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June 30, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:27
MISJUDGING HER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1115
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Coming up, I'm going to cover a bunch of topics, including Zoran Mom Dani eating rice with his hands.
I'm going to talk about, more importantly, the Supreme Court's ruling striking down these nationwide injunctions by district court judges.
I'm going to focus specifically on Amy Coney Barrett's majestic slam dunk on Katanji Brown Jackson.
I'll also reveal the prospects of the big, beautiful bill passing the Senate and becoming law.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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We are now in a position to do a little bit of a post-mortem on the Iran strikes, and I want to make a couple of observations about that.
Then I want to talk a little bit about Zoran Mamdani in New York, the guy who's running for mayor, the socialist, and some of the things that he has said and done, notably his recent eating rice with his hands.
I want to comment on that.
And finally, I want to talk, my main topic is not eating rice with my hands, which I don't do, but rather the Supreme Court and its important decision in essentially striking down these nationwide injunctions or making it much more difficult for judges to get away with this.
This is the kind of headline.
This is the big news.
And I'm going to get into it.
Now, a word or two about the Iran strikes, which, by the way, are also a very big deal.
They appear to have worked beautifully for Trump.
There was a faction of the MAGA right that was up in arms, but I think has now sidled its way back into the Trump camp, recognized that Trump was right.
They've also recognized that this is not some prelude to World War III.
If there was a World War III, it lasted like four hours.
And that Trump never had the intention of drawing us into a war, putting boots on the ground.
I think these guys thought that that would happen regardless of what Trump intended.
And Trump, in a sense, has proven them wrong.
Now, a couple of unobserved things about all this.
One is that notice that Russia and China have been remarkably silent through this whole affair.
Yes, they've had some routine protests against what Trump did, but the most important thing is, did they help Iran in its hour of need?
No.
They let Iran get pulverized.
They allowed Iran's kind of nakedness, by here I mean the undefended skies, to be exposed, and they didn't lift a finger.
And so think about the message that that sends to countries around the world.
Do you want to have China or Russia as your ally?
Will they come rushing to your help when you're in dire need?
And the answer is no.
And all of this, I think, bodes very well.
This is the kind of message you want to send in foreign policy that you, the United States, take action, that your rivals cannot be depended upon by the smaller countries that they're always courting to come into their own security orbit.
The second thing that's happening is an attempt by Trump.
This is going on kind of behind the scenes, but I think we're going to have a big announcement very soon of adding countries to the Abrahamic Accords.
And the big candidate, I think, here that is going to be a surprise to many people is Syria.
Now, what is the significance of this?
Well, the significance is pretty clear.
Israel has the following neighbors, Egypt on the south, Jordan, Syria, Jordan to the east, Syria, and Lebanon.
Israel is currently at peace with Egypt and Jordan.
And adding Syria to that list would be very good for Israel.
And I think the Syrians, again, have looked around the region.
They've noticed who just got pulverized.
They've realized that this kind of jihadism is not really the way to go and is, in fact, signing your own kind of death warrant.
And so I will not be surprised that Syria makes a deal, not just with the United States, but with Israel.
Now, what has been holding up this deal in the past was that the Golan Heights were taken by Israel in the 67 war.
Israel has never given them back.
Israel gave back a large part of the Sinai that was taken from Egypt.
And Israel, in effect, didn't give back, but allowed the Palestinians autonomy in the Gaza Strip, which was also captured in the 67 war.
But what Israel has never done is returned the Golan Heights and is not going to either.
And it looks like Syria, which has always had that demand as a prerequisite for normalization with Israel, will drop that demand.
And that would be a very good thing.
Let me talk about Zoran Mamdani.
There's a kind of a fracas on social media over the guy eating rice and he's kind of eating like a pig.
And it is kind of disgusting.
And Brandon Gill actually tweeted saying something like, aren't immigrants supposed to assimilate?
Now, Brandon is getting slandered.
Your father-in-law's from India, Brandon, as if to say that somehow my family in India is like all eating with their hands.
But no, they're urban, they're educated, they're Western, they're Christian.
They do eat, in fact, with a knife and fork.
This is not, by the way, always the case with immigrants.
There are some immigrants who come to America, they're off the boat.
And this is actually the funny pattern that you see.
And I want to describe it.
Debbie's laughing on the sidelines, but this is a very telling pattern.
Here's the pattern.
Immigrant comes off the boat, eats rice with hands.
That's generation number one.
Interestingly, typically generation number two goes in the opposite direction.
I'm an American.
I don't want to eat with my, that's kind of gross.
I'm going to eat with a knife and fork.
But generation number three often goes back to eating rice with your hands.
But now, not because you don't know better, not because you have to.
It's because you want to be ethnic.
