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June 9, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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WE’RE NOT LEAVING Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1100
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Coming up, I'm going to make the case for how Pam Bondi's DOJ can make the L.A. uprising on behalf of these criminal aliens into the Democrats January 6th.
I want to consider the chances for a mending of fences between Trump and Elon Musk, and comedian Chrissy Mayer joins me.
We're going to talk about her salty take on current events and also about the fate of comedy.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Music by Ben Thede.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
My topic for today is, of course, the L.A. riots, or a, well, replay of the L.A. riots, because we've had L.A. riots before, but not since the 1990s.
And we've had riots around the country before.
Certainly in 2020, the, let's call them the George Floyd riots.
And we're having riots again, and I'll come back to this topic, but I want to say a couple of words first about the Trump-Elon fracas that achieved a certain kind of white heat over the weekend, and I'm really glad to say has subsided ever since.
I say that because this was a most unfortunate kind of falling out.
An unfortunate falling out because I think fundamentally both sides were saying something that is very true.
In other words, there was no need for this kind of break and it appeared to be a almost unbridgeable or unhealable type of break because Well, it happens sometimes.
You see it between friends.
You sometimes see it between spouses.
They go too far.
They go beyond what is acceptable.
they degrade the other person to such a degree that it becomes extremely difficult to come back from it.
So it's one thing to disagree about the It's one thing even to think that the other person is completely wrong.
It's one thing to think it's your patriotic duty to stand up for your side.
It's one thing to maybe even say, I can no longer work with this person because they see it so differently than I do.
It's a whole other thing to basically say, well, you know what?
And to be honest, this guy is like on the Epstein list.
And this would be the equivalent, and this sometimes happens in domestic disputes, where you have a disagreement, an argument.
Oh, my spouse is abusing the children.
So that is the equivalent, right?
It's the equivalent of opening up a whole new By completely false, what I mean is you take an incident that is, you know, your spouse shouted at the kids or grabbed one of the kids by the ear and this is now interpreted retroactively and not because of anything involving the kids but just because you've got a disagreement with your spouse,
you now convert this into some kind of a domestic violence incident or domestic abuse.
Well, the Epstein thing was very similar here and it was similar here.
Because it was just as unfair.
Trump is quite obviously not on the Epstein list.
I don't need to kind of go into all the evidence for this.
But the evidence of it is that Trump, while he knew Epstein, and he even had Epstein over to Mar-a-Lago, Trump did not.
Approve of Epstein's operation, distance himself from Epstein.
Even people who don't like Trump at all, I saw Michael Cohen, Trump's attorney, talking on an interview, and he goes, listen, I was dealing with Trump on a daily basis.
He goes, there's nothing to this Epstein nonsense.
Although I don't like Trump at all, I'm not going to condone this kind of absurdity for one minute.
And Elon, of course, I think this is part of what I'm referring to.
when I say that things are pulling back, deleted that tweet.
I think people have now, look, I mean, if Trump was on the Epstein list, don't you think that Biden and Harris This would have been an absolute atom bomb to drop on the Trump campaign and they certainly would have dropped it if indeed they had it.
They obviously didn't have it and so there was nothing.
I hope that there is a way for, not only for, I'm not even so much concerned with Elon and Trump's, quote, relationship.
I'm more concerned with the fact that I think Elon has moved to the right, has recognized the serious danger the Democrats pose to the country.
And I hope that he does political activism and political involvement commensurate with that.
It looks like he's going to.
In fact, he said something like, anyone who is basically voting to spend the country into bankruptcy is going to be voted out of office in the midterm election.
Kind of telling me that he's going to put some resources.
At least on behalf of the budget cutters as he sees them, obviously mostly Republicans, not all Republicans, but certainly some Republicans who are trying to bring the spending into line with the revenues, which is, I think, not only the best way to go, but kind of the only way to go forward.
All right, let's talk about Los Angeles.
As I say, you have a replay not only of the L.A. riots that we saw in the 1990s, but I think more closely the George Floyd riots of 2020.
And I say this for two reasons.
One is, I would not be surprised if these LA riots spread to other cities.
