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June 3, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1096
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about this Glenn Greenwald scandal, but I'm also going to consider whether the latest terrorist attack in Denver is an indication that Islam is somehow incompatible with Western democracy.
William Wolfe, who's founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, joins me.
We're going to be talking about the liberal drift of the Southern Baptist Convention.
And also to document the influence of Soros on moving conservative churches to the left.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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Music Music I'd like to say a few words about this controversy that involves the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald.
You might be familiar with Greenwald.
He's actually a very good journalist.
He has also been a real champion of free speech.
Although he comes from the left, he has been an outspoken critic of political weaponization.
And he has paid a high price, particularly among his old friends on the left, for taking these stances.
So this is a brave guy.
He is also someone who is pro-Palestine, anti-Israel, and his anti-Israel position comes out of a larger disdain for the U.S. military.
He generally does not like U.S. military involvement or intervention abroad.
But he is pretty ferocious in his attacks on Netanyahu, on the Israeli government, and as he sees it, on the kind of U.S. being bedfellows with Israel.
Now, recently, it was exposed on social media that Glenn Greenwald, who is gay, that's not the part that was exposed, that was actually well-known.
But this rather damaging video which shows Greenwald, I mean, it's a little bit distasteful to even go into it, but he's wearing like a schoolgirl's outfit.
He's got his hands behind his back.
He's crawling on the floor.
He's wearing a kind of weird bib, which is a Palestinian flag, and he is like sucking on some man's toe.
I mean, the whole thing is a little bit hard to watch.
It's a little degrading.
It's a little humiliating.
And the controversy basically involves kind of Greenwald's stature as a credible and responsible journalist, given that you have, again, I think to say the fact that he's gay is putting
otherwise completely nude.
You've got people, you know, essentially human dogs with saddles on them that go around.
On all fours, you've got people being publicly whipped in the middle of the street while other people are watching.
These are kind of sadomasochistic type of rituals.
And there's a lot of just sheer degradation, vulgarity.
And so all of this is, in a way, it's caused a lot of people to say, you know, yuck.
Now, the defenders of Greenwald basically say, hey, listen, people's private lives are private.
Even if Greenwald posted this or filmed it, it has nothing to do with the work that he's been doing.
And I do think that we need to make a distinction between somebody's profession.
I mean, remember, this guy is not a gay rights activist.
He's not pushing the gay agenda.
He's not an LGBTQ guy.
a career trans advocate, none of that.
And so I'm tempted to kind of look the other way, but it is kind of hard to look the other way, in part because this stuff is so...
And not only that, but it's become, in a way, even worse.
because in defending himself, Glenn Greenwald initially put out a statement basically saying, you know, this is something private and this is something that should not be used against me.
But then he somehow got drawn into a...
So all of this kind of now, I think, increases the bad taste in your mouth.
Why?
Because if you have a guy He apparently, in some ways, put out this video.
Now, other people, maybe his critics got a hold of it, and they made it go viral.
That's why people are talking about it.
But when you become the issue in this way, you can say, listen, this has nothing to do with my work.
And some of you may find this repulsive, but I'm not asking you to do it or even to approve of it.
I'm just asking you to read my other work, which stands or falls on its own merits.
And I would be willing to go along with that to a point, but I say to a point because...
Essentially, what you're basically saying is, you know, yeah, I mean, I might have done this, but look at that guy.
He did something even worse.
And so he's pulling Trump into this for apparently no...
And I say this as someone who has not been reluctant on the podcast and elsewhere to talk about Trump, talk about the issue of character, the issue of characters discussed in my book, Vindicating Trump.
So anyway, all of this is a way of saying that I'm a little bit sort of less protective.
Now, let me turn to the attack in Colorado by this guy, Mohammed.
And we have some new reporting coming out of Egypt, of all places, that says that this guy is in fact a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood is known in Egypt as the Ikwan.
The Ikwan is simply a term for brotherhood.
These are the brothers, the members of the Ikwan.
And apparently in Egypt it has emerged that this guy has made a number of statements on his social media, presumably his social media in Egypt, in which he has liked, you know, hit the like button on a number of the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikwan pages.
And he has apparently repeatedly endorsed slogans coming out of Muslim Brotherhood activists saying, in effect, that Islam is the solution.
