All Episodes
Previous Next
June 19, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:17
THE IRAQ PRECEDENT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1108
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, the Trump critics are saying that he's on the verge of making the same mistake with Iran that America under Bush made with Iraq in the early 2000s.
Is this true?
I'll give you the answer.
And I review the Supreme Court's landmark decision, good decision, affirming a Tennessee law banning transgender procedures.
and longtime radio host, now podcaster, Michael Savage joins me.
He's going to give his characteristically blunt take on issues of the day.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
Hit the subscribe, follow the notifications button.
I'd appreciate it.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
Ha.
Good.
Thank you.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Is Iran close to getting a nuclear bomb?
Speaking in March, testifying in March, Tulsi Gabbard relayed some intelligence where she said no.
But more recently, Gabbard has said, Iran's enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.
So what do we make of these not contradictory statements?
Gabbard is not saying anything that contradicts what she said before, but what she's saying is this, that Iran has always emphasized we're not trying to get a nuclear weapon.
Now, right away, this is a very arresting statement.
I just saw one of the Iranian officials saying, we have maintained from the beginning that we have no interest in nuclear weapons.
Well, think about it this way.
If your regime is on the verge of being wiped out, And someone were to say to you, I want you to give up the thing that you don't want anyway, why wouldn't you agree?
Right?
To give you a crazy example, if someone were to say to me something like, Tinesh, you know what, I've got a gun to your head, and I want you to agree that you are not going to, you know, date men.
I would be like, where did you come up with this analogy?
Well, honey, it's for clarity.
I would say, guys, you know what?
You don't have to pressure me.
I don't need a gun to my head to make a pledge.
I'll sign.
Oh, absolutely.
Not only that, you can send inspectors.
You can send inspectors to verify that I'm not dating men.
Anyway, honey, I'm obviously being lighthearted about it, but I think to dramatize the point, you're like, uh-huh, what?
Is there something I don't know?
Alright, so back to Tilsey Gabbard and back to nuclear weapons.
Gabbard's point is that there is no peaceful reason.
If you want peaceful nuclear energy...
And you're doing it.
And that's, I think, Trump's point.
I mean, I think what Trump is getting at here is you've got all these, like, armchair strategists, people who have no knowledge of what's actually going on in these nuclear reactors, who have no access to intelligence, no access to inside information.
And they're like, well, we just, we don't believe it.
Well, whether you believe it or not, you know, kind of, you know, riding out of your basement in Idaho, the point is, should we be taking the risk?
Should we basically say, all right, since, you know, Joe in Idaho doesn't really believe it, why don't we just let the Iranians keep doing it?
Well, Israel is not willing to take the risk.
Their survival is at stake.
Trump is not willing to take the risk.
Trump was asked just yesterday, I believe, what does unconditional surrender mean?
And his answer was actually, I think, quite important.
He goes, that means I've had it.
I give up, meaning the nuclear weapons.
I give up the weapons.
No more.
He says, 40 years, Iran has been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anyone they didn't like.
They were bullies, and now they are not.
I think here we have a conjoining of two separate things.
One is the intention or the motive.
This is what you would call premeditation, right?
Death to America.
And second, you have the bomb.
And so the combination of the intention and the weapon, that's what makes it dangerous.
People say, well, why don't we disarm Israel?
Well, Israel may have the bomb.
Of course, I believe they do.
But they don't have the intention.
Israel hasn't been going around saying death to America.
run here doesn't really work.
It's kind of like saying, well, I don't want the murderer to have a gun, but why don't we disarm the cop at the same time?
The cop and the murderer are not exactly on the same moral level.
The equivalence is the fallacy there.
But what about Iraq?
Because I think for a lot of people, especially a lot of younger people, the Iraq war is kind of as far back as they can go.
They don't go back to the Cold War or Reagan or World War II.
And in fact, a lot of the examples drawn from...
So there are things like, well, preemptive action is always, you know, unnecessary.
No, it's not.
If preemptive action had been taken, for example, by Britain while Hitler was engaging in a massive arms buildup, if the British had preemptively built up their own forces, World War II could possibly have been averted.
They didn't do it.
And the price of it was Hitler thought, okay, well, I've got my way.
There's no power in Europe strong enough to stop me, and so time to invade Poland.
So this is, in fact, also a lesson of history.
An important point about these lessons of history is that these lessons are not definitive.
They are ambiguous.
It depends on what history you choose to draw on.
History is a little bit like the Proverbs that you and I learned as a kid.
The Proverbs are true, but they also contradict each other.
Let me give you an example.