I think the reason for that is because there is an organized basis for them, and the organizers would like them to spread, which is to say that they're using LA as a kind of demonstration project.
By the way, this is why it's all the more important to stifle the uprising, the insurrection, if you will, when it rears its head, so that it is not encouraged.
To sprout elsewhere.
And this is, I think, a key point because what happened to the Democrats?
What price did they pay?
What real accountability was there for their riots of 2020?
Answer, virtually none.
Tons of the rioters were arrested and promptly released.
They were celebrated in some cases as heroes.
Kamala Harris tried to raise bail money for them.
They got away with it.
They pulled it off.
So is it any big surprise that they will do it again?
Of course they will.
They will do it again until the price for doing it is higher than the price for being able to riot in this way.
The same with, by the way, people who go and loot stores.
Will they stop looting?
Yes.
When?
When the price of the looting is higher than the price of the stuff that you can steal out of the store.
It's really a very simple principle of human behavior.
In the end, it all comes down to kind of cost-benefit analysis.
Now, here is Gavin Newsom this morning.
A. Local law enforcement did not need help.
B. Trump sent troops anyway, essentially to manufacture a crisis.
Then Trump got the crisis that he wanted, and therefore Trump is to blame.
For all the stuff that is happening in LA.
Yes, Newsom is conceding.
There now is some violence.
Remember, initially it was all, these are all peaceful protesters, mostly peaceful protesters.
Again, a kind of replay of George Floyd in 2020.
You remember the classic scene of the journalist standing in front of fires blazing in the background, and yet mostly peaceful protests.
I believe this was on CNN and probably also aired.
Now, here's the problem with this whole Newsom line of analysis, which I will sort of summarize or rephrase in this way.
And this was my post in response to Newsom.
Somehow, I say, the problem is never the criminals.
It's the law enforcement mechanism that cracks down on the criminals.
In other words, that's the problem.
The law provokes criminals by aggravating them.
So the idea here is that Don't aggravate them.
Because without the law, we wouldn't have criminals like this.
And so this is the kind of inverted and sort of, quote, high level, I'm using the term sarcastically, thinking that we get from today's Democrats.
Now, another common talking point is, you know, Trump is pulling out the National Guard.
Why didn't he do that on January 6th?
Trump, in fact, did the opposite.
He pardoned all the lawbreakers on January 6th.
And now look, over here, he's cracking down just because these are people politically on the other side.
But what this misses, I think, and the whole January 6th parallel is itself interesting.
I'll probably talk about it a little bit more in the next day or two.
But the first thing to notice about the January 6th parallel is that Trump did in fact sign an authorization.
I'm looking at it right in front of me.
It was a memorandum for the Secretary of the Army coming from the Secretary of Defense.
And it says very clearly that Trump is authorizing the use of the National Guard.
He's authorizing the deployment of forces.
Evidently, that had to be approved by Nancy Pelosi's office and by the mayor of D.C. They did not approve it.
That is why the National Guard was not deployed on January 6th.
But the January 6th parallel, to me, is illuminating in other ways as well, because I think that the prosecution of the January 6th defendants sets a new kind of template.
That needs to be applied against these Democratic rioters.
And I don't just mean the rioters.
Remember, on January 6th, they didn't just go after the people who were violent.
They went after a lot of people who were completely nonviolent.
Julie Kelly has been posting about this, and I printed out an example or two from Julie Kelly.
But let me just highlight here.
This is an example that she gave this morning.
She goes, former NYPD officer and Marine veteran Thomas Webster was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for a minor scuffle with a DC cop on January 6th.
Webster had no criminal record, and he was also denied release and incarcerated pending his trial.
So this is the January 6th playbook, which Julie Kelly spells out with some more detail.
Pre-dawn raids with armored vehicles, dozens of armed agents to terrorize the whole family and the neighborhood.
Hauling off the suspect who was then arrested, charged, and denied, released, put in a gulag for months and in some cases years, and then basically bludgeoned into a plea deal or convicted by a jury made up of jurors entirely hostile to the suspect's political beliefs.
And then this so-called domestic terrorist is sentenced to a long jail sentence with a terrorism enhancement added for extra kicks.