The Muslim Brotherhood has taken the view that the problems of our society are due, by and large, to moving away from Islam.
And so, whatever the problem, there's only one solution.
Islam.
Islam is the solution.
So that is, in fact, one of the kind of chief slogans of the Brotherhood.
Now, one could be a Muslim and believe that Islam is the solution in the same way that Hindus might believe Hinduism is the solution or Christians believe Jesus is the solution.
So there is some dispute about this, and I see some comment by...
She says, it's not really clear whether this guy is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or even really a super fan of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But what's interesting to me about this Egyptian kind of discussion and comment, and I'm here quoting from an editorial in an Egyptian paper called Al-Gumariya.
It says that the West should, quote, re-examine its hospitality to extremists.
So interestingly, these guys are basically saying what people like Laura Loomer are saying.
They're saying, well, you know, we might want to keep some of these people out of our country.
Don't let them in in the first place.
I mean, this guy came in as an illegal.
He eventually did get a visa, but he overstayed that visa.
He apparently applied for asylum but did not get asylum.
I don't know if he was denied or if the application was merely delayed.
In any event, it seems like more of these guys in the country leads to more terrorism, more attacks, more plots, more problems for the country.
Trump, by the way, is echoing this idea.
In fact, he writes recently, I think yesterday, on Truth Social, That the attack shows, quote, why the Muslim Brotherhood must stay banned and its sympathizers removed.
So this is an important assertion by Trump.
And it's one, if you remember, I have had people on the podcast.
Talking about the fact that the Trump kind of vetting system has allowed people who are sympathetic not just to Islam, but sympathetic to radical Islam.
People with connections to groups like CARE.
People with connections to other groups that are maybe even more closer in the terrorist orbit than CARE.
And yet these are guys being appointed to the Committee on Religious Freedom and the Committee on this and the Committee on that.
And Trump is basically saying, let's clean this out a little bit.
Now, Charlie Kirk made the observation on social media that Islam is incompatible.
With Western civilization and presumably with America, with the American Constitution.
And that's something I want to talk about briefly now because I think we can all agree that radical Islam is in fact incompatible with, well, it's incompatible with Christianity.
All Islam is incompatible with Christianity in the end.
It's incompatible with Western civilization.
It's incompatible with our constitution.
But is Islam in general incompatible?
I'm reluctant to say that it is, in part because I'm reluctant to take the view that our society somehow has to, in a sense, you could say, remove all Muslims from our society.
Let's remember there are other countries where Which are democracies.
The best example is, in fact, the largest Muslim country in the world, which, by the way, is not Saudi Arabia, and it's not Pakistan, and it's not even Turkey.
It is Indonesia, and it is a democracy, and people vote, and they have reasonable freedom of discussion and freedom of the press, and this is a Muslim-run society.
If you look at even some of the Muslim societies in the Middle East, places like the United Arab Emirates or some of the other Gulf kingdoms and places like Abu Dhabi and places like Dubai, but even places like Saudi Arabia, we have this view, some of us, and Debbie and I actually, we kind of sometimes butt heads on this.
It's not that our opinions are radically opposed, but they're a little dissimilar because Debbie thinks that the problem of radical Islam arises directly out of Islam itself, and therefore Islam is culpable.
And I say things like this.
I say, look, you know, even though you think, Debbie, that the Muslims all want to have a caliphate and they all want to have Sharia law, Why don't they do those things in the countries where they are in a position to do them?
Like, why doesn't Saudi Arabia have a caliphate?
How is it the case?
A good friend of mine from Dartmouth is a lawyer.
He has spent, like, the last 25 years as an attorney living in Saudi Arabia.
He works for an American firm over there.
I think they pay him very well, partly as a price for living there.
But nevertheless, the point being that this guy is a Christian.
They're not making him pay a special tax or submit somehow to Muslim authority.
He lives a pretty normal and free life in Saudi Arabia.
And there are plenty of people from all over the world who live in places like Bahrain and Jordan, Amman, Dubai.
And so these are not people under the thumb of any kind of radical Islam.
Even Saudi Arabia, which was the most kind of, you may say, religiously extreme.
Remember, this was a Bedouin society that came out of the desert.