You kind of think like, oh, it's really cool to be ethnic, you know.
So at least when the cameras are rolling, and this I think is what's going on with this Zoran Mamdani.
This guy lives in a $2 million condo.
He is very comfortable.
His mother's a filmmaker.
He's got lots of money.
They've got properties around the world.
This is what you call a limousine sort of socialist.
I don't think he's eating rice with his hands.
In fact, I've seen a video of the guy who is eating like a pizza or a burrito on a train, and he's using a knife and fork.
So think about that.
Most people would eat that with your hands.
This guy knows how to eat with the knife and fork.
This is ethnic performance artistry.
I think that's the point.
It's not an immigrant refusing to assimilate.
This guy plays to the camera, and he's now in his kind of ethnic role here.
I think the really scary thing about Mamdani is nothing to do with this stuff, eating the rice.
It's the fact that, well, let's go through a couple of things he says.
Number one, I don't think that we should have billionaires.
Stupid on its face, because the country would be a lot better off if we had more millionaires, more billionaires.
That would be more jobs.
One of the great achievements of the West, by the way, is to create a mass affluent class, and we've done that.
Obviously, there have been people who have been left behind, and that should be the main focus of our fiscal and monetary policy.
But by itself, having people who are prosperous, successful is not a bad thing.
So imagine in New York, the city that, by the way, has the largest number of billionaires in the world.
You have a potential mayoral candidate who says, I don't think there should be billionaires.
Number two, this guy supports policies that impose costs and taxes, not just on people who are well-off, but also on people who are disproportionately white.
So he's a racial grievance specialist, and this is in fact the modern shape of socialism in our time.
Socialism is not just a class phenomenon.
You're targeting people who are not just well-off, but also white.
And Mamdani is quite explicit about that.
Number three, he wants city-owned grocery stores.
Now, think about what this is.
This is basically now you're moving into kind of Cuban or Soviet economic systems, which have famously reduced entire populations to indigence and poverty.
And this guy seems to have no idea that there's any history behind any of the things he's saying.
He just says them with a certain kind of confidence.
It's the confidence of the guy who's born yesterday, right?
You're saying things that everyone thinks, well, we tried this.
Lots of people have tried this.
This has been a disastrous failure.
One of the great achievements, and I remember when I first came to America, to me, one of the most spectacular sites in the country as a whole was the grocery store.
Why?
Because I'd never seen supermarkets and grocery stores that were this abundant.
I remember even when Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet head of the Soviet Union, came to America.
I saw him.
I didn't see him in person, but I saw him on television.
He was in a grocery store in Washington, D.C. And you could see his eyes popping open.
And he kept saying things like, what's the limit?
What's the limit?
And the immigrant, if you will, behind was like, no limit.
Buy whatever you want.
And this guy was like, what?
He was shocked.
So this is the experience of the last century or so with various types of socialism.
And so this is this guy, Mamdani.
And finally, probably the most incriminating of all, an earlier video, this seems to be from a few years ago.
The end goal is seizing the means of production.
So this is what tells me we're dealing with communism.
Because seizing the means of production, there are by and large Democrats who are redistributionists, Democrats who want to end the estate tax.
But as far as I know, there's no other Democrat.
I don't even think AOC.
I've never heard anything like this from any of the squad.
Seizing the means of production means that the government controls everything.
They seize car production.
They seize computer chips.
They seize real estate.
Ultimately, the government becomes the tyrannical overlord of the entire society.
And again, you know, Mamdani might say, well, I'm just saying these things.
He's not just saying these things.
In fact, he goes on, if you listen to this video, he very clearly says, we need to keep carefully in mind what our end goal is.
And our end goal is, in fact, to seize The means of production.
So I have little doubt.
Now, can he do this all by himself?
Probably not, but it is very telling if the hub of global capitalism, certainly the hub of capitalism in the United States, namely Manhattan, namely New York City, has as its mayor a guy of this atrocious caliber.
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All right, let's talk about this big Supreme Court decision, which was ostensibly about birthright citizenship, but had behind it a much, in a way, a much bigger issue.
In fact, such a big issue that if you had given me a choice, I would say I would rather that Trump win on this, even if he loses on birthright citizenship.
I'm not saying he should lose or that he will lose.
I'm simply saying that if I had to pick one or the other, I would choose to win on this other issue.
What's the other issue?
Nationwide injunctions.
We have really seen since Trump stepped into office an incredible surge of judges stopping everything he does, left and right, all over the place.
Even things that Trump does that are squarely within his authority, some judge somewhere, it could be Seattle, it could be LA, it could be Boston, slaps a nationwide injunction and says, you can't do this, at least until we work it all out legally in my courtroom.
