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June 16, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MYSTERY MAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1105
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Coming up, I want to discuss the No Kings protests around the country this past weekend and also the mystery surrounding this Tim Walz political appointee who shot two Democratic elected officials.
I'll examine the Israeli strike on Iran in the context of an emerging anti-Israel faction on the MAGA right.
And best-selling author Joel Rosenberg joins me from Jerusalem.
He's going to talk about what's happening on the ground.
And also the morality of preemptive action against Iran.
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Thank you.
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I want to talk about the military parade in Washington, D.C., the No Kings protests around the country, and also this phenomenon of a guy in Minnesota who shot these two Democratic officials.
And there's a big argument about this mystery Now, with regard to the military parade, the parade seemed to me to be fine.
It seemed to me to be well executed.
Apparently, there was something like a quarter of a million people there.
I don't know how many were expected, more or less.
I saw some chatter to the effect that, oh, the Trump people, you know, they're deeply disappointed.
But there were many people on the left showing pictures of tanks and saying, you know, this is North Korea.
This is like the old Soviet Union.
And I want to make two observations about that.
The first one is that Eisenhower had a massive military parade, bigger than this one by far.
In his inaugural year, 1953, you might say, well, Eisenhower was a hero of World War II.
Yes, he was, but I'm not talking about a post-World War II military parade in 1945.
I'm talking about an Eisenhower inaugural parade, which was really all about Eisenhower, eight years later.
So military parades have occurred throughout American history.
There's nothing all that unusual about them.
The other thing that caught my eye, a little detail that very few people have commented on, and that is that So soldiers dressed in the Revolutionary War outfits, and soldiers dressed in Civil War attire, and soldiers dressed in World War II attire.
So what is this doing?
It's evoking the great battles of American history.
This is not simply, I mean, have you ever seen the North Koreans do that?
Or the Soviets?
No.
Their parades are serving an entirely different purpose.
Now, let me turn to these no-kings marches and rallies around the country.
I think the good thing is that these seem to have been largely peaceful.
There were some flare-ups in places like L.A. and Portland.
I've been sharing some videos about guys who are like, you know, these are people who the left is not held accountable, and so they do crazy stuff.
And then they get really surprised when the cops hit back.
And so this is like the kid who needs to be corrected when he's five years old and you don't.
And then the kid has to be corrected by life itself in later years.
And it's obviously a lot less pleasant.
I'm looking at these videos of these protesters, though, and you can't help but see that this is basically like a retirement center has let out its inmates.
Or rather, that you've got a bunch of aging, graying, hobbling, white, elderly people.
It's like they're all going to some, you know, mortuary convention to find out about burial plots and, like, get discount rates.
It's a very interesting sociological demographic.
Why?
Because that's what the left says we are.
Oh, your people are all white.
They're all dying off.
This is actually what the No Kings protest looks like.
By contrast, if you looked at the Trump parade, Now, let me turn to Bolter, Vance Bolter, the shooter, the alleged Minnesota shooter, because this guy is a bit of a strange bird.
To clarify, something that the left is screaming its head off about because they're hoping that repetition and shrillness will make it true.
This guy's a Republican.
So I went into Grok3, which is now my favorite AI platform or engine.
I go, Grok3, is the Minnesota shooter a Republican?
And the answer?
No.
The guy was registered as a Republican in the early 2000s.
But, quote, subsequent state documents listed as political affiliation as none or other, and a 2020 report stated, quote, no party preference.
Not only that, but this dude was appointed to the Workforce Development Board in 2019 by none other than Tim Walz.
Now, the left goes, well, that can't be true because Tim Walz was evidently on this guy's hit list as a claim.
That this guy had a bunch of people on his hit list, including Tim Walz.
As if to say that if Tim Walz is on the hit list, well, Tim Walz couldn't have been the guy who appointed him to a job.
Well, first of all, I'm not positive that Tim Walz is on this guy's hit list.
I haven't seen the hit list.
I've seen reports of a hit list.
But it's indisputable because I've seen the actual appointment.
That Tim Walz did in fact appoint him.
In fact, the guy had been appointed by a previous Democratic administration to a position, and then Tim Walz reappointed him, the Governor's Workforce Development Board, in 2019.
So the real question is, why would a guy...
Put Tim Walz on a hit list.
I mean, what does this say about the guy?
Or maybe he says something about Tim Walz.
Maybe he has that kind of an effect on people.