And yet what's been happening over recent years is that they have one by one been sort of liberalizing, right?
Now women can now drive and...
And I'd go even further than that.
By and large, if you take, you know, let's look at the kind of MAGA agenda.
You find, to your surprise, that the MAGA agenda is more kind of fully implemented in some of these Muslim societies than it is in By and large, if you look at some of these Muslim societies, Number two, they are extremely tough on crime.
You don't have the kind of rampant criminality that has been encouraged by the Democrats but persists in our society.
They are not only not woke, they are ferociously anti-woke.
There's certainly no LGBTQ type of nonsense or propaganda that is permitted or tolerated.
They are by and large very much upholders of tradition and the family.
They believe in free enterprise.
They will often have very low rates of taxation.
They will have very low rates on capital gains.
They try to draw in as much as they can of foreign investment.
Just look at the ensemble of policies that are followed in these countries.
And by the way, Trump himself commented on that in his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, where he made the point that, look, a lot of these neoliberal and globalist organizations think that they are responsible for development around the world and development particularly in the great cities of the Middle East.
And he goes, no, they didn't do it.
Most of them just pocketed the money themselves.
They're in it for themselves.
They don't really do any good.
This skyline of Amman, you built that.
Skyline of Riyadh, you built that.
The policies that led to all this investment, to the fact that Saudi Arabia is now, for example, oddly enough, one of the leading forces in modern artificial intelligence.
Again, you did that.
So this is a way of giving a certain amount of credit.
I think where credit is due, but it all calls into question this idea that Now, that being said, there is also a lot on the other side.
The stuff that I've talked about on the podcast and others, my guests, have as well.
Jihadi networks to worry about.
The fact that sometimes even traditional Muslims who are not all that political in rich societies will end up giving money that goes to radical madrasas in Pakistan.
They're shaken down by the mullahs toward that end and so on.
So all of these things are in my mind as I think about Think about figures like this guy whom I mentioned yesterday, the fellow who's running for mayor of New York and actually giving Eric Adams a bit of a run for his money, because that guy, I don't think the problem is just that he's a Muslim.
I think the problem is that he is a, he's sort of like a Muslim Obama, by which I mean that he's a Muslim who tries to come across as a Muslim To a more dubious strain in Islam, which is to say in radical Islam.
And not only that, but one part of him is coming out of that perverse strain, if you will, in Islam.
And the other part of him is coming from the woke Marxist left.
That's why he's pushing, for example, for rent control in New York, because that's not coming out of Islam.
That's coming straight out of the Bernie Sanders.
And the left-wing progressive playbook.
So that combination, I think, is very toxic.
Is Islam compatible with democracy?
I suspect it is because we have Muslim democracies.
Is Islam compatible with Western civilization?
I think it's possible within Western civilization to have Muslims in our society, but these should be Muslims who by and large accept our laws, accept our constitution, accept our way of life, and really want to be a part of it.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast William Wolfe.
He's Executive Director of the Center for Baptist Leadership.
He's also the founder of that organization.
He's been part of the Southern Baptist Convention for over a decade.
And his background is he worked for members of Congress.
He worked at Heritage Action, the State Department, the Defense Department.
You can follow him on X at William underscore E underscore Wolf with an E at the end.
And the website is centerforbaptistleadership.org.
William, thank you for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
I want to talk to you about the Southern Baptist Convention, about which you know a lot, and certainly a lot more than me.
But I thought I'd begin by asking you about the Anglican theologian N.T. Wright.
Now, this is a revered figure, particularly in some of the Christian apologetic circles.
He wrote an important book on the resurrection of Jesus.
And yet recently, he's made a couple of controversial statements that, to be honest, kind of surprised me.
One of them was in a discussion on a podcast about abortion.
He goes, well, you know, this would not be ideal, but if you do have rape or incest or the health of the mother is gravely endangered, this might actually be a reasonable or a viable option.
and I'm very reluctant to say, like, they're not a Christian.
So the implication here appears to be that it is somehow Yes, I did see his comments on abortion, and they're deeply troubling.
Catch wind this morning of his comments on the resurrection and whether or not you can deny the bodily resurrection of Christ and still be considered a Christian.