Look before you leap.
That would seem to suggest what?
Caution.
Be careful.
Look before you leap.
Well, here's another one.
He who hesitates is lost.
What does that mean?
Take action.
Don't wait.
He who hesitates is lost.
So which is it?
Look before you leap, or he who hesitates is lost.
And the answer is, it depends.
It depends on the new situation as to which of the two proverbs is applicable.
And one can make the same point here in dealing with Iran.
Is Iran, the situation, the same or even similar to what it was with Iraq?
Are the mullahs pretty much in the same vein as Saddam Hussein?
Well, first of all, Saddam Hussein was a secular guy.
The mullahs, whatever you say about them, are not particularly secular.
The second is that Saddam Hussein had local or perhaps regional ambitions.
The mullahs are very clear.
They have global ambitions, the global caliphate.
And in fact, their ambitions aren't even necessarily about Iran.
There's a very telling statement by one of the senior Iranian leaders in his speech.
He goes, the issue is not Iran.
The issue is Islam.
Now think about that.
Think how interesting this is.
Basically what he's saying is if we have to give up Iran, destroy Iran, it doesn't matter.
Because we're fighting for Islam.
We're not fighting for Iran.
We happen to be in charge of Iran.
So think of how dismaying this is for the Iranian people who are attached to Iran.
They care about Iran.
But the mullahs really don't.
For them, Iran is part of a larger scheme.
And finally, the information about Saddam having nuclear weapons or aspiring to nuclear weapons, Saddam said he didn't.
There was, in fact, no evidence that Saddam had nuclear weapons, so we trusted the U.S. government.
This was under the neocon-run Bush administration.
And I must admit, a hard lesson was learned there.
But the question is that because that was wrong, does it follow that Iran doesn't have these nuclear facilities?
Does it follow that the nuclear plants at Natanz and Fordow and all the others, the plants, the nuclear plants, You can see where they are in the mountain.
You can see where all the checkpoints are.
You can see where all the tunnels are.
You can see where the centrifuges are located.
So I think we're dealing here with evidence that is reasonably public, even though precisely how far Iran is from a nuclear weapon.
I mean, are they months away?
Are they years away?
Are they weeks away?
Iran itself is now putting out intimations that they already have a bomb, and they might even use it.
I mean, this is coming from the horse's mouth, if I can put it that way.
So it seems to me, again, that while we learn from the Iraq analogy, it's not definitive.
Trump country is booming.
We're building, hiring, and winning in America because energy tax credits put America first, bringing manufacturing jobs home and creating a stronger middle class.
Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.
More production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers.
And America's comeback depends on American energy.
President Trump, keep what works.
Don't repeal energy tax credits.
Paid for by Built for America.
We are days away from what has been dubbed the Rio Reset, what may be the greatest threat to the U.S. dollar's global dominance in over 80 years.
On July 6th, BRICS nations, Russia, China, India, Iran, many more, are expected to unveil their plans to circumvent the U.S. dollar, possibly cratering.
Its value.
They've already been laying the groundwork as their central banks have been methodically divesting from the U.S. dollar and U.S. bonds in favor of gold.
Now, how can you protect your savings, your IRA, your 401k from the potential fallout from this meeting?
Well, you can diversify with gold from Birch Gold Group.
Historically, gold can be a safe haven in times of high uncertainty, which is right now.
Get a free information kit on tax-sheltered gold IRAs by texting the word Dinesh, my name, to 989898.
July 6 marks a major meeting among nations that control one-third of the world's GDP.
Arm yourself, like Debbie and I have, with information to diversify your retirement savings.
Text Dinesh to the number 989898.
claim your free information kit from Birch Gold.
The trans issue.
Transgender issue has overtaken our culture, and in a very short time.
I mean, it was nowhere, and then it was everywhere, and it still is all over the place.
Debbie was just recently, I think, just on Google, and because she's in the post-menopausal phase, she was looking at what is the level of estrogen that is required or ideal for a woman at a certain age.
And boom, all this trans stuff comes up.
And Debbie's like, wait, what?
I'm not trans.
Like, what is this?
But sure enough, this is, of course, the propaganda of Google, but it also is an indication of how this issue is being pushed through the culture by a battery of organizations, by a
And yet, here we have the Supreme Court, very important ruling, the Skirmeti ruling.
SCOTUS upholds Tennessee law banning the mutilation and chemical castration of children under the guise of gender-affirming care.
Six-three decision.
All the conservatives on one side and all the liberals on the other.
