speaking bad about the family outside the home.
Then Trump goes, never liked him, never liked his music or his radical left politics.
Trump doesn't have to be negative across the board, right?
One could say, hey, listen, I don't like Springsteen's politics, but guess what?
He's a really talented musician, and he's a really interesting guy.
But Trump doesn't go that way.
By and large, for Trump, you're either on the side of the angels or you're not.
And here we go.
Never liked him.
He's not a very appealing guy.
Never liked his music.
His music always stunk.
Or his radical left politics.
So in other words, his politics is kind of in line.
If he's bad about politics, he's bad in music and he's also kind of a bad guy.
And then sure enough, Trump goes, and importantly, he's not a talented guy.
So again, Trump feels the need to like...
Depreciate Springsteen's talent.
I mean, Springsteen, whatever you say about the guy, has been a massively successful, has even tapped into a unique genre, this kind of working class cadence.
Now, a lot of people point out this guy isn't really working class.
It's all a big act.
He's a multi-multi-millionaire.
He doesn't live like that.
It's all a show.
But the point is, he has a very successful shtick.
You know, just like the actor Carol O 'Connor played Archie Bunker.
Was he really Archie Bunker?
No, but he had a very successful shtick playing that role.
Trump goes, he's just a pushy, obnoxious, all caps, jerk, who fervently supported crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent fool.
This is what I call the Trump backhand.
The post is really about Springsteen.
But Trump can't resist giving a backhand blow to Biden.
So it isn't just that Springsteen is for Biden, but he has to throw in Biden's a mentally incompetent fool and our worst ever president, all caps, who came close to destroying our country.
If I wasn't elected, it would have been, all caps, gone by now.
Now, why is Trump doing this?
I think he's doing really two things.
One is he's obviously...
He's obviously striking back at Biden, who has over the years had some very bad things to say about Trump, not to mention tried to put Trump in jail.
But he's also suggesting that Springsteen, his judgment is so bad that he embraces a guy who is going to take the country.
And by the way, I don't think Trump is exaggerating here.
I think he's stating the fact of the matter.
He's right about this.
If I wasn't elected, it would have been gone by now.
Sleepy Joe didn't have a clue as to what he was doing, but Springsteen is dumb as a rock, in quote marks.
So Trump is like, there's a phrase, dumb as a rock.
Springsteen is dumb as a rock, and couldn't see what was going on, or could he, which is even worse.
So this is one of those Trump meandering sentences where he's...
He's like struggling to figure out, is Springsteen so stupid that he just couldn't figure out that Joe Biden is an idiot?
Or, possibility number two, he did figure it out, but he still supports Biden, which, according to Trump, is even worse, meaning the idea here is that Springsteen isn't just ignorant.
He's genuinely evil because he wants to see the country go down.
He is knowingly supporting a guy who's driving the car off the cliff.
And then Trump's rhetoric takes its most Trumpian turn, which is often the case because Trump is sort of like a debater where he'll argue the point out with you.
But at some point, Trump has to go into, I would call it, full ad hominem mode.
And that's when he begins to attack your appearance, your size, your eating habits, your health.
Those kinds of things.
Now, I say this with a certain degree of neutrality because there are some people who think, and this is an old kind of maxim, ad hominem arguments are always bad.
No, that's actually not true.
Ad hominem arguments are sometimes bad, where they have no bearing on what is being discussed.
And so, for example, if you have a guy who's making arguments, let's just say, for example, against a tax cut, and I just say, you know, well, I can't agree with you because you're extremely ugly.
That would be a...
Gratuitous ad hominem argument because what does this have to do with his case regarding tax cuts?
He may be right, he may be wrong, but being ugly is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
But Trump seems to believe that, well, let me put it this way.
It's almost like in the old movies.
Where your character is shown on your face, right?
Remember in the old movies, if somebody was victimized by a crime, they always had a very innocent, appealing-looking face.
And the villain looked really scary.
Why?
Because the idea was that the moral character of the villain is written on his face.
So you don't have to look very far.
Even in the old Westerns, you'd have Lee Van Cleef, who kind of had a villain's face.
He was always the bad guy.
Why?
Because he looked frightening.
And so it was like, wow, you expect a bad guy to look like that.
And meanwhile, you have other guys like Jimmy Stewart, who has kind of almost a goofy appearance.
And he's the hero because the hero is supposed to be innocent.
The hero doesn't have this kind of cunning or this kind of diabolical mindset.
So here's Trump talking about Springsteen.
This dried out prune of a rocker.
And the word prune is in quote marks for reasons kind of unknown, but this dried out prune of a rocker.
So what's Trump going at here?
Well, you know what a prune is, right?
It's basically a dried grape.
So Trump is suggesting that Springsteen's skin is like a prune.
And then Trump, just in case you didn't get the message, goes into a parentheses.
His skin is all atrophied!
So here's a case where Trump is throwing in a further detail.
That his skin is, not just his skin is kind of dry, but it's atrophied.
It's like falling off.
That's the meaning of, atrophy means to disintegrate.
His skin is like, you can just, so the picture you're getting now is like from one of those horror movies where you have like some, you know, nuclear explosion when the hills had eyes and someone has skin just like peeling off their face.
So this dried out prune of a rocker, his skin is all atrophied, ought to...
Again, all caps, keep his mouth shut until he gets back to the country.
That's just standard fare.
Then we'll all see how it goes for him.
So here you have, again, you know, you can tell what's really annoying Trump is not Springsteen's skin.
It's the fact that this guy is mouthing off against Trump and probably against the USA, and he's doing it in some foreign country.
And Trump's real message is, you know, Shut up.
Stop doing that.
You know, zip it up.
Get back over here.
You know, you're trying to continue your rock career at, what, you know, 80 years old or how old is Springsteen, honey?
Obviously.
Probably close to 80, says Debbie.
So it's like, okay, look, you know, it's kind of impressive if you're able to pull that off at that age.
And obviously, if you've got people who don't mind the fact that you really can't sing anymore, but they're living in that old world.
Well, I went to a Springsteen concert in like 87, see, 75 years old.
You know, and so you want to relive.
There's a tendency on the part of people who are getting old to want to relive the best years of their lives.
And I think this is what keeps all these rockers in play.
It's not that they can actually sing.
In fact, it's rather embarrassing to hear some of them.
But nevertheless, it's sort of like it's an evocation.
It's like going back to a reunion.
It's an evocation of a younger version of yourself.
And it gives you a sense of being in that environment.
Hey, I listened to Springsteen when I was first a student at Baylor and this sort of thing.
And so here is Trump.
Who doesn't mind, by the way, any of that.
Trump actually is impressed by people who are entrepreneurs and can keep it going long past their prime.
▲
Export Selection