And here comes the Supreme Court smacking that down and basically saying, enough.
This has got to stop.
And the author of this majority opinion is none other than Amy Coney Barrett.
Now, initially, if you had told me it's Amy Coney Barrett, I would have expected kind of a soft opinion, not the kind of opinion that you would get, let's say, from a Gorsuch or from an Alido, let alone a Thomas.
But it turns out Amy Coney Barrett goes into the slam-dunk mode and writes a sparkling, spectacular opinion that by itself, I've never been in the school that has dunked on Amy Coney Barrett.
Like, she was a terrible mistake.
She's a closet liberal.
I don't think she's any of that.
And you certainly cannot glean that by the fact that she's in a video with Trump and she seems to be grimacing.
And some people go, see, look, there it is.
She hates Trump.
I don't think, by the way, any of this is true.
Now, am I saying that Amy Coney Barrett has an approach that's identical with Alito or Thomas?
I'm not saying that.
But I do think that she is clearly in the right wing of the court.
She's, by and large, a pretty reliable vote.
The unreliable vote, if there is one, is the Chief Justice.
It's Roberts.
And that's partly because, again, it's not even because Roberts isn't conservative.
It's that Roberts sees himself as engaged in a certain type of balancing act.
And that's why he behaves the way that he does.
But let's turn to this decision.
By and large, the decision does not involve a substantive ruling on birthright citizenship.
They don't uphold it.
They don't strike it down.
They basically say that issue is not being decided right now.
That's something that can be worked out through the lower courts and then appealed up as needed.
But the issue that is decided is the issue of the nationwide injunctions.
And here is what Amy Coney Barrett says.
She says, first of all, federal courts have never been given any authority in the Constitution or by any law to give them general oversight over the entire executive branch.
Nobody said that a district court in Boston, nobody said a district court in Chicago can somehow exercise oversight over the entire federal government, which is to say the executive branch of the, which is to say the president of the United States.
Not only do lower courts not have this kind of authority, the Supreme Court doesn't either.
This is the crusher, because we often think the Supreme Court's job is to uphold the law.
The Supreme Court's job is to make sure that all the other branches are doing their job.
And Amy Coney Barrett remarkably says, no, that's not the case.
Each branch of government is given a certain sphere of authority, and they're supposed to do certain things about it.
Now, let's say they don't do those things.
What can the Supreme Court do?
And Amy Coney Barrett says, in many cases, nothing.
Let me give you a case in point.
Let's say we have a law, and this is, you'll see the example is taken right out of the Biden years.
We have a law that says that you have to, that distinguishes between legals and illegals.
And the law basically says that only these people are legal and these people are not legal.
And yet the Biden administration, flouting that law, has been allowing illegals into the country.
Millions of them.
Why hasn't the Supreme Court stopped it?
Well, Emmy Courtney Barrett's answer is because that job of policing legals and illegals has been given to the executive branch.
They might do it well, they might do it badly, they might not do it at all, but the fact that they don't do it doesn't mean the court gets to do it.
In other words, the point she's making at is the court's jurisdiction is limited and specific.
And so in a crushing line directed specifically at Katanji Jackson, but in a way it applies more broadly, she goes in effect that the solution to an imperial executive, you want to curb the power of an imperial executive?
You don't do it by creating an imperial judiciary.
And the power of this statement, I think, is it brings out, it makes explicit something that the left has always wanted.
They love the imperial judiciary, obviously an imperial judiciary under their control.
The other thing that Amy Konivera does, and this is again a slam dunk on Katanji Jackson, is that Katanji Jackson basically takes the view that if there is a violation, the Supreme Court automatically has the authority to correct it.
So in other words, we're back to this issue of the imperial judiciary.
But what I like is the way in which Amy Coney Barrett excoriates her.
The way she does it is she brings up the very first major case that ever came before the Supreme Court.
This is Marbury versus Madison, 1803.
Years ago, as a student in college, I took a course in constitutional law.
You'd learn a little bit about the founding of the Supreme Court, how it got started, and then boom, the first case you study, Marbury versus Madison.
And what does this case involve?
Well, it involves James Madison issuing a certification.
It's called a writ of mandamus.
And the question is the constitutionality of that writ of mandamus.
It goes before the Supreme Court.
And in a landmark decision, the court basically says, Madison is wrong.
Madison does not have the authority to do this.
But guess what?
We, the Supreme Court, lack the jurisdiction and the authority to fix this problem.
So in other words, there is a case of the executive exceeding its power, but unfortunately, we are in no position to correct it.
And therefore, you see right here, and this is what Amy Kony Barrett is talking about, the fact that the Constitution limits the authority of Congress in certain ways.
Think of it.
Congress has no right to override the Bill of Rights.