Now, I want to say a word about the liberals because it seems on the first glance that this is just your standard liberal conservative divide.
But it is worth noting that there are seven people on the Supreme Court who actually have children.
They are, well, the six conservatives, And two of the, I'm sorry, one of the Democrats, one of the liberals, and that is Judge Ketanji Jackson.
The other two, Sotomayor and Kagan, no kids.
I won't go further than that, but I think you know what that means in these two cases.
But nevertheless, the point is that the Democratic Party is sort of like the party of the childless woman.
And I'm not saying that you need to have children to understand what policies are correct in this area, but kind of what I'm saying is that people who do have kids kind of intuitively get that kids don't know what they want.
And so if a boy who's two and a half years old says, I'm a girl, that doesn't mean he is a girl.
It doesn't mean that he's in the wrong body.
People say all kinds of crazy stuff when they are really little.
And parents know this.
This is part of what it means to have children as they are growing up.
So the Supreme Court weighs in, and this is a very important ruling because what it does is it allows states now to ban these kinds of These mutilation treatments.
Here's the Washington Post.
A divided Supreme Court.
Well, 6-3.
To ban gender transition treatments, a polarizing national issue.
Actually, this is completely false.
This is not polarizing.
Virtually overwhelming majorities agree that children should not be transitioned in this way.
The Trump administration has seized on.
They haven't seized on it.
They're reflecting popular opinion, which is what the government should do in a democracy.
And here's the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The Supreme Court's decision does not change the science.
Well, that's true.
It doesn't change the science.
The science basically is entirely opposed to these kinds of treatments, but these organizations are not opposed.
Why?
Because there's just a lot of money in it.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is no more a champion of science than the food industry is a champion of food science.
No, the food industry is a champion of cheap food.
Degraded food, food with preservatives, food that enables, they don't care if it's good for you, they care if it's good for them.
And we're learning that this is true now of many, many organizations across the board.
One piece of good news, very strong opinion from Amy Coney Barrett, who in her concurring opinion The majority opinion is written by Chief Justice Roberts.
And basically, Roberts says, I don't need to go into the issue of whether the transgender people are a kind of single group that deserves any kind of heightened scrutiny or special protection.
So Robert sidesteps that issue.
But Amy Coney Barrett goes there and she basically says, first of all, they're not a society.
Why not?
She goes, well, what is their distinguishing characteristic?
Separate groups have distinguishing characteristics.
We all know, for example, what a black person is.
They have a distinguishing characteristic.
And it's also, it's not just distinguishing, it's immutable.
A black person doesn't exactly have a way to stop being black.
A woman doesn't have a way to stop being a woman, even if she undergoes, takes all kinds of vitamins or treatments or whatever.
And even the transgender people admit that there are people who kind of come in and out of this group, right?
There are people who transition in.
There are people who de-transition out.
And so Amy Coney Barrett goes, there you go.
The very definition of a discrete group does not apply here.
And I think this is a very important point to clarify in law.
Basically, what it's saying is that transgenders are not the new blacks.
End of story.
An important point made in the Roberts decision, I think this is going to be key in a lot of these cases going forward, and it has wider applications than the transgender issue, is basically Roberts says that the correct approach for the court in these cases is to defer to the legislature, defer to the law.
And what he says is that It doesn't matter what the medical community thinks.
It doesn't matter if it's controversial, because a lot of times these judges think it's a controversial issue.
Let me get right into the bottom of it and settle the issue.
No, says Justice Roberts, that's not your job.
Your job is basically to decide if the law squares with the Constitution.
If it does, it doesn't matter if you think it's a sensible law, a stupid law, makes a lot of sense, doesn't make a lot of sense.
It's not your job.
And not only is it not your job, it's not your job to consult experts either.
If scientists come in and go, well, no, we love these treatments, they're perfectly fine, or, you know what, from my point of view, I really don't see why there should be a national emergency declared by the president.
Roberts' point is, nobody cares what you think.
This is part of the political process.
We have a legislature and an executive to make these decisions.
And so as long as they are acting within their own prerogatives...
They can choose to ignore what the American Medical Association says.
It's not your job to come back and say, well, I as a judge, I'm going to implement the recommendations.
No.
So this point, which is a key point in jurisprudence, is highlighted by Roberts in this decision.
Like I say, it doesn't just make the decision awesome.
It has wider implications for other decisions being considered by other judges in other courts affecting other actions, not only by Congress, but also by the Trump administration.
Are you tired of perverse and destructive content flooding your screens?
I mean, who isn't?
I am.
And that's why I joined the Angel Guild community.