I don't know.
The one thing we do know, there's a lot of, like, bogus information.
This corpulent, overweight guy shows up sweating with a Papa John's employment shirt, claims that the shooter is his roommate, and claims that the guy voted for Trump.
First of all, this is crazy.
The idea that the shooter, who's apparently rather well-off, owns property, is somehow rooming.
With this gross Papa John's guy is itself implausible.
Second of all, how does the so-called friend know how he voted?
He really doesn't.
Third, this information is channeled through left-wing journalists who, as you know, know how to massage this kind of information for ideological spin.
And then a video surfaced of the same guy talking at some church in the Congo years ago, and he talks about Jesus Christ.
I go, look, yeah, he's a fundamentalist Republican.
First of all, he's not a Republican.
I think I've established that.
Second of all, I don't know if he's a fundamentalist, but I see no evidence from this African...
He was apparently running some kind of NGO, some kind of a group called the Red Lion Group.
He was obviously down there working on some sort of projects down in Africa, and he was whooping up the crowd in this talk.
I mean, my point is, not a whole lot can truly be gleaned from this.
But here's one thing we do know.
There was a whole bunch of flyers in this guy's car on his rampage during his attacks.
And what did these flyers say?
Very simply, no kings.
They were no kings protest flyers.
Now let that fact kind of sink in.
Let that inconvenient truth be fully digested.
Why would this shooter do that?
What is the point?
Well, could it be?
Is he trying to throw the cops off the trail?
Unlikely.
Some people have suggested, well, the reason he had those flyers is it was a way of telling him that's the protest where he's going to go to shoot people.
Wait a minute.
Are you saying that this guy is so forgetful that he needs to have hundreds of flyers in his car?
Oh, which protest am I going to go to?
Oh, yeah.
Let me look in my back seat.
Oh, yeah, of course.
This is ridiculous.
The guy was more likely, I think, a no-king's guy.
And that's why he had the flyers, right?
it's kind of like, think of it this way.
If the guy had had all kinds of Would people go, oh, well, he has that literature because he's targeting the Christian nationalist.
No, they'd go, guess what?
We found out that the guy is a Christian nationalist.
And by applying the same logic, the logic of you could call it Occam's razor, the shortest distance to the truth, is probably the right one.
This guy is not a right-winger.
He is perhaps a no-king's guy.
But I grant that we don't know for sure.
The best we can say is he's a bit of a mystery man.
And I think we can also confidently say that he's nuts.
But we can also say that he has been quite clearly radicalized because only someone who's radicalized would do something like this.
And you might say, well, wait a minute, he did target Democrats.
Yes, but he targeted Democrats who are breaking with the Democratic fold.
In other words, he targeted Democrats who, for example, were resisting the Democratic majority's idea to pay health care for illegals.
So these were nonconformist Democrats, if you will.
And they were the ones who were targeted.
So again, we can't make anything definitively out of it.
What we can definitively say is that the efforts to somehow say that this is all the result of Trump or Trumpism or Trump rhetoric or the heartless campaign that MAGA is making against illegals, none of this is in any way true.
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Israel has attacked the critical nuclear and infrastructure facilities in Iran.
Israel has also launched targeted attacks and let's not hold back on this targeted assassinations of key figures in the Iranian government.
Military generals and also nuclear scientists working on the Iranian nuclear program.
Now this is a huge action.
And initially there was the idea, a lot of reports, that the Trump people were not on board with this, that Trump had not signed off on this, that Netanyahu was going rogue on Trump.
And there was a segment of the MAGA right saying, well, you know, this is just further evidence that we need to cut off our ties with Israel.
But then Trump comes out and says, I'm for it.
I approved it.
I gave the Iranians 60 days to work out a deal.
And he goes, basically, and this is very Trumpian, this is day 61. In other words, we're past the deadline, guys.
Sorry.
You're now going to find out the hard way, as they say.
And certainly the Iranians have.
Now, this is something that has been talked about for years, maybe even a couple of decades.
It is the exact opposite approach of Obama.
Obama's approach was, let's give the Iranians money, let's unfreeze their assets, let's coddle them, and this is the best way.
To make sure that they don't have a nuclear bomb.
Now, I think with Obama, everything has to be read between the lines because this was his public statement or this was the public effect of his remarks.
But his real objective, I think, was the exact opposite.
Let us, in fact, accelerate Iran in getting a bomb.
Let's give them the means to get a bomb.