Its authority is limited in that.
Similarly, there are limits on the authority of the executive branch.
And this is the point that's often forgotten.
And Amy Kony Barrett basically says to Katanji Jackson, have you even been reading the Constitution?
The implication being that, of course, without saying it, that Katanji Jackson is a major DEI appointee for whom the Constitution is, let's call it optional, optional reading.
So wonderful win for Trump, big win for Trump.
The left is very discompobulated, and I can kind of see why.
Now, let me make a few remarks about the big, beautiful bill.
As I was heading over to the podcast, the big, beautiful bill was being read verbatim.
It's in full length on the floor at the instigation, at the instruction of Chuck Schumer.
Now, Schumer made it sound like, well, we can't pass this bill without at least hearing everything that's in it.
And of course, in the beginning, as the clerk was reading the bill, Schumer was around.
But pretty soon, Schumer decided, I'm old, I need to sleep.
And so he left.
He wasn't even there for the reading that he just, oh, so important.
We all hear what's in the bill.
And actually, when you hear a lot of what's in the bill, you're going right on, right on, right on.
Why?
The bill has improvements in military spending and military allocation.
It makes the Trump tax cuts permanent, obviously a very good thing.
It has, I think, 10,000 new border security agents, and that means much more effective immigration enforcement.
That's certainly something people voted for in November.
It strengthens the police.
So across the board, there's good stuff after good stuff after good stuff.
Now, the bad stuff is, of course, being highlighted by the media.
One of the most common refrains is that, well, you know, several million people are going to lose health care benefits.
And I think it's very interesting that these Democrats keep saying several million people.
They don't actually say several million citizens.
Why?
Because what the bill does do is it strips free health care from illegals.
Aha.
So what the Democrats are trying to do when they say millions of people are going to lose their health care, what they're actually talking about is the free health care that you and I as citizens are paying for that go to illegals.
And just think about this.
I mean, can you and I go to some other country, basically unauthorized, slip in there, and then start and put ourselves on the welfare rolls and collect benefits, healthcare benefits, educational benefits.
It's preposterous.
And when we're a country that is seriously in debt, I just saw Senator Hickenlooper and he's like, when the wealthiest country in the world cannot provide free health care, something is very wrong.
And I'm thinking to myself, what do you mean the wealthiest country in the world?
How can one consider yourself a wealthy country at all?
Forget about the wealthiest country in the world when you owe $37 trillion that you have no way to pay.
How would you consider that wealthy?
You know, Elon Musk has a great deal of money, $230 billion.
Let's just say that Elon Musk had $500 billion in debt.
Would he be the wealthiest man in America?
Actually, no.
He would maybe be the poorest man in America.
Why?
Because even the homeless guy who has zero doesn't owe $200 billion.
So if Elon Musk has $200 billion in debt, he owes more than the homeless guy, and he's poorer than the homeless guy.
So we need a little bit of realism in talking when we use these pat phrases, which by the way, might have been true in 1946 or 1962, but have to be at least severely qualified today, a country that is not, it's not even that there's a lot of debt.
It is that we have difficulty in the federal budget paying the interest on the debt.
So, again, put yourself in this situation.
You owe so much money, you're so much in debt, you're having difficulty paying your mortgage.
You're having difficulty paying the monthly payment on your car.
Now, this is bad enough to be in that situation, but if you go around like an ass saying, I'm the richest guy in the neighborhood, that's insult on top of injury, right?
That's taking things too far because you've put yourself in a mess.
At least acknowledge that.
Try to come up with some plan to get out of it.
And this is actually what the bill is doing.
The Trump formula is pretty simple.
Let's do a lot of good things with the economy.
We don't have a way to cut entitlements.
So we're going to let them be for right now.
We're going to try to create an engine of economic growth, and we're going to, in a sense, grow ourselves out of this problem, or we're going to grow ourselves into a position where the problem starts diminishing, if only slightly, in size.
It's a gamble.
I don't deny it.
But I think on balance, it's a worthwhile gamble.
I think the good news is that the Senate is going to pass this probably narrowly.
Maybe even with J.D. Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, then there's going to be some reconciliation with the House.
The Big Beautiful Bill, and I'm not sure, it's big.
I'm not sure how beautiful it is.
It has some beautiful parts to it.
But nevertheless, this Big Beautiful bill, I think, is going to become law in a few weeks.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Dr. Joel Kahn.
He is an MD.
He is a practicing cardiologist.
He's a clinical professor of medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine.
He's also the founder of the Kahn Center for Cardiac Longevity.
This is a guy who has innumerable books and articles and monographs.
He's also been on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Larry King, the Joe Rogan experience.
And we're going to talk about being healthy and having your heart be healthy.