I wanted entertainment that inspires, informs, uplifts, and doesn't drag us down with Angel Guild.
I can vote on upcoming films.
I can support movies that reflect values I align with.
Plus, I get early access to inspiring content.
I no longer have Hollywood entertainment pushing its agenda into my home.
Angel Studios is leading the charge, creating high-quality, faith-filled films like Sound of Freedom, Cabrini.
If you want to make a real difference, where we put our dollars shapes the future of entertainment.
So let's support content that amplifies light and protects our kids from harmful influences.
Please join me in making a difference today.
Visit angel.com forward slash Dinesh.
That's angel.com forward slash Dinesh to join the Angel Guild now.
As you know, our friend Mike Lindell, whom I had on the podcast yesterday, he has a passion to help everyone get the best sleep of your life.
And he didn't stop by just creating the best pillow.
He also created the best bedsheets ever.
Debbie and I, we love them.
They look and feel great.
It means a better night's sleep for me, which is important for my busy schedule.
But Mike is now offering the best deal on these Giza Dream Sheets.
Any size, any color.
Just $49.98.
I haven't seen this kind of an offer in I don't know how long.
Maybe not ever.
So you can get queens.
You can get kings, split kings, cal kings.
As I said, any size, any color.
Just $49.98.
But order now because when they're gone, they're gone.
Also for a limited time, when your order is over $100, you get $100 in free digital gifts.
Call 800-876-0227.
Or you can go to MyPillow.com.
You need to use the promo code Dinesh and you'll get the amazing offer, $49.98 on the Giza Dream Sheets, any size, any color.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast the legendary radio host and now podcaster Michael Savage.
You'll remember him from his, well, immortal commentaries on the Savage Nation, which aired on hundreds of radio stations.
Michael Savage in 2016 was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.
You can now follow him on social media on xasavagenation and also his website michaelsavage.com.
Michael, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Let's dive right into it.
I want to ask you about this war between Israel and Iran.
About potential American involvement.
It looks to be like there are some people who think that America should go all in.
The mullahs are very fragile.
Let's just knock them out.
There's another camp that holds that this seems to be the Trump camp.
Let's at least make sure the guys don't have nukes.
And then there's a third camp that just says, like, stay away.
Don't do anything.
This is not our war.
This is none of our business.
Which camp do you fall into and why?
I fall into all three camps, and I'll tell you why.
Because I have been a man of peace almost my entire, well, let's say my last 10 years in the media.
The more death and destruction I've seen on the earth, I believe the only answer is the opposite, the Gandhi-like approach, which is, although we may detest our enemy, there must be some dialogue on this earth in order for world peace to prevail.
I have moved more into the spiritual discussions than I am in the political in some ways, but that doesn't answer your question.
We're dealing with reality.
If a man breaks into your house and threatens to kill you, there's no dialogue possible.
So who broke into whose house is the question.
That depends upon which side of the issue you're on.
I'm on the issue of Western civilization, and I realize Israel is an outpost of Western civilization in essence.
In a very hostile, radical Islamist world.
But if you look at Islam in general, it's not necessarily a hostile world.
Not all Muslims are fanatics.
Unfortunately for this situation, Dinesh, the Ayatollah is a fanatic who believes that there must be some apocalyptic ending to all of this.
For whatever the number of the sacred cow to come back from heaven for peace to prevail on earth.
And I don't think this fanatic represents the Iranian people to the extent that the Iranian media would like us to believe.
I think most Iranians are oriented more toward the Western world than they are toward the Mueller world.
We have to remember, Jimmy Carter gave us this problem.
Jimmy Carter overthrew the Shah of Iran.
I remember the 1970s very well.
All we heard about was the Savak, the secret police, how evil they were.
I didn't quite understand it all.
Well, what happened is after the Shah was overthrown and sent into exile is the radical Islamic faction took over Iran.
The first people who were attacked were the women.
We have to remember it was the women who were attacked first.
You have to wear the head, scarf, you can't drive, you can't teach.
So right away, they put in restrictions against women.
For some reason, radical religious people fear women more than they fear male enemies.
I don't understand why they fear women, but it was the women who suffered first.
And I believe that in Iran today, most of the people would welcome the end of the theocracy.
You know, I think that is, you have beautifully stated the truth of the matter, by which I mean that There are Muslim countries that are democracies.
They're not perfect democracies, but we don't have any quarrel with the people of Indonesia, which happens to be the largest Muslim country in the world.
But there is a divide inside of the Muslim world.
I think this is what people don't get.