And, in fact, let's give them the resources to become stronger.
To undermine America more, to weaken America in the region, all of which were Obama's anti-colonial objectives.
But Netanyahu has, in a sense, you may say, totally destroyed the Obama plan for the Middle East.
And he's done it by, in a sense, hitting the head of the snake in the region.
And that is not Hamas, it's not Hezbollah, it's not even the Houthis.
All of those are the extensions of the Iranian regime.
And in doing this, in my opinion, Netanyahu and Israel have done the United States a huge favor.
In fact, they've done the world a huge favor.
Why?
Because while there are other nuclear-tipped regimes, there is none that is more dangerous.
Certainly more dangerous to us in its willingness and determination to destroy us than Iran.
China may have imperial objectives, but China would be happy to carry out its imperial objectives and grow in power without having any conflict with the United States.
Same, I think, with Russia.
Russia would like to strengthen its power.
Putin has spoken wistfully about the decline of the Soviet Empire.
He'd like to get some of that back.
But it's not specifically directed at the United States.
The Iran, by contrast, death to America.
So there's death to Israel and death to America.
It seems to me that when you have, you know, a country that's anthem is basically, I want to kill you.
And then this same country is accumulating the means to actually do that, which is nuclear materials, nuclear weapons.
And the mechanisms for delivering those nuclear weapons, either directly from Iran or through surrogates.
Surrogates like, by the way, Venezuela, which Debbie has talked about on this podcast.
How are you supposed to react?
And the answer is, you are supposed to react by taking that threat very seriously.
and if you have the ability to neutralize it, you should.
Now, I'm going to have very shortly...
We're going to talk about some of the arguments here involving the legitimacy of, let's say, a preemptive strike.
People say, well, Dinesh, you know, the Iranians didn't strike first.
What is the justification for striking at Iran?
So I'm going to get into all that with Joel.
But now Iran has already begun its counterstrikes.
That should have been expected.
I think the Israelis did expect it.
And there have been some rather striking images of buildings collapsed and rubble and Israelis walking around saying, I've never seen anything like this in Tel Aviv.
But I think the Israeli government expected it.
The number of Israeli casualties so far, extremely low.
The Israelis do have this Iron Dome, but the Iron Dome is not infallible.
It is not impregnable.
It has a very high rate of blocking rockets and missiles, but it doesn't stop all of them.
And so the Israelis must have known that out of 100 rockets, you know, guess what?
Five are going to get through.
They're going to land, and there are people who are going to be killed.
What is striking to me is that in dealing with a powerful country like Iran, Israel so far has taken so little real damage.
And by real damage, what I mean is if you are actually going to fight with another country, you attack.
What do you attack?
You attack their armed camps.
You attack their communications infrastructure.
You bomb their parliamentary buildings.
You destroy the sources of their wealth.
You attack their munitions.
And Iran has done none of this.
They appear incapable of doing it.
Their best approach appears to be, you know what, let's bomb some apartment building in Haifa.
We'll end up killing a bunch of Israelis and a couple of Arabs in the bargain.
And we're using all these rockets to kill like four guys.
But that to me is not a sign of a successful power.
It is, in fact, almost, you could say, the terrorist strategy itself, writ large.
In other words, what do the Hamas guys do?
They go bomb a cafe.
What do the Houthis do?
They kill, like, four guys at sea.
And what does Hezbollah do?
They shoot some rockets, and then, you know, they kill three Israelis and a cow.
And this is basically what Iran is doing.
I must say that in terms of just looking at it from the outside, as a spectator, Israel is really, it's like watching two boxers, right?
And the Israelis are basically doing these body punches.
They are landing blows where it really hurts.
They are evidently hitting at the key figures in the Iranian government.
They're hitting at some of the oil refineries, which are the source of power, but also And so the Israelis have shown that they know how to do this and they know how to do it well.
They had extremely good intelligence inside of Iran so they knew.
In one case, for example, they had launched a surgical strike on one guy, and you can see the apartment building, and they knew where he was.
They knew where his bedroom was inside the apartment, and they...
Nothing else in the building is damaged.
They didn't blow up the building.
They blew a hole into his bedroom.
And I'm assuming that the guy was, you know, incinerated, vaporized, whatever you want to call it.
But these are guys who, if they could, would end the state of Israel.
And so Israel, I think, in acting in this way, is in fact protecting its own survival.
And is protecting its own security.
And I do want to make a final point here.