Now, I'm saying all this because this is exactly what I think Pam Bondi and Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, this is what they should be going for.
This is what they should be doing.
It's not simply a matter of firing some gas and some water hoses and calming the situation down.
It's a matter of making an example out of L.A., making an example out of all these people, showing the Democrats, if you really want to have equal justice under the law, all right, well, what is the standard of equal justice?
Well, the standard is, let's look at how your side treated our side, and we're going to be treating your side in exactly the same way.
Now, I posted this noting that we really need to adopt the democratic notion that never let a crisis go to waste.
And James Lindsay, who has been, in a certain sense, on his own eccentric path on X, Lindsay basically goes, you know, he sort of disputes this idea.
He goes, well, Dinesh, we shouldn't be really going for revenge.
He says, you know, we should be principled.
In other words, we should not be retaliating against them.
revenge, retribution, he says, is not the way to go.
Now, this is worth thinking about for a minute, because, It implies a private extraction of justice when the law should be stepping in.
But leaving that part of it aside, the essence of revenge or retribution, and retribution and revenge, by the way, are pretty much the same thing, right?
Because what is revenge?
Well, an eye for an eye.
What's retribution?
An eye for an eye.
What's revenge?
Well, it's basically you did this to me and I'm going to take my revenge, which means I'm going to be doing revenge.
It's just desserts.
It is teaching you a lesson in response to an injury that you've inflicted.
And retribution is exactly the same thing.
And the point to remember is that retribution is, in fact, the essence.
The essence of justice.
I say this because a lot of times college types and professor types who think they're really smart go, no, Dinesh, the purpose of justice is not retribution.
It's deterrence.
No, it's not deterrence.
Why not?
Frankly, because deterrence has nothing to do with justice.
In fact, deterrence has nothing to do with either the perpetrator or the victim.
How does deterrence help the victim?
Not at all.
How does deterrence relate to the perpetrator?
Not at all.
In fact, deterrence is based on the idea that we should give a penalty having nothing to do with what happened, nothing to do with what the perpetrator did to the victim, but we have to only consider the net effect of our punishment on other would-be perpetrators.
But that could be some kind of a policy consequence of...
It has nothing to do with achieving justice in that given situation.
So, the only way you achieve justice in a given situation is retribution.
The guy murdered this family.
What are we going to do to him in retaliation?
Or retribution or revenge in order that he pay a price for what he did.
This does not, in fact, make the victim whole, but it does provide some consolation to the victim, which, by the way, deterrence doesn't provide.
Let's say, for example, that some guy does something horrible, but it's going to have no deterrent effect on any other.
People committing the same crime.
Then you go, well, listen, there's no point giving him any penalty at all because the deterrent effect is going to be nil.
Well, how is the family going to feel about that?
How are the victims going to be in any way consoled by the fact that you are applying a penalty not even based upon looking at the facts of the case, but merely based on some estimate of what the facts of the case and the penalty is going to do to other similarly situated would-be So all of this is just a way of saying that applying to the Democrats their own playbook politically, very good idea.
But not only politically a good idea, it also ultimately is the just and right thing to do.
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Guys, it's always a delight to have on the podcast Chrissy Mayer.
She is a stand-up comedian, a New York native.
She's appeared on, well, NBC's America's Got Talent, Fox's Laughs, Fox's Punchline, The Wendy Williams Show.
And she also does comedy at Stonewall.
It's a show at the landmark Stonewall Inn in New York City.
It's received critical acclaim in The New York Times, Time Out, The Village Voice.
You can follow her on X at Chrissy Mayer, M-A-Y-R, and the website ChrissyMayer.com slash podcast.
Chrissy, thanks for joining me.
Wow.
Let's talk about comedy, and is it the case that comedy is shaped by the political era in which we live?
In other words, are you doing a different kind of comedy now, let's just say under Trump, that you would in the Biden years?
Or does comedy maintain a certain consistency and it doesn't really matter who's Steve I would say it depends kind of where you perform in the country.
I found like if you're performing more so in places like LA, although who knows, maybe they're all on fire at this point.