Dr. Khan, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Big fan.
Thank you so much.
Hey, we want to talk about something that is downright bizarre, and that is the presence of something called microplastics in places where we don't expect to see these microplastics.
I was reading an article that talked about how these microplastics are a component of missiles and rockets.
So maybe we can start by the very simple question of what are these microplastics and what role do they play in missiles and rockets?
Yeah, and we're varying a little bit outside cardiology specialty, but one has to be up to date on this stuff.
And it is true when they fire off rockets, whether it's for space travel or certain military exchanges like we just had, of course, in the Middle East in the last couple of weeks, there is a lot of plastic exposure, and most of it's falling into the oceans, and some of it's staying in our air.
What's the big deal?
Well, human bodies were never geared to filter out, eliminate, and destroy these basically toxins that are everywhere.
They're certainly in our drinking water.
They're in the air.
They're in our clothes.
They're in our tea bags.
And we are suffering.
Our health is suffering.
So the rockets go up.
When they crash back in the ocean, they're putting plastic pieces all over.
And just the very nature of space travel and missile ballistics is increasing the burden.
I mean, there was a recent study, just to finish up, that there were 10 times more plastics found in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the United States.
And most of it was what is called microplastics, so small you can't see them, but your body knows that they're there and our bodies are suffering.
And this kind of brings us really to our kind of punchline or our theme, which is these microplastics, which, you know, I mean, I suppose at some level you could say they're out there.
Are we degrading the environment?
Are we ruining the planet?
But on a much more like closer to home level, these microplastics are somewhat omnipresent in our food and in our water.
That I think to me was a little bit of the shocker.
But talk to me about the extent of the way in which our food and water is contaminated by these microscopic or tiny particles of plastic.
Yeah, and you know, you're not going to taste it or see it or smell it, but they're there.
There was a recent autopsy study.
I mean, this is the most visual I could possibly offer you.
That when they did an autopsy on 50 humans that died for whatever reason, they had a spoonful, just the entire structure of this plastic spoon.
0.5% of their brain was microplastics and 99.5% of the brain was more normal human tissue.
So just think about that graphic.
That's our goal.
Keep a plastic spoon out of your brain.
It causes inflammation, the fire that leads to so many different diseases in their body.
And they've been found in arteries and they've been found in sex organs.
Big problem with fertility going on.
These plastics, microplastics are called endocrine disruptors.
Endocrines are hormones.
You know, you're 28 years old trying to start a family.
You don't want your brain to be full of this or any other part of your body.
So it's a real deal.
And it's not really the sky is falling chicken licking.
This is 2025 real-life medicine.
And I suppose it's fair to say that this is something that is kind of new in human history, by which I mean there was simply no way for our ancestors to have been contaminated in this way.
This seems to be, I think you're saying, a modern problem, and it affects modern people.
Does it disproportionately affect the United States?
And what can we say about people in this country regarding their exposure to these microplastics?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
I don't think anybody's done this yet.
They have gone to the mummies in Egypt and x-rayed them, and they do find heart disease in mummies from 4,000 years ago.
I'm pretty sure they're not going to find microplastics in the pyramids in Giza and the rest.
It's a new problem.
And every one of us, if we go through testing, which can be done in blood and urine, we'd show up with some of these.
And we want to keep it as minimal as possible.
You know, we are breathing some and it is in our clothing.
It's mainly food and water and food packaging and food preparation.
And even those thermal receipts, you know, everybody gets a receipt at a restaurant.
They actually seep into your skin.
That's called an endocrine disruptor, a little different than microplastics, but they are there.
So we just want to get our guard up.
A recent study in the United States said food varies greatly the more process your food.
That fast food, number one on the list of the most microplastics was actually breaded shrimp, followed by fish sticks.
Those were the two highest in microplastics.
Way down when you get to fruits and vegetables, and even the lowest on the list was tofu, of all things.
So it's worth knowing a bit about this and taking precautions because assume you've got them in your body.
They're causing inflammation.
You don't want plastics in your body.
Now, I've heard, and I'm no expert on this, but that inflammation is kind of the root, not of all problems, perhaps, but a lot of things.
And that inflammation is a characteristic of heart attacks, of strokes, of clots.
Is that correct?
That if we can bring down the inflammation in our bodies, we'd all be doing a lot better?
That's absolutely true.
And you have to also link it to cancer development, dementia development, diabetes development, all these chronic diseases that we're living longer, you know, into our 70s, 80s, occasionally beyond, but we're not necessarily living better.
And if you can master inflammation, and there is blood work, go to your primary care doc and say, can you run some tests on inflammation?
Even just going to the dentist and getting regular dental care can lower inflammation.
But the plastics, the microplastics are fueling and firing up inflammation.