And that is that there are some guys on social media.
Look, you're not anti-Semitic or you're not even anti-Israel.
If you say, look, I think the United States should stay out of other people's wars and the United States shouldn't be funding wars on either side.
And this applies equally to the Ukraine war.
It applies equally to what's happening with Israel and Iran or Israel and Hamas.
We just should stay out of it.
I don't agree with that position because I think that there are times when the United States does need to get involved.
I'm not saying get involved by sending troops.
And by the way, the issue of the United States sending troops has not even come up.
No one has even suggested it.
Israel hasn't asked for it.
And so I find it really amusing that you've got these guys on, you know, on X and other social media platforms.
They're like, you know, 52 years old.
They haven't like been to the gym in like 300 days.
You know, they're sitting on their couch basically, you know, pontificating.
They're like, I refuse to go die for Israel.
Nobody's asking you to go die for Israel.
They wouldn't want you.
You're not exactly IDF material.
Nobody's going to send you to Iran to fight.
This is just a kind of whining that you're doing without any comprehension of the realities on the ground.
So I think Trump, of all people, recognizes all this very clearly.
Trump is not the isolationist that he is sometimes portrayed to be.
Trump does want peace.
He doesn't want war.
But he also recognizes that sometimes force is necessary.
In fact, there are some reports even now that the Iranians are making back-channel inquiries through the United States.
Hey, we'd like to sit down with Israel and make a deal.
So it may very well be that we will get peace, but not the way that the isolationists expect it.
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Guys, with everything happening between Israel and Iran, I'm delighted to say that I've got Joel Rosenberg, the editor-in-chief of All Israel News.
Joel is a best-selling author of 13 novels and 5 non-fiction books.
He's also founder and chairman of the Joshua Fund.
We're talking to Joel from Jerusalem, and you can follow him on X at Joel C. Joel, welcome.
Thanks for joining me and thanks for joining me at really short notice.
You're in Jerusalem.
I see on social media all these images of silhouettes of rockets coming across the dark sky.
I then see images of rubble and people walking around kind of surveying the rubble.
Can you give us a little bit of an on-the-ground sense of what is happening in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem right now?
Absolutely, Dinesh.
Great to be with you.
Thank you for inviting me back.
Always happy to be your Middle East correspondent.
And we've covered a lot of ground over the last 20 or 21 months.
But we are at...
Aside from literally the prophetic recreation of the state of Israel in 1948.
But this is Israel's most dramatic and most important war since the creation of the state, okay?
This is the war that, as long as I've known Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when I first met him, when he hired me, interviewed me to hire me.
To work for him just briefly, in the fall of 2000, so almost 25 years.
As long as I've known him, his focus has been that he essentially wants to be Winston Churchill and stop the Nazis.
He's been warning about it.
He's been writing about it.
He's been preparing the military for an eventual war.
He he's not he has never been opposed to a diplomatic solution if it were possible, but it's never proven to be possible.
He supported President Trump trying for 60 days to get a deal.
Trump made an ultimatum, told the Supreme Leader, make a deal.
We can't confirm this, but we're certain that Trump called B.B. Netanyahu and said they've had their 60 days.
The Supreme Leader just went public and said he rejects all the negotiations.
So they've had their 60 days.
You've got the green light.
We're not going to fight with you, but we've got your back.
We'll stand with you.
And I'll provide some deception by saying, B.B., don't attack while I'm negotiating.
He will provide cover.
That was Thursday, last Thursday, the 12th of June.
Day 61 of the ultimatum.
Day 62, the war started.
And we are paying the price here in Israel right now.
This is messy.
This is painful.
But we are on offense.
We are winning.
And this is a game changing, strategic, transformational moment.
No other world leader in history, not American, not Arab, not Israeli, has ever...
It's painful.
It is painful, but we're winning, and it is a winner-take-all battle right now, Dinesh.
Joel, let's try to put this in larger perspective.
When Iran became a revolutionary state in 1979, you may say that radical Islam, for the first time, took a hold of a major state.
It had some minor victories with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Of course, the Taliban came back, and you've got these groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda and the Houthis and so on.
But it seems like for, as you say, 40 years, you had these tentacles of the Hydra, whether it's Hezbollah or Hamas, and people were willing to sort of wrestle with those tentacles, but nobody was willing to kind of go after the Hydra head itself, which is, of course, Iran until now.