I don't know if there's any place safe to perform in LA or New York City.
There's going to be more, of course, like liberal city folks, maybe people who have, you know, not they have no desire to travel to other parts of the country.
There's a little bit of this kind of.
like elitism that goes on, especially people who, even within the comedy community itself, people who move to specifically New York or LA to pursue comedy, they are a bit in a bubble and they find themselves a little bit out of touch with the rest of the country if they do end up touring outside that city.
But I found just in the places that I've gone that are outside those two cities, people laugh at...
People, since the beginning of time, have always laughed at jokes that are sexist, racial, homophobic, misogynistic, you name it.
It's just, it seems like maybe over the past, I guess, 10, 15 years or so, you know, there's been a little bit of like a hall monitor vibe.
I would sometimes see people at shows.
More so in places like LA and New York, kind of look around, like, is it okay?
And that's just the worst thing in the world.
You never want to be at a comedy show, self-conscious like that, thinking, oh, God, am I going to be judged for what I'm laughing at here?
People have always laughed at inappropriate stuff, but it's kind of like there's a little bit of an HR flavor on top of it all.
Like, well, I can't be seen laughing at that.
But I think that has changed a bit.
Through Trump, his second term, it's been a bit of a pressure release valve on folks and certainly anyone who's watching and Dinesh yourself, you've probably seen it on Twitter.
Yeah, like people are having a field day saying certain F words and saying certain other words that maybe would have gotten them banned or a timeout on their account.
But it's more than just...
But it's interesting, you'll see from certain comics that are household names, like I hate to keep bagging on Nikki Glaser, but there was an article that came out in March where she said that she's actually afraid to do political material.
And you've seen comics like Kathy Griffin echo this sentiment like, "Oh, I'm gonna be deported." And I'm like, "Comedians are the last thing Trump." He doesn't want to deport comedians for doing what they do.
So I see that more as just a kind of virtue signaling from the left to the left as a way to, I guess, sort of keep the resistance going in some sense.
Well, one of the things I think you're saying, Chrissy, is that is the comedy kind of always hovers on the edge of the inappropriate.
Because I remember And then it became quite obvious, starting, I think, probably in the 80s, that the real taboos were really more on the race issue.
Because I found with myself, you know, I never used to like racist jokes, and then I began to really like them when they became totally inappropriate.
When they're the one type of joke like you couldn't say, my favorite jokes were basically racist jokes.
And the reason I think these jokes are funny is because they usually tap into something.
It could be a stereotype.
But stereotypes wouldn't become stereotypes if they weren't grounded in some kind of reality, right?
So it is making explicit the reality that people know.
You know, just today I saw a guy, Like, where are the bullets, man?
And so suddenly I realized, you know, there are probably people who are thinking this, but no one really says it.
And so there's a certain kind of relief and surprise in hearing someone utter out loud the kind of stuff that has crossed your mind, but that, you know, you're not supposed to.
Oh, sure.
Especially coming out of the last five years, I would say we've had pretty heavy censorship from COVID.
All the things we couldn't say that were common sense that were going on about COVID and the things that were forced on us after the fact.
So people are just starting to now be like, oh, I can just speak truth again.
And a lot of times in a comedy club, it'll be, It's because just to hear an honest, fresh take is so refreshing because people are used to being inundated with propaganda from turning it on their radio to watching it on TV to in their phones.
We've been submersed in it even longer than the last five years.
perhaps in some sense, our whole lifetimes, you know, politically.
And, and, you know, that there's actually a movie that's, This is what I get so upset about.
So after, you remember the movie Tropic Thunder with, He played Iron Man.
Robert Downey Jr., he played a guy in Blackface.
And people love Tropic Thunder.
People still talk about it today.
And it was after that performance in Tropic Thunder, actually, Jamie Foxx directed a movie with Robert Downey Jr.
And I guess the character was him doing Mexican face or something like that.
And it was created, I think, maybe right after.
COVID, kind of during those peak censorship years.
And this movie was shelved and has been shelved for the past few years.
I forget the title of it, but that is what really disappoints and depresses me because it's like if people like Jamie Foxx don't have the, I guess, the FU money or the FU status where they can just say, hey, I know that this film is funny.