I just saw a brief interview with a top Saudi official, and he was describing Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, as Hitler.
Now, there are some people in this country who think that the only people who use the word Hitler in that connection are these sort of white nationalists and so on.
But what I'm getting at is that in previous wars, I've noticed, you know, go back to the 48 war, the 67 war, the 73 war, all the Arab countries were together.
Now you notice that the Arab countries are staying out of it.
They are quiet.
And that tells me that there's a big part of them that is actually kind of happy that these Iranian mullahs are being put in their place.
So it's not a matter of Islam.
It's a matter of which Islam, isn't it?
100% correct.
And there's a reformist movement, as you well know, in the Muslim community.
There's some wonderful spokesmen who are very brave.
They're trying to bring Islam into the 18th century.
Not the 13th century.
And we have to remember that Christianity itself was very much like radical Islam is today in the 1500s, if not the 1600s.
Radical Christianity was just like radical Islam in the Middle Ages.
And it took a reformation for Christianity to enter the modern world.
And I think that we're seeing the infancy of a reformation in the Islamic world.
And I think that when these mullahs are gone, the Islamic world will flourish once again.
What do you think about, you know, it seems to me that the United States does not want to, and I don't want to, I don't think you do either, us to be drawn into some kind of a larger war, certainly not with committing troops.
But what if the Israelis were to say to us, in effect, look, we've already largely handled this problem.
Essentially, the mullahs are up against the wall.
Their nuclear facilities have largely been decimated.
But there is this one Fordow nuclear facility that is buried under the mountain.
Can you lend us one of your B-52s overnight so we can drop two bunker-busting bombs, one to dig a hole and the second one to blow up the facility?
We'll give it right back to you tomorrow morning.
Is this like too high a price for us to pay to basically terminate the Iranian nuclear program semi-permanently?
I'm not an expert on nuclear proliferation, but what I have studied indicates to me that this deeply embedded nuclear plant at Fordow has external air supply and an external electricity supply.
I don't see why, through conventional methods, these external Supplies can't be terminated permanently.
I don't know that we need to be directly involved, but it looks to me, Dinesh, as though we are already on the road to dropping that bunker buster and putting an end to this.
It's like a termite colony, and I think the thinking is just go in with a pesticide and kill all the termites and get it over with.
I'm not so sure that's correct.
I also don't think that the mullahs are necessarily on their last legs.
I was reading Sun Tzu again, The Art of War, not a book I wrote.
He came before me by a few years.
But the key line here is all warfare is based on deception.
Do we really know what the extent of the decimation of the Iranian military is right now?
I don't think we really know it.
I think the Israelis were caught by surprise just last night when a missile hit a hospital in Israel.
Their Iron Dome isn't working perfectly.
They thought that we heard two days ago that the Mueller's were finished.
All of a sudden, the missile goes right into a hospital.
What else do they have up their sleeves?
I'm not so sure.
And also, Denisha, what about their agents through Hezbollah all around America?
Let's talk about America first for a moment.
If we do this and we openly become more involved, which is why Trump is a little trepidatious, do we trigger...
Another question that we have to think about carefully.
Yeah.
No, these are very important and valid questions.
And so I totally get it.
Look, I think for me, trying to gauge what the Iranians are capable of, I don't know if you see this, but every single day, It's coming tonight!
It's coming tonight!
And I've been waiting night after night, and it never seems to come.
Now, is this all part of a further deception?
I don't really know.
Let's pivot topics a little bit, because you mentioned America first.
As you know, Trump is caught.
Kind of in the middle of this big skirmish over what the United States should do.
And have we really learned the lessons of Bush and the weapons of mass destruction?
Give us your kind of assessment of Trump this far into, this early into his presidency.
How's he doing?
Has he betrayed his promises?
Has he remained consistent?
What kind of grade do you give him so far?
Thanks for making me the principal of the classroom.
I consider myself very close to Donald Trump before this election.
I saw him at his golf club before the election.
He was very friendly to me.
He gave me a shout-out, called me up on the stage.
I flew on Air Force One with him in the last administration.
We actually shared a hot dog, even though I'm not a meat eater.
I didn't want to be rude, and I took one of the hot dogs.
They were kosher, by the way, because of Jared.
And I got to know him very well.
And I said when he was running this time, even if we get 10% of what he promises, it will be 110% more than we would get with Kamala Harris.
It will be more like 1,010% more than we would have gotten with Kamala Harris.
So is it 10% more than we would have gotten?
He's tacked far to the left from where he began and what he promised.
He said the war between Ukraine and Russia would be over.