And is it because, ultimately, Yeah,
it's as though both Netanyahu, on the one side, Here in Israel.
And then the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei.
It's like they were both working on a Rubik's Cube.
And the race was who could get the cube solved for their national interest first.
And I wouldn't even say for Iran it's national interest.
I think it's an apocalyptic, genocidal death cult that has nothing to do with the nation.
But just keeping the analogy, it was a race.
Who could figure out the Rubik's Cube?
For Iran, The race was to actually enrich uranium without drawing military attack from anyone, enrich uranium to military grade while trying to figure out how to physically build a bomb, miniaturize it, put it on the warhead, and make it work.
Now, personally, I believe, based on my reporting, that while Iran has never tested a nuclear weapon yet, they were buying data.
From North Korea.
North Korea is starving.
Their economy is in a horror show.
Iran had money.
They didn't have the bomb.
North Korea has the bomb.
They don't have any money.
And it was a match made in hell.
And so what you were doing is, I believe Iran has all the data they need.
Now, you still have to test it, right?
It still has to work, but I think that's where the aggression with which Iran was Now, that's the Iran side.
Now, the Israel side, the Netanyahu side, you'll recall, Dinesh, that in 2012 Netanyahu was ready to bomb Iran then because of how dangerous it was.
And his rival, Netanyahu's political rival, It was a man named Ehud Barak.
Ehud Barak defeated Netanyahu in 1999 to become the prime minister.
Then Bibi was able to come back and then recruited Barak to be his defense minister.
The two of them, unlikely allies, admittedly, they were ready to pull the trigger because based on the technology then and Israel's You know, Israel has much better technology 13 years later, but what we had then, what they had then, Netanyahu and his chief rival were ready to go.
But who wasn't?
Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
So Bibi has been trying to figure out how to stay ahead of Iran, but how to get an administration to support him to get all the missiles, the anti-the missiles.
And then Trump came into power in January, and Bibi's like, finally, finally, we're there, we're ready.
We're 20 months, or at that point, 15 months into a war with Iran, but Iran's getting closer and closer and closer, and Bibi's hands were tied by Biden, who absolutely forbade him.
To take any strong, decisive military action against the Iranian regime.
But then Trump surprised Bibi and said, no, no, I'm going to negotiate.
So, so BB used the last 60 days to finish off the cube, making the case of Trump, fine.
I'm not...
But as long as you'll give me the freedom of movement the moment this doesn't work, because it's not going to work.
And at Beebe's side was Lindsey Graham, the senator, who said behind the scenes to Trump, give him every chance in Iran to make a deal peacefully.
But when that clock ends, it's your credibility, not Beebe's.
It's your credibility, Donald Trump, President Trump.
If you don't give Israel freedom of movement, it's not Iran that's the main – that's not our main messaging.
It's to Russia.
It's to China.
It's to North Korea.
Your worst enemies have to see you make an ultimatum and keep it.
And Trump kept his word, and that's a pretty powerful moment in American-U.S.
history.
Pretty dramatic, I would say.
Joel, I've noticed that there is a kind of a little bit of a fracture that is developing on the MAGA or Make America Great Again right.
You're probably aware of this yourself.
There is a, I don't know if it's fair just to call them, I certainly don't want to call them anti-Semitic per se, but they are a faction that essentially is saying This is not America first.
This is, in fact, a betrayal of America first.
And if Trump goes down this road, he is going to not only divide his coalition, but he's going to have the majority of his voters on the other side, not with him.
Now, Trump was asked about this, and he somewhat irritatedly said, well, I'm the guy who came up with the idea of America first.
I get to say kind of what America first means.
Nevertheless, you know, and I'm not talking about some people who clearly are bitterly motivated.
I'm just talking about if some guy were to say, well, Joel, you know, we've been hearing in the United States the case for why we shouldn't be meddling, for example, in Ukraine.
It's far away.
It has not a whole lot to do with us.
And we wish them well.
but really what we want is we just want that all to stop.
Yeah, that's a great question, Dinesh, and it's super timely.
I actually just wrote a column on Saturday, Tucker Trashes Trump.
It's about Tucker Carlson who, yes, I would put him in a different category.
He's not Kanye West.
He's not Candace Owens, okay?
I've got serious concerns about how Tucker approaches foreign policy, but he's not an anti-Semite.
I can't draw that conclusion based on the data that I see.
But here's the question.
Tucker Carlson is arguably the most influential person in Trump's orbit that hates the idea that Trump would stand with Israel.