We're going to put it out regardless and let's see what the people think.
I think a lot of people, when they talk about when are we going to see comedy movies again, when is Hollywood or even you see a potential competitor like The Daily Wire, when are we going to start seeing more comedy movies like The Daily Wire?
They're definitely trying, but I feel like in terms of Hollywood, they're going to need somebody who is solid in the industry, who is not afraid of blowback or being canceled to put their foot down and say, I'm putting this out here and I don't care what my peers think.
It seems like there are a few guys.
I mean, I think of Dave Chappelle, for example, who will, particularly on the trans issue, kind of cross the line.
Now, he doesn't cross the line across the board, but he crosses the line repeatedly on that subject.
Bill Burr is predictably on the left on a wide variety of issues.
But then on the issue of men versus women, he'll take some liberties.
I can see Bill Maher is kind of edging back, it seems, toward the center after having moved pretty far left, maybe out of just an anti-Trump kind of animus in the last several years.
Is the mood of comedy opening up?
I mean, certainly with the guys on like Late Night, the typical, I see no change at all.
These guys like Colbert, they're just robotically on the left and they don't seem to even open up to the possibility of any humor on the other side or see any humor on their own side.
Like they'll never make fun of their own sides.
How do you handle it, Chrissy?
I mean, you're performing in liberal New York City, you know, in places like Greenwich Village, you're performing in the Stonewall Inn.
How do you handle an audience that, you know, might...
Do you go there?
Do you try to avoid going there?
How do you deal with it?
Oh, I for sure triggered somebody.
there was a viral clip that went around, I think it was like maybe two years ago.
I was at a club in Dallas actually, which you wouldn't think, at first I didn't think, But no, certain cities are more blue.
For sure, Austin, very blue city.
And even Dallas in places, surprisingly blue.
And I was at this club that I love that I still perform at called hyenas.
And we were talking about my, So we were joking about that on the whole tour.
And when she left the stage and brought me up, I'm like, keep it going for Dylan Mulvaney.
And then I went off about how has it been 365 days of girl and still Dylan hasn't made any commitments to being female.
You know, Dylan hasn't cut off any particular parts of himself that would...
He doesn't have any skin in the game.
He has all the time, money, resources, and a man in the crowd yelled out, because he's a man!
And it started this back and forth between this guy and these, I affectionately call them land whales.
These very like classically blue haired liberal women.
I couldn't even believe they were at a comedy show of mine because I was like, Oh, maybe they got free tickets.
Cause they, And they're like, no, actually, she's a woman.
She's a woman.
And I was like, it's all right.
This is America.
We can all believe different things.
Some of us can believe in reality and some of us can't.
And they eventually stormed out.
And luckily for me, I caught it on my phone, which was recording in the back of the room.
And I put it out and it was a clip I got a lot of great content and responses and traction from.
So, but if I were, you know, I'm not, I don't do a show at the Stonewall Inn anymore.
That's kind of like part of how I came up in the business.
You know, when I graduated college, I was a classic sort of like template female stand-up comic.
I lived in Brooklyn.
I was a feminist.
You know, I was a women's studies minor in college.
Like all the hallmarks.
I like had issues with my dad.
Really textbook.
I was very liberal.
I didn't vote for Hillary, but I was like, I started to sort of wake up around 2018.
And it's funny, just going from hosting a show at the Stonewall Inn to then doing a show on Compound Media, which was a little bit more of a right-wing, more free speech network.
Just that move alone, without my sense of humor changing, without me as a person changing, the amount of comedians in the New York City scene who kind of like turn their back on me, stop answering DMs, just from that association alone told me just kind of how, just the kind of mob mentality of it all.
And at the end of the day, it's kind of every man for himself in comedy.
You can make and break your own.
And you don't even have to live in a place like LA or New York anymore to have a great career.
You could blow up on TikTok like Matt Reif did.
And then he went out and sold international tours.