And so we do need an antidote to deal with this other than the obvious.
Take some precautions in your life and limit the amount of plastics that only modern society has had to deal with.
Talk about ways in which we can combat all this because, you know, one of the things that happens when we hear about these things is you're aware of a social problem, but what the heck can I do to reduce the microplastics in the air?
Not a lot.
But what I can do is figure out ways that I can protect myself against the influence of these endocrine disruptors, as you call them.
So what's the remedy?
Yeah, and you know, you can run, you can't hide, and we have to be practical people.
So if you can limit or eliminate plastic bottles, particularly if you've got in your car on a 90-degree day a plastic bottle and it's just sitting there baking and baking, you're just drinking a soup of endocrine disruptors and plastic bottles.
And if you're buying food meal after meal, it's all wrapped in plastic, particularly if you heat it up in a microwave, you're just creating a plastic soup.
So take those precautions.
Things like water filters at home and air filters at home are really in modern life.
Certainly if you live around fires, I'm in Detroit and we've had this Canadian smoke that keeps coming in for months and months.
So a home or office air filter is really not an exotic, hippie kind of thing.
It's a smart thing.
But, you know, the most novel way I know to deal with these microplastics, particularly those that we eat or drink, is to take good care of your gut, your GI system.
And it turns out fermented Foods, traditional foods, every tradition has some fermented foods going back.
But the one that's taken the world by storm is the Korean version of fermented foods called kimchi.
And there actually is a research study a few years ago that some of the bacteria, the good, friendly bacteria that feed our gut in kimchi, traditional cabbage-based fermented food, can fight off some of these endocrine disruptors.
So why not block it right from the beginning and not even deal with it by either adding fermented foods or you can supplement with fermented foods.
And kimchi is by far the star.
I mean, that's pretty interesting because, I mean, I'm just speaking for my wife and I, I mean, we're certainly not like regular Korean restaurant patrons.
And so we're always looking, if something is good for you, you're looking for a way to ingest it that's really easy and doesn't require you to be, you know, making dinner plans that you don't necessarily want to make.
Talk a little bit about this product, which I've talked about in the podcast before, Kim Chi1, because to me, it is like a kind of like an easy solution, right?
It's capsules.
You take, what is it, one a day or two a day, pop them in, take them, and you're done, right?
Yeah, I have.
This is my personal bottle, so it's not here specifically for this interview.
You know, within the last couple of years, I kept seeing medical articles.
Kimshi cholesterol reduction, Kimshi blood sugar improvements, Kimshi the gut being healthier.
These are human studies.
And same thing.
I turned to my wife.
I said, where's kimchi in our refrigerator?
It wasn't our traditional background food either.
And it was very funny.
I was actually watching YouTube about a year and a half ago, and I saw this product advertised.
I said, I can't believe somebody actually thought of drying kimchi, good quality kimchi, drying it, pulverizing it into a capsule.
So yes, I will on occasion have kimchi in my refrigerator.
We haven't yet taken the step of making it at home, but every day, it's actually three capsules a day.
I will, you know, protect myself, put some armor on when I walk into the world of unclean air, unclean water, unclean food.
And I know that it has settled my gut down.
It's a very healthy gut at this point.
So I think it's a great, great habit for everybody to grab onto.
I just had a funny thought, which is linked to a conversation that Debbie and I were having last Friday.
It has to do with this guy who is apparently the smartest guy in the world.
I don't know if you heard about this kid.
He's got an IQ of something like 246.
He blows away Einstein by a mile.
And he's on social media, and it's interesting because he's kind of a character, but he's Korean.
And so I'm chuckling to myself because I'm like, I wonder if this guy's taking a bunch of kimchi and it's helping him with his brain function because this guy is like off the charts completely.
But what you're saying is that this is a product that has a lot of benefits.
We probably, most of us, don't take it in any regular way.
And this is an easy way to take it is just in the form of capsules.
Let me recapitulate here because, look, I mean, what I want is for people to get this through a product that endorses this podcast.
And that's Brightcore.
So they've got a great offer for you to get this stuff very easily.
It's 25% off.
You order of Kimchi 1, but you've got to use my promo code, which is Dinesh.
And how do you get it?
You go to mybrightcore.com forward slash Dinesh, or, and this is even better, you need to call.
Call these guys.
Why?
Because if you call, you get 50% off plus free shipping.
But you only get this deal if you call.
And here is the number to call, 888-927-5980.
You've been listening to this conversation.
You probably have some questions, and that's why the call is good.
You'll be talking to people who know what they're talking about.
They'll make sure that this product is right for you.
And also, guess what?
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So once again, the number, 888-927-5980.
Dr. Khan, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much.