That was also deeply troubling.
What we have here, Dinesh, is a compromise on two major issues of Christianity, one on ethics and one on essentially what we could call Christianity.
Doctrine proper.
The resurrection of Christ.
Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 dedicated a whole chapter of that epistle encouraging first century believers to hold fast to belief in the bodily resurrection, not only of themselves, but of Christ as well.
And so what we're seeing here is something actually we've seen happen in quite a few other cases of late, which is unbelief.
That's why the Bible encourages us so strongly to finish well.
And I mean, to be clear, it's not that N.T. Wright is saying that he does not believe in the bodily resurrection, but I think it's almost like an issue of collegiality, that where these guys kind of go weak.
They feel like, well, my friend thinks this, and we know he's been a theologian when we've been kind of in the same department or maybe in the same circles for so many years, and therefore it is out of the spirit of generosity that I'm kind of going to give him a pass on this one.
But I mean, it's almost like that is the insidious, quote, decency that is causing people to abandon, I mean, again.
With the resurrection, we're not talking about a peripheral issue of doctrine.
We're talking about something absolutely central, aren't we?
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And this is what we have to hold fast to as Christians, is that we do not develop our ethics nor our doctrine off of people's experiences in the case of the abortion.
Or off of people's opinions or our friendships, in the case of these theologians he's talking about.
We hold fast to the inspired and inerrant Word of God because of what it says, and we don't change it because of feelings or friendships.
William, let's talk about the Southern Baptist Convention and about the Baptist Church more generally.
It's been sort of one of the stalwart conservative churches.
And I mean conservative here, not so much in the political as in the theological sense.
And yet there appears in recent years to have been quite a bit of drift.
It's an evangelical magazine.
But again, Christianity Today was sort of one of the stalwart It was, I believe, Billy Graham had something to do with the founding of it, if not the founder himself.
And then you've got all these sort of politically ambiguous figures like David French, who come out of the church, but also appear to be patriots.
Now, do you think that a lot of this is specifically the result of Trump?
Maybe some of Trump's own checkered background?
Or do you think that this is something that's been brewing for a long time?
Well, I do believe that there has been a growing tendency to shift towards both political and theological liberalism within the Southern Baptist Convention.
And we've had leaders who have intentionally taken us in that direction.
Sometimes we call it a liberal drift, but that wouldn't be quite accurate because I think we've actually been steered intentionally towards more liberal directions.
And you're really right to point out the connection between the SBC and Christianity today, because one of the most...
And when he left the Southern Baptist Convention, where did he land?
He landed as the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today.
And so you see this overlapping network of individuals who are adopting a more progressive approach to Christianity.
And instead of leaving these conservative institutions where they're no longer in complete alignment, they're doing what leftists do, which is subvert the conservative Christianity.
And what would you say is their kind of tactic for doing that?
Is it the age old God is a God of love and therefore God Is it simply the fact that they are trying to say churches should be less involved in politics and therefore if you give that kind of counsel to a conservative church, you're de facto, of course, advancing the political agenda of the left.
So what are some of the...
Yeah, that's a great question.
And so back in the 50s and 60s and 70s, when the Southern Baptist Convention was going through, What was happening was people were taking away from God's word.
They were saying, we don't know if we can believe the book of Jonah was real.
We don't know if we can trust in the miracles of Jesus, the inerrancy of scripture.
They were taking away from it.
What this new generation of compromisers has done is they've been adding to God's word and fundamentally from a political perspective.
They're saying, on paper, I agree in inerrancy.
On paper, I hold conservative theological doctrine.
Donald Trump, well, that's a bridge too far.
Let's vote for Hillary Clinton instead.
We need to open our borders and let in mass amounts of migration and refugees because the Bible tells us to love our strangers.
Transgender pronouns as an act of pronoun hospitality because we're called to love our neighbors.
So they're sort of adding liberal, political, and socially acceptable schemes on top of Scripture.
And fundamentally, what that acid does is it erodes the theological foundations.
And as God's words reminds us, you should neither add to nor take away from Scripture.