And I think the most important kind of evolution in comedy over the last couple years has been when we started to see Trump and J.D. Vance go on podcasts leading up to the election.
that to me was like wow comedians are are such important cultural figures not just for the ability to make jokes about something but for that ability to not be afraid to say an honest thing or ask an honest question I think that's why those podcasts did so well.
Of course, Joe Rogan.
It's the biggest podcast.
That's going to have a big effect, but Theo Vaughn, even Tim Dillon.
I saw Tim Dillon being interviewed by Chris Cuomo.
I was just watching a clip this morning, and I was like, I can't believe my eyes.
Like this is such an hysterical like meeting of the minds here.
But, you know, I'm like Tim Dillon, although he's, you know, he's a comedian, he's hilarious, making really good points about, uh, So I just think comedians have taken on a whole new layer of cultural significance above just seeing their hour in a club or seeing their special.
You know, it seems that the old style of comedy was in some ways the...
So if Carter was in office, he'd make jokes about Carter.
and when Reagan comes in, he'll make jokes about Reagan.
So there's a certain kind of neutral
could kind of get an inkling of what where you thought his politics were but you really had to guess and you could be wrong it seems like what you're saying now is that the the most effective type of comedy is really rooted in in authenticity in like speaking your mind and like going there and letting people have it and this is who I am and and if you do that you're
Now, do you find there are people who say, you know, conservatives or MAGA people have no sense of humor.
They just don't, you know, they don't know what to laugh at.
And what is, if you have found to some degree a new audience ever since you've politically moved on the spectrum, What is your take on this new audience?
Who are these people and what makes them tick and what makes them laugh?
I would say anybody that is probably very intensely living on a fringe of either political party or someone who's, Like intensely vegan or like hyper into anyone who's so into one thing at the expense of everything else in their life.
Those are also going to be people that are hard to make laugh because they just they're into their one.
People that are on the far right might be hard to make laugh and people on the far left might be harder to make laugh because they're just they're so hyper focused on their their activism, I guess.
It's like, come up for air.
Like, have a drink, buddy.
Let loose a little bit.
But I have found, like, if we're speaking generally, because I was on the left all throughout college and really most of my 20s, and now I'm 40, so it's like I feel like I've spent equal time on both sides.
I would say, yeah, generally people on the right.
Well, now it's kind of like it's the populist, right, because of how the Overton window has shifted.
Tend to take themselves less seriously.
tend to laugh at more racial humor, which I find funny as well.
It's again, because it's based...
Especially if somebody cuts you off or does a bonehead move on the road and you're driving.
You're going to speed up a little bit and see if the person in that car confirms who you have in mind.
Then you feel satisfied.
It's a Chinese chick.
We knew it.
We all kind of do it.
But I would say generally, yeah, folks on the right, which is really if you're thinking about like Trump's right, which I feel like includes everybody, a lot of people in the middle, generally a bit more even keeled, can laugh at themselves, can laugh at things that are inappropriate and can have a good time more so than folks on the left, which I think have been so heavily trained and propagandized to just be reactive.
and triggered and Look at everybody who's participating in the riots right now.
Do these people have kids at home?
Do they have jobs they're really into?
It's pretty interesting stuff.
Don't we also have a guy in the White House who is himself kind of a comedian?
I mean, if you look at some of his posts, like the one on Bruce Springsteen, I'll sometimes cite as a kind of recent classic.
He's obviously upset about Springsteen's politics, but he has to go after his music.
And most politicians wouldn't even do that.
But Trump is not content with going there after he blasts him as a horrible singer who's never had any talent and so on.
Then he starts going after his skin.
Basically talking about how he's got really bad skin that's falling off his face.
And so what I'm getting at is this is obviously a guy who like...
And that's so different from the Republican Party of, say, Romney or McCain, George W., either of the Bushes.
I mean, you can't even imagine them going one inch in that direction.
No, because Trump's a New Yorker.
He came up in the entertainment industry.
He knows what's funny.
He knows what's entertaining.
Can speak to the people plainly.
He knows what's going to grab attention.
I know I'm looking at this post and it's great to see, you know, Trump in 2025 tweeting this way because we know, you know, we love that he tweeted this way before he ran for office and a little bit during his first term.
And then he calmed down quite a bit for a couple of years as he was like.