I am discussing the foreign policy of Reagan drawn from my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
The book came out in the late 1990s.
It was part of a counterattack against the left's effort to redefine the Reagan era, to present it as an era of selfishness and greed, to try to make it look like Reagan's foreign policy achievements were non-achievements, and of these things, the collapse of the Soviet Empire happened automatically.
I'm going to show that none of this is the case.
But here we are almost 20 to 30 years, 25 to 30 years later.
And the question is, how do we think now about foreign policy?
And I think the benefit of studying Reagan is not only for itself, because the achievements of Reagan were quite spectacular, and it's worth looking at what brought those about.
So there's a kind of historical interest in Reagan's place in the pantheon of presidency and understanding the 20th century.
But the other reason is also to make sense of what's going on now.
What should American foreign policy be?
What is Trump's approach to foreign policy and how does it compare or contrast with that of Reagan?
Now, some people say things about Trump's foreign policy that to me are at best inadequate and really can't be right.
So one of them is that Trump doesn't have a foreign policy.
Well, that he kind of makes decisions in an ad hoc manner.
That's what these people are saying.
And even when people seem to make decisions in an ad hoc manner, it doesn't mean that they don't have an underlying kind of compass or guide.
Yes, they are looking at every situation By itself, but that doesn't mean that they don't have an interior idea of where they want the world to go.
And that provides the subtle, maybe even somewhat hidden, rudder guiding their foreign policy.
I think the same is true when sometimes people are dubbed pragmatists.
A pragmatist, of course, is somebody who is very willing to look at the particulars of a situation.
But in the end, pragmatism is not a goal.
Pragmatism is a means for how you get to the goal.
And so what is the goal?
That's kind of what I'm getting at.
And even here, people who answer that question in the case of Trump often answer it, I think, in a way that doesn't do justice to what Trump is all about.
So let's say, for example, his goal is peace.
Well, yes, it is, but it's clearly not any kind of peace.
It's clearly not peace at any price.
If the United States were to surrender to all its adversaries and meekly retreat to being a non-entity in the world, we would certainly have peace, at least peace for a while, peace with subordination.
Clearly, that's not something that Trump is willing to live with or comfortable with, or that's not his goal.
He wants a strong America.
And so did Reagan.
Now, let's look at Reagan a little more closely to see what that meant in practice for him.
Here we start with the debate about the collapse of the Soviet Union, a debate that to this day is not fully settled.
And in fact, a lot of the information that you get about it in the textbooks and the history channel is at best biased and really, I think, quite flawed.
So one of the ideas is that this is coming from the left.
There's really no mystery about why the Soviet Union collapsed.
It collapsed of its own weight.
It was brought down almost, you could say, by gravity.
The Soviet Union, according to this view, had chronic economic problems.
Remember, the Soviets had bad harvests going back to the 19 teens and the 20s and the 30s.
So here's Strobe Talbot.
The Soviet system has gone into meltdown because of inadequacies and defects at its core, not because of anything that the outside world has done.
And this view is also echoed by the great architect of containment, George Kennan, the diplomat, the famous diplomat from the middle of the 20th century.
He says communism was not defeated.
It committed suicide.
And yeah, it might have been a kind of assisted suicide, kind of a suicide with medical help.
But who was the physician?
Not Reagan.
It was Gorbachev.
He was the sort of Dr. Kvorkin, if you get this analogy, who helped to bring this suicide about.
And so in this view, the doves or the liberals in the great debate over the Cold War were right.
Why?
Because they had accused the Reagan administration of exaggerating the Soviet threat.
They said it was based on fears that turned out to be misplaced.
And they say that to the degree that Reagan did anything, he pursued a bipartisan foreign policy that went all the way back to Truman, was supported by Republicans and Democrats.
And in fact, Reagan, if anything, delayed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Here's George Kennan.
The extreme militarization pursued by Reagan and the hardliners, he says, quote, consistently strengthened hardliners in the Soviet Union.
So Reagan didn't bring this about.
He actually postponed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So all of these analyses, if you want to dignify them with that term, are really just impressive for their retroactive audacity.
Because let's look at these critiques kind of one by one.
The revisionists were certainly right that the Soviet Union had economic problems for a long time.
These were not new to the 1980s.
They had been going on in the 70s and the 60s and the 50s and the 40s.
In fact, they're the result of socialism, right?
Socialism produces economic misery.
We should keep this in mind as we think about people like Mom Dani who now want to bring that to New York, bring it in fact to the big apple, the center of, in a way, global capitalism.
And this does not bode well for the free future of New York, as it didn't bode well for the Soviet Union.
But here's the point.
Even though the Soviets had bad economic performance going a long way back, that didn't bring out the Soviet Union.