One of the things I notice in the political sphere is that when you have these guys who are reliably on the right, think of people like Bill Kristol, for example, at the Weekly Standard and others, when they started to defect away, and it could be that it started off that Trump was way too much for them to swallow,
they wanted somebody far more like Reagan or somebody maybe temperamentally of a different mold, but I notice that pretty soon they They end up not only with new allies, they start appearing regularly on MSNBC, on CNN, but you suddenly realize that liberal billionaires are pumping money into their non-profit organizations and their meeting groups and paying them to concoct ads for the Democratic Party.
In other words, there is a rather lucrative infrastructure that is set up to encourage this kind of defection and patronize it.
Now, my question is, is something similar happening in and around the Southern Baptist Convention and might that familiar name of George Soros have something to do with it?
Who wouldn't?
That is exactly right.
George Soros and other progressive billionaires, including Pierre Omidyar, who funded the Democracy Fund, and the Fetzer Institute as well, which is essentially a new age cult.
Together, they all...
Climate change, LGBTQ issues.
And they couched a lot of it under general promoting good democracy.
Well, we're going to be good democracy citizens by embracing this leftist agenda.
And we have seen documentation, and Megan Basham does an excellent job of this in her book, Shepherds for Sale, showing that George Soros'Open Societies Fund started the National Immigration Forum, which started the Evangelical Immigration Table, which our Southern Baptist Ethics arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, formerly run by Russell Moore, now run by his disciple, Brent Leatherwood, works lock, hand, and glove.
with lockstep with to advance an open borders amnesty agenda on on Southern Baptist.
So yes, the money, always follow the money.
And do you think, William, that in the case, for example, just of the example you just gave, it seems to me what you're saying is it's not a case where the people who are doing this are blind or naive or they have no clue what's going on and they are, We need to develop a position on climate change.
It is rather that they are activists on the left already, and what they are trying to do is move the kind of the larger elephant, which is the SBC.
Yeah, that's correct.
The elite class, and I know you see this everywhere else, the elite class in conservatism, in the GOP, is more liberal than the base.
They often work at odds against the base.
And that's happened in the church too.
So we've had Christian leaders who have been taken in by more progressive social justice leaning commitments.
And instead of, again, moving on to find a home in a more liberal denomination, they have partnered with progressive organizations to try to change the opinions of the conservative base that they represent.
And are these guys making any headway with, you would say, conservative pastors?
In other words, is it the case that you have conservative pastors who are either now more liberal in their theological and political views, or maybe even just...
And so, for example, I give sermons all year, but I never mention hell.
Or I don't talk about the kind of doctrines that are now somehow seen as controversial or divisive.
Or I just don't bring up political issues at all, even though they're really rather relevant to the lives of the people who are in the pew.
Yeah, well, so George Soros documents show Open Society board members boasting that they did manage to influence Southern Baptists to be more progressive.
On immigration, and they did have success moving pastors in particular.
In fact, this has been a target and a tactic of Marxists for decades in their long march through the institutions to move pastors to support their Marxist causes, whether economic or cultural Marxism.
But I will point out, over the last decade, even as they have had success with progressive pastors moving them to the left, I'm seeing sort of a reaction.
I'm seeing some pastors wake up and say, you know what?
Either Christ is Lord of everything, or he is Lord of nothing.
And if he is Lord of everything, that includes politics, and we're going to speak to politics from our pulpits, even if Christianity today doesn't want me to.
Wouldn't you also say, William, I mean, I sense, and this is not even so much in particularly the Baptist church, but somewhat more generally, that young people and particularly young men are Kind of feel the chill wind of, I would call it, theological and political namby-pambyism that has been kind of foisted on them, the effeminization of the church, the effeminization of our culture.
And they've taken that as a kind of affront, a political affront, but maybe even in some senses a moral affront.
And we're seeing an increasing conservatism, both political and theological, from young men in particular.
Well, I believe that is true.
I mean, if you've been a young man in America over the last decade, and I would say particularly a young white man, you have had to deal with just ridiculous amounts of wokeness, DEI, CRT initiatives through your HR programs in the corporate workforce.
Why would you want to then come to church and essentially get...
That's going to cause a reaction.
I think we've seen that.
So what young men are yearning for, young people in particular are yearning for, is the unadulterated truth of God's word grounded in the historic Christian tradition that doesn't tell them that they have to sacrifice their country or give up power just because of the skin color that they were born with.