Getting his stuff back together.
Getting all his ducks in a row.
And I was always like, oh, I hope we see that Trump again.
I hope we get our classic Trump tweets back.
And sure enough, yeah, he said about Bruce Springsteen, I see that highly overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a foreign country to speak badly about the President of the United States.
Never liked him.
Never liked his music or his radical left politics.
Importantly, he's not talented.
just pushy, obnoxious jerk who fervently supported crooked Joe Biden.
And then he calls Springsteen dumb as a rock that That's what I mean.
Even if he had stopped halfway through, it would still be a very mean-spirited tweet.
But he doesn't stop halfway.
way he's only just getting warmed up for the second part, which is my favorite part.
People like that he's not sort of classically, uh, I think that's a big part of why he won and why people support him so strongly.
He's not a perfect guy and people like that about him.
He keeps it real with everybody.
Yeah, it wasn't just enough to call him untalented.
He just went off dumb as a rock.
He's pruney.
It's funny.
I hope it never stops.
Yeah, absolutely.
Hey guys, I've been talking to Chrissy Mayer, stand-up comedian.
Follow her on X at Chrissy Mayer and the website ChrissyMayer.com slash podcast.
Chrissy, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
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Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
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Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
you I'm talking about Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
And we are in a quite important section of this biographical study because we're talking about cutting spending, exactly the problem that the country is dealing with now.
And Reagan had to deal with this problem on a practical level, but also in some ways on a...
The chapter is called A Walk on the Supply Side.
By the way, good idea to get the book if you can.
It's easily available on Amazon or Barnes& Noble.
You can kind of follow along with the stuff I'm talking about, and you'll get a lot out of it.
And it's very applicable to the issues that Trump is dealing with, as you'll see in just a moment.
Now, let me begin with a statement that George Bernard Shaw So the idea here is that people benefit from government programs, and if someone will take money out of another guy's pocket and put it into yours, you're going to become a fan of that guy.
You're going to vote for that guy, most likely a Democrat, but maybe even in some cases a Republican.
And this creates a problem for a democratic society where people become accustomed to these entitlements and they want more of them.
They don't care that somebody else, usually someone else you don't know, has to foot the bill.
Now, this may seem to be an insurmountable problem for any politician who wants to cut programs, but I don't think that it is obviously the case.
Why?
Because although it is selfish for people to want things that they haven't earned and get them from somebody else, you can also appeal to the same selfishness of the people who are paying to get them to vote to stop those payments.
Obviously, if money is flowing out of your pocket into mine, I might be an enthusiastic Democrat, but you're going to be an enthusiastic Republican because you don't want to be paying.
So, there seems to be a kind of, you can call it a Madisonian solution to the problem of the selfish looter, to use Ayn Rand's term.
And what is that Madisonian solution?
Well, Madison talks about this in Book 10 of The Federalist, and Madison basically says that the way you solve the problem of faction, faction is one group wanting stuff for itself.
Is you pit one faction against the other faction.
And so, for example, if unions want more money, they're going to be small and large businesses that don't want to pay.
They're going to be on the other side.
They're going to be the side footing the bill.
And they're going to want to block the power of the unions.
So this is the Madisonian solution.
It's like, don't let any single faction become so powerful that it takes over the country.
But as long as you have a multiplicity of factions all vying against each other, politicians can play the one against the other.
Now, this is, you can see with Madison, a kind of cynical, but also very practical understanding of how politics actually works.
But there is a problem with this Madisonian solution, which...
And that is the problem of the, well, I'm going to call it the public choice dilemma.
Using this term, I'm invoking a school of economics called public choice theory.
What is this public choice dilemma?
Well, imagine the following situation.
You have a government that collects, let's just say, $5 from every citizen.
And so since there are 100 million, let's say, taxpayers, you collect $500 million, $5 each from each of the families or each of the citizens that are on the tax rolls.
And you take that $500 million and you give it to one guy.
And the one guy could be any guy.
It could be Lockheed Martin.
It could be to the National Endowment for Democracy.
It could be the USAID.
It could be to the homeless.
It doesn't matter to whom you give it.