Well, he found out it's not as easy as telling them to stop fighting.
He's not a teacher in a schoolyard where you can just tell the kids to stop or we're going to punish you.
Apparently, the Ukrainians and Russians are not going to stop until one of them is dead, meaning one of the countries can't even move anymore.
That's a horrible thing when a million people have been killed and eight million displaced.
So what do you give them on that?
You give them 100 for effort, but a zero for results.
Nothing has happened.
Israel and Gaza.
I don't like what's going on in Gaza.
I don't like the plans to displace 1.2 million people from Gaza and send them to God knows where, Libya.
And I've been screaming from a tower saying, do you have any idea what the optics are of this?
Of moving a million poor people with donkeys out of a poor, impoverished strip of land?
You can't do this.
And so I don't like that talk about cleaning out Gaza.
I don't think that's very good.
On the economy.
I'm not happy with the new Big Beautiful Bill.
I think it's a Big Beautiful Pork Barrel Bill for special interests, which will bankrupt future generations.
Where are the fiscal conservatives?
All we heard about was fiscal conservative.
There's not one fiscal conservative around Trump at this time.
It's just spend, baby, spend.
So on those issues, no.
And then on immigration, another problem.
I certainly want to see America cleansed of the gangs.
And of the violent and of the criminals who came in under Biden.
But when I see old age home workers being arrested, I don't like it.
I don't like meat plant workers being taken out.
I know Mexican people.
They're the hardest working people I've ever met in my life.
I've known them for 15 years living in California.
If you don't know Mexican people, you're not really living in California.
And I've gotten very close to the community in working with people from Mexico mainly.
Hard-working people, they of all people want the gangs gone because they're affected more by them than anybody.
But when DHS is given a quota system of $3,000 a day, that's like the cop who was giving out tickets to middle-class women in the suburbs taking their son or daughter home from a soccer game because they weren't stopping the gangsters on the highway with the cocaine loads.
We all saw that going on because the cops had to meet quotas.
We know that exists in most police departments.
So now we see a DHS using a quota system, and it's not good for America.
I want to know who's going to pick the crops, who's going to work in the old age on cleaning bedpans, who's going to kill the pigs in the factory, etc., and so on.
So we have to be very cautious.
Why are we throwing out innocent, hardworking, illegal aliens?
I don't get it.
I see throw out the bad ones.
We all want the gang members gone.
So, on that issue, not good.
Not good.
Let me push back on that last one for a little bit and ask you this.
You know, it seems to me that if we were under normal circumstances, this idea of just ejecting the criminals would make total sense.
Nobody wants the criminals here, so that's kind of the easy part.
I'm also sympathetic to what you say to this degree, that these illegals got here not because all of them pushed their way under the fence or they eluded the Border Patrol.
They were virtually invited here by the Biden administration.
It was kind of an open door.
And all kinds of immigration lawyers were there to tell them, hey, listen, just keep repeating the word asylum and they're going to let you loose in the country.
So I guess that for me, the problem is this.
What, 5, 6, 8 million of these people who are let in?
Are you saying we should simply just let it be and not send any of them back?
I mean, why not figure out some way?
We used to have a bracero program.
People would come as guest workers.
They would work.
They would take money out.
They'd send money home.
But there was some kind of a legalized system to get the benefit of these people without essentially allowing rampant illegality.
Why not go back to something like that?
You make good sense.
And of course, I'm sensitive to the issue.
For years, I was screaming about borders, language, and culture when people thought I was crazy.
When I began a radio almost 30 years ago, I was saying borders, language, culture.
That's my mantra.
I think there's a middle way.
The Zen, the middle way of everything.
And I don't like the extremes in some way.
I mean, sometimes you have to use extremes.
I understand that.
I'm Barry Goldwater.
Defense of liberty.
I understand all of that.
But when it comes to human beings who are working and paying taxes, I'm not so sure we should throw them out of the country for two reasons.
One, because it's inhumane.
Number two, who's going to replace them?
Who is going to do the work?
Where's the labor force going to come from for these menial jobs?
We keep hearing Americans will do this work.
Really?
I don't think that Americans are ready to clean bedpans to any great extent.
Nor do the stoop labor in the fields of our farms, for example.
Who's going to do all of this?
Slaughtering animals?
Horrible job.
I myself don't eat animal meat for ethical reasons, largely.
But who's going to do that work?
We're going to wind up with shortages that we can't even comprehend.
Having said that, I understand what you're saying as well.
It's a difficult problem.
But when you set up a quota system where DHS must arrest 3,000 people, they're going to go for the low-hanging fruit.