And so the churches that are, I think, standing on God's word will grow, particularly with the young members.
And these liberal churches, I think, will ultimately sort of have their last gap.
We've seen massive erosion of the numbers of the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Anglicans.
As these churches drifted to the left, the mainline churches lost members.
They grew smaller and smaller.
By contrast, the evangelical and perhaps even the fundamentalist churches were growing, were booming.
And so it's almost like that lesson has somehow not sunk in that If you want a reason to be a Christian, you're going to want the real thing and not some kind of female bishop in a kind of LGBTQ costume.
Well, you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
We have seen the hard proof that churches that abandon the historic Orthodox Christian faith in favor of some baptized form of secular progressivism and social justice activism shrivel up and die.
And it's no surprise because they've abandoned the life source that keeps a church going, the gospel of Jesus Christ, and not just the spiritual gospel of Christ, but the real world implications of what it means to obey everything that Jesus has commanded us, including things like, "Thou shall not murder," i.e.
Therefore, we're not going to support so-called same-sex marriage or transgenderism.
It all goes together.
And so the path to growth, if that's what you're looking for, and we do want to see the gospel expand, is the same as it's been for 2,000 years.
Hold fast to the faith once for all, delivered to the saints.
Good stuff, William.
Thank you for joining me.
Guys, I've been talking to William Wolfe, Executive Director, founder as well of the Center for Baptist Leadership, the website centerforbaptistleadership.org.
Follow him on X at William underscore E underscore Wolfe.
William, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me on.
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which was partly in an approach to monetary policy called monetarism and partly in supply-side economics, which had its roots in the thinking of an economist named Arthur Laffer.
Now, Laffer's work was publicized by others In addition to himself, Jude Wineski at the Wall Street Journal, the Congressman Jack Kemp, and Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal.
But Laffer was sort of the theoretician, and part of Laffer's ingenuity was to be able to state a problem in a very simple way, and then you understood something very profound about government and about taxes out of that simple, Thought experiment.
So many people have heard about the Laffer curve, and I'm not going to draw the Laffer curve for you, but I'm going to give you its kind of intellectual foundation.
What we're going to do is we're going to think about the amount of revenue that is going to come into the government based upon what the tax rate is.
So let's start with a question.
What is the amount of revenue that the U.S. government would take in if the tax rate were 0%?
Well, if you think about it, the answer is kind of obvious.
If the tax rate is zero, the government would take in no revenue at all.
Why?
Because however much revenue is produced, however much income is produced, people don't pay any taxes, and so the government gets nothing.
Okay, that is like Obviousology.
But now we consider a second example that is not quite so obvious.
How much revenue will the government take in if the tax rate is 100%?
You might be tempted to answer, well, the government will then take in all the money that everybody makes because the tax rate is 100% and they have to make money and then they just turn it in.
But Laffer says, and he's right, that's the wrong answer.
The correct answer is the same as if the tax rate was 0%.
Because if the tax rate were 100%, nobody would work.
Nobody would produce anything.
Why?
Because you don't get to keep any of it.
You work hard, you make it, and then you turn it over to the government.
And so under a tax rate of 100%, the amount of revenues, tax revenues taken in by the government, would be zero, would be exactly the same as if the tax rate were 0%.
Now, what is the significance of this example?
Well, by and large, what it shows is that it is true that as you tax people more and more, the amount of revenue the government takes tends to go up, right?
If the tax rate is 10%, you're going to take in more revenue than if it's 5%, and if it's 15%, you're going to take in more than if it's 10%.
But Laffer's point is that at some point, That curve, if you will, turns the other way.
Why?
Because you have imposed so much taxation on the marginal dollar.
The marginal dollar is the last dollar earned, that the guy who's doing the work goes, well, it's not even in my interest to earn that dollar, because you're taking so much of it that the effort to earn it is not worth the minimal amount that I get to keep.
And so we learn from Laffer here that even if you are looking at things solely from the point of view of tax revenues, you don't even care about the entrepreneur, you don't care about his welfare, you just care about how much revenue is the government taking in, even by that measure, says Laffer.
You want to have a tax rate that is not so confiscatory that it discourages people from producing so much that you actually end up getting less revenues.