But you give it to a single beneficiary or a single network of beneficiaries.
And these people proceed to completely waste the money.
And you realize very soon that the money is all being wasted.
None of it is doing what you intended to do.
So now you want to stop the program.
And so what do you do?
You basically go to the group that's getting the money and say, we're going to take it away.
And that group goes nuts because it's $500 million.
In fact, they spend $30 million to hire a network of lobbying firms and they get all these non-profits that they've been donating to to be agitating on their behalf.
So they create a big firestorm of controversy and counterattack.
They start calling their congressmen and their senators.
And so you think, hey, listen.
That's okay.
I expect this kind of opposition to come from these beneficiaries.
They are, after all, the greedy looters in my example.
And so we expect them to scream.
But the good news is that there are millions of people who are paying for this program.
In fact, every single voter, in my example, is paying five bucks.
So let me mobilize them because they obviously outnumber Lockheed Martin or they outnumber the National Endowment for Democracy.
There are more payers than there are payees.
And so I should be able to get them to counter the agitation that is coming from But here's the problem.
The ordinary voter is only paid five bucks.
And so it is not it's very difficult to motivate that guy to do much because the cost of doing that effort, writing a letter, calling your congressman, showing up in D.C., organizing a protest is worse.
So you're going to be relatively lethargic, whereas the group getting the money is going to fight desperately, in fact, fight for its life, because they have become dependent on this money.
This is the money that's paying for their three martini lunches and for their homes and for their nice cars.
And so they are going to go to bat to save that money.
happening right now, for example, with NPR, they stand to lose a billion dollars in the So this is the public choice dilemma.
And Reagan was, by the way, quite familiar with it.
And notice that the example I'm giving is not applicable to just one particular program.
It applies in general to all.
Because all government programs, by and large, are funded through a wide base of taxpayers, all paying a small amount of money for that particular program.
And the beneficiaries have an army of defenders, of lobbyists, of dutiful media advocates.
And so this is how our politics works.
Or maybe more accurately, this is how our politics doesn't work.
And Reagan knew it.
In fact, And this was the former senator from Tennessee, Howard Baker.
And Reagan called over to the Baker House to offer Howard Baker the job.
But Howard Baker wasn't home.
His wife, Joy, answered the phone and she goes, Mr. President, Yes.
And Reagan goes, Joy, where is Howard?
She goes, Mr. President, Howard is at the zoo.
And Reagan goes, well, wait till he sees the zoo I have in mind for him.
So what's Reagan going at here?
Reagan's basically saying, I know that this whole con...
This is a zoo.
This is a menagerie.
And it's not going to be really easy to herd these animals in the zoo.
They're all going to want to go their own way.
Remember, Reagan was dealing with a Democratic House of Representatives led by Tip O 'Neill, and Reagan wanted to increase defense spending.
So Tip O 'Neill basically made it clear to Reagan, listen, If you want some of us Democrats to vote for defense spending, and there were some that did, we're not at the same time going to go for substantial cuts in domestic spending.
In other words, we want to spend more on domestic issues, not on defense.
You want to spend on defense?
Okay, we'll go along with that.
But we're not going to go along with you on the spending cuts.
And Reagan tried to twist those arms, and he tried to convince Democrats to do that, but they wouldn't.
And so Reagan was faced with a political reality.
And you have to remember, this is really what Trump is also dealing with, with the big, beautiful bill.
In Trump's case, there is a Republican majority in the House, but guess what?
It's not a real majority.
The same with interest rates.
What is the interest rate?
Well, the interest rate is, let's just say, 5%.
Yeah, but what's the rate of inflation?
Rate of inflation is 3%, so the actual interest you're getting on your money is not 5%, it's 5 minus 3. You're really only getting a 2% real rate.
And so this is the point.
That with Trump, he's got a nominal majority, but not a real majority, because there are always some Republican defectors, and Trump has to keep them in the fold in order to be able to get this bill through.
So Trump, like Reagan, is accommodating to reality.
He's not getting what he wants.
He's not getting everything that he seeks.
He's getting the best that he can, you can say, bargain for.
He's doing what he can get away with.
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