In an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile systems.
And Tucker has trashed Trump publicly.
And so, yes, I'm a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen.
So let me take my Israeli hat off for a moment.
I've got two of my four sons have already served in the Israeli Defense Forces.
and I've got my youngest is serving in the IDF right now.
Because Tucker took a shot at Mark Levine the other day saying, Mark, you've never served in the military.
You're not going to go and your kids aren't going to serve in the military if we have to go to war with Iran.
So what are you talking about?
I just want to be clear.
My boys have served and we are living in the eye of the storm right here.
So we've got skin in the game.
But let's take the Israeli hat off.
The American hat.
What's the American case?
The American case is And it started a little bit earlier when the Ayatollah Khomeini came back from exile, first in Iraq, then in Paris, came back on February 1st, 1979, and whipped up crowds every Friday saying, death to America, death to Israel.
Death to Israel is the secondary objective.
Death to America is the central mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
So Tucker doesn't seem to understand that.
Now, it's not just rhetoric.
They declared war on the United States, and then they took our embassy, the American embassy hostage, took Americans hostage, American diplomats, for 444 days.
humiliating the United States.
And nothing we did worked, and President Carter's effort to send in a military rescue didn't work, and it was a humiliating disaster.
If that were the only moment, we'd say, "Okay, well, no Americans died in the embassy.
It wasn't good, but you know." But what happened then?
Iran began funding terror organizations to kill Americans.
I'm just going to pick a couple because we could go on and on.
We spend the whole next couple of hours.
Most dramatically, perhaps, when Iran funded Hezbollah, their terror arm in Lebanon, to attack the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans and humiliating President Reagan as Reagan pulled all U.S. forces out of Lebanon.
That was a disaster.
That was Iran.
And if you say, well, you don't know it's really Iran.
Yeah, a U.S. federal court did the case and awarded, I think it's north of $100 million to the victims because they proved in court that it was Iran.
And so money that had been frozen of Iranian assets in the United States, $100 million plus was given.
To those American family victims.
So that's one example.
Another would be the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia where American servicemen and civilians were living and defending the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Iran sent terrorists to blow them up.
Nineteen Americans died.
Hundreds more were wounded.
So those are just a few examples.
We all know because there's hard intelligence that Iran was funding and encouraging and arming terror groups inside Iraq to attack.
American servicemen in Iraq during that war.
So it goes on and on and on, and Iran has never paid a military price ever.
Now, the closest it got was when President Trump in the previous term ripped up the Iran nuclear deal, which he said was the worst deal in history, right, paved the way to a bomb, didn't stop it.
And then Trump imposed that.
They were nearly bankrupt until Joe Biden came in and stopped enforcing the sanctions, and then they became rich, and then they began funding Terrigan.
In what part of America First is allowing Iran for nearly half a century to keep killing Americans and funding How is that not being pro-American and
America first to support the end of that regime in Iran, but more immediately neutralizing Iran's capacity To kill Americans and kill our allies.
That's the case.
Now, Trump, I think, has done it pretty well, which is he took the high road.
He's playing the good cop.
I'll negotiate.
And even now he's saying Iran can still come back to the table.
Israel is doing what it has to do.
But if you don't want to be completely wiped off the planet as a regime, come back and talk.
And that combination?
That is America first.
And I'm telling you, every Israeli is cheering, every Saudi is cheering, every Emirati, Bahraini, Moroccan, because everybody in this region, and I've met and talked to all of their top leadership, they, I'll give you an example, Mohammed bin Salman,
the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, told me personally, in the palace, in Riyadh, in 2018, That the Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, is the new Hitler.
That's how Saudi Arabia sees the regime in Tehran.
So if you want to be pro-American, if you want to be America first, you cannot let a nuclear wannabe genocidal country keep killing Americans, much less keep killing America's allies with impunity.
Tucker Carlson doesn't get that.
It's time for him to be exposed as not understanding America first.
He's putting Iran first.
He must not even get into putting Qatar or Russia first, but he's definitely putting Iran first right now.
Yeah, you know, I think, Joel, if this were the Reagan era, we wouldn't even need to be having this conversation because I think Reagan would understand this language completely.
In some ways, I think what we're getting is a reaction to the Bush era, the Iraq War, the absence of the weapons of mass destruction, a preemptive action that in retrospect was probably somewhat ill-advised.
And so the reaction I think is more to that.