They're going to go into the old-age homes.
They're going to take innocent people out who don't even know what happened to them.
I was told last week, I have a company that sends maids once or so to my house once a week.
I was told that DHS went to the maid agency and was arresting these poor women who were cleaning houses, some of whom have been there over 10 years.
They didn't come in under Biden.
So do we start with those who came in under Biden, which Trump says is 30 million, 8 million, 10 million?
Who could even measure this number?
Or how far back do you go with the illegal alien?
Where does it start?
Because there were 20 million illegal aliens when I started in radio 27, 30 years ago.
It's a large population of people, Dinesh.
And I don't know the answer to the problem.
All I know is that innocent people who are working hard and have never been in trouble with the law and paying taxes one way or the other should not be deported, in my opinion.
Very interesting.
Guys, I've been talking to Michael Savage, longtime radio host, now podcaster.
Follow him on social media on XASavageNation, his website michaelsavage.com.
Michael Savage, thank you very much for joining me.
It was a real honor to be on your show, Dinesh.
Honestly, thank you very much for having me.
I'm now right about in the middle of my discussion of Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
Book available in paperback, and I recommend you get it.
It's a wonderful way to inform yourself about Reagan.
If you've lived through it, remind yourself about the Reagan era, but it's
So it is a way of thinking outside the box about what's happening now, not just being captive to the stuff you're hearing, but being able to look at it in the context of things that Reagan faced a whole generation or almost two generations ago.
Now, I'm going to talk today about the second Reagan tax cut.
And the second Reagan tax cut was the tax cut, sometimes called the tax reform, but it was also a tax cut of 1986.
So the first tax cut was the tax cut of 1981, which brought down the top rate, the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50%.
And that tax cut also created three very simple tax brackets.
And the second tax cut, in some ways even more dramatic than the first, would bring the top tax rate from 50 to 28 percent.
So how did Reagan accomplish these astounding transformations of the tax code whose effects are significant?
Look, the tax rate, the top marginal rate is pushed up now to, what, 38% thereabouts.
So the Democrats have been able to kick it up a little bit, but only a little bit.
They haven't been able to go even close to 70. Even the most radical Democrats would not push it more than a few points up.
And so the reality is the Reagan revolution endures, at least in this important respect.
So, Reagan did this with a Democratic House, and in his second term, he even had a Democratic—well, let me think about this.
Did he have a Democratic Senate?
I'm actually not sure, so I'm not going to venture out to say one way or the other.
But let me say this.
The conventional wisdom of the time was there is no way Reagan is going to be able to get a second dramatic overhaul of the tax system.
It's kind of like if you do it once, that's it.
You've kind of done your bit.
Even with Trump.
Look, Trump got a tax cut in the first Trump term.
Not as big as the Reagan tax cut, but it was a tax cut nevertheless.
And what Trump is doing with the big, beautiful bill now is to...
It had an expiration date stamped on it.
And so the Trump tax cuts will persist if this bill is, at least in roughly current form, passed by the Senate and then, of course, reconciled with the House and Trump signs it.
It'll be a landmark piece of legislation.
My prediction is that it is going to pass in some form, although the Senate is now tinkering with it at its end.
What Reagan did with the second tax cut, the 86 tax cut, was he created really three tax brackets.
A 15% tax bracket was the bottom.
Well, actually, let me back up for a second.
The 1981 tax cut had a 15%, a 25%, a 35% tax scale.
And what Reagan did was he pulled it down even further to 20, 28%.
Now, Reagan had to work with some Democrats to get this done.
And that required some compromise.
So the Democrats had pointed out to some tax loopholes that they were concerned about, particularly two Democrats.
One is Bill Bradley.
One was Richard Gephardt.
And these were two influential Democratic legislators.
And so Reagan basically figured out, look, I want to lower the tax rate.
I don't mind closing some of these loopholes in exchange.
It actually simplifies the tax code.
It's going to make the people who are benefiting from the loopholes pay more.
But nevertheless, this is a deal.
In a compromise, each side has to give something.
And Reagan was willing to give something.
And part of what he achieved in this tax cut is not only a reduction of the top rate, I've been focusing on that, but also a real transformation at the bottom.
Millions of Americans were taken off the tax rolls altogether.
These are people who made a little enough money.
Reagan's point is, why are we hounding them to squeeze a little bit of money out of them that's very hard for them to part with and doesn't do us a whole lot of good?
Let's knock it off.
Knock it out.
There was an alternative minimum tax called the AMT that was put in.