Why didn't the Soviet Union collapse like in 1920, 1931, 1940, 1952?
The Soviets not only did not collapse, they were able to fight World War II against a formidable Nazi foe.
They were able to build a space program and put Sputnik into orbit.
They were able to not only fight a Cold War, but they had a faster, more accelerated arms control program, bigger missiles, more warheads than the United States.
So no peacetime implosion is automatically suggested by weak economic performance.
Let's also remember historically, the Roman Empire deteriorated toward the end, but it lasted for centuries before it collapsed.
The Ottoman Empire was called the sick man of Europe.
Very, in a sense, it was ailing economically.
It was overextended, but guess what?
It hung around until World War I. So again, history doesn't give us any clear examples where a country is in economic trouble.
Therefore, the whole regime implodes.
Now, the other point is if the Soviet regime was so obvious that it was going to fall of its own weight, why didn't a single one of these liberals who retroactively said, ah, yeah, of course, of course, it's kind of like Bill Crystal, this guy, his modus operandi is he never predicts anything because he can't.
When he does make predictions, they're always wrong.
But whenever things happen, in retrospect, he always declares them obvious.
Like, yeah, of course, yeah, sure.
Soviet Union, of course it collapsed.
I mean, it was going to collapse.
Anyone could see it coming.
Well, why didn't You see it coming?
Why didn't you show us where you said it was going to happen beforehand?
And of course, he can't.
In fact, the predictions he does make are inevitably wrong.
Now, what about this idea that Gorbachev was the architect and designer of the Soviet collapse?
Well, Gorbachev was a different guy.
Let's start with that.
He was not the same.
If you lived through that era, as of course I did, you would see a kind of unbroken line of Soviet leaders, right?
Going all the way back, there was Lenin, then there was Stalin, then there was Khrushchev, then there was, if I recall if I'm getting it all right, I think I am Brezhnev.
And then there was, what, Andropov, Chernenko.
So this is a very straight line.
And then you have a blip, and that's this younger guy who is clearly more dynamic, certainly a little bit more Western.
This is Gorbachev.
And it is also true that the Politburo selected him because they wanted a different kind of a leader.
But what kind of a leader?
What was the Politburo trying to accomplish?
And what was Gorbachev trying to accomplish?
Well, you have to just go back and take a look.
And it turns out they're both pretty clear about it, especially Gorbachev.
First of all, he did not see his role.
In fact, he emphatically denied that his goal was to bring down the Soviet Union.
He denied it at the time, and he denied it afterward.
In fact, he said on multiple occasions that his goal was the exact opposite, to strengthen the Soviet military, to strengthen the Soviet system.
So his reforms were not aimed at self-destruction.
They were aimed at fortifying an otherwise ailing Soviet empire.
This was Gorbachev's goal.
So he was really surprised, in fact stunned at the result.
No one was more surprised than him when he found himself swept out of power.
Gorbachev subsequently ran for elections in Russia and found he was getting less than 1% of the vote.
He was like, why?
So the wise men of the West, the intellectual class, proclaims Gorbachev to be this great Soviet redeemer.
But it's worth noting that the Russian people have never agreed with this assessment.
And nor is Gorbachev celebrated, even remembered today, in much of the Eastern Bloc.
Even though Gorbachev was the direct cause of sort of lifting the chains, giving Eastern Europe a measure of freedom, the Eastern Europeans don't credit Gorbachev at all because they know that it was not his intention to free them.
He let them go because he didn't really know what to do with this rebellion, this mass rebellion in Eastern Europe.
He felt that he was dealing with problems within the Soviet Union itself.
So this is no credit ultimately to Gorbachev.
The credit has to go elsewhere.
And, you know, I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Gorbachev speaking at Stanford and talking about the Cold War and getting thunderous applause.
If Gorbachev tried to do that in Hungary or the old Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, this guy would have had rocks thrown at him.
So Gorbachev was by his own goals, by his own measure, a failure.
He was a failure in that he did not achieve his goals.
And that's really ultimately how you have to measure somebody, right?
If Hitler sets his goal as conquering all of Europe, you just have to ask, well, did he?
If Napoleon set his goal as defeating Great Britain or England, the question is, did he?
If Reagan set his goal as bringing down the Soviet Empire, you have to ask, did he?
And so we're going to be applying this very practical test in assessing the competence, the effectiveness of statesmen like Reagan.
You can apply really the same measure to Trump.
Trump sets certain goals.
I'm going to make America more prosperous.
I'm going to make it stronger.
I'm going to make America great again.
And at the end of the second term, it'll be very reasonable, not only for us in the kind of MAGA camp, but for anyone in America to ask, given his goals, was he successful?
He said he would do these things and well, did he?
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