And so, by and large, the insight of the supply-siders was, let's keep the tax rate reasonable.
Now, the tax rate at the time that Reagan came into office, this is a little bit hard to believe.
And in fact, it is a very good proof that Reaganism was truly a revolution.
Not an evolution, but a revolution.
The top marginal tax rate when Reagan came in was 70%.
70%.
Now, that rate is so outrageous that today we wouldn't even dream of paying that kind of a rate.
No Democrat that I know of, not AOC, not Maxine Waters, has come out in favor of a rate that high.
By and large, Democrats are talking about taking the 38% or 39% rate, increasing it maybe to 40%, 41%.
But they're not going to go back up to 70%.
Why?
Because it's too much.
So Reagan was able to bring down, he didn't bring it all down in one shot, but in two shots, in the 81 tax bill and the 86 tax bill, which came later, we'll talk more about that later, by and large, the top tax rate came down from 70% to 28%.
Now, as you know, it's not 28% now.
The top rate has moved up to the high 30s, but it still is a long way from 70%.
And why do I say that I'm talking about the marginal tax rate?
Because as you probably know, when you look at the tax table, let's say, for example, that you earn...
Well, your tax rate is not a flat rate applied against that full amount.
Typically what happens is you will pay nothing on the bottom tier of your income, so maybe nothing on the first $30,000 or first $20,000.
Then you're going to pay 10% on the next bracket, and then 15% on the next bracket, and then 25% on the next bracket.
So in other words, our tax brackets ratchet up as your income goes up.
And so the question you're asking is, what is the rate I'm paying on the last dollar that I earn?
Because that's the rate that determines how hard you're going to work, if at all, to earn that final.
So this, I hope, has been an admittedly all-too-brief introduction to supply-side economics.
To recap, Reagan was faced with two kind of alternate systems, both conservative, monetarism on the one hand, supply-side economics on the other.
And Reagan goes, I'll take both.
I'll take both.
A lot of the monitorists and the supply-siders weren't exactly too happy about this.
So the monitorists were people who followed Milton Friedman.
The supply-siders followed Laffer, but they also followed a prominent economist at Columbia University.
I think this is a guy who won the Nobel Prize, Robert Mundell.
And the supply citers and the monitorists thought that their remedies...
The monetarists were talking about tightening the money supply to defeat inflation.
That was their goal.
There's too much money in the economy.
The government has printed way too much money.
Inflation is way too high.
inflation had galloped through the 1970s, and it was In fact, Reagan conquered inflation so well that we didn't even really hear the word inflation very much at all throughout the 1990s, even in the 2000s, all the way until about 2010, when inflation really became kind of a thing, as they say again.
The supply-siders wanted economic growth.
They wanted to kind of kickstart the economy.
They were concerned.
Remember when I mentioned earlier stagflation?
So if stagflation is stagnant growth plus inflation, you could say that the supply-siders wanted to tackle the first part, the stag part, the stagnation part, and the monetarists wanted to tackle the second part, the inflation, i.e.
the inflation part.
But again, The supply-siders thought, if we get the economy going, there might be a lot of inflation.
We don't really want to worry about that.
Our most important priority is growth.
And the monitor has said, no, it's important.
Certainly, first and foremost, to bring inflation down and growth is less important than bringing the inflation kind of monster under control.
Once it is under control, we can then worry about economic growth.
Reagan wasn't willing to kind of go with one camp or the other.
Reagan thought that these two effects could be achieved simultaneously.
And a lot of people, particularly on the left, on the right, the criticism was kind of muted because basically the supply-siders and the monitors were both getting their way.
But the liberals, like Robert Reich, who, by the way, is still out there braying about the evils and inequality of Trump's plans, about the one big beautiful bill, and so on.
Here's Robert Reich, obviously now in his younger days here.
He says that Reagan's policies are, quote, hopelessly contradictory, a tight monetary policy yoked to a profligate or overgenerous fiscal policy.
In a sense, what the Keynesians were saying is this can never work because what you're doing is you're kind of putting on the brake and hitting the gas pedal at the same time.
It makes no sense.
It's going to cause the car to jerk back and forward.
It's not consistent.
It's incoherent.
It's destined to fail, except it didn't.
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