And this has turned out to be a bit of a monster.
And I say that because what has happened is that the AMT over the years has metastasized into something that captures now a lot of, quote, high-income earners who aren't that high income.
They were high income.
It's one of these things with tax laws, right?
Let's just say you set a tax bracket and you say people who are rich, people who make over $100,000, which was a good deal of money in the 1980s, are going to have to be considered for this AMT or alternative minimum tax just to make sure they don't get out of paying a fair share of taxes.
But what happens now is that And now you have all these people making over $100,000 who are like, wow, I have to pay this alternative minimum tax?
What?
I'm not rich.
So this is one of the problems, by and large, with tax policy that doesn't take into account the effect of inflation.
Now I want to turn to a second phenomenon, which I've alluded to before, and that is the technological revolution of the 1980s.
We are now living out the fruits of this technological revolution.
It is a kind of second communications revolution.
I have to admit, it is not the biggest of the communications revolutions.
It's the second biggest.
Even though it seems to us to be huge, right?
It's the, oh my gosh, we have the computer, we have the cell phone, we have the iPhone, we have the internet.
What could possibly be bigger than this?
Well, the answer is the telephone is bigger than that.
I'm talking about the invention of the telephone in the first place.
The telegraph is bigger than that.
The original communications revolution had both an electronic side, the telegraph, the telephone, but it also had a physical side, which was the railroads, the car, the airplane.
So can you think of three bigger inventions in our own day than the railroads, the car, the airplane?
You cannot and I cannot because Now, of course, Steve Jobs took the phone And figure out how you could, quote, pull it out of the wall and miniaturize it and add features like a camera.
And all of that is good.
But in technology, the great achievement is always going from zero to one.
It's not going from one to two or one to three or even one to four because that's the easy part.
Coming up with the first step.
This is, by the way, drawing now on a book written by Peter Thiel several years ago where he talks about the zero to one technology.
Coming up with something Out of nothing, so to speak.
It doesn't exist before.
Let me give my favorite example in this genre, which is a very simple example, but kind of illuminating.
When I came to America, I would go, you know, from airports and I would see all these people lugging this luggage.
Huge pieces of luggage, trunks, big suitcases, and they were hobbling behind them.
And in some cases, two people carrying the two ends of suitcases and so on.
And suddenly I noticed appearing on the scene, I saw something I hadn't seen before, roll-on luggage.
Not exactly a radical idea.
The wheel has been around since ancient times, but nobody thought of putting it on a suitcase.
And yet there was roll-on luggage.
I saw it.
I'm like, wow.
And then suddenly roll-on luggage was everywhere.
So that's called Zero to One.
Zero to One is the first guy with a roll-on suitcase.
And after that, the easy part, other people go, oh, that's a great idea.
And maybe there are better ways now of sort of equipping a suitcase or a trunk with wheels.
But those are mere improvements on the existing idea.
The first guy to think, why don't I put wheels on the suitcase?
That's the innovation.
And so, as I'm saying, the big communications revolution Sort of 1850 to the 1920s.
The Wright brothers, you know, picking up a big piece of steel and putting it in the air and keeping it up there for a while and moving it in the air.
Something that had previously been thought to be an accomplishment only of birds.
So we're living in a second technological revolution.
I don't want to minimize it, but I do want to emphasize that it is the second biggest thing.
And Reagan had something to do with it.
This is a point that the writer George Gilder makes, and he's right.
Before Reagan, it's kind of hard to remember now, but not a lot of Americans owned a computer.
Before Reagan, video cassette recorders were a novelty.
Nobody had an answering machine.
Only one in six Americans.
One in six had a microwave oven.
All of this changed in the 1980s.
Suddenly, cell phones, I believe, were introduced in 1983, yet by the end of Reagan's tenure, more than 20 million Americans owned one.
By 1989, 50 million American homes had microwave ovens.
Most people owned a VCR.
Now, obviously, the VCR itself can become obsolete over time, but my point is these are the gateways to the technologies that we are using now.
I remember, and you probably will, the Sony Walkman from the 1980s.
This was a way, basically, to make music portable.
And it shows the mobility, the versatility of technology.
Now, again, Reagan did not create this revolution.
The tech entrepreneurs did.
But what enabled them?
The answer to that is policies helped to enable them.
Lower tax rates, privatization, deregulation, even the rhetorical celebration of the entrepreneur.
All of this put together helped to enable and speed up and make possible, facilitate the technological revolution.
And no wonder you saw this plethora of companies, Microsoft, Dell computers.
▲
Export Selection