And I think what people are discovering now is that Trump is in some ways In other words, the situation is different.
We've learned some lessons subsequently.
But Trump is not somebody to sort of pack up, pack everything up and let's go home.
Can I just put one corollary on that?
Yeah, go for it.
Here's the additional key.
One is that this is America first.
Israel's doing the dirty work.
Well, how is that wrong?
Like, you know, we're not asking...
We're doing it ourselves, and we're taking the heat.
We just need an America that is America first and stands and realizes our interests are combined.
The added part is, and if you don't do it, then what?
If you just let the Obama-Biden approach go on, they had their day, and Iran is this close to building nine nuclear bombs.
How is that America first?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Guys, Joel Rosenberg, All Israel News, the website joelrosenberg.com.
Check out the latest book, novel.
It's The Beijing Betrayal.
Joel, great stuff, and thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
God bless you.
I appreciate you.
We're now toward the middle section of my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And I'm talking about the Reagan economic record.
I will, in subsequent chapters, turn to Reagan's foreign policy, where I think his accomplishment was even greater.
He had an excellent economic record, but his foreign policy record was even more spectacular.
But let's stay with economics.
The chapter is called, They Don't Call It Reaganomics Anymore.
And, of course, the significance of the title is that when Reagan's policies seem to be causing trouble, unemployment is stubbornly high, the economy is still kind of stagnant, homelessness appears to be on an increase, this is all 1982, Then it's Reaganomics, it's Reaganomics.
The moment the policies start working, unemployment starts dropping like a stone, the stock market goes up, homelessness begins to disappear, Then suddenly the word Reaganomics disappears from media headlines.
So all of this twisted journalism that we are accustomed to now, we see the roots of it here.
It was going on a half century ago.
Now let's look at the Reagan record.
In 1983, the final year the Reagan tax cuts went into effect, the U.S. economy commenced.
A seven-year period of uninterrupted growth.
And this is what the journalist Robert Bartley of The Wall Street Journal called the seven fat years.
It was the biggest peacetime boom in U.S. history.
And the economy was growing at a pretty steady clip, 3.5% a year.
That's a high growth rate, more than double, or close to double.
The growth rate now, the GDP expanded by almost a third in real terms, meaning taking inflation into account.
Family incomes went up 15%.
Unemployment dropped dramatically.
Millions of new jobs created.
Interest rates, which are one of the signature problems of the 1970s.
Interest rates have gone up to 21%.
And they were so high because inflation was running at 10%, 11%, 12%.
So the interest rate, the real interest rate, was more like 9%.
But that dropped by more than a half.
Interest rates came down to 10%.
And the stock market doubled in value.
And all of this was achieved with low inflation.
The double-digit inflation of the Carter era just vanished.
And inflation became a relatively insignificant problem in the Reagan era.
In fact, it stayed low through the 1990s.
Inflation only began to perk up in this century and then to accelerate after the 2008 crash, but even more so under Biden, where the inflation rate, I believe, hit 9%.
That was the highest.
In the last few years.
Now, when the economy recovered like this, the left didn't know what to do with it.
So they went through their usual So first they were like, there's no recovery.
Oh no, it's an optical illusion.
And when it became obvious that there was a recovery, the economic historian Robert Dalek goes, it has little to do with Reaganomics.
Wait.
So when things were going badly, it was Reaganomics.
But now that they're going, well, it's little to do with Reaganomics, and he is at least using the word Reaganomics.
Pretty soon we'll see that they don't call it Reaganomics anymore.
Then, in another familiar fashion, the economists, the Democratic, the liberal economists, start saying, this is a very Keynesian recovery.
When you cut taxes, of course, a lot of money gets released into the economy.
And this causes the economy to grow because there's more money in the economy.
Now, first of all, this is not really true because when you have taxes, the government gets the money.
When the government cuts taxes, the money is transferred from the government to the guy who's paying the taxes.
It's not as if new money is created.
The money is simply spent by one guy instead of another guy.
It's spent by you and me.
Our own money?
Instead of being spent by the government.
So where's the new money?
Where is this Keynesian impetus for the recovery?
There is none.
And not only that, but none of these so-called Keynesian economists predicted the recovery.
If it was so obviously a Keynesian recovery, why didn't you call it before it happened?
So the other thing about Keynesianism, if you remember, I told you that it predicted If you get high inflation, you are going to have low unemployment.
If you get high unemployment, you will have low inflation and unemployment run in opposite directions, so to speak, a kind of seesaw.
But in the 1980s, we had the best of all worlds.
Low inflation.
Low unemployment.
The two are not running opposite to each other, so the Phillips curve was discredited.
Now, needless to say, when Reagan ran in 1984 against Walter Mondale, it was no contest.
Reagan won 49 states.
This is an accomplishment almost unimaginable today.
And yet in that era, Nixon had won 49 states in 1972 against George McGovern, who only won the state of Massachusetts.
In 1984, Mondale won his home state, which was Minnesota.
Now, Reagan was at the White House Correspondents' dinner.
And he approached his success with his usual aplomb and coolness.
He goes, you know, don't worry, guys.
He's talking to the media.
He goes, it's my job to solve the country's problems.
It's your job to make sure no one finds out about it.
So he's making a gentle poke at the liberal media.
And notice again the difference between the way Reagan treats the media and Trump.
Trump goes on the rampage against these guys, attacks them.
Calls them out by name, insults them.
In other words, he does to them what they do to him.
Reagan did not do that.
What Reagan would do is, Reagan sort of was above the fray.
He treated these people as Lilliputians, not worthy of his retaliation in the same mode.
Reagan defines a Keynesian economist as someone who sees something happen in practice and wonders if it can work in theory.
And then it was Reagan, of course, who coined the phrase.
He goes, the best sign that our economic program is working is they don't call it Reaganomics anymore.
Now, one of the interesting things about the left is that their strategy is to turn all positives into negatives.
And so once the left had to take stock of the fact that they couldn't say that the economy isn't growing and they couldn't say that things aren't working and they couldn't say, hey, look at the unemployment rate or look at the stock market or look at this.
There was nothing for them to point to.
And so they had to pivot in a very creative way.
And you have to give the left credit for this.
They know how to do this very well.
They suddenly decided, let's denounce the, quote, era of greed.
And so you had movies like Wall Street.
Greed is good.
And inequality.
Because whenever things are booming, it follows that some people do better than others.
And not only that, gaps begin to appear.
Gaps that might be big become even bigger.
Think of it something like this.
If you have a million dollars and I have $100,000, that's, let's just say, our net worth, and it's a massive economic boom and both of us are able to double our resources.
Well, now you have $2 million and I have $200,000.
So the gap between you and me, which used to be $900,000, is now $1.8 million.
Inequality has increased.
Of course, we're both better off.
And none of us are complaining, and it's been an economic boom.
But inequality becomes a big issue in the 1980s.
Reagan, of course, is unruffled by all this.
In the 1984 campaign, Mondale made economic inequality one of his big themes.
And Reagan didn't even bother to answer him, because Reagan was like, everybody's doing well.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
And so if there's inequality, kind of who cares?
Andrea Mitchell of NBC News cornered Reagan at one point and she says to him, what do you think of Mondale's charges?
Reagan goes, I think he should pay them.
So this is very much Reagan in his kind of witty dismissive mode and he doesn't even feel the need to refute Mondale's charges.
Now, it is worth pointing out that when I said a moment ago, Invoking, by the way, John F. Kennedy, a rising tide lifts all boats.
There is an exception to that rule, and that is a rising tide lifts all boats if they are in the water.
So if boats are not in the water, they're not going to be lifted up, are they?
And it is true that there are certain people in the Reagan era who didn't benefit from economic policies at all.
And in fact, they're the same kinds of people now who wouldn't benefit.
Let's just say there's a massive economic boom in 2025, 2026.
If you're not in the economy, you don't get the benefit of that.
And there are people who are not in the economy.
Think of somebody, for example, who is a single mom who is not working, just collecting government benefits.
Unless your government benefits go up, you're going to get the same.
And so the fact that the economy does better doesn't give you any advantage at all.
When we pick it up tomorrow, I want to talk about a second issue that has become a real problem in our time.
It began to occur in the Reagan era, and we want to devote some careful attention to it.
This is the problem of the disappearing middle class.
Is that there is an aspect of the disappearing middle class, we saw this in the Reagan years, that is perfectly fine.
There's nothing wrong with this middle class breaking up as it did in the 1980s.
But what has happened subsequently in the 1990s and all the way to now is a second factor that has come into play.
This is a post-Reagan factor.
Very bad for the middle class.
And that is the problem that, in a way, helped to create the Trump phenomenon, helped to create MAGA.
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